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- Convenors:
-
Wale Adebanwi
(University of Pennsylvania)
Katrien Pype (KU Leuven University)
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- Discussant:
-
Richard Werbner
(University of Manchester)
- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel examines how the state determine and (de)regulate and/or are determined and (de)regulated by ordinary people's everyday ideas and practices of institutional and personal responsibility in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological reconsiderations of formal and informal encounters of ordinary people with, and the simultaneous (re)production of, state institutions, agencies and processes through the 'capillaries of everyday life' can illuminate our understanding of the complex ways in which the idea and practices of 'responsibility' are constituted in particular social formations. The experiences of people in their everyday transactions with the institutions and agents of the state constitute a critical barometer for gauging the meanings and the significance of state-citizens' relations. In this panel, we wish to tease out the everyday grammars of state and citizens' responsibilities by examining how the state, through its institutions, agencies, processes, etc. determine and (de)regulate and/or are determined and (de)regulated by ordinary people's engagement with the relationship between institutional and personal (citizen) responsibility in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in relation to infrastructures, education, health, safety and security, and citizenship. We are interested in the multiple sites in which ethnographic insight, based on theoretical reflections, can help us in explaining what happens when people come 'face to face' with the state - sometimes as (a) 'metaphorical Person(s).' How do everyday encounters with the state provoke particular meanings of 'responsibility'? How do everyday experiences of ordinary people, in both their symbolic and material dimensions, (re)constitute the ideas and practices of rights and responsibilities? We invite perspectives that throw intelligible light on everydayness and the ideas and practices of responsibility.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Katrien Pype (KU Leuven University)
Paper short abstract:
I explore new forms of state-citizen interactions as they unfolded along technological innovations in the Kabila state (2002-2019). The material helps us to rethink how Kinshasa's inhabitants expressed and performed responsibilities as citizens, while at times refused to be "Kabila's subjects".
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation, I explore new forms of state-citizen interactions as they unfolded along technological innovations in the Kabila state (2002-January 2019). The material helps us to rethink how Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) expressed and performed their responsibilities as citizens, while at times they refused to be "Kabila's subjects". One of the most significant political decisions that Joseph Kabila made was the introduction of the digital voting machines for the democratic elections in December 2018, which marked the end of Kabila’s regime. Yet, the technological equipment, the voting machines themselves, had been the object of protest, derision, and violent attacks throughout 2018. The voting machine was only the last of a series of technological innovations that the Kabila regime had introduced during his reign. These include the imposition of payment into bank accounts for state agents (the so-called bancarisation), the introduction of centralized software to render customs more operational and transparent (guichet unique, Cuvelier and Muamba Mimbunda 2013), and also the voting cards and surveillance cameras ("Kabila's eyes"). It is through and with these technological innovations that contemporary African leaders, such as Joseph Kabila, but also his successor Felix Tshisekedi, perform leadership and statecraft. It is also through these innovations that citizens make claims on their leaders and the state, reminding them about their duties and responsibilities towards their subjects/citizens. In sum, through technological innovations political futures are expressed, and new ways of holding leaders accountable emerge, as well as new forms of disciplining, monitoring, and contesting power.
Loes Oudenhuijsen (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
The privatisation and decentralisation of moral policing in Senegal changes the ways in which people can(not) live queer lives. It is furthermore part of a larger transformation of values like sutura (discretion) that its proponents paradoxically argue to protect.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the state’s rather silent and ambiguous position with regards to homosexuality, Senegalese queers face increasingly institutionalised forms of violence. A number of Islamic organisitions deplore the in their eyes irresponsible stance of the state. Tapping into anti-French sentiments in Senegal and a global clash of civilisations, they mobilise citizens to engage in the quest to preserve supposedly traditional Senegalese norms and values. Their strong anti-gay sentiments pronounced in the public sphere have resulted in a reconfiguration of responsibilities between state, religious actors, and citizens. Vigilante emerge as people are encouraged to look for traces, proof, or indications of homosexuality and other forms of moral debauchery. Paradoxically, such calls for the preservation of Senegalese cultural values discard the value of sutura (discretion) that has been so central to Senegalese cultures. Sutura prescribes a twofold silence: people ought to be dicreet about their own behaviour, as well as keep silent about someone else’s deviant behaviour. This virtue of silence has long facilitated queer lives, but it is being jeopardised by the proliferation of moral policing that encourages outing and humiliation rather than respectful silence. In this paper, I will explore how this process leads to an increase in violence against, and suspicion of, queer persons in their families and (queer) communities. The privatisation and decentralisation of moral policing and claims to citizenship changes the ways in which people can(not) live queer lives, and is furthermore part of a larger transformation of values like sutura that its proponents argue to protect.
Rogers Orock (louisiana State University)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my personal experience of violence, seizure, and terror at checkpoints in war afflicted areas within the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, I examine how these checkpoints work importantly as locally embedded sites of an authoritarian necropolis: a repressive and deadly state.
Paper long abstract:
This talk discusses militarised checkpoints in Cameroon’s Anglopnone war-torn areas as violent spaces of precarious life and abandonment. I suggest that abandonment is the negation of responsibility, that measure of power that demands consideration for moral and legal standards of duty and care. As such, abandonment should be recognised as an important notion in discussions of state power and the responsibility over life in Africa. Drawing on my personal experience of violence, seizure, and terror at checkpoints in war afflicted areas within the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, I examine how these checkpoints work importantly as locally embedded sites of an authoritarian necropolis: a repressive and deadly state. Under such conditions, what are the conditions of everyday life? In addressing this question, I argue that abandonment is a deadly expression of state disengagement from the protection and enhancement of ordinary life in Africa. In Cameroon, this state of abandonment has not only proceeded through a variety of institutionally recognizable forms of divestment and disengagement from care over life but also especially through myriad processes of decentralization and re-investment in multiple orders of power with the freedom to extract, to seize, and even to appropriate and confiscate lives without legible channels of responsibility which, like accountability, would demand an ethical or morality commitment.