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- Convenors:
-
Noriko Tahara
(Shitennoji University)
Kiyoshi Umeya (Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University)
- Chair:
-
Itsuhiro Hazama
- Stream:
- Relational movements: Migration, Refugees and Borders/Mouvements relationnels: Migration, régugiés et frontières
- Location:
- TBT 327
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on the mobility of people in Sub-Sahara Africa and historical and political issues. There were many migrants after independence until now. We discuss people's mobility and social background to understand the mechanisms underlying the production of social inequalities.
Long Abstract:
Spatial mobility and social mobility have been studied for a long time in the social sciences. People's mobility is considered to deal with social risks and the redistribution of resources through state intervention.
We will examine the issue of mobility from the perspective of social inequalities and clarify how people's movements across borders occurred historically. We are not considering the juxtaposition of traditional society vs. modern society with respect to these mobilities, but are concerned with the patterns and manifestations of settled migrants, short-term movers, and their circulation.
We will specifically focus on the transnational movements in the 20th to 21st centuries, and social movements related to livelihood and ethnicity nowadays in East Africa. In reviewing their individual paths, it will be clear that most movements occur as a result of global issues such as trade among Africans, colonisation, crisis, and wars after independence.
For this purpose, we will describe the 'taskscape' of each research field with empirical research, for the space is socially constituted and involves asymmetries and power. Conceptualising the movement of people across borders is a crucial research area for understanding the mechanisms underlying the production of social inequalities. Analysis of spatial and social mobility goes beyond indicators of heterogeneity such as subsistence and ethnicity. We also point out the possibility of people's mobility.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
I focus on the mobility of people, especially related to the way of subsistence for everyday life to point out that these practices could sometimes emasculate the power of politics in the globalisation.
Paper long abstract:
Fish and water, the natural resources of Lake Albert in Uganda, attract people from a wide range of areas, including the northern and western parts of Uganda, the DRC, and Rwanda. My focus is on a multi-ethnic village, which is located on the east side of the lake. About 80% of the people in this village are immigrants or descendants of immigrants.
In this presentation, I will show people's every day practices to create their lives better in the perspective of subsistence. For considering their practices, I would like to use the concept of mobility in broader sense. To understand their practices as tactics, mobility can be used to explain not only the spatial mobility, but also social mobility, including subsistence, ethnicity, nationality, and a sense of belonging.
People's everyday practices in the hopes that they can improve their own lives, and all of them are pursuing their interests by themselves. The efforts create variety of mobilities and these mobilities create the social space where everyone can enter and exit freely based on subsistence. The way of subsistence creates more the way of presentation and emancipation. Even the accidental birth place and ethnicity have been made changed. Mobilities bound subsistence could have potential to emasculate the politics of central and regional governments.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation analyses relational movement of nomadic pastoralists realized without depending on the mediacy of representation in sub-Saharan Africa, with reference to ontological man-animal oneness in post-disarmament societies.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, focusing on politics of movement in the background of forced sedentarization state policy to pastoral societies of northeastern Uganda, I will consider how transnational movement and fluidity of ethnic identity, which have contributed to continuation of pastoralists' everyday life, is related to an animal that has an ontological status. Cattle, goats and sheep are irreplaceable and indispensable others, and communicative individuals in Eastern Nilotic pastoralism. In East African pastoral societies, there are common patrilineal clans and interpersonal ties existing across different ethnic groups and phratries. Flexible group view from which group boundaries are crossed might be defined by the mobility embedded in their subsistence. Contrary to modern, the sedentarized-centric and nation-state perception, in the Karimojong and Dodoth societies, there are cross-cutting ties by person and group between mutually opposing ethnic groups, which enables to define it as combative by using ethnic identity and it as fraternal by using clan or personal identity. It is possible to pick out convenient identity for life situation at stake. Relationship of lower and upper in hierarchical structure can be reversed. It doesn't fix a particular ethnic identity as the only foundation nor float from the actual conditions of life by rising above any identity. Inconsistency and incompleteness is educed by blurring boundaries between the upper hierarchical unit like ethnic group and the lower ones' mutual encountering and collaborating in everyday practice. This resonates with co-existence logic of pastoral world directly relating man-animal individuals beyond modern western boundary biological classification constructs.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the Jopadhola of eastern Uganda as an ethnographic case and considering certain religious concepts, this paper attempts to present some clues of insights concerning the migration of Nilotes.
Paper long abstract:
The Jopadhola are an ethnic group that live primarily in Tororo District, eastern Uganda. Classified as a Western Nilotic people based on their cultural and linguistic features, they are considered a pastoral group that originated from a legendary homeland—Bahr el Gazal in South Sudan—and subsequently became dispersed, migrating southwards to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The Jopadhola are one group among many residing on the fertile lands of the Great Lakes region on the border of Uganda and Kenya; they are surrounded by Western Bantu peoples. The migration of the Jopadhola is believed to have occurred gradually, over several centuries, with the movement of relatively independent, small groups. Focusing on the Jopadhola of eastern Uganda as an ethnographic case and considering certain religious concepts, this presentation presents clues found in first-hand data collected in fieldwork since 1997 to trace the trajectory of their great migration.