Paper short abstract:

This paper centres on Huguette, a Burkinabè market trader, managing a gradual but dramatic shift in the edges of her moral and material world, reorienting herself and her resources through contested and emotionally-laden calculative practices that reflected and reshaped changing possibilities.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on twelves months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Burkina Faso market, this research interrogates the types of cognitive and emotional labour required to attune and respond to continually changing potentials emerging through a protracted macro-level crisis. This crisis entailed a gradual but dramatic degradation of security, compounding and compounded by an erosion of the economic rhythms that once animated this market, prompting traders to constantly “evaluate the possibility of continuities, transformations, or blockages” shaping what forms of moral and material worlds could be stewarded and (re)imagined, and how (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014).

This paper hones in on Huguette, a female trader managing a tea kiosk and caring for five children, actively reorienting herself and her resources to speculate and safeguard, pre-empting unaffordable losses and reimagine best possible futures, even in their newly compromised forms. The erosion of margins of accumulation for her business echoed degrading economic opportunities for her children as they emerged from school, while encroaching jihadist violence and the ripples of this in wider society narrowed margins for error. Huguette’s reconsideration of what she could afford to care about and what she could not afford to neglect illustrates how moral-economic contestations are problematised anew when previously affordable moral worlds are compromised or threatened (Zigon 2009). Moreover, this paper seeks to illustrate the intense cognitive work required to rearrange resources and imaginaries, and the emotional work of grieving complex and uncertain forms of loss in what one can imagine for oneself, one’s family and one’s compatriots.