Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes a sedentary analytics of im/mobility beyond a sedentarist epistemology. Drawing on Gambian and (diasporic) West African ethnography, it shows that immobility, in relation to mobility, must be placed with a wider, longer preoccupation with emplaced life.

Paper long abstract:

Whereas immobility has been initially an underdog in mobility studies, several scholars and especially anthropologists have variously studied how people and other entities stay put or become stuck, fixed, still, etc. in relation to a mobility regime. What is still arguably underdeveloped is a wider reconceptualization of sedentarity or emplacement in which then mobility and immobility take shape. This is by no means a return to a “sedentaritist metaphysics” (Malkki 1992); rather it is an attempt to heed what we may call a sedentary physics – how sedentarity is constructed, how it works and how it provides an analytical concept for studying the relation between mobility and immobility. This paper draws on fieldwork in the Gambia and in the West African diaspora, as well as on comparative ethnography of West Africa. I first consider, among others, at (oral) histories of frontier settlement. In rural Gambia, not only does an increasing sedentarization of agricultural settlements go hand in hand with a greater intensity and scales of human movement. Both migration and staying put stem from the moral and social injunction to ensure sedentarity, in space and time. Secondly, I broaden my view and consider West African forms of hospitality that, even among highly mobile pastoralist groups, sustain im/mobility through a socio-cultural logic of emplacement. This socio-cultural physics of the sedentary foundations of im/mobility complicates representations of West Africa as a mobile region, and provides an alternative epistemology of im/mobility.