Paper short abstract:

Building upon recent ethnographic work with land chiefs in Kinshasa,this papers explores some of the mechanisms of urban expansion and the various processes of place-making underlying the opening up of new land in Kinshasa.

Paper long abstract:

As elsewhere across the African continent, Kinshasa has become a major site for the realization and implementation of neo-liberal urban expansion projects. Often conceived in the form of gated communities and satellite cities, these building projects redraw the geographies of urban inclusion and exclusion in radical ways. And yet, they remain somehow very marginal to the urban dynamics of everyday life and to equally powerful forms of urban expansion and place-making that do find their starting point not so much in the logic of a global neo-liberal capitalism, but in processes connecting the city to the rural hinterland and its moral and political frameworks. I will analyse how, in order to access and open up new land in Kinshasa's peripheries, Kinois have to pass through Humbu and Teke ancestral land chiefs who are not officially recognized by the city's administration and whose activities therefore remain largely under the radars of the city and the state, but who form nonetheless the real motor of Kinshasa's urban growth, redefining in the process what the city is.

Paper short abstract:

Describing a Kenyan village called “place where people get finished” (Shimalabandu)—named by the frequent accidents that take place along the road—this paper considers how place can be made from its ‘opposites’: movement and accident, as well as the role of infrastructure in creating landscape.

Paper long abstract:

In Kenya's Western Province, along the Kakamega-Webuye road, there is a stop called Shimalabandu, meaning "place that finishes people." According to residents, it got this name in the 1950s after a van veered off the road and killed several people. Since the road was paved in the early 1970s, the number of accidents has increased, making death and development a tightly intertwined pair; even as residents celebrate the road which they say has "enlightened" their community, many of the household farms (bomas) at Shimalbandu have lost a family member to the road. Few now remember the previous name, Ichina ("stones").

This paper explores the sense of place as created through what one might consider place's opposites: movement and accident. Shimalabandu is defined by the road that passes through—its place-ness is constructed by the constant through-traffic of those coming from and going to elsewhere—and by the recurrence of the accident. Movement and accidental violence together thus create a sense of place in which the past is constantly drawn into the present, and where outsider and insider collide, quite literally. These are congealed into place through an act of naming and through narratives that draw on different cosmologies to link the originary bloodshed to the recurrence of accidents.

Drawing on Adeline Masquelier's (2002) discussion of the role of roads in historical memory, this paper will consider not only the relationship of place and language (Basso 1996) but also the impact of large-scale "modern" infrastructure on physical and imagined landscape.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the curation of sacred places in northwest Madagascar and specifies how notions of temporality shape the restoration of place.

Paper long abstract:

Among Sakalava in northwest Madagascar the most continuous places are ancestral shrines and cemeteries. Their curation is the responsibility of reigning monarchs, aided by a corps of spirit mediums and people devoted to ancestral work. Sakalava ideas of conservation or preservation have been based on a different form of historicity than the one associated with modernity, in which "everything that is solid melts into air" and the angel of history can only look disconsolately back at the ruins or try to objectify them as 'heritage.' What is lost in such a modernist framework is not merely objects, buildings, or scenes of life but the very quality of a historicity in which continuity is more salient than loss, reproduction than preservation, and labour than work. This paper discusses a living community that maintains a continuous relationship with the past, such that the past moves forward together with the present into the future. This has implications for the way places can change while remaining 'authentic' and gives rise to a distinctive kind of politics of placement and architectural replacement.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which, through spirits, women in Nampula appropriate alternative spaces within the urban context. These practices accordingly defy and transform the male, Muslim city from which many women are/feel increasingly excluded.

Paper long abstract:

'Majini have been made for us to live in this city'. This is how a female healer explained the increase of spirit afflictions among Nampula's women. Majini- spirits arriving from the bush do not only provide women with a creative social commentary addressing the uncertainty of living in the urban community, but enable them to redraw their life and reconfigure urban space.

In this paper, I explore the ways in which women seek to recast city-life through the intervention of spirits, framing the shock of an increasingly male, modern and Muslim urban environment from a set of rural and traditional values. Significantly, several women encounter the spirits while working in the urban fields (machamba) located at the city's margins. Others are forced by spirits to temporarily leave Nampula and head to the nearby mountains, from which they would return with medical herbs, signalling their transformation into spirit healers. Spirits constitute a way of re-appropriating the city enabling a number of women to engineer an independent way of life. Moreover, as these 'marginal' places -machamba and bush - become vital for the city itself, they confer power to local women. Many families' income relies on the work of spirit healers and the agrarian work of women often constitutes the only source of economic security in times of change and uncertainty. Finally, the medical herbs women harvest in the mountains heal and protect the health and fortune of Nampula's population from biomedical inefficacy and sorcery attacks.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores a Dogon therapeutic ritual in order to investigate the role of metaphors in the healing process and the the value of ritual space, its shrines and local spirits as a peculiar kind of “mythical-historical consciousness”: a lieu de mémoire able to interrogate the present and its uncertainties

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological literature explored over the last 80 years almost all aspects of Dogon life (the symbolic role of masks, the circumcision ritual, the changes accelerated by massive ethnological and touristic presence). Nevertheless, some areas of the Dogon plateau remain little known or almost unknown. In these forgotten recesses, a strong religious tradition continues its own life, and many shrines and sacred spaces (rocks, hills, etc.), in some cases simple ruins existing side-by-side the mosques, represent for many people an enduring symbol of continuity with past traditions, where local spirits work to restore health or to solve family conflicts. Based on a study conducted over the last ten years in Wadouba (Dogon plateau), this paper explores the practice of one of the most active healers in this region, and people's ability to reinvent their links with these spaces. More particularly, the author examines the semantic structure of a long chant performed during a therapeutic ritual. Its metaphors work as a ritual memory able to evoke divination practices, local spirits and traditional remedies, as well as the new threats, the moral crisis of traditional hierarchies, and the land conflicts that oppose two groups (the Yalcouye and the Kansay). This research has two main purposes: first, to investigate the relationship between metaphors and therapeutic effectiveness of this thick, imaginative ritual and, second, to explore the role of these sacred spaces as a peculiar kind of "mythical-historical consciousness," a site of cultural memory reproduction able to call into question the present and its uncertainties.

Paper short abstract:

From local spirituality to the Spirit of Pentecost and Spiritual Warfare against territorial spirits, the aim of this contribution is to show how inhabitants are fighting to cross the borders of themselves and the territoriality (locality and ethno-nationality) they are assigned to.

Paper long abstract:

Ndjili, a suburban locality created under the status of "centre extra-coutumier" in the 50's, was an important place of clandestine spiritual practices (kintwadi and bangunza), moving from home to home. There in quarter 3, the Spirit of Pentecost, called to rescue by some local men of God, made its entry after a long conflict (1959-1964) about God's language (tshiluba versus kikongo). Speaking in Tongues appeared to be a good opportunity trying to leave 'ethni-city', territory, and corpority. From French speaking Vernaud and English speaking Lovic (Assemblies of God) to lingala translation, a new generation of God's interpreters was born. Ndjili, where American Evangelist T. L. Osborn fought his first campaign in 1969, was also a good place for spiritual 'glocalization'. The bana Ndjili migrating to Paris in the 80's took the Pentecostal and charismatic practices under their coats and opened there the first 'congolese churches'. But the same question occurs: Does God speak lingala? And how then to make its own place in the world ?

From Pentecostal Spirit to Spiritual Warfare against territorial spirits (i.e. crocodile's spirit as blocking territorial spirit) in the 90's, this contribution, based on fieldwork in Ndjili/Kinshasa and original testimonies, aims to show how people are fighting to cross over the locality (the village as metaphor) they are attached to. Each evangelic assembly becoming a new 'place of birth', where (af)filiation and reinvention of oneself are made possible, and the Bible a territory to move through, trans-ported by the charismatic migrant Spirit.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the discursive and embodied sense of place of West-African residents in Parisian migrant hostels called ‘foyers’. It investigates the ambivalent affective attachments to these places and the ways the migrants make sense of them as their living space.

Paper long abstract:

Contrary to transit residences aptly described as "non-lieux", the foyers, hostels for single labor migrants, have come to be actual places of living for African migrants in French cities. The foyers have been analyzed as political instruments of the state to control the immigrants, as well as places where migratory networks reproduce village communities and their hierarchies, but the way their inhabitants make sense of them has been left unexplored. Based on an ethnographic research with West-African residents of Parisian foyers, this paper intends to investigate the embodied logics of the space they display.

Residents have ambivalent discourses and attitudes towards the foyers: while negating that these buildings count as a "home" for them, they also express forms of affective attachments; while consciously not settling, and keeping stuff in suitcases, they finally make these inhospitable space a place of their own.

This paper will follow the migrants, their moves and discourses on three intertwined dimensions. As urban dwellers, they demonstrate a sense of belonging, especially when fighting for their right to stay there in the face of the massive rehabilitation scheme currently undertaken in Paris. As inhabitants of the foyer, their practices of collective and private spaces run against the architectural design of these disciplinary buildings. Though they contrast harsh living conditions in France with the proper houses built back home, I will also explore the continuities in the ways they make sense of a living place, rooted in cultural practices and representations of space reorganized in the migratory experience.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how members of Cape-Verdean tabancas and Bissau-Guinean manjuandadis mobilize, maintain and rework their bonds to places.

Paper long abstract:

Before anything else, places are names. They are names whose meanings do more than refer to points in physical space. As names, places are enduring signs, shaped by temporality, which evoke (by memory or imagination) past events and help people sketching possible futures As names, they are not something given; they are rather something which is made. And constructing places is tantamount to creating traditions, and a way of being in the world and relating to other people ¬- basic ingredients of personal and social identities. Places do not necessarily bear the concreteness that people usually assign to them. Thus we can dissociate them from the commonsensical idea of physical territory and reach a new understanding about them as imagined networks shaped by fields of communication the range of which is limited by the available communication technologies, cultural values and social structural constraints. This paper develops these ideas examining how members of Cape-Verdean tabancas and Bissau-Guinean manjuandadis mobilize, maintain and rework their bonds to places.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the place-making effects of being in ’permanent transit’ for a large group of urbanites having invaded several construction sites around Maputo, Mozambique, as a series of orchestrated attempts at being resettled and, through that, compensated with land elsewhere in the city.

Paper long abstract:

Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Maputo, Mozambique, this paper explores the peculiar place-making effects of being in 'permanent transit' for a large group of urbanites living on the outskirts of the city. In recent years, the pace of both public and private construction projects in Mozambique has been drastically increased, not least through the growing number of collaborative initiatives between the Frelimo government and several semi-national Chinese construction consortia. To a growing group of poor urban settlers having hitherto been occupying land illegally, however, the construction sites seem to reverberate with meanings and intentions altogether different from those of the Chinese and Mozambican cadres praising the modernist visions guiding the many building projects. In a series of orchestrated events, these urbanites have invaded the projected construction sites; not as an attempt to gain access to the land, but, rather, to provoke an official resettlement process and, through that, compensation with legitimate property rights to land elsewhere in the city. Although this strategy has, in fact, been successful for some urbanites, to the large majority, they end up living on the fringes of the construction sites for exnteded periods of time or, equally likely, being provisionally moved to adjacent areas while awaiting the government's decision. In this paper, I consequently trace the speculative place-making strategies of urban settlers being caught in permanent transit with a particular emphasis on the spatio-political cosmologies activated while living in a state of spatial and temporal deferral.

Paper short abstract:

Spirit possession, Islam, schooling, haunted spaces, erasure of spiritscape, Niger

Paper long abstract:

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of incidents of mass possession among schoolgirls in Niger. Possession by brutal, unpredictable spirits dramatizes the controversies surrounding women's education in Nigerien society. Rather than address the moral panic set in motion by Nigerien girls' increased presence in schoolrooms, I focus on other claims to spaces articulated in the language of spiritual ecology. During exorcism, possessing spirits claim to have lost their homes when trees were cut to build schools. These spirits are part of a sacred topography disrupted by the transformation of the bush into farmland, the shift toward individual property, and urban expansion. In the pre-Islamic past, landmarks such as trees objectified the tenuous relations between people and spirits, configuring the landscape into a vibrant microcosm. Only after securing the spirits' approval could one cut a tree; spirit veneration thus translated into an ecological ethos that guided the management of natural resources. In the wake of colonization, trees were cut to make way for road and human settlements. Later the implementation of new agrarian practices and the promotion of Islamic law further encouraged land clearing and the subsequent destruction of the spiritscape. Today spirits haunt the "edge of Islam," giving voice to conflicts over moral and material spaces, their boundaries, and their histories. In an age of renewed anxiety over the definition of Islam and Muslim practices, schoolgirls caught by violent spirits demanding to be remembered thus obliquely call attention to the ways that some spaces are struggled over.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Pentecostal young women imagine and prepare for their futures in a Nigerian city. The urban/village landscape shows spirituality calibrated with perceptions of ‘modernity’ and possibilities. Preparing for marriage, urban individualism conflicts with community obligations.

Paper long abstract:

In Calabar, southeastern Nigeria, young women do not want to be identified as being "local", a derogatory term connoting 'the village' and limited possibilities. This paper examines how young women experience, and in turn make, the 'modern' metropolis where their God-given futures are imagined and (potentially) realised. Rhetoric and practice of the burgeoning Pentecostal movement in the city intersects with a sense of place encouraging a very specific sense of identity, the formation of new subjectivities, and an attitude of "With God, all things are possible." Ethnographic examples illustrate how place is not just (spiritually) spatial but also temporal.

In the context of Nigeria's growing economic, political, spiritual insecurity - the harked 'end times' by Pentecostals - African urban life poses many challenges, yet presents much unlocked potential. Where Pentecostalism not only denotes 'modernity' but encourages high hopes and aspirations, the spiritual cartography places Calabar diametrically opposed to 'the village', and identifies different parts of the city as helping or hindering the securing of destinies. This paper contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on African youth in 'waithood' (Honwana) by highlighting how spiritual subjectivities are created as young women navigate Calabar and prepare for their futures. Juxtaposed with Pentecostalism's individualism and personal trajectory for 'modernity' (Marshall), which dovetails with urban anomie (Simone), is the uneasy tension of community and family obligations. The need to marry ends young women's 'waithood' and ultimately, through traditional marriage rites, ties them back to 'the village'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how prophets in Guinea Bissau image the wide world and how this imagination is based on, and feeds back into, everyday life concepts of place and space.

Paper long abstract:

Balanta people of Guinea Bissau live in a space they call "fiere". "Fiere" is a polysemic concept meaning almost two opposite locative concepts: it can mean the public central courtyard encircled by houses in an enclosed compound but it can also mean (especially when coming from the mouth of prophets of a local religious movement called kyangyang) 'the world'. Analysing the iconic production of prophets and their discourses, in this paper I discuss the polysemy of the concept of fiere and the semantic and imaginative transformation it operates between the enclosed domain around the houses and the open wide world beyond the villages. I will reflect on place, on closure and openness, on the voice of prophecy and on 'the world', and on the spirit of place as the art of living simultaneously in a close community and in an open and interconnected wide world.