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- Convenors:
-
Simon Turner
(Lund University)
Loren Landau (University of Oxford and University of the Witwatersrand)
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- Chair:
-
Simon Turner
(Lund University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 11
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
In this panel we explore how the potentials of war, climate change and economic precarity in the future affect the ability to imagine futures. The panel considers how relations to uncertain futures play into practices in the present and how they relate to place, politics, and movement.
Long Abstract:
What happens when one is no longer able to imagine a future for oneself or one’s dependents? How do the potentials of war, climate change and economic precarity in the future affect the ability to imagine futures? What practices do people across Africa employ as they build lives amidst such uncertainty? And how do these relate to place, politics, and movement?
Across Africa, urban-rural connections and networks linking camps, villages, and diaspora feature prominently within contemporary scholarship. This panel builds on these by considering the intersection of spaces, temporalities, and human value. Borrowing Bakhtin’s conception of the ‘chronotope’ as our framing device, this panel considers how relations to uncertain futures play into practices in the present: the spatialised socialities, strategies, moralities, and mobilities they engender. While migration practices are movements across space, they are also practices that orient themselves towards (better) futures elsewhere. This can be in the sense of aspirations (Carling) or in the sense of anticipating disasters (Turner). It may also result in forms of connection and disconnection that enable people to build social bridges to multiple elsewheres and multiple futures (Landau, Simone). Through a variety of case studies, this panel explores situations where the future is uncertain, potentially disastrous or even unimaginable, situations where the future horizon (Koselleck) comes ominously close and resembles more a ‘critical threshold’ beyond which we cannot imagine a future (Bryant and Knight). We relate these thoughts on futures to questions of space and place, asking ‘where’ futures are possible and ‘for whom’.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Maha Naami (Maastricht University)
Paper short abstract:
Unable to foresee a desirable future in their home countries and unable to achieve their goals in Europe, North African unaccompanied minors (NAUM) embody a transitory period up to the age of 18. They go into a state of hypermobility to counter the waiting and free themselves from feeling stuck.
Paper long abstract:
The inability to create a desirable future for themselves has pushed many North African unaccompanied minors (NAUM) to leave their home countries. Upon reaching the Netherlands, most of these youth are told by youth care institutions that there is no future for them in Europe. This statement reflects the fact that North African countries are seen as safe, but it also takes away youths’ sense of a future. They feel forced into a state of limbo, wherein the caregivers see them as people in waiting, bound to leave when they turn 18.
Based on 15 months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork I conducted among 23 NAUM and 38 caregivers in The Netherlands, I argue that although they are waiting, they are not immobile. The youth inhabit a temporal space that they and the caregivers consider transitory. They embody the experience of the ‘meanwhile’ by going into a state of hypermobility in an attempt to free themselves from the feeling of being stuck.
Being stuck has an impact not only on the present but also on the perceptions of a future. The NAUM continue to pursue the dream they left their homes for as an idea of the future without being able to take concrete steps towards achieving it.
In this paper, I challenge the idea that migration regimes slow down mobility or limit it either to a geographical location back home or in the receiving country, and I bring forth mobilities that have remained unaccounted for in times of waiting.
Tone Sommerfelt (Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)) Jørgen Carling (Peace Research Institute Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores ‘opportunity’ as a theoretical and ethnographic concept for understanding how migratory futures are imagined and pursued. Based on fieldwork in West Africa, we examine the processes of cultivating and anticipating opportunity, and how they play out in time and space.
Paper long abstract:
This paper departs from the emergence of ‘opportunity’ as a key concept in the intersection of migration theory and ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa – a region where the majority of young adults express a wish to migrate. In migration theory, the most influential attempts at incorporating contemporary barriers to mobility are founded on the separation of ‘migration aspirations’ on the one hand and ‘ability’ (Carling 2002) or ‘capabilities’ (de Haas 2011) on the other. We value this distinction but seek to challenge how aspiration and ability intersect in time, and how the two are acted upon by young Africans. Our ongoing fieldwork is based in three West African urban centres: Tema (Ghana), Serekunda (Gambia) and São Vicente (Cape Verde). We have been struck by how our interlocutors, when they reflect on the future, return to ‘opportunities,’ ‘openings’, ‘chances’ and ‘big breaks’ in life. Especially in Tema, the unpredictability of opportunities is seen to encourage a constant state of preparedness: When the opportunity to travel appears, you must be ready to grab it, so that it does not pass you by. In effect, the anticipatory dimension of opportunity constantly ‘awakens the present’ (Bryant and Knight 2020). In practice, this plays out in the cultivation and anticipation of opportunities. While migration aspirations relate to time-spaces at the scale of the world and the lifespan, the cultivation and anticipation of migration opportunities shapes life in the local time-spaces of the present. The paper is based the ERC-funded project Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI).
Nele Wolter (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Paper short abstract:
This paper elucidates the rich diversity of how internally displaced persons in urban West Cameroon try to realign their lives in a makeshift environment and which resources they draw on.
Paper long abstract:
During the ongoing internal conflict in the two anglophone regions of Cameroon, numerous families have been displaced from their homelands to find themselves in makeshift homes in the francophone part of the country. As there seems no end of the political tensions in sight, the internally displaced persons (IDP) try to re-establish an "ordinary life" in an urban environment which is often marked by marginalization, lack of economic resources as well as deprivation and challenging future perspectives.
Based on ethnographic research in Bafoussam, the capital of the Cameroonian West region, this paper explores the diverse strategies of IDPs to settle into a life of yet unknown struggles and problems. Beyond that, the author illustrates the different practices that people develop, re-establish and adjust in a stage of life when not knowing what their future might bring and if they will ever return to their homelands. Furthermore, she illustrates fluid capabilities and engagements of internally displaced persons in their different forms. Within this realm, special attention is paid to the reconfiguration of social networks, gender roles and income sources. It is argued that the temporal character of the IDPs situation is characterized by contradictions and challenges but, at the same time, they take the chance to shape new networks and build on existing capacities to improvise their pending lives in an unknown setting and that impact on their future aspirations.
Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a four-year ethnography of everyday life in an asylum reception centre, this paper explores the prospects and tensions of future-making, from an apparently frozen present, for young male West African migrants in Italy.
Paper long abstract:
Young male asylum seekers from West Africa, such as my fieldwork interlocutors in a reception centre in Italy, have their own imaginaries and attitudes about the future. Their very histories of migration have also to do with the perceived impossibility to accomplish a meaningful future in Africa, including one’s transition to adulthood and to normatively predominant ways of masculinity. However, these biographical aims are likely procrastinated further ahead, once people find themselves in the protracted uncertainty of refugee reception in Europe. Does the promise of “more future” still hold, and in what respects? How do migration and its aftermath shape young Africans’ ability to nourish (which) future imaginaries, and move towards them? Future, within an asylum centre, is a slippery and elusive topic. The imaginaries associated with it are generally unfocused, beyond the short-term need for legal, work and housing autonomy. However, the residents’ endeavours to envision what might come afterwards share two moral orientations, while struggling to temporalize them: a medium-term desire to make a family life of one’s own, “like anybody else”, and a longer-term commitment to get back “home” (i.e. the country of origin), thereby eventually healing the implicit moral wound of migration. From a present of biographical and socio-legal suspension, asylum seekers are hardly in a position to predict their future. Yet, they are not short of views, aspirations and dreams about it. How future-making emerges from their present emplacement, and in what directions, is then the key question of my ethnographic exploration.
Alessandro Gusman (University of Turin) Guido Nicolas Zingari (University of Turin)
Paper short abstract:
J. and J. Comaroff argued that in African contexts lack of access to the possibility of social becoming is synonymous with “social death”. Based on an ethnography among Congolese refugees in Kampala, this paper interrogates the category of “silent death” and the repertories of the future it contains
Paper long abstract:
Largely fleeing the conflicts in the Kivu region, over 220.000 Congolese now live in Uganda as refugees, with an increasing number of "urban refugees". Although the flows have never ceased and continue in waves, many of them have been in the host country for ten years or more. This prolonged permanence in what in the original aspirations of many refugees was to be a “transit” country (towards resettlements or awaiting repatriation) is producing a phenomenon that is increasingly being described withing the Congolese refugees community in Kampala as “silent death” (mort silencieuse): a growing inability to build perspectives for the future linked to an incomplete or impossible integration in the Ugandan contexts and associated with an experience of gradual deterioration of health, social and physical body. The legal-institutional condition in which they find themselves, defined as “protracted refuge”, in fact suspends access to fundamental freedoms and rights in a structural way, while jamming the mechanisms of social reproduction, mobility and affirmation. This determines a gradual loss of aspirations and well-being, and produces what, following the concept proposed by Sarah Whyte (2010), we could define “ill-being”. Based on the idea expressed by John and Jean Comaroff (2001) according to which in many African contexts the lack of access to the possibility of social becoming and well-being is synonymous with “social death” this paper aims to interrogate the vernacular category of “silent death” and the repertories of the future it contains.