Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of a group of West African migrants in urban Ghana to consider how social and economic pressures convert into efforts at, and frustration about, relational detachment.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine the experiences of a group of West African migrants in urban Ghana to consider how social and economic pressures convert into efforts at, and frustration about, relational detachment, especially from kin back home. In the context of increasing opportunities for transregional mobility and of simultaneously declining opportunities for economic success both at home and abroad, many transnational urban migrants are torn between responsibilities to their families and their own migratory goals. Based on ethnographic research conducted intermittently from 2012 to 2021 in Accra, I show how gradual, selective and temporal social detachment becomes a means not only of escaping what are often perceived to be onerous obligations to kin, but also of cultivating what I term durational ethics: a disposition enabling endurance in the face of socioeconomic predicaments, often for many years on end. I draw on the migrants’ shifting experiences of distance, progress and the felt lack thereof to explore conceptions of pressure and the motivations behind, and effects of, cutting off social relations in times of stress. I argue that the migrants’ efforts at relational detachment, facilitated through geographical and social separation, set in sharp relief – but also contest – the political-economic structures that propel economic inequality and marginalisation, particularly in urban contexts. Conversely, the migrants’ understanding and practices of detachment offer a nuanced reflection on how social and economic pressures are felt, endured and acted upon.