Short Abstract

Inverting dominant framings of emigrant absence as loss, this panel asks what flourishes in the concrete sites it leaves behind: new relationships, practices, and forms of presence. The panel is sponsored by the International African Institute/AFRICA.

Long Abstract

African ethnography has long attended to what absence makes. Classic studies of the Copperbelt showed how restrictions on women’s migration gave rise to new forms of marriage and social organisation in the spaces left by mobile men (Epstein 1981). Yet the dominant frame in recent decades has cast emigrant absence in terms of loss: voids to be managed and gaps to be bridged by remittances, straining those left behind. This panel proposes an inversion. Rather than asking what absence takes away, we ask what flourishes in its place.

We focus on the concrete sites of absence: the household, the compound, the ceremony, the street and the workplace. In such spaces, people do not merely witness departure, but improvise, innovate, and reproduce. Novel participation and ceremonial replacement practices generate new care relationships and moral claims. Digital technologies enable remote presence that reshapes ritual and sociality. New communicative practices emerge and become established. Objects, technologies and persons multiply in the space where someone is not.

This panel invites papers that investigate such productions ethnographically, across settings: ceremonial and ritual adaptation, communication cultures and digitalisation, marriage, and across different trajectories of migration and restricted mobility. We welcome contributions that illuminate both the continuities and the discontinuities introduced by contemporary conditions of (im)mobility, showing how African communities create presence in the face of absence. The panel aims to pass the study of emigrant Africa through a different prism: not the weight of what is missing, but the texture of what grows in its place.

Propose paper