Paper long abstract:

Why do Saharan spaces have the quality of feeling remote, how is this perception generated, and who is most likely to feel it? Why are Saharan nations continuously portrayed as unknowable, static and empty, when they are cross-cut by dynamic networks of exchange and figure prominently in the global imagination as zones of discovery, rich in symbolic and material resources? This paper works through two problems that arose during my ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritania, both of them related to conditions of life in the Sahara that produce dialogical and highly distinctive processes of spatial imagination

First, I consider how villagers in Mauritania's southeastern Hodh province experience the Ṣaḥra as removed, imaginary, and poetic. For example, I found that lexical categories in Hassaniyya related to ecological features are embedded in historical and moral narratives that imaginatively transpose the Arabian Desert onto the Sahara, situating local notions of environment and community within a totalizing, transregional conception of spacetime. I describe this figure of spacetime as a"Quranic Chronotope."

Second, I analyze how perspectives of Saharan spaces that emphasize enchantment and the peripheral attract external actors, such as government agents, developers, and anthropologists, whose projects often reproduce the very conditions of remoteness that made the region alluring in the first place. Thus, internal and external configurations of space/time combine to create the feelings of insulation from historical transformation and social change that characterize regions like the Sahara.