Paper short abstract:

Challenging one-sides views of the relational-cum-dividual person in anthropological studies of West African migration, this paper considers the social and cultural significance of detachment, aloneness and un-dividuation in migrant mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological studies of African migration, and of migration in and from West Africa, in particular, commonly place group relations and efforts front and center. Migration is presented as a collective practice oriented towards making and maintaining relatedness, both at home and abroad. In these accounts, the migrant is conceived as a relational and, by implication or expressly, a dividual person, one driven by social attachment and obligations across geographical boundaries and distance. In this paper, I challenge this relational bias and the one-sided view of relatedness it purports. Drawing on my research with West African migrants in urban Ghana, I probe the other side of relatedness and enacted dividuation in migration: that of detached relations, of boundaries created and maintained, and of the emic and analytical potential afforded by the states of aloneness that geographical and social distance produces. The lens of aloneness, I suggest, not only brings into sharp relief how affective resonances of distance, separation and un-dividuation shape migrant experiences and selves, but it also helps to redress the place of detachment in the intertwined ideas about mobility and social becoming. In doing so I debate the persisting dichotomised view of the autonomous-cum-discrete individual of Western cultures and its inversed model of the relational-cum-dividual person in non-Western contexts. I argue that for the migrants of my study there are multiple forms of relatedness and separation at work, and at the same time, just as there are multiple ideas of what constitutes a person.

Paper short abstract:

My contribution criticizes the revived understanding of culture as un-divided/ individual and homogenous entity. Since digital globalization made obvious that cultural processes are intertwined with elements of different origins, I propose to talk of ‘dividual’ and ‘composite’ cultures, full of tensions and contradictions to be read as problem and fortune at the same time.

Paper long abstract:

My contribution to the VAD conference will propose and unfold the concept of ‘dividual’ cultures as a counter-concept to their supposedly undivided/ individual and identitarian character. Since in times of digital globalization it has become obvious that cultural processes are necessarily intertwined with elements of different origin, their character should no longer be defined by discursive opposites such as Black vs. White, European vs. African and so forth. The argument therefore goes that the often unacknowledged cultural hybridity needs adequate new terms and that the essenialized self-understanding of culture as homogenous coherence should be replaced by an evaluation of its ‘dividuality’. This term wants to indicate the ‘being part of’, the multidirectionally participative character of cultures; it wants to underline the processual and mutual ‘dividuation’ of cultural elements which, recognized and appreciated as such, could induce also less violent encounters within the respective society.

In order to mirror these interferences, I aim at a short reconstruction of the coinage, transfer and translation of the term ‘culture’ within the European-African-Antillan context from the 1940s up to today. It moves from cultural theories of Leo Frobenius, Jean-Paul Sartre and Sédar Senghor to arguments of Edouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze which both sketch cultural interdependence in images of ‘archipel’ and ‘rhizome’. The anthropologists Marilyn Strathern, Walter Mignolo and others take up the term ‘dividual’ for the description of cultural relations in the global South. The ‘African’ filmmakers Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Jean-Marie Teno on their part thematize cultural hybridity in audiovisual works of art.

Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at women’s efforts to produce marital ties and a home in a periurban neighbourhood of Maputo as a lens to explore hierarchy and difference in dividuation processes.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on established theories of personhood in African contexts and specifically, on Roger Bastide’s account of difference as a necessary element for the emergence of the social person (1973), this paper explores processes of dividuation, in Maputo, Mozambique. People, I claim, along with Bastide, are produced out of the plurality of elements that constitute them, and always in fusion with their own alterity.

Exploring the lives of young women, residents of a periurban neighbourhood, this paper analyses the making of personhood through the process of becoming legitimate wives and making a home. Focusing on the domestic relationships that women strive to establish and maintain, the paper shows how these depend on balancing appropriate distances and respecting predefined hierarchies, while weaving ties of unequal co-dependence: women strive to find their place among their in-laws, and strengthen their relationship with their partners by being subservient, patient and enduring. In return, they expect to be respected and financially supported, and to be properly wedded and housed. These morally-determined exchanges compose a fabric of hierarchical ties, which I call tilted, that come to compose women’s personhood. Their social person is never detached from these relationships but, on the contrary, is inherently defined by them.

This ethnographic context affords insights into processes of dividuation that are gendered and inherently unequal. The relationships that compose the person, I argue, are always tilted, whether they are between or within genders. This implies an accounting for questions of power and status differentials in our theorising of dividuation.

Paper short abstract:

The dividuation theory pivoted on prevailing Western experiences of the bio(techno)logical and socio(techno)logical elements as determinants of the ‘dividual’, is applied to Isale-Oyo, an indigenous African community. Results show that the elements of dividuation at Isale-Oyo, tangle the visible, invisible, and spiritual.

Paper long abstract:

Dividuation theorizes that the determinants of the self in our ‘becoming world’ are manifests of the bio(techno)logical and socio(techno)logical elements within our world. Such elements include the visible and the invisible and the several advertent and inadvertent biological non-human others that we co-exist with. In its conception, the theory considers that the billions of microorganisms and socio(tehno)logical elements in our world, shape (dividuate) us, rather than, as we imagined, that we shape ourselves. The dividuation theory, in its conception, was although, based on the cultures and prevailing experiences of the West, the present endeavor employs the ethnographic research method in applying the theory to Isale-Oyo, an indigenous African community in South Western Nigeria. The paper gathers the Isale-Oyo people’s perception of the cosmos and identifies the elements of dividuation within their cosmos. In its findings, the paper identifies unique elements of dividuation outside the initial conception of the theory. The peculiarities of Isale-Oyo, as an indigenous Yoruba community to which the theory is applied, led to the revelation of unique elements of dividuation. The observed elements tangle the visible, invisible, and by extension, with the spiritual. The paper also identifies, various art forms found within Isale-Oyo as material evidence corroborating the physical and spiritual conceptual elements of dividuation as conceived by the Isale-Oyo people.