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.