Remoteness is power: disconnection as a relation in northern Chad

Abstract

Remoteness is as much about a position in topological as in topographical space. Remote areas might look inaccessible from the outside, but, for Ardener (Ardener, E. 1989. The voice of prophecy and other essays, M. Chapman (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell), feel open and vulnerable from the inside, as their connectivity with the outside world is never fully controlled by locals. Drawing on material gathered in northern Chad, we argue that this lack of conceptual reciprocity can also lead to the opposite: a trope of permanent aggression, based on the local endorsement of external negative stereotypes. From the outside, the ‘locals’ are seen to be archetypical raiders, thieves and uncouth. From the inside, people concur in these descriptions to a surprising degree, insisting on their disorder, unpredictability and violence. This endorsement of alterity grants northern Chad a particular place in Saharan history, geography and ethnography.

Sticking around or fading away: water patronage and value in Chad

“…Both physical and symbolic relational distance are factors in the formation of anchored or distant water values as produced by the patrons of N’Djamena. Disconnection is here interpreted as a strategy to cultivate ‘honour and strength’ (Brachet and Scheele 2019: 166). As such, the physical relational distance or discretion associated with the value of relational distance does not preclude increased indirect engagement.…”

“…: 750). In northern Chad, remoteness and disconnection from political centres are a source of power and provide economic opportunities, such as the ability for traders to profit from ‘external fears, anxieties and disruptions’ (Brachet and Scheele 2019: 168). In such a context, disconnection becomes ‘a special type of relation’ ( ibid .…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…As well as peonising graduate and postdoctoral research staff, this turn drives an output‐oriented, project‐based model of research that can sometimes call into question the integrity of the discipline itself by bringing back the division between ethnography (as a practice of gathering data) and anthropology (as a generalising science). A significant number of articles published in 2019, within the rubric of anthropology, inhabit that borderland that anthropology shares with neighbouring social sciences: with human geography (Saxer and Andersson 2019; Brachet and Scheele 2019; Gardini 2019; Saxer 2019; Gohain 2019; Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019; Luo et al 2019; Fradejas‐Garcia 2019; Andersson 2019); area studies (Goh 2019); urban studies (Civelek 2019; Kobi 2019); development studies (Green 2019); human economics (Diggins 2019; Pied 2019; Henig 2019); and sociology (Miller 2019). Geoffrey Hughes, in his 2018 survey of European anthropology in this journal (Hughes 2018), referred to the rise of what he called ‘meta‐anthropology’, breaking down traditional boundaries between academic knowledge production and knowledge practices, both in the field and in wider political economies, a development he cautiously welcomed as prefiguring a more secure future for the discipline in the age of audit and concrete accountability for so‐called ‘deliverables’.…”

Victim, broker, activist, fixer: Surviving dispossession in working class Lahore

“…or distance and, instead, through an 'imperfect attachment'. Much of the anthropological conversation on such relations has predominantly focused on rural or tribal populations and explored the ways in which such groups are able to evade state control (Scott, 1998), live between and in half-states (Brachet and Scheele, 2019;Scheele, 2019). There have been, however, extensive debates on conceptions of marginality within the field of urban studies (see Bayat, 2012).…”