Vital instability: ontological insecurity and African urbanisms

Wilhelm-Solomon, Matthew; Bukasa, Peter Kankonde; Núñez, Lorena

doi:10.1080/21681392.2017.1341082

Cited by 22 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…In a context where everyone is striving to see and act beyond the visible surfaces of social life, even the definition of a witch can be hard to pin down: people may be ‘witch‐like’ to varying degrees, depending on their powers of perception and capacity for concealment. It is possible, of course, for competing explanations for misfortune to ‘enfold into one another without ever being resolved’ (Wilhelm‐Solomon, Bukasa & Núñez 2017: 147). My interlocutors understood, all too clearly, that international trawlers were undermining their coastal ecology, and that this was part of a long, grim history in which rural Sierra Leonean communities had been exploited and marginalized by remote, unaccountable actors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fishing, thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

Diggins

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article explores the ‘apprehension’ that permeates life in coastal Sierra Leone as fisherfolk struggle to navigate a precarious economy of overfished waters and overstrained relationships. In a context of deepening uncertainty, social vigilance has come to be regarded as a key survival skill. At sea, even as fishermen strain their senses for evidence of shoaling fish, they remain equally vigilant to rival crews, who may seek to deceive them in their competition for the same depleted resource. When crews return home with empty nets, again, exchange partners regard them with suspicion, watchful for clues that they could have sold their catch covertly in another coastal town. When businesses founder or savings evaporate, people are quick to assume their fortunes must have been invisibly robbed ‘in a witch way’ by one of their neighbours. And yet, despite the deep mistrust and apprehension through which people regard their social world, moral discourses about this supposedly rampant trickery are nuanced. Despair at believing themselves to have been grifted in some unseen way is often tempered by a weary empathy for their antagonists’ poverty, and even grudging respect for their skills of dissimulation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fishing, thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

Diggins

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…It is a transience born both of migrants’ own ambition and the hostility they experience in the host city. Through it migrants may resist transplantation and may ‘hover above the soil by retaining loyalties to their countries of origin and orient themselves towards a future outside their country of residence’ (Landau, 2009: 205; see also Wilhelm-Solomon et al, 2017). The mobility hubs referred to in this article suggest a tactic of creating a light imprint in the host space that is fundamentally connected to a country of origin.…”

Section: Protection and Profit Amidst Precaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

An enclave entrepôt: The informal migration industry and Johannesburg’s socio-spatial transformation

Zack

Landau

2021

Urban Studies

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The spatial concentration of production in cities attracts international and domestic labour in ways that change the character and scale of urban space. Drawing on two decades of research on migration and informal trading in Johannesburg, South Africa, this article argues that the global trade in Chinese ‘fast fashion’ interacts with South Africa’s immigration policy, transportation networks, informal trade and established migration infrastructures to transform the city’s Park Station neighbourhood into an enclave entrepôt. Operated and supported by a network of informal logistics services that keep the enclave within but apart from the city, it is exquisitely tailored to cross-border shoppers. At the social and legal margins but at the city’s geographic core, it enables fluidity in an otherwise hostile space; it is at once highly visible and invisibilising. Formed in the shadows of formal institutions and law enforcement, this entrepôt is migrant-driven and serves the needs of people often seeking to remain invisible from the South African state and citizenry. As such, its services are adapted from the infrastructures that service legal and irregular migration in the subcontinent. Unlike ethnic enclaves or neighbourhoods that work as arrival zones, it provides the means to move ‘through’ rather than ‘into’ the city. The entrepôt is a form of migrant space-claiming by vulnerable and mobile people wishing to be in but not of the city. It acts as portal into, through and beyond national territory.

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“…At the same time, cities also become spaces of "ontological insecurity" (Giddens 2004), where the vagaries and fragilities of urban centers threaten their inhabitants' sense of identity and coherence, challenging their social, spiritual, and moral beings in highly gendered and embodied ways (Mukonyora 2007). Again, religious practices that originate from the fields of Christianity, Islam, and African or other forms of "traditional" religion help to overcome these states of insecurity and establish affective and emotional belonging in the context of highly fluid urban environments (Wilhelm- Solomon, Kankonde, and Núñez 2017).…”

Section: Affective Urbanisms: Spatiality Materiality and Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

Homewood

2021

Journal of Africana Religions

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The book series examines the religious, cultural, and political expressions of African, African American, and African Caribbean traditions. Through transnational, cross-cultural, and multidisciplinary approaches to the study of religion, the series investigates the epistemic boundaries of continental and diasporic religious practices and thought and explores the diverse and distinct ways African-derived religions inform culture and politics. The series aims to establish a forum for imagining the centrality of Black religions in the formation of the "New World.

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Vital instability: ontological insecurity and African urbanisms

Cited by 22 publications

References 32 publications

Fishing, thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

Fishing, thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

An enclave entrepôt: The informal migration industry and Johannesburg’s socio-spatial transformation

Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

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