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Cultivating Hustlers: The Agrarian Ethos of Soninke Migration

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1369183x.2013.723257

1469-9451

Paolo Gaibazzi,

Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development

Abstract Sedentariness has been disregarded in migration studies. Although recent scholarship pays greater heed to immobility, the latter is often narrowly conceptualised as the exact opposite of mobility. This article attempts to overcome such dichotomies by focusing on agrarian life and activities in one of the most migratory rural contexts in West Africa, namely the Soninke villages of the Upper Gambia River valley. It shows how young men—normally the most mobile group in Soninke society—are trained to embody an agrarian ethos in order for them to be able to pursue not only agricultural livelihoods but also migratory ones. Physical, social and moral virtues cultivated in farm fields are thought to make the young man fit and adaptable to life and work abroad. The article further suggests that this agrarian ethos is reproduced through migratory dynamics, such as the integration of West African migrants as unqualified labourers in the stratified labour market of Europe and North America. As a synthesis or symbiosis between mobile and immobile cultural practices, the Soninke agrarian ethos provides us with ways of rethinking the relation between migration and sedentariness, thus bridging the dichotomy between the two. Keywords: GambiaImmobilitySedentarinessAgricultureVirtue Acknowledgements Previous versions of this article were presented at the AEGIS Workshop on 'Children and Migration in Africa' (SOAS, May 2012) and at an invited lecture organised by Latvia's Association of Anthropologists (March 2011). I wish to thank the participants of these events for their comments. In particular, I am indebted to Dace Dzenovska for her insightful theoretical suggestions on cultivation and virtue. Valuable comments were also provided by Alice Bellagamba, Stephan Dünnwald and two anonymous JEMS reviewers. Research for this article was generously funded by the University of Milano-Bicocca with Unicredit Foundation, Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Missione Etnologica in Benin e Africa Occidentale, the European Social Fund (Exchange Visit Grant) via African Borderlands Research Network and Centro de Estudos Africanos (Lisbon), and Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Notes 1. President Jammeh's speech at the Opening Ceremony of the National Assembly on 30 March 2008, broadcast by GRTS TV. 2. Figures based on a survey carried out by the author in 2006/7 on a sample (10.9 per cent) of the village households. 3. Some currents of Sufi Islam, like the Senegalese Muridiyya, contain explicit sanction on hard work and frugality, though this should not be mistaken for an Islamic version of the Protestant ethics of capitalism (Coulon Citation1981). 4. Begging is often associated with low-ranking status groups, in particular with slave descendants (Sommerfeld Citation1999). Manchuelle (Citation1997) saw the patriarchal drive for autonomy and success as a key historical reason behind Soninke migration. 5. Women are also entitled to some of the men's labour (e.g. digging up groundnuts). Young men can also work on their own individual fields, but rarely do so these days, and mostly work to produce the grain for the whole household. 6. According to my household survey in Sabi, 76.9 per cent of the migrants are active remitters. 7. To be sure, the classic literature on circular migration has already highlighted the dynamic combination between movement and stasis (e.g. Prothero and Chapman Citation1985), and to some extent it has shed light on the social arrangements that have enabled such a combination. However, whereas this literature was focused on migratory models, I am interested in the very nature of mobility and immobility, and in their interrelation, from the socio-cultural point of view.