Conclusion

Exploration and Mobility

Arguments about mobility in this book carry broader implications about power and social encounters. Thinking of mobility as relational, material, and constituted through linguistic practices helps us gain perspective on relationships of power. Exploitative exercises of power have historically occurred when people have assumed that they could map the world and encounter places on their own terms, independently of others. At a broader level, the Anthropocene is partly a recognition of this fact—that few phenomena on our planet can be analyzed independently of human activity.

Indeed, the extent to which mobility is viewed as a technical act of movement is a good gauge of power relations and the related ideologies that often obscure these processes. In many cases, this is possible through particular social distance offered by power and privilege in which interconnections with others are obscured, most blatantly in the case of colonial settler societies on a so-called frontier. For instance, in broader work on settler-colonial mobilities, Georgine Clarsen (2015, 42) writes, “Settler societies were constituted in, and continue to be structured by, ongoing processes of material, social, and cultural transformation that are predicated on—expressed through and measured by—motility and mobility. Foundational to settler colonialism are both the potential and actual capacities of settlers to roam as autonomous sovereign subjects around the world and across the territories they claim as their own—and conversely to circumscribe and control the mobilities of Indigenous peoples, to immobilize the former sovereign owners of those territories.” As one important origin for these projects, the enlightenment was partly a project about obtaining and cataloging scientific knowledge about the known world (Tricoire 2017). This unleashed waves of explorers and merchants who aimed to map out and understand the world. Yet the maps produced during these eras belied the existence of places that were to be not found but revealed in relation to the people who lived there. Even during this seemingly rationalized endeavor, mobility was facilitated through others. For instance, Tim Ingold (2011) draws a distinction between wayfinding, a lived engagement through spaces in contrast to transport, which obscures our broader engagement with lived places under the guise of objective travel between destinations.

However, the social and relational facilitation of mobility has often been obscured. In The Paper Road, anthropologist Eric Mueggler (2011) describes the botanical expeditions of George Forrest, whose life’s work was to discover and collect samples of Himalayan plants. He worked through local assistants from Naxi communities, who facilitated his access to these remote regions. Throughout this time, Forrest was searching for the epicenter of the genus Rhododendron. It might have seemed—even to Forrest himself—that he made decisions about such plant collections based on rational factors on a map. However, the regions he scoured were made available to him through the kinship networks of his assistants, who had hospitality relations in particular valleys and not others. The end result was not merely a map of natural history, but an exercise in social mapping.

In many cases, the travels of early colonial missionaries and explorers also tended to view the world as empty places to discover. Discussing the work of Fabian and Nerlich, Jean and John Comaroff (1991, 98) discuss how “the qualities of the scientific ‘spirit’ were identified with the heroic ‘spirit’ of the adventurer: the natural scientist’s penetration into hitherto unknown realms had become one with the advance into regions unknown. The newly charted surfaces of the African landscape were to have a direct connection with the universe opening up within the person.” In another example, Mary Louise Pratt (1985) describes in detail the travels of John Borrow, whose travel writings of his time in South Africa are illuminating. Rather than seeing it as a landscape to discover through people, Barrow was cataloging a place that could be known independently of the people who lived there. In Pratt’s words, “Though he was traveling as a colonial official, charged with mediating disputes between Boer colonists and indigenous peoples, and though he was traveling with a large party of Europeans, Boers, and Hottentots, human interaction plays little role in his narrative. Instead, page after page catalogs without a thrill what Barrow likes to call ‘the face of the country” (122).

Anthropological perspectives are useful here. Rather than a landscape as merely an objective reality that sits independent of the people who inhabit it, most anthropologists consider our world to be hybrid—a laminated product of both its physical, material character and its cultural representations. Mobility takes into account power relations by engaging with a world that is knowable through other people. Mobility and even places themselves are largely constituted through ongoing linguistic exchanges.

The Importance of Contact

Some of the material in this book may appear to be the stuff of anthropological investigations from years past: ethnography of village settings, face-to-face interactions, and the back and forth of joking cousins or in-laws. Indeed, many of the first anthropologists planted themselves in small villages, examining such practices that they considered to be representative of larger structures. However, the linguistic practices they may have found there were not features of bounded communities. Instead, these linguistic resources facilitated broader networks that allowed people to travel widely and negotiate relationships with a wide range of people. These practices not only tell the story of broader migrations and interactions but also enable these mobilities. And despite a significant lack of cell service and access to computer technologies, many of my interlocutors in Kédougou—and especially its youth—were avid consumers of cell and computer media. As I describe throughout this book, they used these media alongside other forms of verbal exchange to maintain contact across great distances. Face-to-face interactions and facilitated media such as cell phones, radio, and the internet all provided opportunities to connect with and move oneself to places beyond the here and now.

However, one of the most precious things to many of the people I met throughout West Africa was the value of spending time with people. Speaking the names of others, recognizing their presence, and connecting those you meet to webs of relations was a passionate concern. They did everything they could to bring people together. The theoretical approaches adopted in this book capture the spirit of their enduring efforts to mobilize copresence through creative interactional and linguistic means. And yet I also don’t want to paint a romantic picture of harmonious communal relations. Living people in close quarters, especially in the context of a small rural community, is also fraught with conflict, resentment, and frustration. Having an abundance of time to spend with others sometimes reflects systematic unemployment and economic hardship (Ralph 2008). Yet despite all this, the importance of visitations, greeting others, and navigating face-to-face interactions cannot be overemphasized. These are the aspects of life that the people I met in West Africa deeply cared about.

When I explained my ethnographic research, most Kédovins immediately recognized the importance of what I was doing. Even something as simple as an everyday greeting carried a deep significance to people—particularly for migrants. To my interlocutors, my interest in language didn’t seem like an obscure academic topic at all. West Africans not only practiced this verbal art but also reflected deeply about their relationships with others and the linguistic practices through which they were enabled. These were not merely codes of behavior but also a set of strategies that people used to adapt to different circumstances. They enabled people to be mobile and to encounter places through people.

It is the value of this sociality that led me to become an anthropologist of West Africa. After many years of working there, these repeated interactions and relationships with others formed a web of relationality that had drawn me in. I often took on jobs and opportunities to maintain relationships with people. At times, my job as an anthropologist seemed designed to fulfill these relationships as much as it was an end in and of itself. In this, I am lucky. My career enables me to spend time with generous people with very different life experiences and to share in the everyday brilliance of their verbal arts.

As I am finishing this book, we are emerging from what has been an earth-shattering encounter with the global COVID pandemic, even if its effects appeared more tempered in Senegal. As with the Ebola epidemic in chapter 5, disease is not merely a viral phenomenon but one that is constitutive of our interactional lives. If anything, viral transmission exemplifies the materiality of language and interaction. Contact with others has become fraught, and it has shrunken our capacities to be mobile. If anything, COVID has revealed some of the taken-for-granted dimensions of our interactional practices, such as the proxemics of conversation that may have been previously hidden. If there is any silver lining, it is a recognition that interacting with others is a precious thing. Clearly isolation, quarantine, and masking have been important strategies for dealing with the COVID and Ebola epidemics. In one corner of the world, however, this book shows how difficult it is to escape face-to-face entanglements with others. These interactions are part of broader relational infrastructures built over the long term. An attention to these practices also shows how hard it can be to extricate oneself from the affordances of engaging with others. We often frame interactional behavior in the context of a pandemic as a personal choice, but our capacities to insulate ourselves from others are circumscribed by social practices under the level of awareness that may also be patterned in terms of socioeconomic class, race, or other factors. Hopefully this book has shown how these everyday interactional routines enable mobility in a complex world. For my part, I have learned that saying hello to others has revealed to me some incredible places and that greeting people makes me feel fulfilled. My hope is to share the richness of this everyday verbal art with others.

References