Introduction

The Blind Man and the Boy

Hunched over at the midback, a slim elderly man takes small but assertive steps throughout the crowded market of downtown Kédougou. Although it is early in the morning, he is wearing sunglasses. Small caps of white hair emerge at the end of the man’s delicately matted beard. The man is blind. Despite this, he traces a slow but sure-footed route between market sellers, avoiding a crowded field of protruding umbrellas, stools, and motorcycles. People call out to him, and he responds with the confidence of someone who is firmly rooted in time and space. But the elder is not standing alone. He is holding on to one end of a stick whose other end is in the hands of a young boy walking in front of him. Connected to the old man, the boy makes fluid motions and pauses at different times as he considers the path forward. At a short distance away, I occasionally overhear the man murmuring the names of places and people to the boy. These names trace out an inhabited landscape that they will encounter together.

Although the old man and the boy are moving at the same speed, each body has a slightly different rhythm. It is the boy who can see, but it is the old man who appears to be open to the world around him. His trip to the market is one of intense greetings and sociality. He calls out kola nut sellers by last name and politely but persuasively asks them for something to chew on. While the blind man basks in the exchange of these greetings, the young boy maintains his steady silence in a sea of effervescent talk overflowing with haggling, hellos, and good-natured jibes. Moving in concert, they appear to be inhabiting very different places. At the same time, however, they are inextricably linked: each of their experiences in the market is facilitated by the other.

At a basic level, this example draws attention to ingrained assumptions about the nature of what mobility is.1 In this book, I examine mobility as a relational activity that is frequently underwritten by an individual’s perspective. I will show that careful attention to linguistic practices and interactions reveals important insights about mobility, foremost of which, perhaps, is that viewing mobility as a physical experience that language renders meaningful through description hides the ways mobility also emerges through language use and interaction. We are all more like the blind man than we think. Our mobilities are mediated through our connections with others and through the linguistic exchanges we have with them. It is these calls, alongside the guiding stick, that afford this blind man the capacities to move and circulate. Not merely naming places and people, these calls forged a path ahead that these two could follow together. Interactions between the blind man, boy, and those around them shaped the market into a lived and familiar space.

Notice that the blind man’s ability to move is not merely a function of his own body. His movements about the market emerge through a relationship between the boy and himself. These are articulated not only through the physical connection offered by the stick but also through hushed, repeated calls between the elder and his young helper. I suggest, however, that we should use the image of blind man and child as a metaphor for how we consider mobility to happen more broadly. It is an inherently social, relational process. The blind man’s mobility is facilitated through this linguistic and embodied connection. There is no unmediated mobility—places become available to us through our interaction with other people.

Across West Africa, one often sees familiar scenes of blind men and women led about by young girls and boys—each holding on to one end of a stick rubbed smooth from steady contact. This relationship is a rich glimpse into the lives of West Africans and offers insights into respective access to time and technology, communities of care, and what people value. In much of the United States, many physical infrastructures like ramps enable differently abled individuals to navigate built environments. Throughout West Africa, even more of these accommodations must be made through communities of care and human labor. Throughout this book, I hope to break down existing distinctions between language and interaction on one hand and material infrastructure on the other.

The example of the blind man and his guide also reveals assumptions about the autonomous self—the boundaries of the body and assumptions about what its capacities should be. At first glance, it may likewise appear to be a special case in which an individual bereft of the capacity for movement because of blindness is able to move thanks to exceptional help from another. However, this example distills some broader truths of movement and mobility that figure centrally in this book: mobility is relational and therefore enabled through social relationships; it is intertwined with the communicative capacities that facilitate it. Anthropology has long argued that the individual—often assumed to be independent and autonomous—can be better understood as relationally emergent. Our perceived independence is a product of situated worldviews that further political, moral, or ideological projects. Marilyn Strathern (1988), for instance, spoke of dividuals to explore this interdependence in the case of Melanesia. The blind man and his young companion could be thought of in this way. In a more limited sense, the stick can be understood as a channel of communication between two individuals or, more fundamentally, as a relationship that raises doubts about the independence of autonomous personhood. While relational dividualism is useful for conceptualizing this issue given the historical weight of ideologies of individuality, this is not necessarily a question of separate ontologies. Edward LiPuma’s (2000, 132) insight that “persons emerge precisely from that tension between dividual and individual aspects/relations” equally captures the complexity of these questions in West Africa.

The example of the blind man can be traced at least to Gregory Bateson, who meditated on a similar case of a blind man tapping a stick ahead of himself to walk. Bateson (1972) used this example to argue that we should expand the notion of what constitutes a self beyond the confines of a physical body, narrowly construed. For Bateson, the blind man’s stick constituted a pathway of communication that was a central part of his locomotory capacities. Matthew Wolf-Meyer (2020) builds on Bateson’s example and his own case studies to argue that any communication is facilitated through material objects and technologies. I find these debates useful because they help us realize that movement and mobility are practices that are not independent of the things and people around us but mediated through them.

In the first part of this introduction, I will offer an initial sketch of the relational character of mobility in West Africa. I will begin with an intuitive example of mobility that shows how it is experienced and construed in a local context and from local perspectives. The rest of this book will build on these insights to show the importance of language in studies of mobility. I will argue that linguistic practice is a constitutive aspect of mobility and not merely a medium through which it is represented. Some of my examples may not appear to be classic ones of mobility, for instance, that of migrant Senegalese Mouride traders hawking sunglasses on the Spanish Steps in Rome. However, mobility as an analytic frame helps us understand broader social formations that are affected by the circulation, exchange, and movement of individuals and communities. In this analysis, it is equally important to account for the roles and positionalities of those people who remain stationary, as they are key players in these communities (Gaibazzi 2015). A close analysis of the language of interactions helps reveal mobility’s relational dimensions.

The Garandaaru Caught Him

Throughout this book I offer a new analytic perspective for studying mobility that reframes linguistic practice. To begin with, I offer an example that begins to sketch out mobilities emerge in a local context. Twenty kilometers to the southwest of the downtown market where the blind man did his daily shopping sits a cluster of villages on the Senegal-Guinea border in southeastern Senegal. This place of patchy forest and brushy savanna is where I conducted linguistic anthropological fieldwork between the years 2014 and 2016. A few months into my time there, a young boy from the village went missing. The explanations and reactions to this episode taught me a lot about how people conceive of mobility in West Africa.

It was the dry season—a month and a half before the seasonal rains would awaken the parched landscape and bring forth unearthly shoots of neon green grasses. The field crops were long harvested. This was a time of taking stock—of food stores, neighbors, and flocks. Residents of the small village of Taabe on the border of Senegal and Guinea did what they could underneath such an unyielding sun. Women tended a dry season garden next to a small stream, trying to coax vegetables from the silty soil. Work was only possible in between drawn-out tea breaks that offered respite from the hot day. During this time of year, sweat-soaked skin searched out for any possible breath of wind; squinting eyes scanned for patches of precious shadow.

We had just returned from another awareness-raising meeting hosted by an international NGO that had attempted to warn the plateau residents of the dangers of eating bushmeat. As we dispersed and the village residents disputed the NGOs warnings (though they had not countered them publicly during the meeting), I suddenly heard news that Didi, an eight-year-old boy, had gone missing. He had disappeared, as if swallowed from the earth, near a mango orchard by a little stream where village women tended a vegetable garden. My friend and village host, Rune (nephew of the village chief), went to Didi’s large family compound to hear if it was true. Normally very emotive and prone to laughter, Rune returned in a state of somber alertness. “It’s serious,” he uttered, “ko sobee.”

Nearly the whole village went out to look for Didi. Messengers were sent out to surrounding villages to alert them of Didi’s disappearance. I went out with Rune, meeting up with residents from all corners of the village to organize our search efforts. The next afternoon, hours were spent in small fission-fusion search parties. We fanned out into the surrounding groves, riverbeds, and fields, occasionally encountering another group of concerned, sweaty faces. Didi was not found that day, but his father and other close kin continued to look for him through the night. I went back to my hut to round up precious flashlights, which served as essential equipment in an area without electricity. My headlamps—filled with brand-name Duracell batteries—were particularly sought after.

Skipping breakfast, Rune and I woke up early the next morning to look again for Didi. Although it was cooler, we were tired from a long day of traipsing around the bush. We met up with more and more villagers as we left Taabe, prepared to renew our search for the poor boy. As an anthropologist studying everyday language use in this southeastern corner of Senegal, I found my ears perked up when a word I had never heard before peppered the concerned conversations: “garandaaru nangi mo” (garandaaru got him). I heard this phrase over and over again during the course of our search efforts. A garandaaru, I gathered, was something that could occupy or overtake someone and cause them to get lost or move in unhabitual ways. “It could be right by you and not respond to your calls,” someone explained to me. It was something that would make you lose yourself and your way, like a spirit that confounds you.

It soon struck me that the places where people were looking for Didi were anywhere but the places that people would ordinarily go. Fearing Didi had been possessed by garandaaru, family and friends were looking not primarily on the paths between human settlements or places where individuals harvested wood or food. Instead, they began to scour the so-called wild places that an individual would be least expected to visit. Locals here did not ordinarily go rambling about the bush in search of adventure and natural beauty. Most stuck to the paths and inhabited spaces that were hewn out of this potentially precarious environment. The wild animals and uninhabited spaces around these villages were generally approached with respectful caution. And yet this search was the first time that I felt like I was exploring with members of the community. We bushwhacked along streambeds, in the underbrush of palm groves, and through the scrubby bushes that interspersed the termite mound-pocked plains. During these hours of searching, I came upon clearings, forests, and streams I had scarcely imagined during my time in southeastern Kédougou.

Viewed in this way, garandaaru can be understood as the decoupling of the boy’s trajectories from his habitual human context. New forces in the forest might attract Didi, and the unsettling thing for Didi and his family was that neither he nor they might be able to predict where he would have gone. If Didi had been taken by the garandaaru, locals feared that he would respond not to socialized pathways of movement but rather a world that is devoid of shared paths and waypoints. The ways people engage with space and landscape have been rich topics of anthropological discussion. Tim Ingold (2000), for instance, understands wayfinding as movement in a landscape in relation to lived, habitual activities, which draws attention to the connections between mobility and personhood. Garandaaru seemed to sever these habitual moorings, letting Didi loose in an entirely differently constituted landscape (cf. Caine 2022). What scared people about Didi’s absence was that he had lost all grounding in the habitual social world and was roaming about the landscape in a way that they could not understand. To the great relief of his family and us all, Didi was finally found in the outskirts of a village some fifteen kilometers away at the end of this second day of searching.

The first two examples here show how inherently social and relational the process of mobility is. For instance, even as Didi is possessed by garandaaru, his condition can be understood as a relational one. Didi is not merely someone who lost his way but someone who has been led astray by a spirit that has him in its clutches. Like the aforementioned example of the blind man and the child, Didi’s story reveals why it is useful to think of movement and mobility as inherently social, and recognizing how mobility emerges through relational, interactional processes is a first step. Throughout this book, I argue that mobility is not merely an experience of movement or migration—in this case Didi’s wild roaming throughout the bush. The conversations about his trip, contestations about what happened to him, and claims about his journey were themselves at the heart of mobility; these linguistic practices bring mobility into being.

Furthermore, mobility offers a more expansive way of framing fundamental questions of social life and its interconnections. Scholars of mobility have uprooted assumptions of social life as stationary, using mobility as a lens for capturing human activity and thereby emphasizing process and flux. This approach helps to look across borders, examine connections across space and time, and avoid the reification of identity and community as local constructions. Part of the field of mobility’s productivity lies in posing questions that go beyond the frame of mobility as mere physical movement.

In essence, the study of mobility is the study of movement layered over time with social and symbolic meanings. Tim Cresswell (2006), for instance, uses the frame of mobility to account for power and social meaning, while Peter Adey (2017, 102) mused, “Perhaps mobility is always meaningful and therefore never simply movement. Even approaches that characterize mobility in the most abstract of ways see mobilities as imbued with valueladen judgements and labels.” These considerations ultimately point to the recognition that there is perhaps no movement without meaning. Any form of mobility or motility, such as walking or running, are socially learned techniques of the body rather than natural capacities (Mauss 1935). Language is often implicitly identified as the process through which we give meaning to the experiences of mobility. The danger, however, is to see language only as an immaterial, conceptual process of coded meaning that sits in contrast to the “real,” material experiences of mobility.

This book argues that many theoretical issues can be resolved if we avoid separating mobility dualistically as an experience that is then rendered meaningful through linguistic and social representations. Situating language as a core component to mobility, rather than a mere reflection of it, helps resolve many of the theoretical tensions of this referentialist ideology of language and helps make sense of ethnographic encounters. Didi’s wanderings caused by garandaaru, for instance, show that the physical experiences of mobility as movement should not be understood as independent from how they are articulated through language and interpreted through forms of relational possession as personhood. His movements were not independent phenomena but came into being partly through the local conceptions of garandaaru that community members articulated together.

Across West Africa, children like Didi are sent on errands to make small purchases at stores, transmit messages, or check on the status of visitors and events. The way in which they must report on their trips when they return demonstrates the importance of viewing mobilities as articulated action in relation to others rather than as a transparent representation of experiences. Gracia Clark (2010) discusses the local term used to understand this process in Ghana:

Every time children go on an errand or adults pay a visit, they are asked on arrival to present their ɔkwansu, the story of their trip. This narrative should not be interrupted. It starts with the circumstances that led up to their making the journey and ends with their arrival. Relatives and neighbors judge a child’s maturity and intelligence by the coherence of the ɔkwansu. The story also sets the stage for any subsequent request by describing the circumstances which created the need for it. Ideally, it should alert listeners to the intended request before it is voiced explicitly, so that they can be ready with a response or an alternative solution. (9–10, emphasis added)

At first glance, this “narrative” may appear to be only a representation of experiences or facts as they happened on this journey. However, notice that the results of the ɔkwansu condition future actions and responses, thereby articulating the children’s movements in relation to requests and activities of the adults. In so doing, these stories provide platforms for shaping future interactions and relationships between children and adults in which the child might be characterized as a certain kind of person; for instance, as an unreliable child who would not be asked to complete similar errands in the future or a dependable child who understands the stakes of the errand and may be trusted as a page. The story told thus offers a form of social action where the child is articulating a narrative in relation to the expectations and anticipated counteractions of the adults. Not merely a feature of youth language socialization, these features of narration as social action are true of linguistic practices more broadly. Building on the previous examples, which showed the relationality of mobility, the custom of sharing ɔkwansu offers a first example that demonstrates how linguistic practices can be understood to constitute mobility in a meaningful sense.

Language as Infrastructure

Examining language as a material process makes better use of mobility as an analytic device. Doing so also helps us understand how local communities of migrants live their lives distributed across space. In the previous section, I begin to show how linguistic practices are not merely a representational technology through which migrants share information. Applying this insight one step further, we can say that they are also a material means of forging pathways and channels along which people and objects circulate. In his stimulating essay on African cities, Abdou Maliq Simone (2004) called for an increased consideration of human creativity within a discussion of infrastructure in what he called people as infrastructure, a term that captures how people’s situated actions are not merely layered on but also radically change material forms in our world. Such frameworks also challenge stark nature-culture boundaries that provide a cultural blueprint based on keeping objects and humans conceptually distinct (Latour 1993; Descola 2013). Drawing on Simone’s analytic, people as infrastructure, this chapter explores what we can learn about mobility and social change when we examine linguistic practice as a form of infrastructure.

Other literature from urban anthropology, such as the fascinating study of West African migrants in Paris’s Gare du Nord shows how a train station constructs pathways for durable social infrastructure (Kleinman 2014, 2019). Building on the question of how physical space mediates social and linguistic exchanges, however, this book interrogates the material implications of linguistic practice in the context of mobility. These qualities of language emerge even more fully in published responses to Julie Kleinman’s work: “Stories, and even practices associated with particular urban forms, continue to exist after buildings and neighborhoods are demolished or reidentified after gentrification” (Newman 2021, 3). In other words, places are laminated productions of their overt material properties and other conceptual layers constituted through language as a material, symbolic infrastructure. These latter processes and can sustain a place long after they are “gone.” In the same set of responses to Kleinman’s work, Rudolph Gaudio (2021) examines the way in which language sustains and is materialized through infrastructure. Grounding language as a material practice, he defines what he calls discursive infrastructure in two ways: “1) the ways in which language is materialized—that is, mediated by material forms—and 2) the ways people and institutions use language to comment and act upon physical and social infrastructures” (3). This book expands these important foundations to examine language as a material channel that mediates and constitutes mobilities.

It is useful to consider language as a kind of infrastructure in several senses. Firstly, contrary to popular conceptions in which it is held to be a purely symbolic technology, language is a material thing and process. Its frequency and force can be measured by instruments, and it is produced by the physical body as instrument. Our bodies thus offer physical channels of this embodied practice, producing vibrations in our lungs and vocal apparatuses that are captured by other interlocutors through measurable processes. Alongside other infrastructures like internet cables, electric wiring, or roadways, language is “matter that enable[s] the movement of other matter” (Larkin 2013b, 329). Language’s separation from the material world can be located in intellectual histories going back at least to Ferdinand de Saussure, who proposed a separation from the denotational sign and the material world, a conceptualization that parallels broader Cartesian distinctions between mind and body (Irvine 1989). As discussed by Webb Keane (2005, 185), “Saussurian semiology fails to see the role linguistic practices play in the objectification of things.” It is for these reasons that linguistic signs as material things can interact with other forms of materiality to wear down or fail such that linguistic signification is disrupted (Keane 1997). Drawing on work from coastal Senegal, Judith Irvine insisted on the material qualities of language and their consideration alongside issues of political economy by examining, for instance, how praises sung by West African griots constituted a material form of exchange (Irvine 1989).

A material thing in its own right, language also enables the circulation of other material, social forms. Other anthropologists of media have offered a broader framework for examining infrastructure’s capacity to enable circulation and exchange—in addition to a technical process, it is one that is intertwined with political, aesthetic, and social concerns. Brian Larkin (2008, 6) looks to infrastructure as material forms that enable broader circulations across channels: “Infrastructure, in my usage, refers to this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” The forms of verbal art I describe in this book establish channels of communication and circulation across which mobility is made possible. Alongside quintessential forms of infrastructure and media such as radio, internet, or cell networks, language in interaction offers a form of mediation that “bring different people, objects, and spaces into interaction” (Larkin 2013b, 330). Alongside that of Simone, the work of Julia Elyachar (2010) demonstrates the infrastructural aspects of linguistic exchange and practice. She shows how phatic labor in the form of social exchanges establishes an “infrastructure of communicative channels” that can further other social, political, and economic projects (452). In so doing, she demonstrates that language can be examined on the same plane as other forms of conventional infrastructure. In this book, language emerges as a particularly useful lens for investigating mobility precisely because it has an intersubjective character that emerges in between people rather than as the property of one person. In the second half of this book, I draw more heavily on the perspective of language as infrastructure to explore how linguistic exchanges in mobile settings form a material infrastructure through which migrants bring homes, markets, and borders into existence.

Linguistic practice can etch lines into the ground, so to speak, giving rise to the emergence of socially meaningful sites, places, and mediating material connections along which people and things circulate. I offer two short examples of what language as infrastructure may sound like. For instance, the language traded between migrant merchants in Kédougou’s downtown market was a key practice through which they rooted themselves in a new place. Merchants and laborers from Guinea, the Gambia, and Mali frequently tried to take advantage of Kédougou City’s place on a busy road to make money away from home. Here, among kola nuts and ready-to-wear clothes, in-law talk was very productively used among individuals to build relationships of futurity between individuals who weren’t always in-laws in a technical sense. Traders hoping to build long-standing relationships with customers often yelled out “esiraaɓe!” (senior in-law) to passersby. The bamboo stools or wheelbarrows on which they were sitting became a domestic space partly through the way they used honorific and teasing registers of in-law talk. This talk was not merely bouncing off the surface of an already constituted place; it shaped the market in domestic space, which emerges as a hybrid of physical and conceptual layers. Eating large plates of meals together from their selling spots, these merchants could disperse patronage and favors from a place that had become more like a new home than merely a market of buying and selling.

Viewing language as infrastructure also helps understand our desperate search for Didi in the land surrounding Taabe village. Although all I could see was an unfolding landscape, the area we had been scouring was overlaid by a social infrastructure. What appeared to me to be rivers and clearings were often highly saturated sites of human activity, constituted through iterative stories told and distinctions made by inhabitants who discursively shaped this into a built environment: places where oil palms were harvested; a site where a young couple had been discovered; areas where spirits still dwelled; and caves where traces of the autochthonous residents were to be found. To have been a part of these previous chains of speech events was to be able to see the linguistic infrastructure that shaped the land in front of it. As a newcomer to this, I did my best to try to navigate the same landscape, awkwardly entering into incomplete and broken chains of language-as-place saturated with meaning.

Mobility as a Verbal Art

When I speak of language in this book, I do not speak of it primarily as a formal system of representation, as it is frequently approached in linguistics. Instead, I consider language a socially infused, material practice in everyday life, not merely a symbolic system (Irvine 1989; Miller 2005; Keane 2005). These approaches to language guide linguistic anthropology, a field from which this book emerges. Close attention to language can show how people become successful migrants—as a way to expand or contract their life possibilities—but it can also reveal how we should be thinking of mobility from a broader perspective. My research suggests that it is useful to view mobility as a kind of verbal art. Doing so takes emphasis away from individual capacities and movement and shifts it toward the social and linguistic contexts that render people and places available and knowable to one another. Linguistic practices enable migrants to be successful—to build relationships with others far from home or to articulate their stories to others. Not merely a semiotic system for encoding referential statements, my ethnography among migrants in Senegal has demonstrated language to be an interactional, performative medium that can impel changes in the world. In this first sense, perspectives on language as social action (and not mere reference) allow us to see the negotiation of relationships, identity categories, and status.

Thinking of language as verbal art can help us view an international border as a joint construction of the material environment and talk. The border between Senegal and Guinea, for instance, was formed not out of physical barriers but rather through the exchange of talk by local residents, border police, and travelers. Boundaries between those living in Senegalese and Guinean villages were established through repeated stories told about who had rights to harvest straw and other natural resources in certain areas. The story of a conflict between border dwellers offered a narrative site through which interlocutors agreed on long-standing boundaries between areas. As people came and went, reports on their movements included deictic expressions like here and there through which individuals made distinctions between places that were held to be distinct. As such, appearances of an objective, Cartesian space were transformed into a lived landscape through talk. These distinctions helped established spatial boundaries such that one could be away in the first place. Physical distance thus does not always map onto space as it is socially experienced. Being a migrant is not merely a question of spatial distance expressed in kilometers but also an issue of inhabiting socially constituted spaces and roles that are negotiated through talk. I develop the verbal art of mobility more fully in the first half of this book, and in the second half, I build on these insights to show the language as a form of infrastructure.

Describing linguistic practices as a verbal art draws attention to the important social consequences that everyday language can have in the lives of migrants. I adopt the term verbal art in this book to capture commonsense understandings of the value of everyday linguistic practices. However, this work significantly departs from the ways that scholars have approached verbal art in the past. Most frequently, verbal art has become shorthand for the jokes, proverbs, or folktales that were shared in communities. Currently, most linguistic anthropological approaches eschew this kind of cataloging approach because classifying generic forms tends to reify an expressive culture rather than showing its sociocultural dynamics and its situated functions. Scholars such as Richard Bauman (1975) have attempted to build bridges between folkloric studies and verbal art, on one hand, and linguistic anthropology, on the other, by eschewing a text-centered approach and looking to performance as an analytic. Performance helps explore the mediated doing of verbal arts, how roles, audience, and manner all matter and offer creative opportunities for social action. For instance, work by Sabina Perrino (2020) examines the narrative processes through which migrants are performatively excluded from northern Italy. Her analysis employs concepts like stance, chronotope, and scale to tease out how speakers position themselves with respect to migrants. Using the analytic intimacies of exclusion, Perrino examines the affective dimensions of these processes, wherein authenticity, food, and history are suffused with often racialized feelings of belonging.

Examining mobility as a verbal art offers critical insights on power and precarity in migrant lifeworlds. For instance, consider the example of an international refugee (Jacquemet 2009). Even becoming a refugee entails the successful performance of what precarity and destitution look like in the eyes of a state. What does a refugee talk like? What do they look like, and what kinds of things should they know? Many of the international migrants I met were intensely aware of such issues, even if they could not always navigate them perfectly in highly unequal interactions. Using language in particular ways could thus quite literally make someone into a refugee. This was a question of performance—an interactional frame between an individual and their interlocutors driven by certain assumptions about language.

The linguistic varieties individuals wield impact the ways people are interpreted and the opportunities they might have. This is a question not just of codes but of specific competencies—knowledge of contexts and of norms of usage. According to Paul Stoller (2013), a foundational scholar of West African diaspora in the United States, language and its related cultural competence were the most important factors determining the success of West African migrants. The performances of migrants—their possible missteps, interactional disjunctures, or use of stigmatized varieties—were closely monitored. As Jan Blommaert (2010, 6) has remarked, “movement of people across space is therefore never a move across empty spaces. The spaces are always someone’s space, and they are filled with norms, expectations, conceptions of what counts as proper and normal (indexical) language use and what does not count as such.” For these reasons, it is just as important to study how language is interpreted as it is to track how it is produced. For instance, the borderlands of Senegal and Guinea offer a field of evaluation in which certain linguistic signs became highly salient and policed. In the multilingual context of West Africa, to speak certain varieties—and not others—is to encounter an entirely different kind of place. Speaking different languages and being a part of different networks can thus mediate experiences in distinct ways, such that the same “place” could appear very different to a newly arrived migrant in contrast to a longstanding local. In contrast to visuality, language as aurality presents one of the most shrouded and underappreciated forms of power and evaluation (Lippi-Green 2011).

In sum, linguistic practice should be seen as more than a representation of mobility, in terms of coded meaning, as it is a core part of mobility itself. At first glance, dodging law enforcement in distant lands, perilous maritime voyages, and other precarious leaps across space appear to be the experiences on which becoming a migrant are founded. However, the true craft of a migrant often emerges in the capacity to manage contingent social relationship with hosts, friends, and kin. In a basic sense, the study of mobility entails the resources, infrastructures, and social contexts that render it feasible. Being a successful migrant in West Africa, as throughout the world, requires an ability to manage relationships through idioms of kinship, commonality, or destitution. Ethnic identification, kinship relationships, or other form of community building in mobile contexts should not be questions of automatic affiliation but, instead, are contingent on creative acts of linguistic performance. This entails the capacity to articulate oneself as a certain kind of legible person, such as guest, kin, or worker.

However, this relational work was also a double-edged sword. Building relational connections with others through interaction could enable migrants to succeed, but they could also be exploited by others to make demands on a person’s time and resources. For instance, many across West Africa shared a concern with the power of language and gossip to bring unwanted attention to one’s possessions. A jealous eye might threaten one’s successes and desired possessions such as expensive phones or automobiles. For this reason, aspiring migrants often hid their imminent travels carefully from their communities. There was thus a danger of bragging about or talking about one’s plans to move abroad for fear that this talk would bring unwanted attention to one’s possible fortune. Young aspiring migrants would frequently “disappear” overnight, having launched a migratory adventure many months in the making. Even knowledge of their whereabouts abroad was not always shared with those back home. News often came in the form of Western Union and MoneyGram transfers, which offered steady streams of support to extended families. In an important sense, being away didn’t manifest itself until such gifts back home made this migrancy a reality.

From Representing Mobility to Articulating Mobility

Becoming a migrant thus constitutes an act of social articulation that is performative rather than narrowly communicative in that it constructs relationship with others and facilitates access to other social spaces. For these reasons, I prefer to use the term articulation rather than representation to better show the work of language in mobility. Articulation draws on the dual meaning of making connections and making propositions or references. By entailing meanings that emphasize both material processes and social labor, articulation provides a theoretical middle point to my discussion of language as verbal art and as infrastructure. This term builds on long-standing work in linguistic anthropology that has critiqued a referentialist ideology of language in which people ignore language’s connective, affective, or poetic capacities in favor of viewing language as mere reference. As such, migrants don’t come to places as complete persons but learn to articulate and identify themselves in relation to new people and places. Capturing the emergent character of interaction helps move away from a view of unchanging, autonomous people who simply move around to new spaces. In speaking and connecting with others, migrants learn to adopt new voices and retool how they present themselves in different contexts. Another way to think of this concept is to consider identity and place as emergent productions. People make the places they move through, and respective identities emerge in relation to one another. The task before us is to examine not only the political or economic contexts in which mobility happens but also the social and linguistic contexts that render people and places available and knowable to one another.

Approaches to mobility have often been separated into two separate processes: the movement and experience of mobility, on one hand, and the construction of meaning, on the other. Here movement is often conceptualized as an embodied, physical, or material sense, and the construction of meaning and its representation is held to be the purview of language. When language does figure in approaches to mobility, it becomes tacked on to ask how acts of mobility are represented or reflected. Meaning as investigated through language is treated as a separate calculation that occurs before or after mobility has happened. Such approaches often employ terms like representation, imaginaries, and fantasy. Methodologically, the model here is the interview or story told that represents the faraway travels of migrancy as it happened. Although mobility studies have often insisted on the importance of exploring the meaning of mobility,2 these approaches risk separating out mobility in terms of experiences and their representations. As such, language is often held to be a mere representation of a preexisting experience. Throughout this book, I insist on language as a form of social action in its own right and not merely a representation of the world. Language does not merely reflect “experiences” in the world but can also bring things into being.

Viewing talk on mobilities in terms of articulations rather than representations helps resolve tensions in the scholarship around the purported “accuracy” of migration realities. Beneath the gilded allure of emigration, there is an increasing recognition that Europe and the United States are also places of hardship and suffering. However, these difficulties are often hard to express to those who remain in Senegal partly because they must be shown and not merely told. As such, a migrant telling their family back home how hard it is over there is often accused of protecting their successes. In this way, many scholars have noted a disjuncture between the stories told of migration and the realities that migrants face when they get there. Based on work between Mali and the Congo, Bruce Whitehouse (2013, 25) notes how “migrants frequently misrepresent their circumstances in the place of destination, exaggerating successes and playing down hardships.” Viewing such talk of mobility as an articulated form of social action shows how it is a force for broader interactional or political designs rather than a narration to be examined in terms of mere truth value. At a broader geopolitical level, the way in which African migrants to southern Europe have been narrated in terms of civilizational invasions provides another example. Not mere representation, this discourse constitutes a form of exclusion and alienation rather than a mere reporting on the state of things (Triulzi and McKenzie 2013). In the work of Caroline Melly (2011), migrants discussing the disappearance of an infamous clandestine vessel bound for the Canary Islands is not merely a story told as an imaginary; it structures future possibilities for mobility and action. These effects are also important to track at the level of face-to-face encounters. Even the term that West African migrants or media employ to discuss their migrations encode stances and situated ways of experiencing mobility: terms such as aventure or aventurier that encode notions of risk, uncertainty, and possibility (Bredeloup 2008, 2014).

These arguments about articulation and the materiality of language may at times appear to be abstract. The stakes are most apparent in an example I describe in chapter 3. Simply put, I show that a young Guinean trader can leave his homeland, be abroad for four years before returning, and yet not be a migrant. At first, this might seem like an impossibility. However, this apparent conundrum can be explained by thinking of language as not merely a representation of existing mobilities but something that brings migrancy and mobility into being. In this example, a Guinean laborer makes his way to Mauritania, where he is exploited as a domestic servant—a slave almost—for four years in the compound of a wealthy family. After he returns, his story is told and interpreted by his peers in a downtown Kédougou market. They evaluate the signs of his mobility, including whether he had learned any local languages, returned with any money and new belongings, or had knowledge of the neighborhoods of Nouakchott.

As proof of his lack of mobility, his peers conclude that he hadn’t acquired any new things or money and had displayed little local knowledge of the area. Mocking him with a customary teasing nickname, the friends of this young Guinean trader in effect deny him the status of migrant; thus, mobility is negotiated through language in interaction. The approaches adopted in this book resonate with studies of mobility around the world where a frequent preoccupation with economics and material resources as accumulation belies central concerns of becoming “somebody” (MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000). This process cannot be captured as a single, individual telling of a “story.” Becoming somebody entails a translation of cumulative experiences in relation to others through everyday interactions.

Chapter Summaries

This introduction has set the stage for thinking about language and mobility in new ways. Approaching language as material and as negotiated decenters assumptions about the primacy of human autonomy and intentionality in which language is held to be a transparent window on people’s thoughts and personhood. Instead, we must look to language as a material, embodied practice through which mobilities are articulated. Talk on the move does not flow unimpeded as self-evident representations. It becomes snagged on the contingency of multiparty interactions; it is entangled with objects and places, and through it, the shards of many a migrant’s personhood become distributed across time and space. Navigating this interactional, material landscape through creative performances is the verbal art of mobility in West Africa.

Chapter 1 (Navigating Change in a Rural Borderland) examines cross-border treks from Senegal to Guinea as starting points for considering language and mobility as well as the regional histories within which these arguments are made. While conventional approaches to mobility emphasize material resources and physical movement, mobility is rendered possible through the relationships negotiated along the way. This chapter situates this book’s linguistic anthropological approach within the processes of social change that have fundamentally shaped southeastern Senegal. Within the past decade, a gold mining boom, the construction of an international highway, the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic, and the establishment of Kédougou as a region have all contributed to significant social and economic challenges for Kédougou’s communities. These changes sit alongside a deep history of seasonal, regional mobility that have allowed communities to thrive amid economic and environmental precarities. First grounding these issues in a cross-border trek to establish initial conceptions of mobility, this book goes on to explore more complex forms of mobility constituted through language.

In chapter 2 (The Pursuit of Relations in a Time of Social Change), I take a step back to discuss the broader repertoire of social idioms and routines West Africans creatively adopt to thrive in mobile contexts. While kinship, affinity, and other forms of mutuality are often presented as static social structures that push people into migration, this chapter demonstrates that these idioms in interaction can also be used to creatively navigate and build relationships. Local migrants, keen observers of their own social worlds, understood this relational work to be fundamentally mobile and described it as the pursuit of relations (jokkere enɗaŋ). To study mobility is necessarily to account for different forms of personhood and identity that emerge from varying contexts. The ability of migrants to present themselves across time and space is mediated by the specific kinds of resources, routines, and understandings that are shared in distinct environments. Migrants do not transport themselves as autonomous, complete people from place to place but emerge in relation to existing sociolinguistic understandings. At the end of this chapter, I show how technologies of statecraft like ID cards, birth registries, and surveillance initiatives on the border also are a part of these flexible social practices.

Chapter 3 (Articulating Mobility: Migration in Interaction) offers a toolkit for exploring how mobility is negotiated and articulated in multiparty social encounters. Whereas individual narratives or interviews might appear to transparently represent the experiences of migrants, tracking negotiated interactions better accounts for mobility in the lifeworlds of migrants. This approach is grounded in the recognition that communicative acts bring things into being at the same time that they represent experiences. To do this, the chapter develops the term articulating as an alternative to representing to emphasize the dual meaning of expressing a proposition and making relational linkages. Articulating mobilities entails a social practice that can shape relationships, mediate the formation of collectivities, and enable the movement of people, bodies, and ideas. This shift of perspective is a useful complement to other approaches to meaning making in mobility studies that draw on nonmaterial concepts such as representation, imaginaries, and fantasy. Linguistic representations of mobilities might first appear to be communicative acts of reporting on existing “events” or “experiences.” However, ethnographic encounters show how articulating mobile experiences should also be seen as a form of social action—a practice of mobility itself. While most studies have looked at language as a source of information about mobility and examine these as texts based on interviews, I look at the textures of interaction through which migrants become legible in different places. Rather than only reflecting worlds and experiences, language creates them.

Chapter 4 (Kola, Salt, and Stone: Forging Pathways of Belonging through the Materiality of Language) shows how the exchange of talk and objects grounds more durable social infrastructures that help migrants connect with dispersed communities. As such, it tracks the material webs of exchange through which migrants manage their presence in distant hometown communities. In a first example, it zooms in on a naming ceremony in a small rural village to explore how communities account for the participation of migrants who are often absent from village life. This tells the story of an increasingly mobile woman who resorts to creative performances of teasing and reenactment to reassert herself as a central community member. With strong methodological implications, it shows that participation needs to be studied from perspectives that combine the exchange of language and material objects on the edges of ritual action. In a second example, this chapter examines my journey in founding a field station in the outskirts of Kédougou with a local collaborator. Not merely a question of stones and mortar, this enterprise is also dependent on the distributed attunement of neighbors to succeed: a process achieved through material ritual blessings.

Chapters 5 and 6 draw on central concepts of the book—articulation and language as infrastructure—to reinterpret central sites of mobility: the international border and the market space. Chapter 5 (Constituting a Border through Linguistic Practice) shows how the border between Kédougou and Guinea came into being through situated interactions during the Ebola pandemic. I argue that firstly, this amorphous border was constituted through distinctions that emerged in routines of storytelling and surveillance. During the Ebola epidemic of 2014–16, this zone became the site of intense scrutiny by the Senegalese state and international communities who were concerned with the spread of Ebola. The border simultaneously offered a zone of discernment in which marked distinctions based on provenance, linguistic usage, and demeanor could affect one’s ability to travel, trade, and thrive. Drawing on scholarship in medical anthropology, this chapter argues that Ebola should be analyzed alongside sociolinguistic practices as a force for shaping the interactions of mobile individuals in these borderlands.

Chapter 6 (Kédougou Market: A Place of Wares and Words) examines how migrants made a place out of Kédougou’s downtown market. Through the exchange of wares and words, migrants performed routines of verbal creativity that include teasing, storytelling, and greeting to negotiate relationships with one another and ground themselves in a fickle place. The performance of in-law talk, for instance, enabled migrants to constitute a domestic sphere from which they could dispense hospitality and enjoy in the comforts of home. Markets were profitable but potentially risky places that could eat your money just as quickly as you could make it. Succeeding here required migrants to monitor their language and wealth so as to benefit from connections with others while also not revealing too much of themselves. The conclusion discusses the implications these approaches on mobility carry for questions of power and precarity. The appearance of autonomy in the context of mobility—in which mobility appears to be a mere technical, logistical question—is often a gauge of power relations. Having to account for social others in contexts of mobility is thus indicative of an individual’s power and position with respect to those others.

Notes

1. 1. Some scholars might call this level of movement at an individual level motility. Although this term can also be useful, I prefer to speak of mobility because even at an individual, organismal level, our capacity to move and migrate are relational and therefore not merely a question of natural bodily movements. Furthermore, the way we scale human activity (in terms of duration, collectivities, and other complexities) should be seen as a question to investigate processually rather than an a priori assumption. In this initial example, I draw out some insights at an individual level that I will apply to more encompassing questions later.
2. 2. The term mobility can be approached in a couple ways: in one sense, mobility provides an analytical perspective through which scholars study human practices in a new and useful way. In another sense, local communities of practice have understandings of these phenomena—who is a migrant, what this means and the local significance of migrations, movement, and circulation.