Chapter 5 Constituting a Border through Linguistic Practice

Linguistic Assumptions through Spatiality

Rather than a static thing that is then represented by language, space comes into being through linguistic practices. Important scholarship within the past decades has reframed thinking of space as self-evident and objective to thinking of it as an emergent cultural product coconstituted by relations of power, gender, and class.1 Doreen Massey (1994), for instance, has shown how places are constituted through gender, an ideological process in which local, domestic spaces are often gendered as female and public spaces as male. In work that emphasizes how we experience space beyond the level of awareness, anthropologists such as Ingold (2000) suggest that we think in terms of landscapes that emerge through lived, habitual human activities. To simplify complex and wide-ranging discussions, many of these approaches rely on distinctions between space on an objective, Cartesian plane that can be cut up through mathematical calculations and the spatiality that emerges through the lived space of habitual collective action and through implicit forms of (often language-based) spatial reckoning.

Scholars of language, culture, and society have explored the emergence of space and place within linguistic practice. For the Western Apache described by Keith Basso (1988), for instance, place names encapsulate moral stances and personas through the recitation of narratives. Place names are thus interwoven with broader values and worldviews such that different people can inhabit the same so-called places very differently. From a broader perspective, the way speakers conceptualize space is partly a function of their language’s spatial frames of reference. Whereas many languages conceptualize everyday spatial relations in relative terms (e.g., left and right), some speakers think primarily or exclusively in terms of absolute frames of reference (e.g., N/S/E/W) (W. A. Foley 1997; Majid et al. 2004). Thinking in terms of narratively and experientially constituted space, the world we inhabit is not merely a product of its physical attributes, narrowly conceived, but also a function of how it is articulated through human systems of signification. This also means that space is not merely “represented” by language—that is, described as an object in terms of its qualities. It also emerges through habitual human practices. Viewed as such, space is the laminated product of its physical characteristics and social practice. Thinking in terms of language as infrastructure helps us capture these processes.

However, assumptions that position language as a form of representation rather than a material practice—as I argue throughout this book—are implicit in scholarship on space. For instance, Henri Lefebvre (1991), an important theoretical touchstone in approaches to space and urban studies, made distinctions between representations of space, the supposed objective, Cartesian view of urbanists and scientists, and representational spaces as “directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’” (38–39). Lefebvre views the former as a “system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs” and the latter as a more phenomenological and lived space of “non-verbal symbols and signs” (38–39). This contrast contributes to a referentialist ideology foregrounding denotation that views language as primarily a question of naming things in the world. In this view, habitual, lived action is reserved as a realm of nonlinguistic phenomena. In contrast, I have characterized language as a habitual, lived resource for intersubjectively constituting a world with others, which includes the space across which we envision mobility to happen.

Within the lens of a borderland that came into being through a particular political and epidemiological context, this chapter and the book more broadly highlight the ways in which individuals constructed social space through practices of mobility—by articulating connections between places through linguistic practice. Examining language in the context of mobilities reveals it to be a kind of emergent infrastructure. Rather than merely a vessel for expressing propositions, it is a material force that facilitates connections or even enacts borders. It is through repeated linguistic practices that places came into being and that pathways for social relations are constructed. While someone could attempt to delineate the border between Senegal and Guinea on a map, in practice the meaning of these boundaries and their consequences for the residents of this area were negotiated through everyday interactions. Not merely a geopolitical boundary, the Senegal-Guinea borderlands around Taabe and Takkopellel came into being through repeated discourses about border-crossing, rights to resources, and national origins. In particular, I draw on the epidemiological context of Ebola to show how this border became a materialized social boundary. Understanding these forms of boundary drawing and spatial distinction making is essential to understanding how mobilities are conceptualized.

Constituting a Border through Surveillance and Scrutiny—The Case of Ebola

Leaving to do fieldwork in Kédougou during the fall of 2014 was difficult. I had just finished my last year of graduate coursework and preliminary exams at the University of Michigan and spent a restorative summer of family visits in Maine and Germany with my partner, a fellow anthropology graduate student. News of the spreading Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia had been filling my news feed, and I felt somewhat nervous about going to a region that formed its penumbra. Assessing the situation within a Western media sphere—where West Africa was the imagined epicenter of suffering and disease—was particularly challenging. In talking with my friends and relatives, distinctions between perceived and actual risk were ever on my tongue in the weeks before my departure. I arrived in Senegal in September 2014, almost the peak of the Ebola epidemic that had torn through communities in nearby Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. For the first two months I stayed in Dakar and Saint Louis, visiting migrant families from Kédougou who had made coastal Senegal their home and reconnecting with friends from my previous time in Senegal as a Peace Corps volunteer and experiential education instructor.

Thinking across perspectives from medical and linguistic anthropology allowed me to conceptualize how the Ebola epidemic helped constitute the borderland between Senegal and Guinea. When I arrived for this trip in 2014, although from an epidemiological perspective Ebola had not yet made it into Senegal, it had nevertheless become a social and material reality that impacted people’s lives and mobilities. As critical medical anthropologists have argued from cross-cultural perspectives, diagnosed illnesses are not preexisting, innate phenomena that affect all human societies in the same way as neat bundles of natural features (Lock 1995; Mol 2002; Fullwiley 2010). Viewing them instead as instantiated through socialized understandings of bodies and practices of healing helps us notice their situated emergence in different cultural contexts. Annemarie Mol (2002), for instance, argues that diseases are enacted through medical examinations, technologies of presentation, and medical interventions. Practitioners of biomedicine have largely limited its consideration of disease to the somatic symptoms bounded by the human form: this is most simply seen in the kind of diagnosis manuals used in most medical practices today. Other anthropological approaches to illness have expanded the notion of disease, locating its emergence across sociotechnical practices that cut across what is commonly assumed to be a nature-culture divide (Roberts 2013; Stonington 2012). These include ways of counting and assessing bodies, social stigma and forms of self-identification after diagnosis, and other ways in which disease is rendered visible.

Applying these insights to our context, Ebola emerged not merely as a viral disease in a biomedical sense. Looking to language as a material practice helps us insert language into these changing forms of evaluation and interaction on the border. Oftentimes, scholars of language examine genre, intertextuality, and interactional regularities in ways that make them appear to be nonmaterial properties of a speech community. Yet Ebola has affected the pragmatics and reflexive awareness of linguistic encounters in a material way. Language should be seen as an embodied practice that can be analyzed alongside epidemiology, which—wrapped up in webs of human meaning—has lasting effects on dynamics of interaction. Relating these insights to spatiality in the borderlands, it might be tempting to think of a border as an extant boundary that has the capacity to stop the spread of a disease such as Ebola. However, it is partly through changing routines of interaction and evaluation impacted by Ebola that this border became articulated. As cultural beings, we are socialized into particular habits of discerning others that shift according to setting and ongoing attunements generated through discourse. We latch on to particular signs of difference—all the while overlooking others—and use these as the basis for typifying and engaging with others (Irvine and Gal 2019). Irvine and Gal describe these as axes of differentiation, through which individuals make socially salient distinctions in the world, often based on linguistic features. These ideological processes of drawing distinctions can change, and in the context of the borderlands, Guinean versus Senegalese as well as Ebola versus Ebola free became more important distinctions.2

Many of these processes below the level of consciousness, a phenomena that scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu (1977) have understood as habitus: ingrained, embodied predispositions for moving, reacting, and evaluating. However, these intuitive frameworks do not exist independently from the changing and more-than-human world in which we find ourselves. They are historical and shift amid changing contexts. As such, habitus offers ingrained and embodied principles for dealing with new contexts like Ebola. However, the Ebola epidemic also exposed disjunctures in interaction and social practices that individuals performed intuitively, such as the proxemics of how far to stand from one another during face-to-face interactions. In the context of this emergent border, Ebola as a sociobiological entity impacted the kinds of interactionally performed signs and discernments that came to matter. In the case of Kédougou, this often meant that signs of Guinean origin gleaned from the comportment, clothing, and greetings of borderland travelers were increasingly scrutinized. Bodily contact and greetings in many places became increasingly fraught. Many debated conventions for greeting—for instance, a mere hello rather than the common handshake—which otherwise was an unexamined, habitual act.

As such, Ebola often subtly changed the ways in which people construed a border and gave evidence of their knowledge of it. Because this border was closed in the wake of the Ebola epidemic, people’s claims about going to and from Guinea increasingly became couched in euphemism and obfuscation. Although epistemics—the linguistic issue of how people indicate how they came to know things—is most frequently analyzed as a structural, grammatical issue, it is also a product of interactional, social, and even epidemiological dynamics. For instance, during the beginning of my research, before I had fully understood the stakes of cross-border mobility, I came upon a young man I had previously met on the outskirts of Taabe. Standing on a path that ultimately led to Guinea and beyond, I asked him if he had been to Laabi, the Guinean border town where the border post was located. As a routine of placing fellow travelers, people frequently asked for each other’s provenance and destination. While he did not outright deny his trip there, he insisted that Laabi was not, in fact, part of Guinea. In the face of an outsider’s questioning, he was cautious in betraying his trips to Guinea at a time when the borders were officially closed. It is less useful to consider his answer to my question in terms of lying or truth value and more helpful to approach it as a product of shifting narrative epistemics in the wake of the Ebola epidemic. Similar discourses of obfuscation characterized interactions between locals and the gendarmes from coastal Senegal who increasingly roamed the area in an attempt to enforce the border closure. These considerations show that linguistic norms and practices often emerge in relation to exigencies of the material world.

The sociolinguistic construction of the Senegal-Guinea borderland was unique partly because of the absence of visible, official markers, such as barriers or cairns. Separated by several kilometers, the Guinean and Senegalese border stations framed a wide band of indeterminate social space. In between these places were situated a number of villages—some ostensibly in Guinea and others seemingly in Senegal. Taabe itself sat between these border stations. Most border posts along this area were small, backroad shacks that were easy to miss. In many cases, they were a good distance from the presumptive “border,” located at the outskirts of towns or the forks of roads. Instead, lived boundaries were formed out of the discourses of local residents and travelers whose shared and repeated acts of storytelling brought a border into being. Occasionally, travelers from Guinea to Kédougou made their way through Taabe asking for directions, even if this was not the most direct route for international travel. Given the indeterminacy, this meant that the border was constantly at risk of being negotiated by ongoing human interactions.

Discourses about where straw could be harvested, for instance, were a narrative routine that partly instantiated the border in the lives of border residents. Claims about the location of borders were often grounded in dramatic articulations or interactional tensions that came to serve as narrative cairns. Establishing the border was thus not only an issue of space and boundary drawing but also a question of interdiscursivity—tracking the connections between speech events and places of utterance. One dramatic encounter in which two young Taabe straw cutters were drawn into a violent encounter with Guinean youth was such an event through which the border was discursively constituted. Blows were exchanged, bikes were abandoned, and counterclaims spit at one another—this intense activity became a marker of the site where the border was purported to be. During these tellings and retellings, claims to resources and concomitantly the notion of a border were incrementally established.

Of Gendarmes and Weekly Markets

Paying attention to the social relationships and linguistic interactions on the Senegal-Guinea border helped me understand it as a place of increased scrutiny and evaluation that brought into view origins and mobilities. In these borderlands, this anxiety over mobility in the wake of the Ebola epidemic manifested itself in the weekly market (luumo) located in Takkopellel, just at the base of the Fouta Djallon mountains. The Takkopellel market brought in villagers from surrounding settlements across Senegal and Guinea as well as traders from Kédougou. At its peak, the weekly market was a busy meeting spot where villagers could buy meat by the pound, exchange information about commodity prices, or buy knives or other tools without having to go to Kédougou. On off-days, the site of the weekly market appeared as a skeleton of bamboo structures with little bits of colored plastic sheeting sticking out from underneath the straw. The changing interactions in this weekly market town demonstrate some of the ways in which language and space impacted one another.

Soon after the closure of the Senegal-Guinea border in the wake of the Ebola epidemic, the regional government also closed borderland markets like the one in Takkopellel. In the weeks after the closure of the weekly markets and of the Senegal-Guinea border, patrols of Wolof-speaking gendarmes from western Senegal appeared in Takkopellel. Residents nervously remarked on the increased reach of the state. Indeed, the police offers were a new presence in this rural area, which was used to adjudicating its own affairs without official state agents. Encountering gendarmes on patrol was new for residents who had only known police officers to be stationed at the border posts. Formerly, police presence had been limited to the border post down the road, where officers stayed put in a small post on the edge of the main artery. Even Kédougou City residents were coming to terms with an increased mobile police presence. Until recently, only a few border police were stationed at checkpoints in and out of town where intercity transportation voluntarily stopped for occasional ID and customs checks.

Mariama, a woman who sold home-cooked meals from a small eatery that her family managed, complained to me one day about this new gendarme presence. With them, there is no negotiation she said to me: “negotiation alaa.” What bothered her most was that they were inaccessible and that any attempts at social negotiation were rebuffed. As such, gendarmes could resist simple yet significant exchanges of social information all the while opening up others to scrutiny. In explaining this, she insisted on the importance of simple practices of greeting and, in so doing, opening oneself up to another person. Greetings across West Africa tend to be not merely a simple phrase but an often lengthy exchange of information, social identity, and substances that can be better understood as access rituals—the act of making another person accessible to you (Ameka 2009). As the seller of delicious roadside snacks, Mariama exercised this as her stock-in-trade: the ability to cut through a crowd and identify with potential customers through a knowledge of their kin, in-laws, last name, or origins. She did this by greeting people by name and by finding different kinds of social idioms in common with them.

But to have someone who flatly refused these techniques of sociality was uncomfortable to her. With the gendarmes “there is no negotiation,” Mariama lamented. She continued to reflect on her inability to engage with gendarmes as available others with whom she might chat or establish a relational hook. Her tirade was interspersed with calls of “teyyil!” (shut up!), which mimicked the foreign voice of a gendarme who shuts down any possibility for sustained interaction. This inaccessibility is potent, given the myriad ways in which West Africans have built on interactional channels to creatively negotiate relationships with one another—often in the idiom of ethnic or patronymic joking relationships, generational relationships, or alliances of affinity. In many respects, the gendarmes’ social insulation parallels Duke’s unwillingness in chapter 2 to offer his name as a sign that his interlocutors might use to place him within webs of sociality.

What particularly bothered Mariama about the gendarmes was their reticence to make concessions or to recognize the claims of Guinean and hoore fello residents who had been coming to the market for years—many of whom had kin on this side of the border. Stories spread of Guineans being caught on the footpaths down the mountain to the market. Guineans entrapped in this way were escorted to the border by gendarmes, and any goods they were carrying were confiscated. While questions such as “ko honto wonuɗaa yahde” (where are you headed) were commonly interwoven amid greetings between travelers meeting each other on the road, the stakes of such questions were elevated in the context of a newly policed border.

In conversations with border police stationed in Kédougou, I often heard them explicitly talk about this strategy of interactional isolation. A police officer from the distant town of Kaolack, whom I had occasion to talk to over the course of several weeks, reflected on this explicit tactic of interactional isolation at the organizational level. He warned me that if you let them, locals would try to find some kind of relationship with you. It is partly for these reasons that police were cycled in and out of posts across the country. In this way, police were thus administratively discouraged from developing long-lasting relationships with the locals in their posts. Their rotating appointments, often on a six-month basis, shielded officers from developing and investing in social relationships that might compromise their positions.

Such were the techniques of the state, in which its agents were frequently insulated from instantiating relationships with individuals through interactional as well as technological means. Simple objects like dark aviator sunglasses, office furniture, and uniforms functioned as social skins (Turner 2012) to insulate their wearers and thereby prevent individuals from giving too much of themselves in interaction. At issue was the capacity to extract information about others without running the risk of giving signs of oneself. As I argue in chapter 2, the bureaucratic methods of statecraft like ID cards were used not just as tools for control but also often as creative ones for individuals to gain access to different opportunities. In practice, what this meant was that IDs were seen less as cornerstones of one’s personhood and citizenship and more as documents that could be shared, exchanged, and in some cases altered to present oneself in novel ways.

Alongside these interactional dynamics, there were also basic language issues at play. The inability of gendarmes to speak Pular at times also had the effect of insulating them from interaction. Few of the predominately Wolof-speaking gendarmes tasked with patrolling the Takkopellel area spoke Pular, the lingua franca of this area. Those posted to Takkopellel spent their time patrolling the town and its environs, often lingering at the crossroads at base of the roads leading down from the Guinea border. During this time, patrolling gendarmes traveled with a member of Takkopellel’s volunteer security detail, who served as their translators and guides. These volunteer security officers were normally tasked with managing local disputes but were not officially part of the police force.

Once while coming down the mountain to the Takkopellel weekly market, a small group of Taabe residents and I encountered two gendarmes accompanied by a member of Takkopellel’s volunteer security force. Any Guineans entering town would have had to pass along the same roads as we did, and those traveling alongside me were suspected of coming from Guinea. Arriving in front of the gendarmes, we overheard the police officers ask the security volunteer about our presence as we entered town. The translating security volunteer responded by placing us as residents of the town of Taabe, “ko ɓe Taabe ɓeŋ” (they are people from Taabe), suggesting to them that this village was in the territory of Senegal. The security volunteer confirmed to the gendarmes—who were particularly concerned about one of our companions—that we were from the village of Taabe. It was warm, but one of my companions, Rune, was wearing a jacket. At moments like these, the gendarmes, with the help of the security force, attempted to pick up on cues involving dress, baggage, and footwear that might betray one’s provenance. Indeed, warm layers like the one Rune was wearing were often identified as signs of being from Guinea, where the higher altitudes of the Fouta Djallon mountains could bring in cool evening air.

Standing across the lane from a gendarme, I noticed that he spoke only with his local security counterpart. Although he and the volunteer stood close together, he spoke loudly as if he intended for us to overhear him. Even though those in our group spoke Wolof, the gendarme eschewed any direct engagement with us, talking about those around him rather than to them. This was partly possible because the gendarme spoke Wolof to the security volunteer, who became his linguistic mediator. While many of the locals did speak Wolof, the institutional assumption seemed to be that this was not the case. The local security officer thus translated and transmitted questions to us at the same time that his role closed down direct contact with the gendarme. In so doing, the local guide transmitted this voice of authority while insulating the police officer from potential exposure of his personhood during interactions. Here, any point of connection, shared name, joking relationship, or affiliation might be used as mitigating context. “Negotiation alaa,” Mariama had said (there is no negotiation). Not merely a question of cairns and quadrants, the border was traced and made intelligible by linguistic exchanges that brought it into being.

I can imagine that my presence also impacted the gendarmes’ assessment of our provenance. I wondered how much the security volunteers resisted this scrutiny of those who did not belong. While in some cases the gendarmes accepted their guides’ assessments of whether people were Senegalese or not, the production of a Senegalese national ID could become the final arbiter of such investigations. In theory, a passport, national ID card, or visa might appear to provide the grounds on which individuals were granted passage across borderlands. In practice, however, the border offered a field of evaluation in which actors assessed one another based on outward linguistic and embodied signs. For those from Taabe crossing into Guinea at the border town of Laabi, for instance, sufficient performed knowledge of language and kin networks precluded them from having to show official IDs. Other scholars have written of similar phenomena elsewhere. For example, in the context of racialized language practices in Brazil, to be able to perform upper-class “standard” language enabled Brazilian youth to inhabit privileged spaces such as beachfront areas, which were otherwise rendered inaccessible to them without IDs (Roth-Gordon 2016). In a similar manner, the Guinea-Senegal border was woven through the warp and weft of ongoing linguistic evaluation and performance. Signs of one’s provenance included one’s clothing, possessions, and linguistic signs gleaned through even the shortest of greetings. Guinean chauffeurs and travelers—often descending from the more temperate climate of the Fouta Djallon mountains—could be recognized by thick coats, scarves, and gloves, accessories that often betrayed their provenance by the time that they arrived in the heat of Kédougou. At a moment of social change and an epidemic, this contentious border became the site of shifting principles of discernment that guided what people paid attention to. It emerged as a material site for hearing and not merely seeing others.

The Sociality of Border Crossing

As I have argued throughout this book, mobility can be usefully thought of as an act of social negotiation. As such, borderland residents like those from Taabe thought about border crossing not as a legal or security issue but as a social practice necessitating the proper performance of respect. Like other interactional contexts in which individuals must mutually navigate appropriate principles, border crossing was also evaluated as an interactional act that necessitated the performance of greetings and respect. Even during the height of the pandemic when the border was officially closed, stories of Guinean youth storming over the border on motorcycles were discussed in these terms.

Talk of one particularly egregious encounter lingered in the air for some time in which two young Guineans on motorcycles ostensibly declined to stop at the request of a Senegalese border official and blew through on their motorcycles. Without any immediate means of transportation, Guinean and Senegalese officials were often incapable of pursuit. What bothered my local interlocutors, however, was neither that these youths had contravened legal entry procedures nor that they had put others’ lives at risk in a time of Ebola. What bothered them was that these youth had shown themselves to be disrespectful (alaa needi).3 Less concerned by the potential for viral spread, residents lamented their inability to recognize the Senegalese border guards through the arts of greeting and social recognition. Border guards themselves were often the subject of similar discourses of respectfulness. Locals often remarked on the respectfulness of Senegalese guards in contrast to Guinean border guards, who were often portrayed as uneducated and unsophisticated. In this part of the world, in fact, there was a whole genre of jokes dedicated to Guinean border guards. While bribery and informal negotiations have historically been common among Guinean police in the context of political dysfunction, any resistance of Senegalese border officials to bribery has frequently been interpreted by traveling Guineans as a sign of a functioning Senegalese state (Fioratta 2020).

With the border being a zone of intense social discernment, acts of border crossing and routines of vehicular travel came to be interpreted through such discourses on respect. Travel by car or motorcycle was not merely a technical mode of transportation but also a mode of sociality that became a part of processes of enregisterment, a linguistic anthropological term that helps track how certain typified behaviors and ways of speaking became models for certain kinds of people (Agha 2007). Border residents frequently read respect into the forms of movement in and through the materiality of vehicles. Asif Agha (2007, 55), for instance, views enregisterment as a process in which “diverse behavioral signs (whether linguistic, non-linguistic, or both) are functionally reanalyzed as cultural models of action, as behaviors capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics of incumbents of particular interactional roles, and of relations among them.” As Agha rightly points out, these diverse behavioral signs need not be narrowly conceived of as linguistic and may include comportment, gesture, or style more broadly.

Travel along the Senegal-Guinea border shows that such forms of enregisterment not only concerned social actors, narrowly speaking. The behaviors of car and driver as sociotechnical hybrids blur boundaries between human and machine such that Guinean driving was seen as disrespectful driving and interactional mode. Along the Dakar-Bamako highway, for instance, Malians were broadly associated with the heavy, new vehicles of long-distance freight. This was partly due to networks of relatively wealthy Malians who dominated the long-distance freight networks and the mercury markets (used for extracting gold from surrounding rocks), along the Dakar-Bamako highway through Kédougou. At times, the weight of their vehicles appeared to parallel the weightiness of their conduct in interactional contexts, in which significance of a person (such as that displayed to one’s in-laws) was itself conceived of in these terms.

Particularly in the context of the Ebola epidemic, Guinean travel was intensely scrutinized on the roads between Guinea and Kédougou City. As I traveled with Mamadou to and from Taabe, he and other fellow travelers sketched out pragmatic models that typified people in terms of their movement and travel. Local Senegalese cars were often construed as slower moving and therefore more polite than the overladen, hurried, and “rude” Guinean vehicles. Respect in motion was thus shown by slower cars allowing faster cars to pass and, in response, by faster cars honking in thanks. This peripatetic theory of respect informed Mamadou’s understanding of which cars were Guinean and which were Senegalese. “Guinéens alaa respect,” I often heard (Guineans know no respect).4 Looking broadly at linguistic anthropological work, interactional approaches are very good at accounting for linguistic practice in neat, stationary face-to-face encounters. However, such approaches have a harder time accounting for diverse modes of social interaction that happen in relation to the built environment and via these different modalities of movement. Thinking of linguistic practice in the context of mobility helps us notice these forms of social practice on the move.

In an area with highly unequal access to means of transportation, different modes of mobility furthermore afforded different levels of social exposure and risk. Owning a car, for instance, could provide a measure of protection against the pressures of attending to social relations. While visiting with colleagues in the more distant city of Tambacounda, I had occasion to meet the former head of Kédougou’s gendarme brigade, who was a well-known and respected man. For an individual of such renown, traveling in a car became a way to avoid the time-consuming exchange of everyday greetings. By the end of his career, he could barely walk down the streets of Kédougou without being consumed by greetings and solicitation. In a palpable way, this example demonstrates the role of language to constitute, not merely represent, mobility. Ultimately, this state of affairs was so disruptive to his daily life that the retired gendarme took a car wherever he went—even if it was a short distance away. Attending to his phone while being shielded from the outside allowed him to slip in and out of areas where he might otherwise be carried into drawn-out conversations. Being driven around by a chauffeur also helped excuse him from any responsibility to make the decision to make social stops on the way since he wasn’t at the wheel. While having a car could be used to project a consequential and successful persona, at other times vehicular travel helped to insulate individuals from the responsibilities of managing face-to-face interactions with others.

In contrast, for my friend Mamadou who often drove his four-wheel-drive SUV from Kédougou to Takkopellel, having a vehicle often set him up for notoriety and increased scrutiny. The road from Kédougou to Takkopellel was a route that often saw little public transport, and foot passengers frequently solicited him for rides. Such encounters frequently impelled travelers to insist on a particular relationship with individuals who, like Mamadou, had wheels. It was uncanny how often Mamadou was claimed by many to be a long-lost kinsperson. I teased him that he was “kinshipping” on these trips, a joke resulting from sun weariness and extended time in the field that would only make sense to a few fellow anthropologists who had taken courses in the now almost abandoned field of kinship. In fact, it is often through such trips with Mamadou that I learned the genealogy of his family and how they were related with surrounding communities. While most might envision an anthropologist interviewing locals about their kinship relationships under a palaver tree, I found that these fraught mobile encounters offered opportunities for self-distancing through which individuals came to reflect upon their relations with others (Keane 2015). Genealogies and social relationships between people are not merely questions of static facts; they can be seen as links mobilized by people on the move as forms of social action.

As such, moving across the borderlands in different vehicles and modalities afforded situated engagements with others. Mired in never-ending bottlenecks in the back of a taxi, Catherine Melly (2017) described how the act of driving through Dakar’s traffic jams offered travelers affordances for their self-narration that emerged in concert with their surroundings. Forms of narration and the things a person might attend to can thus be seen as a function of their mobilities. Other anthropologists have reflected on these forms of mobility as ethnographic methods. For instance, in his exploration of a provincial town in Mali, André Chappatte (2022) chose a bicycle to encounter the urban environment and its residents with greater intimacy. From a phenomenological perspective, different modes of mediated mobility afford different forms of ethnographic engagement. For my part, I have tried to engage ethnographically through a range of different forms of mobility as transport. Walking through Kédougou allowed me to witness greetings and a recognition of others in face-to-face interactions. Riding a bike in southeastern Senegal afforded a quicker form of mobility that was nonetheless frequently interrupted by calls to stop and say hello. This vehicular mobility was frequently associated with being a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal and thus is accompanied by a form of social typification. Purchasing a motorcycle during my period of anthropological fieldwork allowed me to reach greater distances more quickly, but it also constrained the kinds of paths I could take and brought me into relationships of reciprocity with many who wanted to borrow it. Riding a motorcycle also brought me into contact with the gas station owners and, more importantly, repairmen, who became a significant site of ethnography later in my fieldwork. Beyond the negotiation of social encounters through vehicular technologies that mediated mobilities on this scale, I have endeavored to show how linguistic practices constitute mobility in a very real sense.

Mountain Path Sociality

Just as broader processes and events, such as the Ebola epidemic and the ways of talking that arose because of it, could instantiate a border, so can affordances of the “natural” environment also mediate how people use and evaluate language. As I moved through the landscape of southeastern Senegal, I began to notice that certain routes and places were marked through the routines of interaction that occurred there. The mountain paths between Senegal and Guinea were such a space. Traveling between Senegal and Guinea in the Fouta Djallon mountains happened at the boundaries of what people considered settlement and bush—a network of paths that led Robyn, Steve, and me astray on our fateful journey. From Takkopellel in the lowlands, you had to first climb a precipitous foot trail up a forested slope to reach Taabe and other villages on top of the first rise. This narrow mountain path formed a liminal space that offered a place of play and linguistic freedom for many. Taabe’s schoolchildren made this trip down and back up the mountain every day to attend school. Mamadou would occasionally take tourists up here to his hometown of Taabe, where they would take souvenir photos of the sprawling African savanna below.

For children finding themselves momentarily between the home, school, and market, these mountain paths along the border of Senegal and Guinea were a place of wondrous imagination. Their dreams etched into rocks and their voices echoing through the trees, local children inhabited the personas of famous rappers or forest animals as they played in the liminal space between settlements. It is here that Nigerian stars such as Davido found themselves inscribed and at home in the trees. Along these in-between paths through the forest, children would tease travelers by impersonating chimpanzees from high points along the canyon rim so that their animal calls resounded widely. Chimpanzees as well as baboons also traveled through these areas, and travelers were keen to pick up on sounds of movement around them.

Mobility in this area manifested itself through interactions. Seemingly a place of isolation and silence, these pathways also became a place of overhearing and social evaluation. For those slowly trudging up or down the mountain, the path opened down on miles of surrounding savanna and offered excellent cell coverage. Since the Senegalese cell network all but disappeared once you reached the top of the plateau, the forested paths up the hoore fello plateau were ironically a place of intense sociality. Plateau residents from Guinea and Senegal headed to the weekly market made use of the phone network as long as they could, exchanging news with distant relatives as they ascended the steep mountain paths. Whereas I huffed and puffed my way up the mountain, my fellow travelers often climbed these steep paths while negotiating family dramas on their cell phones. Indeed, discussions along these paths between towns were where I witnessed some of the most sensitive conversations. Talk of marital problems and disagreements with siblings were often kept private until we reached the spaces of discretion among the trees and pebbly footpaths.

Locals from this area were quick to remark on their secretive nature. They were proud of their ability to dissemble their speech to urban Pular speakers by adopting a “deep” (luugungal) variety. These were accompanied by a slew of hand signals and secret signs to those in-the-know. A common move was the tactic of gundagol, the act of slipping away with a subset of fellow conspirators to engage in secretive talks of a delicate nature. Passing by and encountering other groups of travelers, however, one could not help but catch bits and pieces of their talk in these ostensibly “private” zones. Following behind individuals, or momentarily spending time with them at places of rest, travelers caught bits of discussions and usually put pieces together to guess at what might be going on.

One day, Mamadou and I were climbing behind a man in conversation with his brother on speakerphone. We began to overhear him counseling his older brother about how to deal with his apparently intractable wife. She had, it seems, burned money as an act of marital defiance, and the man and his interlocutor were discussing how to proceed. Mamadou and I both listened curiously to these troubles as we continued to follow him up the mountain. Since hoore fello residents often stashed their bikes at the top of the mountain and descended the rest of the way on foot, a three-kilometer up section provided a particularly productive space of compressed sociality. As many travelers reclaimed their bikes on the top, they then made quick progress to their final destinations, and the liminal space of eavesdropping was abruptly ended.

Site Making

On another trip up the mountain, Mamadou and I had just summited the first rise and entered the outskirts of Taabe. Crossing paths with another traveler, we were greeted by the admonishing voice of his kinswoman: “aŋ a jeyaaka ɗo” (you, you’re not from here), she said to Mamadou. He offered some faltering excuses in a laugh-speak. In one sense, these teases can be understood as a strategy of baiting Mamadou to invest himself more in Taabe, which, in his responses to her, he promised to do. The spatial language used by this woman, however, should be thought of not as representing preexisting places but as an ongoing articulation of the relationship between places as socially constituted. For instance, by insisting on his absence here (ɗo) in the village, which sits in contrast to places such as Kédougou City (there, “toŋ”) that have kept Mamadou away, the young woman establishes a spatial distinction between socially meaningful sites. As I mentioned, Mamadou often split his time between his home village of Taabe and the city of Kédougou, where he had a primary residence. Instead of seeing these as two distinct places that are evidence of Mamadou’s absence, the young woman might have seen them as linked sites that composed one integrated social sphere (i.e., a Kédougou-Taabe zone that sits in contrast to coastal Senegal). In the case of a diasporic context, inhabiting the same community is not always a question of inhabiting the same space in a Cartesian sense of dots on a map but of inhabiting the same social sphere as constructed through memory, gift exchange, or discursive reciprocity. Such forms of community building through linguistic and cultural practice are thus not dependent on geographical coordinates. The question of being home (here) or abroad (away) is one that is not entirely solved by judging distances on a map.

This distinction between Taabe (home) and Kédougou (away) thus could be constituted differently for those who see Kédougou City and surrounding villages as a local zone of action that together lie in contrast to more distant economic centers. Indeed, many Kédovins regularly traveled in between rural hometowns and Kédougou, where they often clustered together in a particular neighborhood. In effect, this young woman was engaging in an act of social site differentiation that implicated particular scalar assumptions (Irvine and Gal 2019). Such distinctions between places as socially relevant should be seen as emergent forms of social evaluation rather than a priori differences. When Mamadou’s kinswoman thus utters “ɗo” (here) on top of the plateau, she is establishing a meaningful distinction that marked these two spaces as sociologically distinct.

A short kilometer’s walk down the mountain toward Takkopellel sat a crossroads that brought together a few paths up the mountain. For Mamadou and many of his friends, this was a site of important sociological differentiation. As I gathered, going up the mountain was to be evaluated based on specific villageois expectations for dress and comportment. Up there, Mamadou tended to wear more “traditional” clothing; he monitored his speech for respectful greetings and shied away from flaunting things of value. The larger village of Takkopellel, down from the Taabe plateau, however, was a place where Mamadou put the successes he gained from previous migrations on display. This was a place where one could wear one’s best clothes and show off.

Coming down from hoore fello villages like Taabe, Mamadou and his friends would sneak into the bush at this crossroads at the base of the mountain and change into their latest fashionable outfits on their way to late-night soirees. Mamadou’s crew, drenched in the sweat of the mountain trek, would take off their simple T-shirts and trousers just off the path, where they could be hidden among the foliage. Donning sporty prêt-à-porter clothes purchased during the weekly markets in Kédougou or Dakar, Mamadou and his friends would then spray themselves with cologne and display their finest baseball caps and sneaks. Their language often changed too. I noticed more French phrases, more English thrown in for effect, and more Spanish as evidence of their knowledge of a cosmopolitan world. Here, he was as likely to greet his peers in a “que tal” as he was in Pular. The use of Spanish was becoming increasingly common in an area where Spanish tourists visiting the nearby waterfall and Spanish primatology enthusiasts had become steady fixtures. By choosing between traditional bou-bous or the latest fashions unwrapped from plastic, Mamadou and his fellow people of the world were crafting different understandings of themselves for different audiences.

In so doing, Mamadou and his friends were monitoring their own bodies as vehicles for articulating connections with fashions, ideas, and objects from faraway places. While my previous discussion of articulating mobilities rests on the analysis of linguistic performances, this episode shows the symbolic dimensions of embodied practice. Beyond the spoken word, this embodied practice could speak volumes about one’s mobility and connections with distant lands. Capturing these as embodied articulations means that people are looking at one another as models—not merely things said, but signs given off by embodied comportment. For Mamadou, to insist on his belonging to the village as well as to return more frequently were both acts that could articulate an ongoing, negotiated relationships with his home village.

Conclusion

For much of its history, the region of Kédougou offered a shatter zone, an area just out of the reach of state control in which individuals could retreat to their own affairs. Many of the surrounding communities were formed by those escaping taxation from the Guinean state. This trend toward regularization accompanied not only the presidency of Macky Sall but also the mayorship of Hadji Cissé, which I discuss at greater length in the next chapter. In practice this meant that borders between places appeared to be increasingly fixed on the maps of land management bureaus, municipalities, and NGO platforms. In this chapter, however, an attention to linguistic practices reveals a borderland that was etched not only though cairns and crossroads but also through linguistic routines and processes of social differentiation. Events like the Ebola epidemic and the attention of NGOs, police officers, and international actors turned the borderlands into a zone of discernment of hearing as well as sight. Through these processes, this area became targeted as a space whose natural environment, social interactions, and population movements were intimately connected to the well-being and livelihoods of individuals elsewhere.

I have suggested that we can learn about mobility in West Africa and elsewhere by examining it as a social process mediated in large part through language. The Senegal-Guinea borderlands came into being as an intertwined product of linguistic practices, broader epidemiological-political processes, and the affordances of its natural and built environment. Rather than studying bodies crossing a line, an increased focus on interaction, language, and processes of differentiation shows that many insights on mobility and borders emerge in the intersubjective spaces between people. Border crossing was not merely a question of crossing from one side to another but of mastering certain linguistic performances in a highly scrutinized field of social interpretation. In the case of gendarmes, this meant insulating themselves from risky social interaction with locals. For local farmers, this entailed successful performances of belonging in a way that potentially minimized signs of being from Guinea. These sorts of evaluations happened not only at the level of embodied persons but also through the technologies of travel like cars and motorcycles. Talk on the border rarely happened in neat configurations of face-to-face encounters; it was more likely to occur on the backs of motorcycles or within tightly packed buses. These interactions not only reported on existing configurations between places but also constituted spatial relationships, a process I describe as site making. It is through routines of verbal art that language becomes infrastructure—a web of everyday exchanges, stories, and articulations of social action that, woven together, form a laminated borderland.

Notes

1. 1. Scholars have furthermore insisted that space also implicates an understanding of time, such as so-called distant, exotic tribes of ethnographic study that were therefore also held to be from a previous, more ancient time (Fabian 1983). M. M. Bakhtin (1981), who inspired work in linguistic anthropology, showed how time and space traveled together in the form of a chronotope.
2. 2. As with the Ebola epidemic, these borderlands also became a prism for interpreting relationships between people and the environment through the lens of ecological conservation. Beginning in my time as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2006 to 2009, Spanish primate conservationists began to come to Kédougou region to observe chimpanzees. This part of Senegal and Guinea offers the most northerly reaches of West African chimpanzees and for these reasons offers an interesting case study for those interested in habitat loss and environmental change. By my fieldwork in 2014, the center in Takkopellel had become incorporated as an environmental research station associated with the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI). By this time, the center was offering tours for visitors interested in the chance to observe chimpanzees in their habitat. As part of their larger project, JGI Spain had established much of this borderland region as a réserve: a specific status that intended to provide the community a framework for engaging in conservation, though largely without local buy-in. Through this, the JGI was concerned with redefining how locals were to interact with the land and through this, with the chimpanzee populations. There were frequent miscommunications between parties; locals were often confused by JGI’s exhortations to limit their collection of wild fruits and to refrain from urinating on reserve land. The way in which the nonhuman primate residents of these borderlands were framed as an international conservation issue furthermore impacted how this border was experienced and monitored. Although frequently resisted by Taabe locals, this borderland area thus became a function of international discourses on conservation, thereby impacting the horizons of mobility.
3. 3. Needi tended to be used in reference to children who were learning basic manners and social norms.
4. 4. Here the speaker uses a loan word from French. The Pular word for respect, teddungal, tends to be used in contexts of hospitality and behavior norms toward others, such as guests, in-laws, or elders. Related terms include tedduɗo (n.), an honorable person, and teddingol (v.), to respect (someone). Here respect took on an embodied meaning and the root (tedd-) refers to the weightiness of a person who is to be respected or the gravity of the context (for an example, see the anecdote about the Malian trucks in this chapter).