Viabilità relazionale: una prospettiva im/mobile delle relazioni nel Gambia transnazionale
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1473/ea.v12i2.482Parole chiave:
migration, relatedness, im/mobility, house, SoninkeAbstract
While anthropologists have long studied how mobility and immobility shape social relationships, this article describes relatedness itself as a form of im/mobility. It draws on ethnographic research among Soninke speakers in the Gambia and in the diaspora who express their relationship to others through images of what could be characterized as “viability”. The conceptual metaphor of viability serves to analyse three aspects of relational im/mobility. Firstly, viability hints at the infrastructural aspects, such as when Soninke speakers imagine kinship as a road or a network of roads connecting and channelling kinsfolk. Secondly, such relational paths are more or less viable, socially, affectively and economically, depending on whether related people travel either collectively or in a scattered fashion, either closer to or away from each other. Thirdly, viability captures the existential aspect of relatedness, for Soninke speakers also perceive others as entering, inhabiting and exiting their own lives and living condition.
Riferimenti bibliografici
Alber E., Van der Geest S., Reynolds-Whyte S. (eds.) 2008, Generations in Africa. Connections and Conflicts, Munich: Lit Verlag.
Bird C. S., Kendall M. B. 1980, The Mande hero, in Karp I., Bird C. S. (eds.) 1980, Explorations in African systems of thought, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 13-26.
Bledsoe C. H. 2002, Contingent lives: fertility, time, and aging in West Africa, Chicago: Uni¬versity of Chicago Press.
Bledsoe C. H., Sow P. 2011, Back to Africa: Second chances for the children of West African immigrants, «Journal of Marriage and Family», 73 (4): 747-62.
Boccagni P. 2016, Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carsten J. 2000, Cultures of relatedness : new approaches to the study of kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carsten J. 2020, Imagining and living new worlds: The dynamics of kinship in contexts of mo¬bility and migration, «Ethnography», 21 (3): 319-34.
Carsten J., Hugh-Jones S. (eds.) 1995, About the house: Lévi-Strauss and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coe C. 2013, The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality, Chi¬cago: University of Chicago Press.
Cole J., Groes C. (eds.) 2016, Affective Circuits: African migrations to Europe and the pursuit of social regeneration, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Consoli G. 2021, Genealogie statali? Della “genitorialità sociale” del “tutore volontario di minori stranieri non accompagnati” e del suo inserimento in una rete istituzionale locale, «Antropologia Pubblica», 7 (1): 29-48.
Domenici D. 2019, La vitalità della casa. Il modello delle sociétés à maisons nella riflessione antropologica e archeologica e la sua applicazione al contesto mesoamericano, «Antropo¬logia e Teatro. Rivista di Studi», (11): 186-213.
Drotbohm H. 2012, Horizons of long-distance intimacies, «The History of the Family», 14 (2): 132-49.
Fairhead J., Leach M., Small M. 2006, Where techno-science meets poverty: Medical research and the economy of blood in The Gambia, West Africa, «Social science & medicine» 63 (4): 1109-20.
Gaibazzi P. 2015, Bush bound: young men and rural permanence in migrant West Africa, Oxford; New York: Berghahn.
Glick Schiller N., Salazar N. B. 2013, Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe, «Journal of ethnic and migration studies», 39 (2): 183-200.
Grilli S. 2019, Antropologia delle famiglie contemporanee, Roma: Carocci.
Grimaldi G. 2019, Oltre il ritorno: le case della diaspora come infrastrutture della mobilità, in Riccio B. (ed.), Mobilità. Incursioni etnografiche, Milan: Mondadori, 94-114.
Groes C., Fernandez N. T. (eds.) 2022, Intimate mobilities: Sexual economies, marriage and migration in a disparate world, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Ingold T. 2000, The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, London: Routledge.
Kea P. 2013, ‘The complexity of an enduring relationship’: gender, generation, and the moral economy of the Gambian Mandinka household, «Journal of the Royal Anthropological In¬stitute», 19 (1): 102-19.
Lentz C., Lobnibe I. 2022, Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family: Indiana University Press.
Lévi-Strauss C. 1983, Histoire et ethnologie, «Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales», 38 (6): 1217-31.
Lloyd J., Vasta E. (eds.) 2017, Reimagining home in the 21st century: Edward Elgar.
Ma Mung E. 1999, La dispersion comme ressource, in (a cura di), Cultures & Conflits.
Malinowski B. 2011, Argonauti del Pacifico occidentale, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Manchuelle F. 1997, Willing migrants: Soninke labor diasporas, 1848-1960, Athens; London: Ohio University Press, James Currey.
McKinnon S. 2016, Doing and being: Process, essence, and hierarchy in making kin, in, The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology: Routledge, 98-177.
Olwig K. F. 2007, Caribbean journeys: an ethnography of migration and home in three family networks, Durham: Duke University Press.
Pozzi G. 2020, Fuori casa: Antropologia degli sfratti a Milano, Milano: Ledizioni.
Pozzi G., Grassi P. 2021, The anatomy of houses: Materialities of being at home, «ANUAC» 10 (2): 111-28.
Razy E. 2007a, Les sens contraires de la migration: la circulation des jeunes filles d’origine soninké entre la France et le Mali, «Journal des africanistes», 77 (2): 19-43.
Razy E. 2007b, Naître et devenir: anthropologie de la petite enfance en pays Soninké (Mali), Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie.
Sahlins M. 2011, What kinship is (part one), «Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute» 17 (1): 2-19.
Spittler G., Bourdillon M. F. (eds.) 2012, African Children at Work: Working and Learning in Growing Up for Life: Lit.
ù Strathern M. 1988, The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia: Univ of California Press.
Urry J. 2000, Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century, London: Routledge.
Vigh H. 2009, Motion squared: a second look at the concept of social navigation, «Anthropo¬logical Theory», 9 (4): 419-38.
Werbner R. 2020, Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, colonial and postcolonial transformations, Manchster: Manchester University Press.
Whitehouse B. 2009, Transnational childrearing and the preservation of transnational identity in Brazzaville, Congo, «Global networks», 9 (1): 82-99.
Whitehouse B. 2012, Centripetal Forces: Reconciling Cosmopolitan Lives and Local Loyalty in a Malian Transnational Social Field, in Okome M. O., Vaughan O. (eds.) 2012, West African Migrations: Transnational and Global Pathways in a New Century, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 144-65.
Zharkevich I. 2019, Money and blood: Remittances as a substance of relatedness in transna¬tional families in Nepal, «American Anthropologist», 121 (4): 884-96.
Pubblicato
Come citare
Fascicolo
Sezione
Licenza
Copyright (c) 2025 Paolo Gaibazzi

TQuesto lavoro è fornito con la licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione 4.0 Internazionale.
Gli autori mantengono i diritti sulla loro opera e cedono alla rivista il diritto di prima pubblicazione dell'opera, contemporaneamente licenziata sotto una Licenza Creative Commons - Attribuzione che permette ad altri di condividere l'opera indicando la paternità intellettuale e la prima pubblicazione su questa rivista.
Gli autori possono diffondere la loro opera online (es. in repository istituzionali o nel loro sito web) prima e durante il processo di submission, poiché può portare a scambi produttivi e aumentare le citazioni dell'opera pubblicata (Vedi The Effect of Open Access).