Amélie Grysole

This panel investigates African migrants’ kinship strategies and economic arrangements in light of sub-Saharan Africa’s long history of migration, to consider how families draw on longstanding cultural repertoires and moral frameworks to manage contemporary economic volatility. In the decades since Kopytoff and collaborators (1987) investigated the reproduction of “traditional African societies” across intra-African frontiers, anthropologists have demonstrated how practices glossed as “traditional” continue to provide Africans with tools for managing global structures of inequality that accompany neoliberal capitalism (Guyer 2004; Buggenhagen 2012). Scholars have demonstrated how kinship practices like child fostering and ritual gift exchanges facilitate the reproduction of socioeconomic relations across distances, showing how Africans adapt older strategies to navigate contemporary political-economic tensions, changing state policies, and other obstacles associated with transnational migration (Bledsoe and Sow 2011; Coe 2014; Cole 2014).

This session invites participants to consider how transnational African families draw on and adapt cultural categories to produce emergent forms of kinship, creating and transforming socioeconomic connections that link those in Africa to kin Europe, North America, and frontiers beyond. It draws attention to the values that animate resource redistribution, or “economic moralities,” to ask how individuals negotiate normative expectations regarding material rights and responsibilities as they attempt to manage the flow of resources and strategically reproduce certain socioeconomic connections while curtailing others.

How might family members draw on and transform social roles associated with gender and generation or categories like host/stranger or freeborn/casted/slave in attempts to manage their own obligations? How, in applying these cultural tools to navigate novel circumstances, do individuals transform the kinship strategies and economic processes that link geographically scattered kin? And how do transnational families grapple with culturally specific notions of presence and absence, care and material support in attempts to make sense of their rights and responsibilities in migration? This panel brings together scholarship on the everyday practices of kinship making, the anthropology of values, and transnational families to shed light on the reproduction and transformation of socioeconomic networks linking individuals in Africa and abroad.

Cher.è.s collègue.s,

Nous vous faisons parvenir le programme du colloque "Mobilités sociales et migrations internationales", qui aura lieu à Paris les 13 et 14 juin 2019, à l'École d'Économie de Paris (bd Jourdan, 14e).

Organisé dans le cadre de l'Institut Convergences Migrations, et avec le soutien du Labex TransferS, ce colloque interdisciplinaire réunit des chercheur.e.s en sciences sociales (sociologie, anthropologie, démographie, histoire, science politique, sciences économiques, géographie, etc.) qui exploreront les liens entre migrations internationales et mobilités sociales, et interrogeront la multiplicité des positionnements sociaux des migrants d’une société à une autre.

Pour plus d'informations, voir le programme détaillé, ci-joint.

L'inscription est obligatoire, en écrivant un mail à cette adresse : colloquemobsoc@gmail.com

Au plaisir de vous retrouver et d'échanger avec vous autour de ces questions les 13 et 14 juin.

N'hésitez pas à faire circuler l'information dans vos réseaux.

Bien cordialement,

Le comité d'organisation

[Jennifer BIDET (U. Paris Descartes, Cerlis), Hugo BRÉANT (U. Rouen, Dysolab, CESSP), Amélie GRYSOLE (CNAM, CEET, CMH), Anton PERDONCIN (ENS, IDHES, CMH), Liza TERRAZZONI (EHESS, CEMS), Simeng WANG (CNRS, CERMES3)]