| 1. |
- Jennische, Ulrik, 1981-
(författare)
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Small-Small : Moral Economy and the Marketspace in Northern Ghana
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over the past decade, the Ghanaian government has tried to include and accommodate the many people working in the so-called informal economy. This formalization process is in line with a global market-driven development discourse. The small-scale traders selling their goods from marketplaces and along the streets in major cities have been of particular interest.While the Ghanaian government defines these actors as working in an “informal sector” and thus beyond the formal political and economic system, it simultaneously targets them with welfare services and various policies with the purpose of including them in the creation of a modern welfare state and shaping them into moral and entrepreneurial citizens.In Tamale in northern Ghana, years of political neglect, violence, and structural adjustment have led to small-scale traders taking over streets, sidewalks, and infrastructure, which has created a boundless and dynamic marketspace that far exceeds the delimited and politically defined marketplaces. For the state, therefore, much of the formalization process is about restoring the control and power of public space through evictions and relocations of traders. In conjunction with the inclusive welfare services, this demonstrates the contradictions entailed in the politics of informality.The study is based on an ethnographic fieldwork among small-scale traders in northern Ghana with a specific interest in the events that occur at the intersection where state, market, and citizenship meet. By asking what it means to be a trader in this contradictory process of formalization, the dissertation aims to understand this transformative moment in Ghana’s political and economic history.In this study the emic notion of small-small is used to frame the norms of gradual progress and letting others in that define the moral economy of small-scale trade. Norms, values, and obligations generate trust and solidarity within the marketspace. But more than that, small-small produces a form of politics against an obstructive and unreliable state and it guides traders into the future by shaping dreams, aspirations, and possibilities. Situated in traders’ daily lives, work, and relationships, and through the small-small lens, this thesis investigates the underlying moralities of formalization. It describes the politics of the Ghanaian state, which in its attempt to create an inclusive welfare society, struggles to both protect the moral dynamics of small-scale trade while adhering to the norms and standards of an open liberalized economy.
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| 2. |
- Körling, Gabriella, 1980-
(författare)
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In Search of the State : An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study explores public health and education provision in Niamey, the capital of Niger, by merging the ethnographic study of public services with an anthropological analysis of the state and of local politics. Based on anthropological fieldwork carried out in a group of neighbourhoods in the periphery of Niamey, the study highlights the political dimensions of public service provision in a local arena where international development interventions and national plans meet local realities and where a wide range of actors and institutions, dis-courses, meanings, and practices are mobilized in the offering of and the regulation of access to public services. It focuses on the political, economic, and socio-cultural aspects of public service provision, too often hidden behind contemporary buzzwords of development such as community participation and decentralization that dominate global debates about education and healthcare in developing countries. The study brings forth the strategies of urban resi-dents in dealing with daily challenges in the consolidation of service provision and in educa-tion and health-seeking trajectories. It shows that access to a satisfactory treatment of illness or a successful school career is premised on the ability to navigate on the medical and educa-tion markets, which are made up of a plurality of providers and of official and unofficial costs and transactions. Further, these public services engage different actors such as commu-nity committees, traditional chiefs, local associations, the municipality and elected municipal councillors, emergent leaders, NGOs, and international development aid. The study demon-strates that despite the uncertainty of state support in health and education provision and a widespread dissatisfaction with these public services, the image of the state as service pro-vider is reproduced on a day by day basis through local efforts at securing public services.
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| 3. |
- Lindberg, Emy, 1985-
(författare)
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Dream Machine : an Ethnography of Football Migration between Ghana and Sweden
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines football migration between Ghana and Sweden. Based on multi-sited, transnational, part-time ethnographic fieldwork that spanned 22 months between 2017 and 2019, it focuses on the everyday realities of Ghanaian football migrants throughout their labor migration trajectory. At the same time, the thesis contextualizes these experiences within the larger historical processes of neoliberalism, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade. The theoretical framework draws on literature concerning dreams and aspirations, time and migration, family structures, race, and the enduring impact of colonialism. The thesis sheds light on the historical connection between Ghanaian and Swedish football as a colonial project, a national project, and a global postcolonial phenomenon, emphasizing the political economy of football migration. By zooming in on dreams and the footballing body, it then examines footballers as neoliberal entrepreneurs of themselves as well as objects of the industry’s racialized dreams. Next, the thesis draws attention to the temporal aspects of football migration, including institutional borders, capitalist timelines, and the time of the footballing body. The thesis goes on to explore family structures, particularly fatherhood, in the migratory and footballing context, showing how these structures are interconnected with the business interests of the global football industry. It further demonstrates how race and racialization are present in the Swedish footballing context and finally looks at return migration, investigating how migrant footballers seek to repay economic and social debts. As performers on a commercialized global stage, the footballers embody the dreams of people all over the world. They are commodified and seen as investments for the future, both by people at home and by those working in the industry. Their success generates profit and shows that the dream of migration and the dream of football can come true. This thesis uses the metaphor of the dream machine to understand how dreams operate both globally and locally. It examines the linkages between maintenance of the footballing body, transactions of care, practices of social inclusion and racialized exclusion, and the functioning of the global capitalist football industry. Doing so, it emphasizes the meaningfulness of the migration trajectory for individual footballers and their networks, placing these relationships at the very heart of the beautiful game.
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| 4. |
- Sundberg, Molly, 1982-
(författare)
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Training for Model Citizenship : An Ethnography of Civic Education and State-Making in Rwanda
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis addresses how government in Rwanda plays out in practice and how it affects lived experiences of state power and citizenship. Two decades after the genocide, Rwanda has come to be associated both with security, development, and stability, on the one hand, and with state repression and coercion, on the other. In 2007, a nationwide programme was launched to teach all Rwandans about the politically dominant vision of the model Rwandan citizen – an ideal that is today pursued through remote trainings camps, local village trainings, and everyday forms of government.The thesis is based on ten months of anthropological research in Rwanda, oriented around three ethnographic spaces: the life and workings of the Itorero training sites, the voices of two dozen Rwandans living in Kigali, and the daily government of a local neighbourhood in Kigali.The findings highlight how certain government practices in Rwanda engender in people experiences of being exposed to the state’s power and violent potential. As such, they represent an authoritarian mode of rule, reproduced through the way experiences of exposure guide everyday actions and behaviour vis-à-vis the state. The thesis starts from the Foucauldian assumption that all relations of power depend on the acceptance and agency of both those holding power and those who relate to themselves as their subjects. In Rwanda, the terms of acceptance are partly grounded in local social realities. Personal memories of mass violence, for example, justify for many the state’s tight social control. Such memories are also actively nurtured by the government itself, by associating the loosening of state control with the risk of renewed violence. Furthermore, in light of Rwanda’s attraction of foreign aid, authoritarian rule needs to be understood in relation to international terms of acceptance, which are embedded in liberal understandings of good, or at least good enough, governance.
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| 5. |
- Zougouri, Sita, 1973-
(författare)
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Derrière la vitrine du développement : Aménagement forestier et pouvoir local au Burkina Faso
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Cette étude se base sur des recherches ethnographiques menées dans un village nuni autour d’un projet de développement au Burkina Faso. Elle se situe dans une dynamique relationnelle « homme-société-ressources » qui met en lumière des enjeux socio-politiques et économiques, qui sont notamment des espaces de pouvoir, de complémentarité et d’exclusion d’acteurs. L’aménagement forestier dit participatif introduit par ce projet de développement repose de nos jours sur une gestion locale officiellement dirigée par l’Union de groupements de gestion forestière (UGGF), mais simultanément supervisée par un pouvoir local, représenté par un chef de village, prêtre du fétiche principal (Kwere Aniaba) du village de Bougnounou. L’étude nous plonge au cœur de dynamiques politiques entre individus, entre groupes, et entre les groupes et le pouvoir local. Elle décrit et analyse les rapports étroits entre ce pouvoir local et l’aménagement forestier. Ce travail démontre que aussi bien l’UGGF, que le prêtre du fétiche ont intérêt à ce que ce chantier d’aménagement forestier fonctionne bien. Car, ce dernier tire sa légitimité non seulement de son statut religieux au niveau local d’être le protecteur omnipotent, mais aussi de l’extérieur auprès des structures politiques publiques et des structures de développement d’être le garant de la réussite des actions de développement. C’est pourquoi, l’objectif de cette étude a été de comprendre les interactions entre les acteurs locaux derrière une vitrine du développement, et de voir en quoi ces interactions sont le produit de processus d’exclusion et d’inclusion qui, finalement, modèlent et organisent ce projet. Les principaux résultats de l’étude indiquent que les structures préexistantes, qu’elles soient politiques, sociales ou culturelles de ce contexte nuni de Bougnounou, établissent effectivement des privilèges et des structures de façon inéquitable pour les acteurs locaux. Cela introduit ainsi des situations d’exclusion de ces structures entre femmes et hommes sur le marché du bois, entre autochtones nuna et migrants moose autour de l’accès à l’aménagement forestier, entre Tiogolia « gens du village » et Tiogotian « propriétaires du village » basé sur une autochtonie qui s’exprime dans tous les rapports socio-religieux et politiques entre des groupes d’acteurs nuna. Ces situations d’exclusions entrevoient cependant l’inclusion de certains acteurs (les migrants) grâce à leurs rapports fonciers avec les Nuna. Par ailleurs, divers groupes d’acteurs se donnent la possibilité de produire différents modes de résistance pour échapper aux règles du jeu entretenues par ces situations.
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| 6. |
- Andersson Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-
(författare)
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Medicine for Uncertain Futures : A Nigerian City in the Wake of a Crisis
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Nigerian city of Jos used to be seen as a peaceful place, but in 2001 it was struck by clashes that arose from what was largely understood as issues of ethnic and religious belonging. The event, which would become known as ‘the crisis’, was experienced as a rupture and a loss of what the city had once been, and as the starting point of a spiral of violence that has continued up to today. With the crisis, Jos changed. Former friends became enemies, and places that had been felt to be safe no longer were so. Previous truths were thrown into confusion, and Jos’s inhabitants found themselves more and more having to manoeuvre in an unstable world coloured by fear and anger. Life in Jos became increasingly hard to predict, and people searched for different ways forward, constantly trying out new interpretations of the world. This book, which is inspired by pragmatism, analyses the processes that were shaping the emergent city of Jos and its inhabitants in the aftermath of the crisis. At its core are some of Jos’s practitioners of traditional medicine. As healers, diviners, and providers of spells to protect from enemies or solve conflicts, they had special skills to influence futures that were becoming more and more unpredictable. Still, the medical practitioners were as vulnerable to the changing circumstances as everyone else. Their everyday lives and struggles to find their footing and ways forward under the changing circumstances are used as a point of departure to explore larger wholes: life during times characterised by feelings of uncertainty, fragmentation, fear, and conflict – in Jos as a city and Nigeria as a nation.
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| 7. |
- Bjarnesen, Jesper, 1977-
(författare)
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Diaspora at Home? : Wartime Mobilities in the Burkina Faso-Côte d'Ivoire Transnational Space
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the period 1999-2007, more than half a million Burkinabe returned to Burkina Faso due to the persecution of immigrant labourers in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Ultranationalist debates about the criteria for Ivorian citizenship had intensified during the 1990s and led to the scapegoating of immigrants in a political rhetoric centred on notions of autochthony and xenophobia. Having been actively encouraged to immigrate by the Ivorian state for generations, Burkinabe migrant labourers were now forced to leave their homes and livelihoods behind and return to a country they had left in their youth or, as second-generation immigrants in Côte d’Ivoire, had never seen.Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, the thesis explores the narratives and everyday practices of returning labour migrants in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, in order to understand the subjective experiences of displacement that the forced return to Burkina Faso engendered. The analysis questions the appropriateness of the very notion of “return” in this context and suggests that people’s senses of home are multiplex and tend to rely more on the ability to pursue active processes of emplacement in everyday life than on abstract notions of belonging, e.g. relating to citizenship or ethnicity.The study analyses intergenerational interactions within and across migrant families in the city and on transformations of intra-familial relations in the context of forced displace-ment. A particular emphasis is placed on the experiences of young adults who were born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire and arrived in Burkina Faso for the first time during the Ivorian crisis. These young men and women were received with scepticism in Burkina Faso because of their perceived “Ivorian” upbringing, language, and behaviour and were forced to face new forms of stigmatisation and exclusion. At the same time, young migrants were able to exploit their labelling as outsiders and turn their difference into an advantage in the competition for scarce employment opportunities and social connections.
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