Joël Noret - Social Im/mobilities in Africa

Edited by
Jol Noret

First published in 2020 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2020 Jol Noret

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Names: Noret, Jol, editor.

Title: Social im/mobilities in Africa : ethnographic approaches / edited by Jol Noret.

Other titles: Social im/mobilities in Africa

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019037866 (print) | LCCN 2019037867 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789204858 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789204865 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social mobility--Africa. | Social status--Africa. | Africa--Social conditions--1960-

Classification: LCC HN780.Z9 .S633 2020 (print) | LCC HN780.Z9 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/13096--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037866

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037867

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-485-8 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-486-5 ebook

This volume engages with the complex issue of social mobilities and immobilities in Africa at a time when the public debate about the continent is passionate but dichotomized either portraying Africa Rising or attending to huge levels of inequality epitomized by the poverty of shantytowns. As this book demonstrates, both of these realities are true simultaneously, depending on which segments of African societies are scrutinized. What is more, they intersect. In fact, broad stroke depictions of the continent are only made possible by the neglect of social positionality, and how it mediates and intertwines with political and economic dynamics. A central argument of this book thus resides in a plea for a more consequential and critical attention to the ways in which social positions matter when accounting for current changes, as some groups and individuals are always better positioned than others to appropriate opportunities, in Webers famous terms.

Against this backdrop, the notion of social im/mobilities refers to the multifaceted dynamics of social structure in Africa today, and to the complex and sometimes paradoxical social trajectories they frame. These dynamics feature both social possibilities and social reproduction, social opportunities and social obstructions, in societies that are themselves subjected to rapid change that is, in which the forces at play in the making of social positions are also in motion. Therefore, the idea of social im/mobilities emphasizes the limits, uncertainties and complexities of current social mobilities, since social trajectories can be marked by change without significant alterations of life chances, to refer once again to Weber. Considering a variety of situations, the chapters in this volume investigate the complex intersection of important social qualities including levels of wealth and education, gender, autochthony or ethnicity in the production and the distribution of social positions, and the correlative making of social divisions. Advocating a multifaceted view of African societies, they investigate the nature of the social powers that constitute the texture of societies, and that individuals confront or mobilize in the course of their existences.1

In what follows, social positionality is analysed from a multidimensional perspective, in which multiple factors intersect to produce more or less enduring social proximities among social subjects sharing similar conditions, but also, as a correlate, social divisions and social distances. In other words, the societies we scrutinize are here understood as social spaces, that is multidimensional and relational spaces of social positions structured by different, interlacing systems of inequality (Bourdieu 1979, 1984, 1994). The work of Pierre Bourdieu indeed offers a fertile framework to consider the intersection of social powers or qualities, potentially working as capitals, in the production of social positions and chances of social im/mobility. What is more, the idea of social space also allows us to avoid what might be considered a pitfall of unidimensional conceptions of the social ladder, along which social actors can only climb or fall. Contrastingly, a multidimensional analysis of social positions points to the entwinement of different social attributes or qualities in the production of social spaces, in which diagonal or horizontal moves, transverse movements (Bourdieu 1979: 14546), are also possible.

Consider, for instance, situations when people move from a condition of rural poverty to urban settings, but where they remain in the lower segments of urban society. This is a social move that cannot easily be understood through the prism of a unidimensional social ladder, or be referred to unequivocally in terms of gains or losses. Or consider when a slight increase in the formal education level between generations goes hand in hand with a general elevation in educational standards. This move will not necessarily translate into a notable change in economic position, albeit delivering the social profits of literacy, and therefore consisting in a form of social move in a relational space of social positions itself undergoing structural transformations. In this book, Fawzia Mazanderani analyses the undelivered promise of education in a rural township of north-eastern South Africa, where higher levels of education haphazardly translate into the fantasies of success of the born free generation. Some moves in fact are more significant than others. For instance, short moves in the lower regions of social space, those of the deprived and the excluded, cannot unambiguously be viewed as social mobility, insofar as they do not necessarily represent actual increases in living standards and life chances.

From that perspective, the moves of social subjects between sectors of activity, tracked through massive databases by some development economists with an interest in social mobility (for instance Bossuroy and Cogneau 2013, Lambert et al. 2014), can actually represent ambiguous forms of social mobility something returned to in the conclusion. On the one hand, the reduction of the share of the population involved in agriculture certainly represents a massive social change, and a significant social move for many rural youth, with cultural implications reaching far beyond the occupational structure, as lifestyles change dramatically. It also reminds us how closely strategies of social mobility and quests for a dignified life have been entwined with physical mobility on the continent, at least since the colonial period. On the other hand, if we consider social mobility as altered life chances, when the move away from agriculture brings poorly educated people into the poor strata of (peri)urban society, this does not unambiguously alter their chances of accumulating wealth or accessing sufficient income. Added to which there are the uncertainties and precariousness of social positionality in African states with generally poorly developed social rights. As Laura Camfield and William Monteith point out in their chapter, Ugandan small entrepreneurs of the informal sector often achieve only fleeting social mobility in the challenging environment of Kampala.