Chelsie Yount | Universiteit Leiden (original) (raw)

Papers by Chelsie Yount

Journal des africanistes, 2022

This article examines how relatives in Dakar take up diverse parental roles (Goody 1971, 1982) vi... more This article examines how relatives in Dakar take up diverse parental roles (Goody 1971, 1982) vis-à-vis migrants’ children, in efforts to cultivate transnational affective and economic relationships with children growing up in France. It examines the social work of kinship-making during families’ trips to Dakar, questioning whether and how transnational kin might establish roles of pluriparentalité with children growing up abroad. Not everyone who cares for a child assumes a parental role, however. Analysis of an example of transnational “cross-cousins” sheds light on the ways caregivers distinguish between types of care that create parenthood and those that underpin other kinship relations. Applying insights from linguistic anthropology into the ways speaking roles may be distributed among many social actors, it considers, first, how transnational relatives share parental roles and second, how Senegalese caregivers signal extra- parental relations of care. Examining how adults in Dakar care for migrants’ children who live abroad, I show how Senegalese caregivers trace the contours of parenthood within a universe of kinship relations.

In the United Nations 2019 climate-change report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (... more In the United Nations 2019 climate-change report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advocated the adoption of plant-based diets to mitigate global warming. This recommendation encouraged already rising interest in vegetarian lifestyles internationally (Schiermeier 2019). Although the shift towards plant-based diets has been most visible in countries of the Global North, an estimated 20% of South Africans claim to be trying to eliminate or reduce meat in their diet (Schimke 2020). Far outpacing other African nations in sales of vegetarian cookbooks and online searches for the term "vegan," South African media proclaim the country to be "leading the continent into [a] vegan lifestyle," (Powell 2020, Emecheta 2020). And yet, per capita meat consumption continues to rise in this country whose annual Heritage Day is widely dubbed "Braai Day" for the meat-filled barbecues South Africans hold to celebrate (Oirere 2019; Sihlangu 2019).

Signs & Society, 2021

This article analyzes moral registers about and within one of the world’s largest food corporatio... more This article analyzes moral registers about and within one of the world’s largest food corporations. Based on fieldwork at a French multinational corporation, I trace how speech registers surrounding food circulate across institutional arenas, reconfiguring material connections between the company and consumers. I examine the emergence of a “Big Food” register, critical of the food industry, and analyze the discourses it has triggered within one corporation, comparing talk of ethics and economics among employees in Paris and Johannesburg. Corporate efforts to produce value through food result from struggles between value projects of diverse employees who are positioned differently relative to corporate
hierarchies and global inequalities. I argue that moral language in and around the food industry can elucidate current transformations in global capitalism, revealing multinationals’ struggles to credibly voice registers aligned with consumers’ values in their search for competitive advantage.

Politique Africaine, 2020

Middle-class Senegalese families who live in France bring their children to Senegal during their ... more Middle-class Senegalese families who live in France bring their children to Senegal during their summer vacations to visit their families. This article examines how, through the socialization of children, university-educated Senegalese migrants work to transmit their middle-class status in both France and Senegal. Given that middle-class status
does not depend on the same resources or economic moralities in France and in Senegal, these transnational class aspirations require strategic investments in the two
countries. Familial tensions created by this situation unfold during families’ vacations in Senegal, as migrants and their relatives in Dakar work to create or maintain socioeconomic relations with and through children.

Des familles sénégalaises issues des classes moyennes résidant en France emmènent leurs enfants au Sénégal durant les congés scolaires pour rendre visite à leurs familles. Cet article examine comment, à travers la socialisation des enfants, des migrants sénégalais diplômés du supérieur cherchent à leur transmettre un statut de classe moyenne à la fois en France et au Sénégal. L'appartenance aux classes moyennes ne reposant pas sur les mêmes ressources ni sur les mêmes moralités économiques en France et au Sénégal, ces aspirations sociales transnationales nécessitent des investissements stratégiques dans les deux pays. Cette situation génère des tensions au sein des familles, qui se donnent à voir à l'occasion des congés au Sénégal, quand les migrants et leurs proches à Dakar essaient de créer ou de maintenir des liens socio-économiques avec et à travers les enfants de la diaspora. Les enfants représentent des personnes clés dans les circuits intergéné-rationnels basés sur la réciprocité au Sénégal, comme ailleurs en Afrique 1. À Dakar, les enfants sont éduqués dès le plus jeune âge pour comprendre que le « soin matériel 2 » qu'ils reçoivent de leurs aînés témoigne de leur affection et implique en retour certaines obligations dans le présent, mais aussi dans le futur. Les adultes interprètent l'obéissance et l'aide quotidienne des enfants à la maison comme autant de signes de leur gratitude et de leur déférence, ainsi que d'une socialisation réussie visant à leur faire intérioriser leur place d'enfant dans les logiques de réciprocité intergénérationnelle. Les recherches portant sur l'envoi en Afrique d'enfants nés en migration (pour de longues périodes sans leurs parents) ont démontré que ces enfants confiés permettent aux proches qui les accueillent en Afrique de créer et de renforcer les liens affectifs et économiques avec les parents migrants 3. Dans les 1. J. Rabain, L'enfant du lignage. Du sevrage à la classe d'âge,

Africa Today, 2020

This article examines the social work of maintaining middle-class status in multiple ... more This article examines the social work of maintaining middle-class status in multiple national contexts, focusing on university-educated Senegalese in Paris. Once considered elite African intellectuals, these Senegalese find that diplomas no longer protect them from stigmatization in France. While Senegalese increasingly associate Islam with lucrative paths to mobility, in France, religion is treated as a barrier to belonging. French fluency and formal education index status in Senegal and facilitate integration in France, whereas religion is a key point of divergence between French and Senegalese notions of class, complicating efforts to achieve status transnationally. I argue that investments in multiple middle classes are complicated by a growing political and economic distance between Senegal and its former colonizer, showing how the symbols and stakes of middle-classness shift with national context and political–economic transformations.

Revue des Sciences Sociales, 2019

The world’s largest food corporations have been losing market share, faced with criticism and mou... more The world’s largest food corporations have been losing market share, faced with criticism and mounting consumer mistrust. While previous scholarship has demonstrated the political dimensions of, what we call, the engaged plate of food activists and the charitable plate offered to the poor, the politics of the ordinary plate of mass consumption have been largely overlooked. This article considers the evolution of distrust in France and the United States over the past 50 years, analyzing the visible effects which these transformations have had on the food supply, as the food industry has recycled the critiques it has received. The article investigates a process through which the political nature of eating has become increasingly visible within the mass industrial food system – in the sense that choices have multiplied regarding how food connects eaters and concretely positions them in social and technical systems. The food industry’s responses to criticism have resulted in the diversification of labels advertising production methods and the origin of ingredients. This diversification indirectly highlights the opacity of the historically powerful food companies. The contingency of the choices that guides their production becomes more apparent. The critical, or even conflictual relationship between eaters and the food industry has thus become a driving force behind the politicization of everyday eating. This reintroduction of the political dimension into the market is proof of the constructive nature of distrust.

Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send ... more Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send to children in their country of origin. This paper illuminates another permutation of these processes: family members in Senegal who establish relations with and through children in France through gifts and money. Focusing on relationships between children in Paris and their family members in Dakar, it provides insight into the everyday exchanges through which transnational families attempt to assure the material reproduction of households in Africa. I trace the ways children use Facebook to maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal and examine how adults shape these relations. Focusing specifically on innovative forms of “cross cousin” relationships in the Senegalese diaspora, this paper illustrates how adults create cultural scaffolding around children who may be unaware of the kinship terms for the relationships in which they are implicated. I demonstrate how practices that have permitted Africans to weather economic volatility for centuries are now carried out, in part, through social media. Approaching material circulation and the transmission of cultural values as mutually imbricated processes, I demonstrate how Senegalese selectively reinforce links with certain family members, in efforts to favorably position themselves in socio-economic networks of transnational kin.

Neoliberal policies that foster the international flow of commodities but hinder the movement of ... more Neoliberal policies that foster the international flow of commodities but hinder the movement of people have transformed the ways in which kin across continents struggle to assure the reproduction of households in Africa. The austerity measures of structural adjustment diminished the ranks of civil servants and decimated state investment in infrastructure, education and social welfare systems. This themed section attests to a multiplication of educational and migratory trajectories West Africans pursue, each path seemingly more precarious than the last. Focusing on everyday moments of family life achieved across borders, these articles show how global transformations have placed increasing pressure on migrants, while pushing those in Africa to find new ways to connect with and send family members abroad.

Faced with heightened xenophobia and economic decline, middle class Senegalese in Paris provide a... more Faced with heightened xenophobia and economic decline, middle class Senegalese in Paris provide a striking example of the ways immigrants reinforce transnational hierarchies as they cling to (post)colonial privilege. This article examines how Senegalese immigrants and their French-born children draw on eating practices to index religion as an axis of social differentiation, producing hierarchies of belonging in France. In the context of escalating anti-Islamic sentiment, even naturalized citizens feel pressure to permanently perform their integration according to the ever-shifting demands of French secularism, as " eating French " is increasingly defined in opposition to the practices of Muslim immigrants from France's former colonies. This article shows how French Republicanism contributes to a tiered form of citizenship through examination of the ways that educated migrants from Dakar and their children adopt the language of secularism to valorize their own eating practices relative to other transnational (Senegalese) migrants. When Mouna Diallo invited me to lunch during Ramadan, I assumed that she did not observe the month of fasting in France as strictly as one might in Senegal. However , when she served the hachis Parmentier that had been warming in the oven, Mouna brought only one plate to the table, apologizing that she could not join me because she was fasting. I complimented her mastery of the French dish, noting that she had developed impressive culinary skills in only three years in Paris. Mouna laughed and explained that this recipe was a staple she had learned in Dakar years ago. Like many middle-class Dakarois, Mouna framed the practices necessary to integrate in France as a continuation of her habits in Senegal premigration. Unlike lower class and rural Senegalese, she had arrived in Paris with French language skills and a university degree that helped her obtain a visa and formal employment. In Paris and Dakar, Mouna alternated between French and Wolof languages and ate both Senegalese and French foods. The lives of Senegalese families in Paris encompass French and Senegalese contexts , each associated with its own value-laden interpretations of eating practices.

In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, stereotypes of Muslim migrants who pose a thre... more In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, stereotypes of Muslim migrants who pose a threat to the French nation loom large. This article considers how communicative practices associated with belonging in France shift with rising tensions surrounding Islam and immigration. By analyzing the language used in state discourses on the one hand, and in conversations in Senegalese households on the other, this article examines 'integration' in France, both as a legal category and as a powerful metapragmatic framework that mediates indexicality in everyday interactions. This article shows how immigrants take part in the continual redefinition of what is required to 'sound' integrated in attempts to illustrate their belonging in France. It contends that French republican ideologies create an axis of contrast between the 'integrated' foreign-born and potentially problematic 'immigrants,' revealing how immigrants appropriate state discourses in their efforts to demonstrate their own integration. In so doing, immigrants themselves produce nested hierarchies of belonging among France's immigrant minority populations, in which Senegalese Catholics perform integration through critiques of Muslims, while Senegalese Muslims denounce Islamic associations and others who are more pious in public than they.

Adults in Senegal explain children's snack sharing practices as the product of gender and age dif... more Adults in Senegal explain children's snack sharing practices as the product of gender and age differences in children's temperament, describing older girls as better behaved and thus better suited to divvy up food. But close examination of children's language practices while sharing food reveals the nuanced semiotic strategies they draw on to negotiate rights to material resources. This article builds on Judith Irvine's research into the intersections of language and material exchange, to shed light on the ways children participate in the reproduction of linguistic forms that mediate material circulation. Analysis of snack sharing between siblings in Dakar illustrates how children embody contrasting semiotic practices linked to caste-based modes of behavior. I argue that the semiotic resources children use to negotiate obligation and entitlement while sharing food can illuminate the naturalization of morally charged forms of language materiality that underpin material circulation according to asymmetrical, but complimentary social roles. [materiality, children, language ideologies, language socialization, food, morality] R ushing toward me, nine-year-old Fatou eagerly reported that her uncle had brought her two juice boxes and three bags of chips for her younger brother Karim. 1 I admired the gifts, nodding appreciatively in response to her excited tone as I puzzled silently over the uneven allocation of snacks. Having often observed Senegalese caregivers give snacks to one child who would divvy up the food among all children present or transfer it to another child to distribute, I noticed with surprise that the task of apportioning unequal quantities of snacks rarely provoked dispute. That afternoon in Dakar, Fatou's redistribution of her uncle's gifts sparked no sibling rivalry, but the following week, when I offered each child an identical snack, my gifts provoked a lengthy redistribution process. Fatou's previously affectively charged speaking style was noticeably absent, replaced by calm, quiet words of thanks. Her reaction contrasted with her four-year-old brother's unusually high-pitched, elaborate display of gratitude, in ways that Senegalese adults described as indicative of Fatou's age, maturity, and right to redistribute the snacks relative to Karim.

Co-edited volumes by Chelsie Yount

This special issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford - online presents a se... more This special issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford - online presents a series of papers from the Language, Indexicality and Belonging Conference, which was held at the University of Oxford in April 2016. The discussion presented in this volume will continue during the Language, Mobility and Belonging Conference in March 2017. The editors of this volume, Nancy Hawker, Kinga Kozminska and Leonie Schulte, together with the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, invite you to engage in a further debate on the role of language in the conceptualization of belonging in the contemporary world this spring! Copyright for all articles, reviews and other authored items in this issue falls under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/).

Panels & Sessions of Conferences by Chelsie Yount

This panel investigates African migrants’ kinship strategies and economic arrangements in light o... more 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.

This panel explores the everyday eating practices through which individuals practice and perform ... more This panel explores the everyday eating practices through which individuals practice and perform social positions relative to others, attempting to manage future possibilities through social events of food sharing. Commensality, the act of eating with others, is necessarily both inclusive and exclusive, simultaneously bringing together certain individuals while leaving others out. Although the quotidian politics that shape food sharing practices may appear anodyne, pragmatic necessities, we ignore them at our peril, because commensal practices are undergirded by ideologies that organize hierarchical social relations more broadly, shaping social groups according to morally-charged social values and notions of appropriateness.
In this session, we take up questions of how eating practices vary within and across social groups relative to context and participants involved as well as broader social and economic forces. Through analysis of commensal practices, this panel will examine the intersection of social change and individual life trajectories as manifest in the materiality of food sharing and everyday eating practices.
Anthropologists have long examined connections between eating practices and group identity, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the actual processes through which feelings of group belonging and togetherness are forged, rendered palpable through acts of eating and speaking about food. How do foods and eating practices become charged with social meanings capable of uniting and dividing individuals into recognizable social groups? How are power, prestige, and status instantiated and negotiated in food sharing? If social change and political-economic forces carve even the most mundane activities, how might analysis of food and eating practices provide insights into the ways individuals and social units grapple with societal transformation? How might cultural variability in meal patterns and attitudes towards commensality elucidate ideological differences and divergent understandings of ways of being in society? The presentations in this session will highlight specificities of the ways of eating together in diverse social groups as well as transformations occurring at the critical moments in one’s life course, linked to individual, social and historical trajectories.

Book Reviews by Chelsie Yount

Social Anthropology, 2019

Food, Culture & Society, 2019

Journal des africanistes, 2022

This article examines how relatives in Dakar take up diverse parental roles (Goody 1971, 1982) vi... more This article examines how relatives in Dakar take up diverse parental roles (Goody 1971, 1982) vis-à-vis migrants’ children, in efforts to cultivate transnational affective and economic relationships with children growing up in France. It examines the social work of kinship-making during families’ trips to Dakar, questioning whether and how transnational kin might establish roles of pluriparentalité with children growing up abroad. Not everyone who cares for a child assumes a parental role, however. Analysis of an example of transnational “cross-cousins” sheds light on the ways caregivers distinguish between types of care that create parenthood and those that underpin other kinship relations. Applying insights from linguistic anthropology into the ways speaking roles may be distributed among many social actors, it considers, first, how transnational relatives share parental roles and second, how Senegalese caregivers signal extra- parental relations of care. Examining how adults in Dakar care for migrants’ children who live abroad, I show how Senegalese caregivers trace the contours of parenthood within a universe of kinship relations.

In the United Nations 2019 climate-change report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (... more In the United Nations 2019 climate-change report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advocated the adoption of plant-based diets to mitigate global warming. This recommendation encouraged already rising interest in vegetarian lifestyles internationally (Schiermeier 2019). Although the shift towards plant-based diets has been most visible in countries of the Global North, an estimated 20% of South Africans claim to be trying to eliminate or reduce meat in their diet (Schimke 2020). Far outpacing other African nations in sales of vegetarian cookbooks and online searches for the term "vegan," South African media proclaim the country to be "leading the continent into [a] vegan lifestyle," (Powell 2020, Emecheta 2020). And yet, per capita meat consumption continues to rise in this country whose annual Heritage Day is widely dubbed "Braai Day" for the meat-filled barbecues South Africans hold to celebrate (Oirere 2019; Sihlangu 2019).

Signs & Society, 2021

This article analyzes moral registers about and within one of the world’s largest food corporatio... more This article analyzes moral registers about and within one of the world’s largest food corporations. Based on fieldwork at a French multinational corporation, I trace how speech registers surrounding food circulate across institutional arenas, reconfiguring material connections between the company and consumers. I examine the emergence of a “Big Food” register, critical of the food industry, and analyze the discourses it has triggered within one corporation, comparing talk of ethics and economics among employees in Paris and Johannesburg. Corporate efforts to produce value through food result from struggles between value projects of diverse employees who are positioned differently relative to corporate
hierarchies and global inequalities. I argue that moral language in and around the food industry can elucidate current transformations in global capitalism, revealing multinationals’ struggles to credibly voice registers aligned with consumers’ values in their search for competitive advantage.

Politique Africaine, 2020

Middle-class Senegalese families who live in France bring their children to Senegal during their ... more Middle-class Senegalese families who live in France bring their children to Senegal during their summer vacations to visit their families. This article examines how, through the socialization of children, university-educated Senegalese migrants work to transmit their middle-class status in both France and Senegal. Given that middle-class status
does not depend on the same resources or economic moralities in France and in Senegal, these transnational class aspirations require strategic investments in the two
countries. Familial tensions created by this situation unfold during families’ vacations in Senegal, as migrants and their relatives in Dakar work to create or maintain socioeconomic relations with and through children.

Des familles sénégalaises issues des classes moyennes résidant en France emmènent leurs enfants au Sénégal durant les congés scolaires pour rendre visite à leurs familles. Cet article examine comment, à travers la socialisation des enfants, des migrants sénégalais diplômés du supérieur cherchent à leur transmettre un statut de classe moyenne à la fois en France et au Sénégal. L'appartenance aux classes moyennes ne reposant pas sur les mêmes ressources ni sur les mêmes moralités économiques en France et au Sénégal, ces aspirations sociales transnationales nécessitent des investissements stratégiques dans les deux pays. Cette situation génère des tensions au sein des familles, qui se donnent à voir à l'occasion des congés au Sénégal, quand les migrants et leurs proches à Dakar essaient de créer ou de maintenir des liens socio-économiques avec et à travers les enfants de la diaspora. Les enfants représentent des personnes clés dans les circuits intergéné-rationnels basés sur la réciprocité au Sénégal, comme ailleurs en Afrique 1. À Dakar, les enfants sont éduqués dès le plus jeune âge pour comprendre que le « soin matériel 2 » qu'ils reçoivent de leurs aînés témoigne de leur affection et implique en retour certaines obligations dans le présent, mais aussi dans le futur. Les adultes interprètent l'obéissance et l'aide quotidienne des enfants à la maison comme autant de signes de leur gratitude et de leur déférence, ainsi que d'une socialisation réussie visant à leur faire intérioriser leur place d'enfant dans les logiques de réciprocité intergénérationnelle. Les recherches portant sur l'envoi en Afrique d'enfants nés en migration (pour de longues périodes sans leurs parents) ont démontré que ces enfants confiés permettent aux proches qui les accueillent en Afrique de créer et de renforcer les liens affectifs et économiques avec les parents migrants 3. Dans les 1. J. Rabain, L'enfant du lignage. Du sevrage à la classe d'âge,

Africa Today, 2020

This article examines the social work of maintaining middle-class status in multiple ... more This article examines the social work of maintaining middle-class status in multiple national contexts, focusing on university-educated Senegalese in Paris. Once considered elite African intellectuals, these Senegalese find that diplomas no longer protect them from stigmatization in France. While Senegalese increasingly associate Islam with lucrative paths to mobility, in France, religion is treated as a barrier to belonging. French fluency and formal education index status in Senegal and facilitate integration in France, whereas religion is a key point of divergence between French and Senegalese notions of class, complicating efforts to achieve status transnationally. I argue that investments in multiple middle classes are complicated by a growing political and economic distance between Senegal and its former colonizer, showing how the symbols and stakes of middle-classness shift with national context and political–economic transformations.

Revue des Sciences Sociales, 2019

The world’s largest food corporations have been losing market share, faced with criticism and mou... more The world’s largest food corporations have been losing market share, faced with criticism and mounting consumer mistrust. While previous scholarship has demonstrated the political dimensions of, what we call, the engaged plate of food activists and the charitable plate offered to the poor, the politics of the ordinary plate of mass consumption have been largely overlooked. This article considers the evolution of distrust in France and the United States over the past 50 years, analyzing the visible effects which these transformations have had on the food supply, as the food industry has recycled the critiques it has received. The article investigates a process through which the political nature of eating has become increasingly visible within the mass industrial food system – in the sense that choices have multiplied regarding how food connects eaters and concretely positions them in social and technical systems. The food industry’s responses to criticism have resulted in the diversification of labels advertising production methods and the origin of ingredients. This diversification indirectly highlights the opacity of the historically powerful food companies. The contingency of the choices that guides their production becomes more apparent. The critical, or even conflictual relationship between eaters and the food industry has thus become a driving force behind the politicization of everyday eating. This reintroduction of the political dimension into the market is proof of the constructive nature of distrust.

Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send ... more Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send to children in their country of origin. This paper illuminates another permutation of these processes: family members in Senegal who establish relations with and through children in France through gifts and money. Focusing on relationships between children in Paris and their family members in Dakar, it provides insight into the everyday exchanges through which transnational families attempt to assure the material reproduction of households in Africa. I trace the ways children use Facebook to maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal and examine how adults shape these relations. Focusing specifically on innovative forms of “cross cousin” relationships in the Senegalese diaspora, this paper illustrates how adults create cultural scaffolding around children who may be unaware of the kinship terms for the relationships in which they are implicated. I demonstrate how practices that have permitted Africans to weather economic volatility for centuries are now carried out, in part, through social media. Approaching material circulation and the transmission of cultural values as mutually imbricated processes, I demonstrate how Senegalese selectively reinforce links with certain family members, in efforts to favorably position themselves in socio-economic networks of transnational kin.

Neoliberal policies that foster the international flow of commodities but hinder the movement of ... more Neoliberal policies that foster the international flow of commodities but hinder the movement of people have transformed the ways in which kin across continents struggle to assure the reproduction of households in Africa. The austerity measures of structural adjustment diminished the ranks of civil servants and decimated state investment in infrastructure, education and social welfare systems. This themed section attests to a multiplication of educational and migratory trajectories West Africans pursue, each path seemingly more precarious than the last. Focusing on everyday moments of family life achieved across borders, these articles show how global transformations have placed increasing pressure on migrants, while pushing those in Africa to find new ways to connect with and send family members abroad.

Faced with heightened xenophobia and economic decline, middle class Senegalese in Paris provide a... more Faced with heightened xenophobia and economic decline, middle class Senegalese in Paris provide a striking example of the ways immigrants reinforce transnational hierarchies as they cling to (post)colonial privilege. This article examines how Senegalese immigrants and their French-born children draw on eating practices to index religion as an axis of social differentiation, producing hierarchies of belonging in France. In the context of escalating anti-Islamic sentiment, even naturalized citizens feel pressure to permanently perform their integration according to the ever-shifting demands of French secularism, as " eating French " is increasingly defined in opposition to the practices of Muslim immigrants from France's former colonies. This article shows how French Republicanism contributes to a tiered form of citizenship through examination of the ways that educated migrants from Dakar and their children adopt the language of secularism to valorize their own eating practices relative to other transnational (Senegalese) migrants. When Mouna Diallo invited me to lunch during Ramadan, I assumed that she did not observe the month of fasting in France as strictly as one might in Senegal. However , when she served the hachis Parmentier that had been warming in the oven, Mouna brought only one plate to the table, apologizing that she could not join me because she was fasting. I complimented her mastery of the French dish, noting that she had developed impressive culinary skills in only three years in Paris. Mouna laughed and explained that this recipe was a staple she had learned in Dakar years ago. Like many middle-class Dakarois, Mouna framed the practices necessary to integrate in France as a continuation of her habits in Senegal premigration. Unlike lower class and rural Senegalese, she had arrived in Paris with French language skills and a university degree that helped her obtain a visa and formal employment. In Paris and Dakar, Mouna alternated between French and Wolof languages and ate both Senegalese and French foods. The lives of Senegalese families in Paris encompass French and Senegalese contexts , each associated with its own value-laden interpretations of eating practices.

In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, stereotypes of Muslim migrants who pose a thre... more In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, stereotypes of Muslim migrants who pose a threat to the French nation loom large. This article considers how communicative practices associated with belonging in France shift with rising tensions surrounding Islam and immigration. By analyzing the language used in state discourses on the one hand, and in conversations in Senegalese households on the other, this article examines 'integration' in France, both as a legal category and as a powerful metapragmatic framework that mediates indexicality in everyday interactions. This article shows how immigrants take part in the continual redefinition of what is required to 'sound' integrated in attempts to illustrate their belonging in France. It contends that French republican ideologies create an axis of contrast between the 'integrated' foreign-born and potentially problematic 'immigrants,' revealing how immigrants appropriate state discourses in their efforts to demonstrate their own integration. In so doing, immigrants themselves produce nested hierarchies of belonging among France's immigrant minority populations, in which Senegalese Catholics perform integration through critiques of Muslims, while Senegalese Muslims denounce Islamic associations and others who are more pious in public than they.

Adults in Senegal explain children's snack sharing practices as the product of gender and age dif... more Adults in Senegal explain children's snack sharing practices as the product of gender and age differences in children's temperament, describing older girls as better behaved and thus better suited to divvy up food. But close examination of children's language practices while sharing food reveals the nuanced semiotic strategies they draw on to negotiate rights to material resources. This article builds on Judith Irvine's research into the intersections of language and material exchange, to shed light on the ways children participate in the reproduction of linguistic forms that mediate material circulation. Analysis of snack sharing between siblings in Dakar illustrates how children embody contrasting semiotic practices linked to caste-based modes of behavior. I argue that the semiotic resources children use to negotiate obligation and entitlement while sharing food can illuminate the naturalization of morally charged forms of language materiality that underpin material circulation according to asymmetrical, but complimentary social roles. [materiality, children, language ideologies, language socialization, food, morality] R ushing toward me, nine-year-old Fatou eagerly reported that her uncle had brought her two juice boxes and three bags of chips for her younger brother Karim. 1 I admired the gifts, nodding appreciatively in response to her excited tone as I puzzled silently over the uneven allocation of snacks. Having often observed Senegalese caregivers give snacks to one child who would divvy up the food among all children present or transfer it to another child to distribute, I noticed with surprise that the task of apportioning unequal quantities of snacks rarely provoked dispute. That afternoon in Dakar, Fatou's redistribution of her uncle's gifts sparked no sibling rivalry, but the following week, when I offered each child an identical snack, my gifts provoked a lengthy redistribution process. Fatou's previously affectively charged speaking style was noticeably absent, replaced by calm, quiet words of thanks. Her reaction contrasted with her four-year-old brother's unusually high-pitched, elaborate display of gratitude, in ways that Senegalese adults described as indicative of Fatou's age, maturity, and right to redistribute the snacks relative to Karim.

This special issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford - online presents a se... more This special issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford - online presents a series of papers from the Language, Indexicality and Belonging Conference, which was held at the University of Oxford in April 2016. The discussion presented in this volume will continue during the Language, Mobility and Belonging Conference in March 2017. The editors of this volume, Nancy Hawker, Kinga Kozminska and Leonie Schulte, together with the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, invite you to engage in a further debate on the role of language in the conceptualization of belonging in the contemporary world this spring! Copyright for all articles, reviews and other authored items in this issue falls under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/).

This panel investigates African migrants’ kinship strategies and economic arrangements in light o... more 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.

This panel explores the everyday eating practices through which individuals practice and perform ... more This panel explores the everyday eating practices through which individuals practice and perform social positions relative to others, attempting to manage future possibilities through social events of food sharing. Commensality, the act of eating with others, is necessarily both inclusive and exclusive, simultaneously bringing together certain individuals while leaving others out. Although the quotidian politics that shape food sharing practices may appear anodyne, pragmatic necessities, we ignore them at our peril, because commensal practices are undergirded by ideologies that organize hierarchical social relations more broadly, shaping social groups according to morally-charged social values and notions of appropriateness.
In this session, we take up questions of how eating practices vary within and across social groups relative to context and participants involved as well as broader social and economic forces. Through analysis of commensal practices, this panel will examine the intersection of social change and individual life trajectories as manifest in the materiality of food sharing and everyday eating practices.
Anthropologists have long examined connections between eating practices and group identity, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the actual processes through which feelings of group belonging and togetherness are forged, rendered palpable through acts of eating and speaking about food. How do foods and eating practices become charged with social meanings capable of uniting and dividing individuals into recognizable social groups? How are power, prestige, and status instantiated and negotiated in food sharing? If social change and political-economic forces carve even the most mundane activities, how might analysis of food and eating practices provide insights into the ways individuals and social units grapple with societal transformation? How might cultural variability in meal patterns and attitudes towards commensality elucidate ideological differences and divergent understandings of ways of being in society? The presentations in this session will highlight specificities of the ways of eating together in diverse social groups as well as transformations occurring at the critical moments in one’s life course, linked to individual, social and historical trajectories.