Thompson, D.K., Jemal Yusuf Mahamed, and Kader Mohamoud. On "worlding" urban ethnography: conceptualizing scalar reconfigurations in an Ethiopian frontier city (original) (raw)

2023, The Routledge Handbook of Africa and Urban Anthropology

“It is only by triangulating both depth and surface dimensions of contemporary urbanism that we can hope to get a purchase on what is actually going on,” write Simone and Pieterse (2017, xii-xiii). Among urban paradoxes they highlight are that dichotomies including local-global and North-South “are simultaneously intensifying and waning, becoming more sharply drawn as they are also being folded into each other.” Africa’s urbanites are no strangers to contradictory processes that Simone (2004, 2) elsewhere terms “scalar recomposition” and others have analyzed in terms of people’s aspirational “worlding” or “world-making” projects (Ong 2011). People work to continuously relocate themselves in space, to rearrange territories, and to renegotiate social arrangements as they construct and connect multiple spaces of operation—from neighborhoods to transnational circuits—in order to create opportunity and meaning. Anthropologists have often approached such complex efforts through thick description of surprising juxtapositions between local and global found in Africa’s cities and their meaning for daily life. Urban geographers and some sociologists, meanwhile, have focused on spatialized social networks and the distribution of power between cities, states, and global assemblages. At the juncture of these approaches, a conceptual and methodological challenge emerges: to bring into view, on one hand, the spatial breadth and specificity of urbanites’ connections across a landscape usually conceptualized in terms of pregiven scalar concepts (local, urban, national, global)—and on the other, to address the shifting meanings of these spatial categories themselves as they shape daily life’s milieus. How do we understand, for instance, globalization(s) in African cities when “the global” is circumscribed by racialized inequalities, restrictions on mobility, and limited modalities of trans-spatial connection for those without the power and money to make the rules that govern connections? We approach this issue by dialectically addressing anthropological and geographical notions of scale. Analyzing productive tensions between social relatedness and geographical proximity brings into view a “globalized” but unique and specific relational world emerging in an Ethiopian regional city: Jigjiga, the capital of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State (SRS). Jigjiga is situated in a geopolitical borderland and is itself an emerging “frontier” for transnational mobilities and investments by the Somali diaspora. Our study conceptualizes the links between two processes of respatializing social, economic, and political relationships. The first is the shifting regional position of Jigjiga as a state capital in Ethiopia’s federal power structure. The Ethiopian government began introducing a system of ethnicity-based federalism in 1991; however, increased fiscal and security-related decentralization have unfolded only since 2010. This “new federalism” affected a “global” dynamic of respatialization: as diaspora Somalis perceived new opportunities for belonging (and business) in Ethiopia, a steady flow of diaspora remittances gave way to increasing return migration and investment. We analyze how businesspeople (diaspora investors and Ethiopian nationals) living at the juncture of these two processes conceptualize, forge, and materialize relationships across space in ways that have reorganized (a) Jigjiga’s relative political and economic positioning as manifest in trade and social networks; and (b) what Gupta and Ferguson (1997, 6) call “processes and practices of place making”—specifically, how people conceptualize and differentiate elements of locality, regionality, and globality in their relationships and economic practices. Conceptualizing qualitative and systematic elements of Jigjiga’s trans-spatial linkages required drawing on mixed methods, which we pursued through interdisciplinary collaboration (coming from our respective backgrounds in anthropology, geography, and sociology) with a commitment to ethnography.