This dissertation explores how people use creative linguistic techniques to address the communication uncertainties that arise between self and others in West African zongos (“traveler’s camps” or “stranger’s quarters”). Found throughout the region, zongos are characterized by the mobility of their populations, their social marginality, and ethnic diversity. They reflect a long history in which Muslim travelers—clerics, traders, and explorers—constructed economic, religious, and political ties with their indigenous hosts in unfamiliar places. The research focused specifically on how the inhabitants Nima Zongo in Accra, Ghana negotiated intersubjective uncertainties in a place where everyone saw everyone else as a stranger.
Based on eighteen months of continuous fieldwork from 2018 to 2020, I employed a combination of ethnographic methods, mapping techniques, linguistic analysis, and visual representation to show how individuals living in the Nima Zongo addressed this problem by using folded speech (karin magana in Hausa). This is a cryptic communicative practice in which enigmatic phrases (“The world is nothing,” “Love your friends, but don’t trust them,” “If you give kindness, you receive wickedness in return”) combine different stances, ideas, or materialities that are not typically (or should not be) linked together to address dispositions of uncertainty that arise between self and other. I demonstrate how karin magana’s linguistic structure, symbolism, and indirectness combine to propel the listener into an imaginative to-and-fro mode of trying on different perspectives. This cognitive process has the potential to help speakers and listeners find ways to, as my interlocutors put it, “keep traveling together,” a mode of being in the world that keeps stability and instability in productive tension. Rather than resolving uncertainty through security or stability, I argue that the practice of folded speech serves as an invitation to entangle with conflicting ideas to keep doubt, questioning, and possibilities problematically at play. The research contributes to the anthropology of uncertainty by not only illuminating how people employ such imaginative strategies but also by questioning the tendency to assume that stasis and stability are states towards which people universally strive. / 2025-09-25T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47026 |
| Date | 26 September 2023 |
| Creators | Ibrahim, Emily Williamson |
| Contributors | Davidson, Joanna |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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