Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, Belonging

Appendix 1: Notes on Methods

Appendix 1. Notes on Methods If the methodological challenges facing James Ferguson (1999) in the Copperbelt seemed unusual at the close of the twentieth century, they have become more familiar today to anthropologists studying contemporary patterns of social change, cultural flux, and human mobility—commonly understood as components of globalization. Since the 1990s social scientists have sought to adapt ethnography to the study of global processes (Stoller 1997; Hannerz 1998; Burawoy et al. 2000). We have applied ethnographic approaches which, while necessarily local in their scope, illuminate macro-level social processes by examining their micro-level manifestations. One technique for applying ethnographic methods to global processes is multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus 1998). This type of research is especially useful for studying migration flows, since, by their definition, they concern more than one geographic location. Unfortunately multi-sited fieldwork also demands more time, preparation, and money than single-sited fieldwork, and the challenges of learning about a community and gaining acceptance in it are multiplied with each additional research site. In planning my fieldwork, I chose to concentrate on Brazzaville and rely mainly on my previous experience in Mali for insights into the culture of the sending region. My fieldwork began in Bamako , Mali, where I renewed contacts from previous research and gathered information about flows of people, goods, and information between Bamako and Brazzaville. After a month in Mali, my family and I took the route most Malians use to travel to Central Africa, flying on Air Mauritania from Bamako to Brazzaville , via Abidjan and Cotonou. We returned to Bamako (again on Air Mauritania ) the following year for a final stage of research lasting another month. The two Bamako legs of the fieldwork enabled me to identify and pursue transnational connections between Mali and Congo. 226 / Appendix 1 In Brazzaville my primary avenue of approach was participant observation —the practice of studying a community while taking part in its daily life. After a month of searching, my family and I moved into a two-room apartment on the Avenue de France, close to the Poto-Poto market. We shared a residential compound with a Congolese family as well as a group of young Togotalans forming their own household. Starting with our neighbors and the friends and kin of our contacts in Mali, we gradually built up relationships with men and women who had come to Brazzaville from throughout West Africa. I spent much of each day in the market learning about the commercial activities of these immigrants, and after sunset attended Qur’anic study classes at a neighborhood mosque. I also occasionally attended meetings of various immigrant associations. My wife, Oumou, interacted with merchants and others doing errands in the market, visited with the West African women cooking daily meals in our courtyard, and made frequent outings to meet friends around town. Although much of what we learned about the study population came from informalconversations,wealsorecordedandtranscribed interviewswith more than 130 individuals during our year in Brazzaville. These interviews were semistructured : we asked interviewees a set of questions on topics from basic demographic information to their attitudes toward life in Congo. Owing to cultural norms that would have made it awkward for some interviewees to respond to questions from a member of the opposite sex, Oumou interviewed female informants and I interviewed males. We diverged from the standard questions whenever the situation called for additional questions. Some interviews were short and matter-of-fact, others lengthy and free-ranging. To maximize the level of candor I could expect from informants, I generally only conducted interviews with people I had met on at least one or two previous occasions and whom I had informed in advance of the nature of my research and the sorts of questions I might ask. Informants were not randomly selected. In choosing an individual to interview , I kept several axes of diversity in mind, including gender, ethnicity, professional activity, nationality, and specific region of origin, and I made a special effort to seek out second- and third-generation immigrants born in Congo. Though I had initially hoped to conduct a scientific survey of West African immigrants in Brazzaville based on a random sample of its members, assembling a sampling frame for this population proved unworkable. A large number of West Africans in Congo reside there without Congolese government sanction or documentation. Mali’s consulate in Brazzaville keeps a register of Malian Notes on Methods / 227...