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9 Identities of place: Mobile naming practices and social landscapes in Sudan Siri Lamoureaux Abstract The growing body of literature on mobile phones in Africa seems to stress at least two somewhat paradoxical perspectives: Its ability to connect a fixed person with a wandering target or to connect a wandering person with a fixed target. One narrative is an encounter with new social relations, otherwise known as “globalization” the other of connectedness to ‘home’, often called “belonging”. Following conflict in the Sudan, about two-thirds of the population originating from the Nuba Mountains has migrated to one of the urban centers of Northern Sudan or abroad to Cairo, the UK or the US. Currently, the most important ways these dispersed and fragmented families keep in touch is through the mobile phone. Furthermore, the mobile phone is a site for new spaces of interaction, a place where in-group intimacy based on concepts of “home” can be expressed. The use of names as indices of origin will be examined in this chapter in the context of several text messages, as such terms say a lot about how people perceive their physical and social distance, and categorize others. While urban migration has increasingly fused regional distinctions in Sudan, urban identities are simultaneously sharpened, largely defined by one’s balad (place of origin). Through the use of reference terms and other evidence, it is suggested that some marginalized Nuba student migrants living in the urban capital of Khartoum use the mobile phone in part to create a place of belonging. It is instrumental to urban migrants since it allows the maintenance of group interactions that defy distance and time, while providing a context for the sharing of familiar terms of reference. But meanings of ‘home’ differ across the Nuba students. For some who have arrived more recently and maintain closer kinship ties, ‘home’ is meant in the literal sense, while for a second group, ‘home’ is meant in the ideological and highly politicized sense as a ‘homeland’ or place of origin. Chapter 9: Identities of place 179 Introduction It is not uncommon in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to begin a text message dialogue with the phrase, ϢϜϴϠϋ ϡϼδϟ΍ . Ϧϳϭ ϰΘϧ΍ ‘Peace be upon you, where are you?’ Potential answers could be: 1. ϦϴϤϟ΍ ϰϓ Ύϧ΍ ana fil min ‘I’m on Main Street’ 2. ϯέϮϟ ϪΒϛ΍έϭ ΪϠΒϟ΍ ΖϠλϭ waSalta al balad, wa raakiba lorry ‘I arrived home, came by lorry’ Both of these text messages contain phrases1 that situate the sender in the spatial landscape of Sudan. These seemingly banal snippets of conversation are not unlike those heard on a street corner in Berlin. However, as Laurier (2001: 485) so nicely puts it: ‘It is precisely in such mundane and familiar geographic talk that we can find out how the world is socially and spatially organized’. Such labels would indeed carry no meaning in Berlin as the ‘locations’ are only interpretable in a specific deictically2 relevant context. ‘Main Street’, a ubiquitous name, is here interpreted as a small side road on the University of Khartoum campus where students often meet. The latter message is especially interesting because balad ‘home/country’ which here translates as ‘rural place of origin’ simply would not apply to the majority of urbanites who have long been in Berlin or other cities. Balad, as a location of origin in this way, has incorporated the concept of urban migration in its very meaning. It could only be meaningful among people – their parents or grandparents – who have had the experience of moving to the city, where the peripheries merge with the centre. Earlier work on mobile talk and place names (Laurier 2001; Arminen 2006) focused on how mobile conversations organize daily mobility in urban settings. The present discussion suggests that through mobile talk, we can also learn about other forms of mobility, in this case urban migration, which includes physical as well as social displacement. This kind of talk informs us of people’s perceptions of ‘place’, their sense of ‘belonging’ and ‘identities’ of place. The mobile phone, ostensibly limited to a tool of personal organization, becomes a tool charged with deeper meaning in Sudan – a site for intimacy, in-group affectiveness and political expression. 1 These kinds of phrases have been called ‘locational formulations’ by Schegloff (1972: 79) who carried out extensive analysis of the conversational uses for stating location via landline telephones. 2 Deixis is ‘those aspects of language whose interpretation is in relation to the occasion of utterance, to the time of utterance (…) to the location of the...

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