The Poetics of Relationality: Mobility, Naming, and Sociability in Southeastern Senegal

Abstract

The Poetics of Relationality studies linguistic routines through which increasingly mobile communities manage sociability and interpret one another in a borderland region that is the site of expanding gold mining, the risk of Ebola in nearby Guinea, and infrastructure expansion. It begins with an interactional analysis of sanakuyaagal, a so-called joking relationship of categorical license (i.e. teasing or insults) between individuals based on patronymic, generational, or ethnic grounds. However, this research subsumes these routines within larger strategies of verbal creativity through which interlocutors reinterpret principles of relationality across West Africa. As such, ostensibly distinct practices such as teasing and honorification offer analogous principles of sociality through which mobile individuals cultivate social networks across increasingly dispersed sites. This research draws on the analytic of routine to show firstly, how interlocutors may adopt strategies to insulate themselves from these powerful routines of social inertia through which their names or origins may be implicated into larger webs of relationality. Secondly, this research pays attention to moments of breakdown, precarity, and negotiation as moments of dialogic reflexivity in which particular relationships between signs and social types, or other naturalized assumptions come to be objectified. For instance, the sociality of road travel provides a particular frame through which changing forms of social evaluation are mobilized. In so doing, this research examines routines of linguistic creativity that might have been categorized as mere verbal art as situated modalities of social action through which individuals negotiate status, bait others into participant frameworks, or contest access to material resources.