We are very pleased to announce CEDEJ Khartoum next Seminar on « South Sudan and the Politics of Region-craft » by Zachary Mondesire, on Thursday 19 July- 11 am
The seminar will focus on the new nation of South Sudan and what it now means to be South Sudanese in Africa. First, Zachary Mondesire will draw from his MA thesis that outlines the ideologies of racial difference that circulate in Juba defining relationships between South Sudanese themselves as well as with others from the region, whether northward to Khartoum or southward to Nairobi. These ideas emerged from three months of ethnographic research in 2017 in a modest hotel in Juba that operated as a site of refuge during the still-ongoing civil war and hosted Africans of multiple nationalities (Eritreans, Somalis, Ugandans, and South Sudanese of multiple backgrounds). Thinking through the linkages that his interlocutors made between race and national identity led him to ask (1) how Arab positionality, Khartoum, and Sudan continue to be relevant in South Sudanese political community and (2) given the multi-polar racial thinking of his interlocutors that envisions a racial and political geography much broader than the nation-state, what other forms of political community exist beyond the nation-state and towards the idea of multi-state region and how can his research account for them? The second piece of this paper is the conceptualization of Zachary Mondesire’s dissertation research project that will attempt to answer these questions.
Zachary Mondesire is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at the University of California – Los Angeles. His research focuses on South Sudanese journalists, politicians, and intellectuals in Khartoum and Nairobi, exploring how they think through regional belonging, race, and political community between East and North Africa.
CEDEJ Khartoum is currently hosting Max Münch, a student in Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. For his Master’s thesis, he conducted three months of fieldwork in a Quranic school in Northern Kordofan. In an immersive process, the research was based upon the multi-sensorial focal points of didactics, socialization and embodied knowledge. He participated in the daily learning routine to get access to the social and experiential ways of teaching, learning and knowing.
Research Assistant « Tribal Diplomacy in Kordofan » (Univ. Bayreuth)
Date: 01.01.2017 – 31.12.2017
Deadline: 10.12.2016
The Chair of Anthropology, University of Bayreuth, offers a one year contract on the German scale TVL13/50% for preparatory research leading to a PhD on « Tribal Diplomacy in Kordofan » to start at the end of 2016. The eligible candidate holds an above average MA in Anthropology or a related discipline and has a working competence in Arabic.
Please send your application to <ethnologie@uni-bayreuth.de> till December 10, 2016.
Based on comparative fieldwork studies of the Muslim ‘Feast of the Sacrifice’, this article questions the places, shapes and stakes of ritual animal death in the urban space. The examples of Istanbul (Turkey) and Khartoum (Sudan) illustrate different but comparable perceptions, practices and management of a ritual event simultaneously associated with religious traditions and confronted with deep transformations in urbanised and globalised societies. Between ritual normalcy and controversial practice, sacrifice in the city is not reducible to a religious matter but addresses at once spatial, social and cultural issues, informed by economic and political stakes. Through a ritual performance and its manifold aspects, the article explores the multiple and evolving representations of the place and role of animals (and their death) in an urban context.
CEDEJ Khartoum was pleased to organize the conference « Metropolization and Liminal Spaces in Greater Khartoum » on Sunday 30th October, 2016 at the University of Khartoum.
This conference heralded the end of a two-year research programme entitled « Metro 2 Sudan » and conducted by a Sudanese/international team of researchers and students from the CEDEJ Khartoum and from the University of Khartoum.
This research programme has received support from the AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie) as well as several other partners (Paris 8 University/LAVUE, the French ministry of Foreign Affairs/Campus France and the Sudanese ministry of Higher Education).
Abdelghaffar Mohamed Ahmed & Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker
« Metro 2 Sudan » aimed at analyzing the interplay of actors and power relationships built around these areas that have a rural/urban interface in the Greater Khartoum. These spaces exist at various scales and in various inter-crossed parameters: functionally and economically, it refers to residential, industrial, agricultural, livestock or of « wasteland » areas; socio-spatially and in terms of housing, it refers to luxury compounds, former IDP camps, rural villages which were recently encompassed in the capital; administratively and legally, it refers to urban neighborhoods, rural or urban administrative units; socio-culturally and anthropologically, reconfigurations are varied, in regards to ethnic, tribal, religious and statutory affiliations.
[9:30-10 am] – INTRODUCTION
Alice FRANCK – Programme Coordinator (CEDEJ Khartoum/University Paris 1): METRO2 objectives, participants, partnerships, fieldworks
Barbara CASCIARRI – Co-coordinator (University Paris 8 – LAVUE): ethnographical and anthropological approaches of in-betweenness
Barbara Casciarri & Alice Franck
[10-12 pm] – PANEL 1: IN-BETWEENNESS: THE WATERSHED OF 2011 AND THE CREATION OF TWO SUDANS. SOUTHERN-SUDANESES BEFORE AND AFTER SEPARATION
The first panel focuses on the situation of Southerners (living in Northern Sudan, notably in Greater Khartoum) after the separation of South Sudan. Though, more generally, we can question whether this major political event constitutes a globally meaningful and all-explanatory watershed, nonetheless it is a matter of fact that this category of people has more visibly been targeted by the post-2011 dynamics of change and marginalization. The panel papers share a twofold focus: first, the one on 2011 as a temporal dividing-line bringing to new configuration of Southerners who willingly or not passed from a status to another; second, the variety of in-between spaces in which they are caught as far as citizenship, territorial and land access, social relations and cultural perceptions are concerned.
Azza AHMED ABDEL AZIZ – The In-betweenness of Southerners in Khartoum: Recasting Different Registers of Status through Narrative and Experience
Mohamed AG BAKHIT – The ‘community’ citizenship status for Southern Sudanese in Khartoum. The case of Al-Baraka
Katarzyna GRABSKA – Negotiating citizenship and belonging in displacement: Nuer in Khartoum
Alice FRANCK – The second urban marginalization: Southerners in popular neighbourhoods of Greater Khartoum from a land property analysis
Hind MahmoudIdris Salim el-HassanAlice Franck
[12-1:30 pm] – **LUNCH BREAK**
[1:30-4 pm] –PANEL 2 – IN-BETWEENNESS: PLURAL EXPRESSIONS OF MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC LIMINALITY. GEOGRAPHICAL, SOCIO-POLITICAL AND LEGAL IN-BETWEEN SPACES
The second panel focuses on the multiplicity of contemporary contexts in which Sudanese people are livingsituations where the fluidity of borders makes experience a status of in-betweenness at different levels and with various effects. The panel papers are not strictly focusing on the 2011 events as a breaking point, they rather underline the variety of situations where the notion of in-betweenness may be a useful analytical tool for understanding ongoing social realities: the relation between shifting urban and rural spaces, the transitional political arena, the identity processes influenced by marriage strategies, the legal pluralism and ambiguous land issues entangled with communities’ reconfigurations and rights.
President: Munzul ASSAL / Chairperson: Abdelghaffar MOHAMED AHMED
Barbara CASCIARRI & Alice FRANCK – Reconfigurations of the pastoral and agricultural in-betweenness in Khartoum State. Insights on the ‘urbanization of neoliberalism’
Clément DESHAYES – New socio-political actors: the stakes of categorisation and political reproduction
Peter MILLER – Whom to marry? An ethnographic study of marriage practices and strategies amongst upper-middle class city-dwellers
Hind M YUSUF – The Impact of urbanization on education processes: Youth’s life strategies in Al-Fatah
Mohamed A BABIKER – Between Law and Practices. Rendering vulnerable displaced and stateless on issues of land and identity
[4–4:30 pm] – **COFFEE BREAK**
[4:30–5:30 pm] – CONCLUSIONS
Stella GAYTANO – Identity
ROUNDTABLE AND DEBATE: SYNTHESIS AND PERSPECTIVES (moderator: Jean-Nicolas BACH, Coordinator of CEDEJ Khartoum)
Netsereab AndomAzza Ahmed Abdel AzizJean-Nicolas BachPeter MillerStella GaytanoHassan Haj Ali
Mai Azzam is a junior anthropologist graduated from the University of Khartoum. Mai holds two master degrees in Anthropology. The first one is from the University of Khartoum 2010 and the latest is an M.Phil. in anthropology of development from the University of Bergen. Her research interests are on youth, Islam, and political anthropology. She worked with youth movements in Khartoum, Sudan, to explore more about youth role in public life in Khartoum. Mai worked in Khartoum as a junior researcher at CEDEJ (Centre d'Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et sociales) for three years. She also worked in different capacities with local NGOs in Khartoum and developed her activist personality.
Introduction
This is a series of life stories of young motivated people in Khartoum. It is a direct reflection from ethnographic material collected in 2015. I spent six month for data collection among two charity associations in Khartoum namely Sadagaat and Shari’ Al Hawadith. Each association has started via informal methods and grows to fill a gap left by government privatization policies and investments on war and defense rather than social services.
How and where did returning Nuer refugees make their ‘homes’ in southern Sudan? How were gender relations and identity redefined as a result of war, displacement and return to post-war communities? And how were those displaced able to recreate a sense of home, community and nation?
During the civil wars in southern Sudan (1983-2005) many of the displaced Sudanese, including many Nuer, were in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. In the aftermath of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, they repatriated to southern Sudan. Faced with finding long-lost relatives and local expectations of ‘proper behaviour’, they often felt displaced again.
This book follows the lives of a group of Nuer in the Greater Upper Nile region. The narratives of those displaced and those who stayed behind reveal the complexity of social change, in particular, the crucial yet relatively unconsidered transformation of gender and generational relations, and how this has impacted on state formation in what is now South Sudan.
Katarzyna Grabskais a research fellow with the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. She is also an associate researcher at the CEDEJ-Khartoum.
Barbara Casciarri, from the University Paris 8, has submitted in last December for her accreditation to supervise research a synthesis of her research entitle « Ethnographies pastorales en « situation globale » at the University Lumières Lyon 2. This presentation is the results of 24 years of anthropology fieldwork in Morocco and Sudan. You will find following the summary, writing in French by Barbara Casciarri, of the synthesis.
Ethnographies pastorales en « situation globale »
Ce mémoire constitue le bilan de mes recherches de terrain en anthropologie qui se sont déroulées sur une période de 24 ans (1989-2013) dans deux contextes africains (le Soudan et le Maroc), avec une focalisation constante sur la catégorie des sociétés pastorales, par un travail conjoint au sein d’équipes interdisciplinaires aux composants variés (préhistoire, sciences naturelles, géographie). Les groupes qui ont fait l’objet de mes enquêtes (Aḥāmda, Baṭāḥīn et Awlād Nūba au Soudan, Aït Unzār au Maroc) partagent un même contexte écologique (milieux arides africains), une forte liaison avec les modes de production et de reproduction sociale typiques du pastoralisme nomade, et certains traits culturels qui sont communs à l’aire dite arabo-musulmane. Plusieurs thématiques ont caractérisé mes recherches chez ces groupes : les institutions politiques locales et leur rapport avec l’Etat central ; les formes d’accès aux ressources naturelles (terre et eau) ; les formes identitaires et les idéologies ancrées dans les systèmes de parenté, les rapports de sexe ou le « paradigme tribal » ; les transformations liées aux crises écologiques, à la sédentarisation, à l’urbanisation, à l’incorporation dans un système dominé par la logique capitaliste ; les interventions d’acteurs divers pour le développement et la « modernisation ». Dans ce mémoire je reprends les résultats principaux de ces données ethnographiques, qui ont fait déjà l’objet de publications ponctuelles, en essayant de dépasser leur particularité. Mon objectif est d’établir une synthèse capable de souligner les interactions multiples des dynamiques sociales analysées et de déceler leur redéfinition constante au sein du contexte global qui dans la conjoncture actuelle incorpore ces sociétés de petite échelle. Néanmoins, ce mémoire ne veut pas se limiter à une revue, par ordre chronologique ou thématique, des données issues de mes enquêtes et de leur systématisation ou interprétation. Ce travail est aussi guidé par l’ambition de développer une réflexion capable de contribuer au débat plus large de l’anthropologie du monde contemporain.
The Sudanese team of the Andromaque project held a second Workshop in Khartoum in the reading room of the CEDEJ, on Sunday 2 March, from 9:00 am to 13:00 pm.
The Andromaque Sudan Team gathered European and Sudanese researchers, whose main background is social anthropology, and has recently integrated 2 researchers with a law background. The members present at the workshop of the research team were: Barbara Casciarri (anthropologist, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, France, team’s scientific coordinator); Munzoul Assal and Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil (Department of Anthropology, UoK); Mohamed Abdessalam Babiker (Department of Law, UoK); Philippe Gout (PhD in Law, University Paris II Panthéon Assas, France) and Mai Azzam ( PhD student in anthropology, Khartoum, Sudan). Alice Franck, the coordinator of the CEDEJ in Khartoum was also present during the workshop.
For further information about the Andromaque project you can refer to the post about the first workshop of Andromaque.