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Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. This book examines recent transformations in spatial patterns, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villages. The book analyses the consequences that the recent change entails for social group formation and collective identification, and how this impacts integration into wider society amid the structures of the modern nation state.
“Köhler integrates a meticulous analysis of recent developments related to urban migrations and rapidly advancing rural sedentarization in a general description of the relationship between various forms of mobility, social organization, and identity formation among the Wodaabe and thus provides an overall analysis of structural stability and change…[His] work can be recommended to all those who are interested in pastoral nomadism and the societies of the West African Sahel region. It is also an inspiring contribution to recent debates in social science mobility research.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“…a substantial addition to the body of literature that examines ongoing transformations in the lifestyles of contemporary nomadic Fulɓe societies. Its central thesis, which stresses the translocal networking ability of nomadic peoples, sheds valuable light on the adaptive strategies required to cope with increasing global resource scarcity.” • Nomadic Peoples
“A highly welcome contribution to research on mobility in West Africa and more particularly in the West-African Sahel region in as far as it focusses on the complexity of mobility phenomena in a pastoral nomadic group.” • Elisabeth Boesen, Université du Luxembourg
“This is a wonderful and deeply detailed study of a group of Wodaabe in Niger. The author’s descriptions of a sub-group of Gojanko’en and their various strategies of mobility, dispersion, and cohesion is absorbing and clearly based on solid fieldwork.” • Wendy Wilson-Fall, Oeschle Center for Global Education
Florian Köhler is currently a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is also trained as a practitioner in peace-building and conflict-resolution and worked for the German Development Service (DED) in Haiti and for the Civil Peace Service (ZFD) in Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Language and Transcriptions
Part I: Taariihi: Mobility and Group Formation in Historical Perspective
Chapter 1. The Wodaabe in Niger: Structure as Historical Process
Chapter 2. A History of Migrations: Placemaking Processes in Diachronic Perspective
Part II: Duuniyaaru: Spaces of Social Interaction
Chapter 3. Inter-ethnic Relations: The Balance of Integration and Conflict
Chapter 4. A Meta-ethnic Social Space: The Continuum of Identity and Difference
Part III: Ladde: Transformations in the Pastoral Realm
Chapter 5. From Nomadic Pastoralism to Sedentarization and Economic Diversification
Chapter 6. Consequences of the New Spatial Strategies
Part IV: Si’ire: Appropriating the City
Chapter 7. New Resources in the Urban Space
Chapter 8. Social Interaction in the City
Chapter 9. The Translocal Dimension of Urban Migration
Part V: Gassungol Wodaabe: The Translocal Network of the Ethnic Group
Chapter 10. The Translocal Community and Social Reproduction
Chapter 11. Cultural Change and the Reproduction of Difference
Conclusion
References
Index