Conference report on ECAS 2013: African dynamics in a Multipolar World  (Lisbon, June 26-29 2013)

By Inge Butter & Lotte Pelckmans

Overall impression

Overall the conference left a positive impression; it was well frequented and had a diverse program on offer. The closing-party in the monastery now housing the widows of war veterans was as hard to find as the beer but… the location and band did impress! Lisbon itself is a beautiful city and the long days at the conference left us longing for a time to actually explore the city we were in. Nevertheless, the conference was a great opportunity to catch-up with colleagues and old friends.  These moments are to be cherished as Lotte was only recently given the news that one of Lasdel’s Nigerien researchers, whom had attended ECAS 2013 and whom she had met several times in Niger, had died in a tragic car accident only a week after the conference. Our thoughts are with her family and friends.

The conference itself

The four-day conference was once again filled with roundtable discussions, workshops, book launches and numerous panels. Below, Lotte and Inge have selected a few of their highlights to share.

*In the Panel on Digipolitics, Lotte and Mirjam presented a paper entitled: “Communicating war” which discussed the role of new media during conflicts, such as the open conflict in Mali’s Douentza area in 2012 and the more under the surface tensions in Chad. The other contributions were very diverse, ranging from radio and journalists in Somalia to press reports on a ‘war” disease in Uganda, and panel co-organizer Koen Stroeken’s highly theoretical and technical critique of some aspects of the digipolitics model.

*Lotte assisted in the Roundtable about “Popular culture revisited”, the notion of popular culture was introduced in the 1980’s by Karin Barber and Johannes Fabian. An interesting debate about its current uses and applicability ensued with hot shots such as Bryan Larkin (Nigeria film), De Boeck (Witchcraft, funerals, youth Congo), Barber (popular culture) and Bob Whyte (music industry). The debate was lively and the notion was not declared dead.

*Lotte also assisted in the book launch of “Le fil de l’ecrit” by her friend Aissatou Mbodj. Karin Barber was discussant and she told the audience that we should buy the book now, because it will soon be sold out! She believes it is going to be an instant classic! It is one of the first thorough anthropologies about alphabetization more generally and about Mali more specifically. It is a brilliant anthropological study. It can be interesting for our project, especially for those of us who will deal with the personal archives of people. Aissatou focused on those personal archives that contain texts written by the owner.  See also: http://www.lcdpu.fr/livre/?GCOI=27000100840350

*Lotte attended a panel on Islam in West Africa, organized by Ben Soares and Rudiger Seesman. She mainly came to hear Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem speak about his recently published book on the Mauritanian anti-slavery movement IRA. Lotte has been following this movement over the past year and assisted in some of their meetings and interviewed some of the activists in Paris. Lotte can show us some small movies about it if team members would be interested.

*Panel on Religious NGO’s in West Africa: This was the panel in which Lotte presented her own paper on Mauritanian anti-slavery organizations, with a focus on how they are explicitly fighting certain currents of Islamic interpretation of sharia, but do have a model of bringing ‘development’ to co-citizens with slave status. Funny detail: former colleague Rijk van Dijk was her discussant!

*Panel on Creative industries in Africa: last day, last panel! It ended up being very refreshing. There is hardly anyone working on creative industries in Africa, Lotte’s colleague and Friend Jenny Mbaye now is. She will write a first report for UNESCO on the issue soon.

*Inge co-organized a Panel on ICT and networks in Africa: The panel was the result of the merging of three panel proposals and resulted in ten wonderful paper presentations throughout the whole of the first day. The panel was a mix of long-time research in the field (Chénau-Loquay, Porter & Hampshire, Lesourd) and new up-and-coming researchers (Iazzolino, Hamelink, Masika, Brunotti and Tétreault). Inge particularly enjoyed Iazzolino’s paper on mobile money as financial alternative and the social networks involved.

*The first half of the panel on Mobilities and trans-border cultural identities gave an interesting insight into religion (and education) as sources of migration. Amongst others, it discussed the results of a ten year research program on the destiny of African (in this case Senegalese and Burkinabe) students at Egypt’s al-Azhar University while in Egypt and once they have returned home.

*Inge and Karin van Bemmel greatly enjoyed our ASC colleagues’ panel on Hidden dimensions in demographic trends and sexual culture. Jan Abbink and Yinka put down a good case for pursuing this line of research and we look forward to hearing more on childbearing careers and reproductive networking!

*The three-slot panel on Methodological challenges in researching African warzones, fieldwork in conflict and conflict in fieldwork was well-visited. Inge attended the first two slots and enjoyed listening to the personalized aspects of doing research and the well-thought out constructive advice which was given by the three conveners. Louisa Lombard re-visited Gluckman’s “Africans as rebels, never revolutionaries” while relating her own experiences surrounding research in CAR and her role in the mediatization of it’s’ conflict. She ended on a note by Amitav Ghosh in which he sees humility as lacking in the peace-keeping process in Cambodia, making it perhaps a place to start when addressing conflict as productive.

We look forward to the papers that will flow out of some of the above mentioned panels!