Here is the blog I mentioned in class. Susanna Fioratta is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She’s been doing ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea, West Africa. Her blog is fascinating, as are her thoughts on her research, the political situation in Guinea, and possibilities of doing multi-sited ethnographic research (even if that is slightly prompted by the US government). In the middle of her research, Susanna was required, by the US government, to evacuate from Guinea because of political violence in some parts of the country. It’s a long and fascinating story and better I let you read her accounts of it. Her summary of her research project is below though, as we’ll discuss in class, almost all ethnographic project change in the field. As you read her blog, please keep in mind that she is not writing formally here -- this is a blog, after all, not a published journal.

Susanna’s Project --

Abstract

This dissertation research examines how ethnic Fulbe people in rural Guinea and their relatives abroad negotiate the moral ambiguities of making, sending, and spending remittance money. In particular, I will explore how people participating in a transnational remittance economy cope with the uncertainties and tensions involved in constructing village mosques with money rumored to have controversial or “unclean” origins. Changing understandings of Islam and widespread reports of migrants’ involvement in selling and smuggling drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol have led to escalating moral contestations between Guinean Fulbe villagers and their relatives who send “unclean” money home. Yet in the face of ongoing economic hardship and political uncertainty, particularly since the death of long-time president and dictator Lansana Conté in December 2008, Guineans rely on remittances now more than ever. What happens when migrant remittances that provide people with economic security also become a source of moral insecurity? I approach this question through the ethnographic lens offered by remittance-funded mosque construction in rural Guinea. Drawing on anthropological theories of money and informal economies, Islamic religious production, and transnational migration, my research investigates how remittances used in Fulbe village mosques become the focus of social, moral, and religious debates over “clean” and “unclean” money.

Taking mosques as situated foci within the transnational remittance economies of Guinean Fulbe communities, this study will integrate village-based ethnographic research with recent anthropological approaches to transnational and multi-sited research. Over the course of eighteen months, I will conduct fieldwork 1) in three different sub-prefectural villages in Guinea’s Fulbe-dominated Fouta Djallon highlands region, with periodic visits to Conakry, Guinea’s capital (July 2009-June 2010); and 2) in Dakar, Senegal, a city that figures both as a destination for Guinean migrant wage earners and as a transit hub for Guineans seeking to continue, often via clandestine routes, to Europe, North Africa, and North America (July-December 2010). Through participation in women’s religious study groups and a variety of other research methods including semi-structured interviews, oral histories, migration narratives, genealogical interviews, and household surveys, I will examine how disputes over mosque funding and construction reflect social, generational, economic, political, and ideological tensions among Guinean Fulbe at home and abroad.

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