Paolo Gaibazzi is a Social Anthropologist and a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. In addition to (im)mobility in the Gambia, he has published on West African post-slavery, Euro-African borders and West African Muslim traders in Angola.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Transliteration

Abbreviations

Introduction

• From Ploughing the Sea to Navigating the Bush
• Soninke Migration and the Young Men Who Stay Put
• 'Sitting': Creating and Inhabiting Immobility
• The Onus of Rural Permanence
• On Bush-bound Ethnography
• Overview of the Book
• A Brief Note on The Gambia

Chapter 1. Peasants by Other Means:(Im)mobility and the Making of a Village Mooring

• 'Sitting' Sabi, Creating Movement, 1902 - ca.1945
• The Farmer-trader
• New Routes and Roots in the Post-war Period
• Parting Sedentary and Migrant Livelihoods: 1970s - Present
• Bush Troubles: the Decline of the Rural Economy
• The Rise of International Labour Migration
• Barriers to International Migration
• Diasporization, Transnationality and Urban Homes
• The Traveller, the 'Sitter' and the Urban 'Sitter'

Chapter 2. Being-on-the-land: The Agri-culture of Migration

• Of Bushmen and Moneymen
• Earning Calloused Hands: The Embodiment of Rural Suffering
• Cultivating an Agrarian Ethos
• From Bush to Travel-bush
• The Alienation of the Farmer?

Chapter 3. Looking for Money: Livelihood Trajectories in and out of Mobility

• The Social Currency of Money
• Locating the Bounty: Routes and Destinations
• Two Hustlers
• Navigating the Political Economy
• Stranded in Circulation: From Spurious Travel to 'Sitting'
• Wind in the Sails: the Economy of Support

Chapter 4. Just Sitting: The Spectre of Bare Immobility

• Ghetto Youth: (Em)placing Male Sociability
• Stilled Bodies and Burdened Heads
• The Nerves Syndrome
• Waiting: The Stilled Time of Sitting
• The Virtue of Patience: Temporal Fixes to Spatial Problems

Chapter 5. Hesitant Patriarchs: Becoming a Household Head

• The Ka
• Becoming a Kagume: Ascent to Power or Buck Passing?
• In a Meal Bowl: Ensuring Subsistence in an Extraverted Domestic Economy
• Around a Meal Bowl: Creating Conviviality and Male Authority
• Governing Change: Cooperation, Conflict and Translocality in Household Formation

Chapter 6. Civic Leaders? Reviving the Age Groups, Recapturing Permanence

• The Sappanu
• Youth, in the Active Voice
• The Sabi Youth Committee
• Quiet Ceremonies: Legal Innovation and Socio-moral Reforms

Conclusion: Possibilities

• If...
• Placing Immobility in Migration
• Trailing on

Glossary

Bibliography