Bassari Migrations

The Quiet Revolution

Riall W. Nolan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367011697
• eBook ISBN: 9780429712470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Migration among the Bassari people of eastern Senegal has produced an apparent paradox: villages are experiencing rapid and profound change as they are being incorporated into larger national structures and, at the same time, village institutions remain largely untouched. In this book, Dr. Nolan examines both the causes and consequences of migration from the Bassari village of Etyolo. Through extensive fieldwork spanning eight years, he shows how rural and urban areas have interacted over time. Although levels of both seasonal and long-term migration have become substantial, agricultural productivity remains stable and traditional practices persist. Dr. Nolan explains how the effects of migration have been controlled and shaped and discusses how migration may even have strengthened the village power structure. Returning migrants contribute cash and goods to the village economy but do not act as dissidents or innovators. However, Dr. Nolan points to adverse effects migration may have in the future and indicates what the first signs of strfèss may be.

Part One
Background

1
The Problem and the Setting

THE PROBLEM

Throughout the Third World, small-scale societies are being incorporated into larger socio-economic units. Rural to-urban migration almost invariably accompanies this incor poration process, serving simultaneously as a cause, effect, and prime indicator of major change within these smaller societies.

How migration developed in one particular West African society—and with what results—is the subject of this book By looking closely at movement from the Bassari village of Etyolo in Eastern Senegal, I hope to illuminate one of the central questions regarding migration. It is this: how does such a seemingly uniform process produce such significant differences in both pattern and outcome among specific cultural groups?

To understand change within a given cultural group, it is necessary to look in detail not only at the group itself and its immediate environment, but at the wider context of which it is a part--to look, in other words, at both "micro" and "macro" variables together. I have tried to do that in this book by using an approach derived from systems theory. This approach--which will be described below--helps us to see how factors intrinsic to Bassari society have interacted over time with extrinsic ones to produce observed patterns of migration and change.

Findings and Explanations

The question of culture-specific variations within an overall general pattern is naturally of great interest to anthropologists. It links our disciplinary stock in trade— cultural values, social structures, and how societies function—to the issue of the consequences of these things for socio-economic change.

Although migration affects many Third World rural societies today, it does not affect all of them in the same way. What happens-speappenecifically—to a rural village when urbanward migration occurs?

The short answer is, it all depends. Some investigators (Diop 1965, for example) describe a pattern of increasing rural poverty, deterioration and "breakdown" as a response to migration. Others (Brandes 1975, for example) report the reverse. Dasgupta (1981), Adepoju (1981) and Goldstein (1983) discuss variations in outcome and cite numerous other examples, both positive and negative.

Variations in outcome appear to be linked to many things: who the migrants are and what position they occupy in rural society; what skills or knowledge they have; why they leave; and where they go. How long migrants stay away, what they do while abroad, and what sorts of people and situations they encounter there are other important factors. Outcomes also depend, of course, on who stays behind, what they do, and how (see Dasgupta 1981 for a particularly good discussion of these various factors).

If we ask about how migrant groups adjust to city life, we again find a range of answers, linked to a number of specific variables. Some groups maintain strong links to their rural area of origin; for others, these links are largely absent. Some migrant groups seem to integrate well into urban life, others less well. In a few cases, we find groups on the fringes of city life who have broken—or otherwise lost—all ties to rural groups and institutions: Little (1974), Gugler & Flanagan (1978), Southall (1973), Speare (1983), Goldschneider (1983) and DuToit & Safa (1975) provide examples of all of these situations.

The diversity of findings poses no real problem; cultural variation is familiar territory for anthropologists, after all. Difficulties arise, however, when we try to explain this diversity.

Although we have been investigating Third World migration for decades, we still have no coherent theory which accounts for what happens in these situations and why (see DeJong & Fawcett 1981, Hugo 1981, Chan 1981 and Shaw 1975 for summaries of major themes in research and theory-building). In effect, each study of migration examines a slightly different situation. Each study varies, moreover, in its treatment of the changes which are seen to occur, as well as the causes, consequences, and significance of these changes.

This problem stems from the difficulties we have had with conceptualizing migration and urbanization in nonWestern settings, as the history of urban anthropology clearly shows. This history has been marked by the continual and often substantial modification of Western-derived concepts and approaches, as it became evident that these were less than helpful when applied to the Third World (Fox 1972, Basham 1978:9-30, Nolan 1979, Goldstein 1983).

We have discarded, for example, certain favored dichotomies, among them "tradition/modernity" (Gusfield 1968), "folk/urban" (Hauser 1965:20-21), and "tribal/detribalized" (DuToit 1968). Originally adopted as convenient ways to order and direct our thinking, these ideas proved ultimately to contain few useful insights into how change occurred as rural people moved to town.

Even the notion of "town" and "village" as separate entities seems less useful today than in the past. We now recognize that both these groupings are contained, as Parkin puts it, within "a single social field of relations made up of a vast criss-crossing of people, ideas and resources" (1975:3). Were cities containing large numbers of recent rural migrants truly urban places at all? Or was migration producing, as Abu-Lughod (1961:327) claimed, a virtual "ruralization of the cities"?

The distinction between rural and urban became blurred; the folk/urban dichotomy unclear. Gutkind comments:

Not only do these strongly contrasting typologies make it very difficult to understand the relationship between rural and urban life, but what is more detrimental is that the abstractions simplify the exact nature of the entity they purport to characterize with precision. The city, its structure, and the way of life it generates must be analyzed in its own right; yet its organizational form reflects how and why it is linked to the rural areas, its central place in a regional context, and its place in the nation as a whole. (1974:46)

As more and more studies of non-Western areas appeared, their their findings were often at variance with what Western models would have predicted. For example, although African urban migrants exhibit a wide range of behavior, Berry points out that "...rapid migration has not produced the alienation, anomie, psychological malad justments and other symptoms of disorganization held in the Wirthian model to be hallmarks of rapid urbanization." (1973:83)

Today, we still have no coherent and widely applicable theory of "what happens" as a result of migration. The abundant variety of empirical findings, however, has taught us some important things.

We have learned, for example, that migration need not always lead to rural decline. We know that there is no clear line between "urban" and "rural" migrant behavior (see Mayer 1971 for one of the first formulations of this)—and indeed, no clear line between city and village (Mitchell 1966). We now see that change takes place not only from town to village, but from village to town (Epstein 1967).

In the cities themselves, we know that the "breakdown" of urban migrant families and communities is not inevitable (Lewis 1952). We see more clearly now than before that urban migrants are not simply the passive recipients of a ready-made urban culture; they behave in a wide variety of ways, actively influence their surroundings, and choose—at a great many points at least—the kinds of lives they will lead in town.

This diversity of findings leads us directly to the quest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• PART ONE BACKGROUND
• PART TWO MIGRATION
• PART THREE CHANGE
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY