'A log in water never becomes a crocodile': Practices of return migration and intergenerational gifting in West Africa (Guinea)

Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in eastern Guinea during 2003 poses the questions: how are notions of Islamic and Mande identity constructed and maintained across generational and gendered borders during and after episodes of migration? How does marriage in West Africa respond to the presence or absence of household members, war, fluctuations in political economy, and the maintenance of Islamic and Mande conjugal practices across time and space? Research methods (including local residency, use of local languages and participation in routine daily activities) identified and tracked return migrants and foreign-born returnees to an area that designates personhood according to kinship and gender. Because increasing violence in neighboring nation-states forced a flow of returnees to the place of their father's birth, research participants were recent returnees from surrounding zones of conflict in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Their interrupted economic sojourns complicate demographic categorizations, contesting labels like "refugee."; This dissertation traces three major themes dealing with the constructions of gender, generation, and identity: (1) kinship, descent and the family, as Mande peoples reckon descent through the father, the foreign-born children of a man are entitled to claims on the household of the father, even as adults. The resulting transregional polygyny and maintenance of multiple households complicates the power dynamics of married women who reside within the home of origin. Mande cultural strategies and religion are employed in strategic ways to address arising intrahousehold conflicts; (2) transregional migration, marked by a desire on the part of the migrant to avoid categorization by international relief agencies and to return to the home of origin as a "success." This is someone who can repay kinship obligations to the prior generation by mobilizing symbolic capital accrued and translated from another context, especially conversions to spiritual capital in highly-visible pilgrimages to Mecca or western capital through highly-prized automobiles and autonomous mobility; and (3) unfolding issues of personhood and identity in response to pressures from Mande religious and cultural sources, as well as the tensions of balancing more western practices of the self, especially as these intersect with the material practices of gifting and commodity exchange.