Preliminary notes for an ethnography of itinerancy in Cape Town South Africa

French Institute Seminars in Humanities (FISH)
19 November 2015

15:00 – IFAS Conference Room, 62 Juta Street, Braamfontein

Chloé Faux
EHESS

The point of departure for this project is the conundrum of geography, “not [as] a location but a situated knowledge” (Rogoff 2010). Formally, in studies of migration, the pathways followed are privileged over their content. How, then, can we fill that which is sectioned off, put in parentheses—itinerancy, the movement itself —with density? The aim of this project is to examine how itineraries have converged in Cape Town, where many tricks of geography are put in relief, at once enacting and undermining “geography as a disciplining force on the subject” (Rogoff 2010). What can attention to what Kathleen Stewart calls “emergences” tell us about the relationship between embodiment and integration as a socio-political construction, not just only of those deemed “migrants” but also those who are considered “expatriates”, as well? How does this disrupt or converge with a post-Apartheid optic, through which hierarchized social and spatial mobilities are easily read? How does it map into the affective and sensory relationship between the body and its environment(s)?

Chloé Faux is a doctoral student in social anthropology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She received her Masters degree in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universitat Berlin in 2014, and her BA in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University in 2010.