The Cultural Logic of Strangerhood: Subjectivity, Migration and Belonging Among Ghana’S Transnational Zongo Community

The Cultural Logic of Strangerhood: Subjectivity, Migration and Belonging among Ghana’s Transnational Zongo Community Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Christopher M. Brown, M.A. Graduate Program in Anthropology The Ohio State University 2019 Dissertation Committee: Mark Moritz, Adviser Anna Willow Joy McCorriston i Copyright by Christopher M. Brown 2019 ii Abstract This anthropological study examines how cultural principles of strangerhood shape perceptions of rights, identity and belonging among the Ghanaian Zongo community, a multi-ethnic population known colloquially as “strangers” throughout West Africa. The project uses ethnographic methods and grounded theory analysis to examine the multilayered social processes through which Zongo migrants in Ghana and the United States perceive, enact and experience their relationships to the institutions, structures and authorities that shape their lives. Although the concept of strangerhood is commonly applied to intra-African migration, it is rarely used to understand the position of migrants in other global settings. Entailing perceptions of difference, legitimacy and belonging that stand in marked contrast to conventional understandings of citizenship, it is nevertheless an alternative basis for claims to rights, recognition and resources. Tracing the ways in which discrepant ideas, practices, values and institutions intersect and shape one another, I argue that although the logic of strangerhood is intertwined with that of citizenship, it nonetheless remains a distinctive, overarching framework through which Zongo migrants negotiate the social and political tensions associated with transnational migration. In this regard, it is a useful concept for understanding emergent forms of subjectivity in an increasingly globalized world. ii Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my Ph.D. adviser Dr. Mark Moritz in the Department of Anthropology for his unwavering guidance, support and encouragement; to Dr. Ousman Kobo in the Department of History for his insights and advice, without which this project would not have been possible; and to the Department of Anthropology, the Office of International Affairs and the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University for helping to fund my travel and research in Ghana and the United States. iii Vita 2004……………………….. B.A. Political Science, Northwestern University 2009……………………….. M.A. International Studies, University of Connecticut 2012 – 2015, 2018 ………… Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University 2016, 2019…………………. Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Anthropology iv Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………. ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………... iii Vita………………………………………………………………………………………… iv List of Tables ……………………………………………………………………………… vi Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 2: Literature Review ……………………………………………………………… 15 Chapter 3: Research Design and Methodology……………………………………………. 52 Chapter 4: The Cultural History of Strangerhood in West Africa…………………………. 67 Chapter 5: Citizenship and Strangerhood in Kumasi Zongo………………………………. 94 Chapter 6: Contemporary Strangerhood in the United States………………………………142 Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusions……………………………………………………. 213 References………………………………………………………………………………….. 235 v List of Tables Table 1: Principles of Citizenship and Strangerhood……………………………………. 93 vi Chapter 1. Introduction Concern for the welfare of humanity can be found in numerous cultural traditions, many of them promoting solidarities that cut across the territorial boundaries of states. It is far from clear that this concern is best pursued today primarily through the Western idiom of citizenship. - Hindess 2004, 315 This anthropological study examines how cultural principles of strangerhood shape perceptions of rights, identity and belonging among the Ghanaian Zongo community, a multi-ethnic population known colloquially as “strangers” throughout West Africa. I use ethnographic methods and grounded theory analysis to examine the multilayered social processes through which Zongo residents in Ghana and the United States perceive, enact and experience their relationships to the institutions, structures and authorities that shape their lives. Although the concept of strangerhood is commonly applied to intra-African migration, it is rarely used to understand the position of migrants in other global settings. Entailing perceptions of difference, legitimacy and belonging that stand in marked contrast to conventional understandings of citizenship, it is nevertheless an alternative basis for claims to rights, recognition and resources. Inspired by the assertion that strangerhood is a “powerful tool for analyzing the social processes of individuals and groups confronting new social orders” (Shack et al. 1979, 2), I shake the concept free from its “traditional” roots by exploring how it shapes the subjectivity of contemporary transnational migrants. The question of subjectivity, of how social actors understand and enact their relationships to the institutions, structures and authorities that shape their lives, is among the most complex issues of 1 the global age. Encompassing raw power, normative perceptions of rights and legitimacy, as well as affective dimensions of identity and belonging, subjectivity cuts to the heart of what it means to exist in an increasingly interconnected social world. In particular, transnational migrants, who are simultaneously embedded in multiple politico-legal and cultural systems, have an outsized impact on the ways in which people perceive the social, spatial and political boundaries of community. While it is by now common place to recognize that erosion of borders and ease of movement is but one side of an equation that is balanced by the building of walls and hardening of hearts against the intrusion of the other, these dual aspects of globalization present significant challenges for theorizing contemporary forms of subjectivity. The project is a contribution to a burgeoning literature that addresses the accelerating pace of globalization and its attendant processes of migration and de-territorialization. As political subjects and institutions are increasingly dispersed across conventional borders, multiple dimensions of power expand, intersect and overlap (Trouillot 2001). These reconfigurations destabilize the terms and conditions of national citizenship (Sassen 2006), contributing to vitriolic cultural politics that seek to configure immigrants as an existential threat to the nation (Vertovec 2011) and generating sophisticated mechanisms of regulation, surveillance and control intended to reinforce physical and ethno-cultural boundaries (Fassin 2011). Such stark manifestations of boundary-making are evident not only in resurgent discourses of autochthony which seek to excise perceived interlopers from the political community, but also within the bureaucratic and regulatory infrastructures of the state (Geschiere 2009). At their extreme, tensions associated with legitimacy and belonging quite literally define who gets to live and who dies (Petryna & Follis 2016). While much of this literature 2 focuses on techniques of power and control that either shape or exclude certain kinds of political subjects, I explore these processes from the perspective of those who navigate and contest them. Studies that adopt this perspective overwhelmingly invoke the language and logic of citizenship, assuming that all claims-making strategies and struggles for recognition are either expressions of or aspirations to a subject-position that is best understood as a version of citizenship. This tendency reflects a puzzling aspect of anthropological theory: although it is widely recognized that globalization and transnational migration disrupt territorial borders and state sovereignty, the political conditions on which citizenship rests, it remains the overriding frame of analysis used to understand and assess emergent modes of subjectivity. The impulse to enfold even the most disparate and illiberal ideas and practices into the rubric of citizenship may, in part, be seen as an attempt to disentangle the discursive rhetoric of “citizenship” (an instrument of rule) from the diverse ways it is actually experienced by variously positioned political subjects. Recognizing that citizenship can mean both subjugation and empowerment (Isin 2009), there is certainly a need to wade through the polyvalent meanings and practices associated with it. Nevertheless, as a result of this “conceptual stretching”, citizenship has ostensibly come to encapsulate all the ways in which social actors are constituted as political subjects (Fox 2005, 175). This stance, which crowds out consideration of alternate subject-positions, is intimately linked with teleological notions of modernity that view citizenship as the height of social and political progress. “Valorized” as the unrivaled contribution of Western liberal thought (Hindess 2004, 306), it reduces all variations to mere distortions or, at best, partial approximations of the real thing. Thus, rather than helping us to understand the diverse bases on which claims to rights, 3 recognition and belonging may be staked, expansive definitions of citizenship all too often preclude the development of

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