Tag Archives: identity

In this article, I analyze the “countdown,” a popular rhetorical trope of contemporary discourses of environmental and cultural crisis. Drawing on fieldwork in a Cucapá village in the Colorado River Delta of northern Mexico, I show how, through the counting of people, birds, fish, water quantities, and language speakers, the habitat, culture, and language of the delta’s indigenous residents have consistently been represented by NGO workers, scientists, and state officials as “endangered.” In taking on the form of a “countdown,” this numerical tracking has ideological effects distinct from other kinds of enumerative practices, leading some Cucapá people to express frustration with it. I analyze how certain domains of experience, such as language, people, and water, are locally identified as being uncountable, and I use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to illustrate how particular domains of experience become enumerable or resist enumeration in the first place.

Anthropology remains an unpopular discipline among many African intellectuals. I revisit debates on relations between fiction and ethnography to make a case for enriching African anthropology through a systematic reinterpretation of African fiction. I make my case through the ethnography of flexible identities among Cameroonian bushfallers—who seek their fortunes far from home—and support it by analysis of a novel, Married But Available. Through the figure of the bushfaller, I discuss hunting and distance farming as metaphors of choice among Cameroonians. Bushfallers are enmeshed in a complex web of expectations and obligations. They continually straddle relationships and social margins in their quest to break and bridge boundaries. Faced with others’ obsessive claims of autochthony and authenticity, bushfallers’ insistence on being married but available in identity and belonging speaks of the human future as one to be negotiated. It also serves as a metaphor for the relationship I envisage between anthropology and Africa and between fiction and ethnography.