Aloneness and the terms of detachment in West African migration

Abstract

In this article, I examine practices of social detachment among West African migrants in urban Ghana. Faced with pressures arising from expectations of reciprocity, especially from kin back home, some migrants exert considerable efforts to break, if temporarily, with relations of mutual recognition and support, entering what I term migratory aloneness. Far from being an individualizing endeavour linked to the corrosive effects of modernization, this contingent withdrawal from social relations has a continuity with the cultural grammar of West African frontier mobility, wedded to a paradoxical pursuit of social becoming through social detachment. By attending to the efforts and effects of detached relations, which I explore in relation to valuations, predicaments, and the temporality of aloneness, I seek in this article to nuance anthropological arguments about the significance of relatedness in West African migration practices, as well as to contribute to broader efforts to depart from anthropology's fixation on norms of reciprocity and connection.