Theme: 4. The Role of Local Communities: Society Against States and Corporations?

Kafu, Jamano, Lamu, Lamanat, Lang, Kampung, Ujamaa: Permanence and Resilience of Local Communities in the History of Africa and Asia

Roundtable Convenor(s)

• MF

  Mamadou Fall

  Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal

Roundtable Participant(s)

• MF

  Mamadou Fall

  Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal
• RS

  Richard Sambaiga

  University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
• WK

  Webby Kalikiti

  University of Zambia, Zambia
• AT

  Abdou Karim Tandjigora

  Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal
• IB

  Idrissa Bâ

  Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal
• MM

  Mamadou Mané

  Histoire Générale du Sénégal, des origines à nos jours (HGS), Senegal
• PS

  Poussi Sawadogo

  Université Burkina Faso, Burkina Faso
• IW

  Irfan Wahyudi

  Airlangga University, Indonesia

Roundtable Abstract:

Summary

Rural and urban local communities in Africa as in Asia seem to have retained an autonomy and registered impact in preserving their natural environment as well as the configuration of their social space. This is what gives them a liveliness and resilience that the centralized State has never been able to undermine. Local communities and their culture embody an ontological position beyond the regional or even linear chronological framework of the territorial State. Formal precedence in time and space introduces a false hierarchy, which domination procedures tend to consolidate.

Despite the strength of the structures of globalization, local communities have always kept the fundamental identities of societies as the most original dynamics. It is therefore necessary to make an empirical and analytical description to establish the comparison in the same contemporaneity between community, society and State in Asia as in Africa.

This roundtable wants to return to these communities that find a universal coherence in the forms of solidarity, reciprocity and local and international mobility, cosmogonies, religions, rituals, endogenous knowledge, agrarian techniques. The contribution of anthropology, rural geography and collective experience remains decisive in this respect as they allow us, beyond the simple geographical table, nomenclatures or the typology, to define cultural strata and their specific material cultures. This is manifested in the issues of power around land and rites, the division of labor, the dynamics of exchanges, the forms of habitat, the supports of the sacred, aesthetics and especially the coherence of space.

This roundtable therefore returns to the rediscovery of a dynamic social field in communities long marginalized or confined in an epistemological rebus as ethnographic or exotic objects. Long labeled as primitive and unorganized, they are readapting with a singular vivacity to the heart of globality as urban ruralities, community life or new neighborhood, kinship or religious solidarities.
The roundtable will be twinned with an exhibition of scenes of very day lifeof different local communities in Africa and Asia.

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