https://www.pennpress.org/9781512827569/selective-solidarity

Ashley McDermott: Selective Solidarity looks at how children are socialized into economic moralities, or as you write, “normative expectations regarding material circulation.” Over the course of the work, you foreground children’s agency in economic and kin relationships but also demonstrate the ways their moral-economic behaviors reflect adult anxieties over their family’s future and maintaining middle-classness in shifting political-economic conditions. Could you tell us what brought you to researching moral-economic behavior through the lens of language socialization? Did you set out to study children, and their transnational networks, from the outset of the project?

Chelsie Yount: Thank you for this question that gets at the different themes woven together in the book. To answer I need to add one more thread: food. I came to examine how language mediates economic moralities by way of studying food and eating practices in Senegal. Before starting my PhD, I had done fieldwork in Dakar for a master’s at the EHESS (Paris), where I noticed that the metapragmatic language surrounding food sharing – whether at family meals shared around a communal dish or moments of children divvying up snacks – regularly centered on the ways one supposedly ought to redistribute resources. Across social classes, households tended to prepare roughly the same dishes each week. My interlocutors focused less on food as identity marker and more on food as index of generosity and on questions of who was feeding, cooking, providing for whom. Senegalese routinely use food sharing as a metaphor for other, money-based forms of solidarity, and speakers illustrate Senegalese values of generosity and hospitality (teranga) through reference to the social expectation to invite anyone who so much as sees you eating.

I initially set out to understand how language surrounding food sharing mediates moral-economic relations in Senegal and its diaspora. Semiotics got me far, especially Irvine and Gal’s “semiotics of difference,” in describing how interdiscursive connections are made between talk around food sharing and exchanges of money, gifts, or other forms of material support. But after reading work on language socialization (Ochs, Schieffelin, Kulick), especially through food sharing (Paugh, Cavanaugh, Karrebæk, Berman), I decided to focus specifically on how children come to understand the normative expectations that underpin material exchange.

Children growing up in the diaspora, specifically, seemed like a group that could tell me a lot about the ways children are socialized (or not) into the economic moralities that animate transnational kinship relations. By thinking about food sharing as bound up in broader moral-economic expectations, my research came to focus on questions at the heart of Selective Solidarity: How do children raised in Paris come to understand the financial responsibilities of migrants vis-à-vis those at home? How do they experience expectations to give? How do they learn things like how, in Senegal, when a person sings your praises (like a griot), you are expected to hand over some cash?

Ashley McDermott: One poignant example for me was when Aminata “played crazy” or feigned ignorance of others’ expectations during trips to Dakar to avoid giving. Throughout the book you provide myriad examples of how children understand moral-economic behaviors, and their relationships with kin, in ways that differ from older generations. Could you speak more on how adults view these moments when they are faced with the ways that youth are participating in economic practices differently than they themselves would?

Chelsie Yount: For my Senegalese interlocutors, Aminata’s choice to “play crazy” or even pretend not to speak Wolof to avoid requests for money is one of the most troubling vignettes in the book. In 2019, I did a theater workshop in Dakar, where children acted out scenes from the book. When I described Aminata’s admission of “playing crazy” to them, they lowered their eyes, unable to look at me as I described behavior they saw as shameful. I think what hits a nerve in this example is Aminata’s admission of the intentionality of her strategy. Unlike strategies of delay, furthermore, “playing crazy” impedes any future relationship and future requests, distancing Aminata from networks of reciprocity.

The moral-economic behaviors of children growing up in the diaspora diverge from those of older generations and of children in Senegal due to both naiveté and intentional refusal, like Aminata’s, and whether something appears to be the former or the latter matters substantially in people’s reactions to children’s practices. In Wolof, people say xale xamul dara (children know nothing) to brush off children’s gaffes as inoffensive. This is often the attitude people in Senegal take with they meet young relatives growing up in the diaspora whose (moral-economic) practices diverge from their own. Dakarois commonly know (Senegalese) people who live in Europe and the U.S. and when they encounter Senegalese children raised abroad, many are able to recognize when a child simply does not yet understand how redistribution works in Senegal. Children raised in the diaspora are rarely expected to behave or to work for their elders like children their age in Senegal. But stories of intentional refusal to engage, like Aminata’s, tend to be judged more harshly and cause many Senegalese to write her off as a tubab (white person) whose childhood in Paris turned her into a European.

Parents, like Aminata’s mother, shook their heads at rebellious teens, chuckling at her determination not to give to the relatives she meets on their next trip to Senegal. Older people know that whatever French-born children say about giving, when they go back to Dakar, they will inevitably meet pressures to give that no one can control, regardless of what the rebellious adolescents announce to their mothers about the moral (il)logic of giving when you know you will never receive in kind. It’s worth noting, however that over the years, I have watched many of these rebellious teens become regular remitters once they begin to receive a regular salary.

Ashley McDermott: I appreciated your approach to semiotics; It felt accessible to a non-specialist audience, especially with your gentle introduction to signs and typification in the beginning, and you maintained this clarity as you built on various theoretical strands in linguistic anthropology. How did you conceive of the theoretical framing of the book, and what audiences did you envision yourself engaging with as you wrote?

Chelsie Yount: When I was first initiated into semiotics in grad school, it felt like a secret language that one could apply to any ethnographic case and reveal important insights. But the price of this robust analytical toolkit was the risk of alienating those uninitiated into the specialized vocabulary of Peircean semiotics and Silverstein’s metapragmatics.

As I set out to revise the dissertation into book form, I aimed at an undergrad audience, so non-experts, uninitiated into semiotic language. But the theoretical core of the book, and my dissertation before it, hinge on explicit semiotic theory, articulating my approach to economic moralities relative to theories of semiotic/language ideologies. The clearest way to articulate the book’s argument seemed to be by way of semiotics, but using specialized vocabulary sparingly, so that I might take the space necessary to develop each concept in a way that makes intuitive sense without bogging down the narrative with jargon that makes the reader wonder whether they really understood.

The book was the first time I was able to draw on semiotic theory in a text aimed at an audience of non-experts, challenging me to provide an ongoing meta-narrative that defined and unpacked semiotic concepts progressively, in a way that you can’t do in an article. Article writing is aimed at experts, so the density of semiotic terms and the sorts of definitions you need to provide is quite different than what made sense for the book. I took this new (to me) register of academic writing, drawing on and simultaneously explaining semiotics, as a challenge in writing the book. When I struggled to know how much jargon to include or whether I had unpacked the theory enough, I would imagine writing for my grandma’s sister, my great aunt Jackie, a retired high-school librarian in Missouri, who was kind enough to read several chapters of the book to help me clarify for non-specialists.

The theoretical framing ended up being both very much the same as what I had initially developed in the dissertation (especially on economic moralities). But simultaneously it took on a new form, presented in a way that was guided by this goal of presenting complex concepts bit by bit.

Ashley McDermott: In chapter five you discuss how children maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal through social media, particularly Facebook, using data from Facebook tour interviews. What was a typical Facebook tour like, and what were the most surprising insights you gleaned from the method? I’m also curious about how social-media mediated relationships have changed over the course of your research due to platform preferences.

Chelsie Yount: Facebook tours are a research method I developed during my dissertation research, in which I asked youth in Paris to take me on a tour of their Facebook page, to show me how they use the site to connect with their relatives in Dakar. I developed this tactic when I noticed, first, that children were often immersed in tablets or phones, and second, that children’s Facebook profiles and ease at using Facebook messenger could render them message carriers in their transnational families. When I arrived at a family’s home in Dakar, carrying an overflowing shopping bag of clothes, perfumes and other gifts from their relatives (my interlocutors) in France, for example, I received a message from the high-school aged son in Paris, less than an hour after I had arrived. He communicated his mother’s thanks for bringing the gifts to her family, while I was still sitting on the rooftop of the boy’s grandparents’ home in Senegal. 

Some of the most surprising insights from these tours were also the most banal: observations about how my young interlocutors were using the site versus the ways their elders, in Senegal and France, were using social media at that time. Different generations used the site at different paces, with varying levels of ease. This meant that children growing up in the diaspora could sometimes take up important roles in transnational exchanges, by maintaining digital connections with transnational relatives, which I show in the book, could sometimes lead to youth receiving real trips to Dakar and gifts. One thing that touched me was to see that youth would sometimes have sent a number of messages to transnational relatives that went unanswered, happy birthday messages or hellos that got no response. While this detail seems sad, youth never seemed particularly touched by unresponsive relatives, since you could never really know who used the site regularly. Then, like now, people varied greatly in their engagement with the site and some never check Facebook messenger. I think these unanswered messages sent by bored kids on their tablets in Paris are actually a sweet reversal of the common trope of the spoiled second generation children raised in the diaspora or of selfish migrants who supposedly forget their family, to show how transnational youth were actively reaching out to their relatives in Senegal and elsewhere in the diaspora, using the media that made most sense to them.  

I was also impressed to see the ways that, at that time, on Facebook, youth could be passive observers of others’ interactions. Youth who did not really speak (or read) Wolof would nonetheless be familiar with a genre of Wolof-language memes and cartoons about finding your sheep for the Tabaski festival (Eid), for example, the common space on Facebook giving them a means to passively consume media their transnational relatives shared. I was also impressed and incredibly grateful for how willing people were to talk to me about their use of the site. Giving the interviewee the tour guide status empowered them to take me to whatever parts of their social media usage they felt comfortable sharing, avoiding anything they preferred to avoid.

In the time since, many of my interlocutors in Senegal, of all ages, continue to use Facebook quite a bit. In France, like the US, younger generations’ usage of Facebook began to taper off as older generations became more (the most) active on the platform. Some of my (then child, now young adult) interlocutors migrated to use mainly Instagram, posting moments of their lives in France and, occasionally, a trip to Senegal, or old photos of a trip years prior with nostalgic captions about returning to their country. This migration from Facebook to Instagram has had only limited effects, however, on communication in Senegalese families, in which WhatsApp is by far the most important way that people, children and youth included, exchange messages daily with groups of relatives near and far. Senegalese family members also actively use their WhatsApp statuses (and Instagram statuses and Snapchat, to a lesser degree) sharing prayers on widely circulated memes, photos of themselves dressed up for an event, and birthday wishes with all their contacts. Each of these sites have their own affordances in terms of the forms of relationality they encourage and allow. Perhaps what has impressed me the most, in working with the ways Senegalese use (social) media over the past decade, is how willing and ready people in Senegal and its diaspora are to take up new media through which to communicate and otherwise exchange with their relatives and friends abroad. People engage in a variety of different platforms and adapt accordingly as usage shifts from one to the next.

Ashley McDermott: The families you work with are caught between spending in ways that match French middle-class sensibilities (in a time when it is getting increasingly more difficult to do this) and redistributing wealth in accordance to rank and kin relationships as is expected by their families in Dakar. In the conclusion, you offer a longitudinal perspective, showing how the transnational networks are changing in the decade since the primary research. How do you see the tension between economic moralities shifting as children begin to pursue opportunities in Canada and their kin remain in both France and Senegal?

Chelsie Yount: I saw tensions between economic moralities as shifting, not necessarily related to the geographic distribution of the Senegalese diaspora, so much as relative to the opportunities that people see as available in specific places, which shape the investment people made in various economic moralities. The investments my interlocutors made in the economic moralities of the French middle classes varied relative to the stability they were able to achieve in France. For those who were the most precariously employed, struggling to get by on short-term contracts, investment in the economic moralities most important in Senegal tended to grow in importance, sometimes to the point that they appear a more urgent priority than investment in moral expectations in France.

This shift often appears counter intuitive to French audiences, who often presume that financial pressures will sooner or later push immigrants to abandon their perceived responsibilities to their country of origin. French immigration policy is based on the presumption that immigrants should or will inevitably, integrate into French culture. French families tend to see financial responsibilities as limited to the nuclear family-unit and the tacit assumption is that immigrant integration will eventually entail freeing oneself from financial responsibilities to those in their country of origin. But rather than abandoning their investments in Senegal, growing economic precarity in France appears to encourage Senegalese to invest further in their connections in Senegal, in the hopes of moving back or finding opportunities elsewhere in Senegal’s diaspora.

I pulled this transition out for a couple reasons: first to highlight the fact that France is often the easiest way abroad for educated Senegalese, but not necessarily their end goal, and French citizenship and diplomas can provide means to further migration later. French colonial ties are alive and well, but France isn’t necessarily the goal. Senegalese have contacts in many different countries, so as people are thinking about their children’s futures, France is not the only path, nor is it a definitive destination for everyone.