Book and Film Reviews Bottlenecks and Other Current Problems of Circulation Gretchen Elisabeth Pfeil Department of Social Sciences, Division of Applied Under- graduate Study, School of Professional Studies, New York Uni- versity, 7 East 12th Street, Suite 700, New York, New York 10003, USA (gp69@nyu.edu). 3 XII 18 Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City . By Caroline Melly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Right now, everything moves. Money travels faster than ever: “ investment, ” “ development aid, ” “ remittances ” via Western Union, digital currencies. Information moves seemingly faster than thought. Commodities move freely: single items (even individual sheets of fentanyl!) shipped worldwide to retail con- sumers from China by post, all but evading customs. Against this seemingly unrestricted movement, stoppage stands in stark relief: people at the borders of the United States and Europe are ever more visibly detained. The swirling currents of global traf fi c are at once expanding and newly hemmed in: movement fore- closed, dreams deferred, eddies and backwaters, bottlenecks. Caroline Melly ’ s remarkable Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City takes up these pressing questions through the windows of cars stuck in endless traf fi c jams in Dakar, Senegal. The ethnography thematizes blockage, stalling, and the forms of movement, commerce, and dreams that arise in the meantime. The ethnography teases out a concern central to life in African cities but worth considering everywhere at this geopolitical moment: “ what it means to plan, to build, and to govern amidst chronic uncertainty and narrowing possibilities ” (51). Yet for Melly, these are not only concerns for an Africa “ in crisis ” but also concerns that in fl ect our current global pre- dicament — the inevitability of which was perhaps presaged by Comaroff and Comaroff (2012). Bottleneck is exceptionally attentive to methodological chal- lenges of working in urban Africa and in Dakar speci fi cally. The ethnographer ’ s eye is trained to mediators: taxi drivers (ch. 2), houses under construction and the people left in the city to look after them (ch. 3), development of fi ce of fi cials (ch. 4), and clandestine migrants (ch. 5). Engagements with each are grounded in long-term relationships with people and institu- tions from across the city ’ s social strata, a deep engagement with scholarship of local social scientists (published only in French and African academic presses), and an impressive fl uency in Dakar ’ s particular linguistic and cultural forms across many different registers. Along with geographer Rosalind Fredericks ’ 2018 Garbage Citizenship (which also thematizes Dakar ’ s in- frastructure), Bottleneck sets a high bar for American scholar- ship on Senegal and francophone Africa going forward. Melly ’ s discussion begins with the literal traf fi c jams that consumed the time, attention, and conversation of Dakarois during the period of her fi eldwork. Dakar ’ s roads were being completely reworked, an infrastructure campaign that led di- rectly to the reelection of then President Abdoulaye Wade and brought street traf fi c to a near standstill for years. In descrip- tion that moves from traf fi c jams to taxi drivers, through the city ’ s ubiquitous homes under construction, to the long af- termath of structural adjustment and the state ’ s (unrealized and perhaps unrealizable) dreams of domesticating remittances from overseas Senegalese as development capital, Melly demonstrates the productivity of blockage on scales from individual moment- to-moment decisions, to state and international relations and treaties. In each case, she demonstrates the utility of the traf fi c jam as a means of thinking about the most intimate of conse- quences of the changing possibilities of global movements of money and people. This ethnography is both topical and un- expected: it calls us, for example, to think about transnational migration from the perspective of a taxi driver who has never left his West African nation and to think about questions of gen- eration and absent presences through individual concrete bricks. The ethnography also draws important attention (although per- haps unintentionally) to what I believe are the most important new modes of theorizing circulation more broadly: the study of restriction of movement and of holding back as productive and necessary aspects of a world of social action fi gured as existing in a state of perpetual movement and exchange. Dakar, Senegal ’ s capital, is a densely populated peninsular port city: geographically, a literal bottleneck. In Dakar, real estate is shockingly expensive and traf fi c jams — embouteillage , or bottlenecks — constant. The ethnography turns on this central conceit: that the embouteillage Dakar ’ s residents experienced during the 2006 – 2007 renovation of Dakar ’ s roads is of a piece with the embouteillage experienced by a population aching to travel abroad, yet contained on the peninsula. As transnational migration has emerged as young men ’ s best means to accrue the capital necessary to marry and head their own households, new immigration regimes in France and the United States narrow the routes out of Dakar, leaving Dakarois sitting in traf fi c. As a taxi driver Melly interviewed notes about foiled plans to visit a friend in New York, “ these routes have been closed . . . and now I ’ m just sitting in the city, sitting in this embouteillage ” (66). In this and other vignettes, the seemingly improbable connection be- tween road traf fi c and transnational migration is proved very real to Dakarois. The concept of embouteillage suggests a useful unifying analytic for the broader literature on African cities, a means of seeing and discussing the inventive modes of action that emerge in various kinds of meantimes. By examining how, exactly, people in Dakar negotiate exception and waiting, Melly For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu. Current Anthropology Volume 60, Number 2, April 2019 275 suggests a means of thinking ethnographically through the tem- porality and consequentiality of what others have discussed as the (permanent) “ crisis ” — for example, see van De Walle (2001) but see also Mbembe and Roitman (1995) — of postadjustment, radically urbanized African states. For Melly, embouteillage is neither a “ state of exception ” (cf. Agamben 2003; Mbembe 2003) nor of suspended animation but is rather a temporality charac- terized by radically creative social action and denser movement catalyzed by the pressure and concentration of energy built up in deferral. These conditions of containment do not sti fl e; they instead build a vibrant city “ in the meantime. ” As one (overeducated) taxi driver explained, driving in Dakar was a detour from his career goals, yes, but the fact that he remained in this position “ enabled him to circulate continuously through the city, to insert himself into potentially useful networks, to engage in various kinds of worthwhile transactions ” (68). The intensity of circulation in the bottled-up city — the swells and eddies of restricted place under high pressure — and his place within that circulation created an ideal space for his material success through what Wolof names liguenti ( xaalis ) “ working [habitu- ally, repeatedly] at (money). ” Liguenti in this sense is explicitly about movement, framed as the work of dugg and gene , that is, of “ coming in ” and “ going out, ” borrowing some money here, mediating a deal there, running errands for a tip, etc., through which one might scrape together just enough money to meet the needs of the day (see Pfeil 2012). This practice of scraping to- gether one ’ s living by mediating other people ’ s transactions has been described in some detail in recent ethnographies of other West African cities, most notably in Newell ’ s (2012) ethnogra- phy of young con artists in the capital of Côte d ’ Ivoire practicing similar modes of deal making by mediating knowledge (or, in many cases, the lack of it) about the city for outsiders, and about Europe and the United States for consumers in the city (see also Jones 2010 on Zimbabwe ’ s kukiya-kiya economy). Bottleneck reminds readers that social worlds are always in a state of motion, yet failures or restrictions of movement for people or things are not an exception but a crucial and con- stitutive aspect of the state of the circulatory system in question (Weiner 1992). The ethnography provides an instructively concrete entry into emerging literature theorizing commu- nication and sociality through infrastructures of circulation (Hull 2003; Lee and Lipuma 2002), particularly the discussion in linguistic anthropology of “ the phatic ” (Jakobson 1960) as a means of describing networks of communication and per- during patterns of circulation, with the term “ phatic infrastruc- ture ” (Elyachar 2010; Kockelman 2010) now gaining currency in the discipline at large (e.g., Larkin 2013; Maurer, Nelms, and Rea 2018). These questions gain new weight when considered from a taxi stuck in traf fi c. References Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. Stato di eccezione: homo sacer, II, I , vol. 1. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa. Anthropological Forum 22(2):113 – 131. Elyachar, Julia. 2010. Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of em- powerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist 37(3):452 – 464. Fredericks, Rosalind. 2018. Garbage citizenship: vital infrastructures of labor in Dakar, Senegal . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hull, Matthew S. 2003. The fi le: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy. Language and Communication 23(3 – 4):287 – 314. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In Style in language . Thomas Sebeok, ed. Pp. 350 – 377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, Jeremy L. 2010. “ Nothing is straight in Zimbabwe ” : the rise of the Kukiya-kiya economy 2000 – 2008. Journal of Southern African Studies 36(2):285 – 299. Kockelman, Paul. 2010. Enemies, parasites, and noise: how to take up resi- dence in a system without becoming a term in it. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2):406 – 421. Larkin, Brian. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:327 – 343. Lee, Benjamin, and Edward LiPuma. 2002. Cultures of circulation: the imag- inations of modernity. Public Culture 14(1):191 – 213. Maurer, Bill, Taylor C. Nelms, and Stephen C. Rea. 2018. “ Bridges to cash ” : channelling agency in mobile money. In Linguistic and material intimacies of cell phones . Joshua A. Bell and Joel Corneal Kuipers, Pp. 69 – 98. New York: Routledge. Mbembé, J.-A., and Libby Meintjes. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1):11 – 40. Mbembe, Achille, and Janet Roitman. 1995. Figures of the subject in times of crisis. Public Culture 7(2):323 – 352. Newell, Sasha. 2012. The modernity bluff: crime, consumption, and citizenship in Côte d ’ Ivoire . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pfeil, Gretchen. 2012. Sarax and the city: almsgiving and anonymous objects in Dakar, Senegal. In The anthropology of ignorance: an ethnographic ap- proach . Casey High, Ann Kelly, and Jonathan Mair, eds. Pp. 33 – 54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. van de Walle, Nicolas. 2001. African economies and the politics of permanent crisis, 1979 – 1999 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while giving . Berkeley: University of California Press. Differentiating Difference Daniel Fisher Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berke- ley, 232 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, California 94720, USA (dt fi sher @berkeley.edu). 21 XII 18 Dynamics of Difference in Australia: Indigenous Past and Present in a Settler Society . By Francesca Merlan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Dynamics of Difference in Australia is at once an apt and a deceptive title for this sweeping ethnographic and historical monograph. The book ’ s project is indeed to chart such dy- namics across two centuries of interaction and relation be- tween colonist settlers and Indigenous Australians. This fi gure of difference, however, is made to perform more analytically and politically pointed work in this book than its title might initially suggest. Francesca Merlan thus begins by framing the book in terms of a particular interest in the stakes of difference and in the ways that locally construed “ re fl exive senses ” of what is to be made of difference come to matter (2). She does so, it soon becomes apparent, in a determined effort to avoid under- 276 Current Anthropology Volume 60, Number 2, April 2019