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