Erinnern, Vergessen, Vorstellen: Identitätsstrategien in Mayotte
Afrika-, Amerika- und Ozeanienbezogene Wissenschaften
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The aims of the project were to explores memories, narratives and practices that frame, are invoked in, and are produced by identity strategies and discourses on the island of Mayotte, one of the Comoro Islands. Despite being socially and culturally Comorian, the people of Mayotte, the Maorais, pursued a political path that saw the island remain a part of France when the other islands acquired their independence in 1975, and Mayotte became a French department in 2011. The political choice of being French required the elaboration of a distinction between Mayotte and the other three islands. Consequently the Maorais have been required to emphasise their differences from other Comorians both by denying their “Comorian-ness” and by proclaiming other forms of identity; on other words, by emphasising differences with those close to them, and by claiming similarities with those who are truly different. Both processes are largely achieved through political discourse since any credible (and practical) denial of the Comorian character of Maorais culture is quite impossible in the light of the evidence: religious practice, rituals, cultural attributes such as language, food and clothing, and so on are all firmly Comorian and can only logically be Comorian since Mayotte is one of the Comoro Islands: there is no alternative. Furthermore, social and cultural practices reinforce links between the islands as people regularly move between them, marry, settle and have children, thus impeding rather than facilitating the establishment of distinct insular identities. The alternatives are claiming to be French, which, in anything other than a purely political sense, is impossible to sustain (and, indeed rarely attempted), while claims to be Malagasy, if less impossible, nevertheless meet with limited success. Maorais identity is therefore established discursively, by subscribing to a civic and political discourse that is played out in a different register from daily practice. In these formal contexts the Comorian character of Mayotte is largely ignored and French civic identity is foregrounded. This grants Maorais French identities a somewhat superficial character: every commune has a town hall and the streets of the island’s capital look like the streets of any provincial French town; but a third of the island’s households have no running water, and power locally remains inscribed within customary and kin-based networks. As the increasing French presence (political as much as demographic) forces the Maorais to accept the impossibility of truly being French ultimately leads to them being forced to confront their Comorian-ness, giving rise to confrontations with their neighbours that are both symbolically and physically violent. Analytically, this is explained by developing the concept of mimesis, which provides an explanation of how imitation, and appropriation, of the desirable attributes of Other necessarily leads to confrontation as the Self increasingly comes to resemble an image of the Other more than the Other does.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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“Ali Mfaume: A Comorian hub in the western Indian Ocean,” in E. Alpers & B. Schnepel, eds, Connectivity in Motion: Island Hubs in the Indian Ocean World. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan
Walker, Iain
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“Citizenship and belonging amongst the Hadramis of Kenya,” in Noel Brehony, ed., Hadhramaut and its Diaspora: Yemeni politics, identity and migration. London: I. B. Tauris
Walker, Iain
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“Introduction.” In Iain Walker, ed., Contemporary issues in Swahili ethnography. London, New York: Routledge
Walker, Iain
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“Un explorateur allemand à Ngazidja en 1864: Otto Kersten,” Etudes Océan Indien, 53/54: 349-393
Iain Walker, Marie-Aude Fouéré & Nadine Beckmann
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Islands In A Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros. London: Hurst & Co. “Al-muwāṭana wa-l-intimāʾ bain al-ḥaḍārim fī Kīniyā.” In Noel Brehony, ed., Ḥaḍramawt wa-l-mahjar: Al-siyāsa al-yamaniyya wa-l-hawiyya wa-l-hijra. Riyadh: King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies
Iain Walker
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“The Comoros: Strategies of islandness in the Indian Ocean,” in Toyin Falola, R. Joseph Parrott & Danielle Sanchez, eds, African Islands: Leading edges of empire and globalization. Rochester: University of Rochester Press
Walker, Iain
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“The production of identities on the island of Mayotte: a historical perspective,” T. Sen & B. Schnepel, eds, Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan
Walker, Iain
