Sandro Simon

Mollusc gleaning in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, hinges on the situated navigation of a deltaic world in flux. It unfolds both above and below water as well as in the mud and is crucially guided by haptic engagement, which in turn generates sound. Audio/visual inquiry into gleaning  explores the sensuality of this haptic engagement and its more-than-human dimensions. Haptic sound, as this article traces, has thereby been key. Indexing to touch and how it creates contact with the self and with the other, haptic sound affords proximity. At the same time, it points beyond the all-knowing and all-sensing self by probing intensities and making us aware of resistance and impenetrability. As such, haptic sound evolves at a limit and harbors excess. In the recordings from the delta, haptic sound is also conveyed by the “indeterminate” and the ways tones and sounds mix and interchange and are difficult to localize and categorize; by the “disproportionate” and the ways the sound of touch is amplified and appears as “too loud”; or by the “imperfect” and the ways sound is grainy, overdriven, distorted, dull, piercing, full of static hiss or windy, and so forth. Thereby, the materiality of recording devices and the constructiveness of mediation with all its affordances and limitations become palpable as well. Haptic sound, this article concludes, is thus touching and, in this touching, evokes both more-than-human sensitivity and alterity. In mobilizing both experience and reflection, it ruptures anthropocentrism and ultimately opens up pathways to reconsider both anthropology and cinema as well as audio/visual practice in general with an ear to an embodied multispecies conviviality.

We have twelve professions', say the Serer Niominka of the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. Th is article traces how they have embraced two short-lived opportunities: to glean sea snails from the bycatch of industrial trawlers and to salvage fi sh for a fi sh factory. Salvaging for is about relating oneself and one's environment to capitalist value chains and feeding into them, allowing for 'salvage accumulation'. Gleaning from, I argue, points in the opposite direction. It is about performing the marginality of remainders of capitalist value chains while redescribing their value for one's own profi t. As such, gleaning can be a 'minor tactic' that allows one to create niches intertwined with capitalist processes and mobilise them to one's own ends. For the Serer Niominka, this article shows, both gleaning and salvaging have represented ways of exploring and valorising capitalist-induced volatilities as opportunities from 'below' and integrating them into their rhythmic meshwork of practice.

In the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, development actors strive to ‘develop’ female mollusc gleaning. In an apparently boundless amphibious environment, domestication underlined by discursive dispossession figures as an attractive alteration of enclosure and material dispossession. It intervenes especially temporally in human and mollusc life and overlays the (material) dialectic of capitalist ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ with one of bringing humans and molluscs from an ‘archaic’ and ‘wild’ ‘outside’ into a ‘modern’ and ‘cultivated’ ‘inside’. However, domestication projects remain entangled with the unruliness of molluscs and waters, and struggle with organisational problems and the agency of gleaners. The latter seek to foster and profit from the continuous production of ‘outsides’ and ‘insides’. They attract, appropriate and undermine projects and integrate them as mere additions into their gleaning practice. In upholding their gleaning practice and complicating mollusc domestication in alliance with unruly molluscs and waters, I argue, gleaners can also resist their own domestication.

Molluscs are omnipresent in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal and parts of an array of multispecies practices and relations. Gleaning is one of the main ways how humans engage with molluscs. An amphibious, multisensory practice, gleaning builds on both habituated skill and a distributed attentiveness and is characterized by regular slippings of molluscs and suspensions of work, just as by a generative rhythmicity.
In deltaic lifeworlds such as the Sine-Saloum Delta, where flow and change in both temporal and spatial terms are incessant and where humans and non-humans (have to) rely on the (re-)alignment of the various elements of their transforming world in order to create continuity, an inquiry into mollusc gleaning promises to be useful. It allows us to trace the relevance of and the relations between practice, pause and anticipation in the creation of a rhythmicity that generates continuity in situations of volatility. And so examining mollusc gleaning not only helps us to learn about the life and the history of the Serer Niominka in the Sine-Saloum Delta, but can also foster our understandings of rhythmic life in river deltas more broadly.

When I was about to start my long-term ethnographic fieldwork on human-environmental relations, my research area was shaken by numerous attacks ascribed to an Islamist militant group. While the area has a longstanding history of ethno-political conflicts around elections between farmers and pastoralists, such a form of violence, which consisted of attacks on vehicles and villages across the area and in the course of ten incidents left dead around a dozen locals, travellers, and security agents, was unprecedented.
Making sense of this kind of danger that was both absent and present, as the militants were neither rooted in the communities nor following known patterns, and relating it to one’s individual positionality and experience proved difficult for all those affected. In consequence, ‘truth’, rather than being stable and shared, was always situational, partial, and relational.
In ethnographic fieldwork, validating is a continuous practice not to be separated from data production and left for analysis. To proceed in research, one is constantly and often tacitly testing and making decisions about ‘reality’, largely by searching for alignment, overlap, and commonality with others. And so it is especially in moments of intersubjectivity that we feel deeply and uncontradictedly connected to and knowledgeable about the world.
In this light, the present contribution seeks to examine a form of validation that might precede processes of validation in other scientific practices but is central to ethnography. In describing the attempt to make fieldwork succeed against the odds, I will trace my navigation through different (self-)perceptions of danger and my use of different methods in the search for validity and control. This endeavour turned into an epistemic and emotional borderwalk, raising questions about the limitations of ethnographic validation in personally demanding research settings.

In late Summer 2017, around the time of Kenya’s general election and when I was starting my long-term field- work, the Tana Delta was shaken by numerous deadly attacks ascribed to the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab, specifically its branch Jaysh al-Ayman, which threw into question and finally prevented my envisioned research on water-related work practices in the area. In this paper, I will recollect my efforts to make fieldwork work against the odds, and, ultimately, my having to abandon it. Specifically, I ponder the epistemic and personal challenges of navigating through different (self-) perceptions and experiences of danger, anxiety and fear in a ‘field’ that is embroiled with the unpredictable and ephemeral.