"Diama Djigui - Unsere Hoffnung"Ethnographische Forschung und radiophone Präsentation am Beispiel eines Dorfvereins für Entwicklung zwischen dem westafrikanischen Sahel und Paris.

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the "associations villageoises pour le developpement" that were founded in the 1980s in Paris by West African migrant workers from the region of the Senegal river valley between Senegal, Mali and Mauritania. The initial point of these associations was to realize developmental projects in the hometowns and to improve the living conditions of the families left behind. Using the Senegal village of Sinthiou Dioye and its transnational community as an example, one can note however that the importance of these "projets de developpement" is today based above all on the establishment of new social reports between "here" and "there". The investigation is essentially based upon a large quantity of acoustic materials, including extensive interviews, that were recorded in the course of detailed research in migrant hostels (foyers) in Paris and a longer stay in a migrant hometown in Senegal. One aim of this research was to produce a "radio feature" (a German radio broadcast genre mixing dialogues, commentaries, quotes, sounds, soundscapes and music) that was first broadcast by the radio station "Deutschlandfunk" in May 2002 under the title "Diama Digui - Unsere Hoffnung. Ein afrikanischer Weg der Entwicklungshilfe" ("Diama Digui - Our Hope. An African method of development aid") and is now - alongside a written ethnography - included as part of this thesis. The potential of this particular broadcast genre to communicate human experience and to construct forms of knowledge (about "others") is discussed in the first section of this thesis, whose central objective is to propose the "radio feature" genre as one possibility of undertaking and representing ethnography in response to the multiple demands for new kinds of ethnography beyond text that have accompanied academic debates within the discipline since the 1980s and are currently discussed under the keyword "sensory turn". The radio feature "Diama Djigui" can be ordered as mp3 audio file via e-mail: AnnaSchrade@web.de or downloaded via http://elib2006.suub.uni-bremen.de/diss/docs/Diama_Djigui.mp3