Conceptions of space and autochthony among the Tubu of Eastern Niger

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Tilman Musch
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230252790

The project studies changing spatial orders and changing spatial conceptions among the Tubu in Eastern Niger. It starts with an empirical and ethnological analysis of space among the Teda Gunda Tarduga who are settling between Ngourti and Agadem. The Tarduga are living mainly around their well of Atruna, and they are currently in the very centre of petrol-exploiting activities carried out by the China National Petroleum Corporation. Their resettlement is scheduled for 2012/13. The project supposes that space, due to the petrol-exploitation activities as also to the scheduled resettlement, is modified and has to be anew negotiated between the state and the Tubu. It tries to study conceptions of space among the Tubu in an ethnographic and processes of negotiating territories in a socio-anthropological approach. It supposes further that the Tubu will use discourses of autochthony and that these discourses, contrary to viewpoints of political anthropology, are not lacking in content, but that they have a very concrete relation to space and that they can be understood only within this relation. Analyzing the development of these discourses with their concrete relation to space is thus another aim of the project. After the analysis of such primary discourses, the project studies secondary politicized discourses on a regional and national level, as also processes of abstraction and alienation from the concrete space. The project tries to elaborate a spatial anthropology of the Tubu and to analyze, in so doing, if and how nowadays discourses of autochthony can be deduced from concrete conceptions of space.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants