Contenu du sommaire : Citoyens de papier en Afrique

The decade prior to the independence of the Côte d'Ivoire featured a more invasive French colonial government, especially in terms of family policy. Civil status became the only legal way to establish descent. However, this case study demonstrates how some individuals – particularly women, but also wage earners and parents – made the best of these legal opportunities, opened by paper, to bring about a conception of the family not matching that of the new civil code. Administrative work thus reproduces the uncertainties stemming from social practices, rather than reducing it, and its identificatory power was curtailed. Court archives and regional civil registers attest to a change in orientation by a state turned purveyor of rights.

The article concerns how the professional group of passenger transport drivers relates to the driver's license in Senegal. It first reviews the events leading to the establishment of a specific licensing procedure almost entirely reserved for this social group. It then describes certain practices that representatives of the profession use to protect the license du ring road checks. Lastly, it details the license's role in marking key moments of dri vers' careers. Taken together, these elements outline a collection of uses and representations giving the document a meaning that surpasses its initial social and legal functions, thus highlighting the social relativity of practices and imaginaries of the state.

For forty years Nigeria has separated its body of citizens in two parts, indigenes and non indigenes. Indigene citizens can trace their genealogical roots back to a community in a specific locality, and local governments issue indigene certificates certifying this origin. This article explores the relationship between local bureaucrats, intermediaries, and users seeking this certificate in three Nigerian states. Analysis demonstrates how applicants take on these procedures, how the bureaucratic relationship is an ordinary apprenticeship in the state that redefines belonging as an exclusive local citizenship, and the conditions under which issuing documents becomes a controversial political issue.

This article analyses the activity of so-called margouillats, informal go-betweens found around the Abidjan court house who work to “get papers released” for people having filed a request for civil documents, particularly birth certificates and other documents proving citizenship. The article describes their integration into the administrative practices of document production and the interpersonal networks of the court “food chain.” Analysis of bureaucratic corruption is of secondary importance to the moral justifications brought to the commodification of nationality. Focusing on the moral ly liminal space of the production of a false identity document, the article suggests that these intermediaries do not erase the political boundaries of citizenship, but rather, through capillary action, extend the discriminating action of the state into the street.

How does the attribution of sexuality to a researcher help expose the principles that subdivide the spaces in which informants develop ? Based on observations of a training program for noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in the gendarmerie, a national police force and branch of the French armed forces, I demonstrate their investment in a demonstrative virility built around a combative display of the body and lewd jokes. Among NCOs, the stigmatization of effeminacy tends to be a deformed expression of class and gender relations and institutional hierarchies. The construction of a virile definition of the occupation appears as both a stake and an outcome of power relations between all gendarmes and among NCOs more particularly. Among NOCs, Judicial Police officers are the most disposed to cracking jokes and bantering, while, in their own interest, investing in their bodies as a symbol of their operational effectiveness.

This article proposes associating the tools of ethnography with the critique of historical sources. Based on a comparison of two studies using “private” archives, we highlight the value of inserting the archival encounter into the material and social conditions of possibility. Re-examining how the studies unfolded, the properties of the actors (archivists and researchers alike), and the collection of archival holdings, this article introduces the reflexive endeavor into the ordinary work of historian. Far from the passive role generally attributed to archival researchers, they are full-fledged actors in the studies they conduct.

Ethnography is now well established in French sociology. Suspicion nonetheless still lingers over the scientific validity of results, some questioning its subjectivity. This article, which is based on an auto-socio-analysis, demonstrates that the effects on and by researchers not only present no obstacle to scientific knowledge, but that they are in fact a lever for obtaining it, because they allow researchers to rid themselves of scholarly knowledge in order to reveal the relevance of some kinds of indigenous knowledge.