Familles, migrations et conjugalités : une ethnographie aux familles cap-verdiennes-sénégalaises à Dakar
(2025)
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- (en) In contemporary societies, people from different cultural backgrounds are in constant and continuous contact, either directly or through new communication technologies. This dynamic is marked by negotiation, incorporation, reformulation and adaptation of individuals to new cultural environments, as well as by tensions and attempts to impose cultural models resulting from the devaluation of differences. The intimate context of human interactions, particularly that resulting from intercultural marital relationships, is not immune to these dynamics, imposing social and symbolic challenges on the couple and their families. Based on an ethnography of Cabo Verdean-Senegalese families, particularly first-generation immigrants who arrived in Senegal in the early 20th century and women of Cabo Verdean descent married to Senegalese men, this thesis questions the implications of intercultural relations on family, marital and gender relations, as well as on the socialisation process of children. Based on the approach of social anthropology and its intersection with the anthropology of power relations, it seeks, at first, to examine the historical, social, political, and economic constraints that allowed for the presence of a significant Cape Verdean diaspora in Senegal. It also aims to understand the processes of integration of immigrants into Senegalese society, the challenges they face, and the strategies they have devised to overcome the difficulties they encounter. Secondly, it analyses the impact of migration on kinship relations, focusing on the different family configurations that emerge from the departure of family members, both from the point of view of filiation and from the point of view of conjugality. The focus on the processes of building intercultural marital relationships allows us to explore the motivations of Senegalese and Cabo Verdean men and women in building intercultural marital relationships, the perceptions and representations they construct, as well as the impacts of cultural differences on the individual identities of spouses, on the quality of the marital relationship, and on the socialisation process of children born into these family arrangements. It also allows us to examine the different axes of power and inequalities that permeate the intimate contexts of family relationships, as well as the strategies invented by women to subvert and redefine the asymmetrical and unequal relationships that mark their daily lives. This thesis demonstrates that the imbalances between Cabo Verde and Senegal at the beginning of the 20th century, associated with the influence of contact networks and the ability to mobilise human, material and symbolic resources of emigrants and their families, were at the root of the Cabo Verdean diaspora in Senegal. The mobilisation and transformation of cultural resources enabled these citizens to reconfigure their identity, giving them a dual sense of belonging and enabling them to build intercultural marital relationships. The daily management of these family arrangements poses challenges for spouses related to tensions between individual identities and social norms, resulting, on the one hand, in the separation of the couple and, on the other, in the possibility of building a marital identity in which the intimate context of family relationships becomes a space for consensus building and cultural recreation. The socialisation of children is a process negotiated between the mother, father and father's relatives. The capacity of these individuals to reinvent strategies for overcoming the difficulties they face, from Cabo Verde to Senegal, as well as to redefine and reformulate social norms, is noteworthy, as is the influence of matrifocality in the different family organisations analysed, as well as in the process of women's emancipation.
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Ramos Semedo Tavares, M. (2025). Familles, migrations et conjugalités : une ethnographie aux familles cap-verdiennes-sénégalaises à Dakar. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/279690