Elia Vitturini: The Gaboye of Somaliland – Division of labour, social marginalisation and political mobilisation within an open trajectory of emancipation

Ethnologiekolloquium

Abstract

African hereditary groups of occupational specialists are an object of study neglected by social sciences. They are often diluted within the broad and confused category of African minority groups; and thus social and historical analyses miss the specific characteristics of their trajectories of marginalisation and emancipation. This article adopts the analytical perspective of the Gaboye of Somaliland as an example of the contribution that these groups can make to the study of social stratification, and of economic and political transformations. The case study of the Gaboye shows how the dynamics of social division of labour and the processes of emancipation undertaken by occupational specialists during the colonial phase enrich and complicate the analysis of the circulation of legal models, political apparatuses and the penetration of economic forces within the African continent. It also facilitates the identification and study of past social institutions’ legacies or historical continuities during the postcolonial state’s collapse, contemporary forms of transnational mobility and the re-organisation of global economic networks that have affected the North-western Somali territories and several other regions of Africa.

Dr. Elia Vitturini (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)

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