{"id":17956,"date":"2021-05-21T12:29:55","date_gmt":"2021-05-21T16:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=17956"},"modified":"2021-06-02T12:25:10","modified_gmt":"2021-06-02T16:25:10","slug":"emily-anne-williamson","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/profiles\/emily-anne-williamson\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Anne Williamson"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"page\" title=\"Page 7\">\n<div class=\"layoutArea\">\n<div class=\"column\">\n<div class=\"page\" title=\"Page 5\">\n<div class=\"layoutArea\">\n<div class=\"column\">\n<p><strong><em>Folded Speech: An Ethics of Comings-and-Goings in an Accra Zongo <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>\u201cWe are all strangers here. Like rice and stones, we are all mixed up. The zongo is a place on your way <\/span><span>somewhere else.\u201d This statement from one of my interlocutors in Nima, a zongo (Hausa settlement) <\/span><span>in Accra, Ghana, raises fascinating questions about how zongo inhabitants make sense of a life on the move in which contradictory ideas exist side-by-side. What might life-ways steeped in multiplicity teach us about an ethics of living with others that relies less on abstract principles than on pivoting to gain <\/span><span>another viewpoint? To answer this question, I draw on my fieldwork in Nima, Ghana\u2019s most diverse zongo, where residents voice moral injunctions called \u201cfolded speech\u201d that instruct people on how to try on multiple perspectives \u2013 an activity I term \u201can ethics of comings-and-goings.\u201d To understand how <\/span><span>folded speech works, I participated in everyday activities and conversations, conducted interviews, and collected diverse materials, such as folktales, social media, wall art, songs, and Islamic sermons. I suggest that folded speech not only helps individuals adapt to their rapidly changing environment, but also has <\/span><span>the capacity to transform how they perceive and participate in the world. These findings hold important <\/span><span>implications for how we understand an ethics of living together in our diverse, mobile world. Instead <\/span><span>of focusing on resolving \u201cthe problem of diversity\u201d or relying on abstract principles, my ethnographic <\/span><span>material offers a different account of ethics \u2013 one that keeps doubt, wonder, and questioning alive. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":16661,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/17956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/17956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17958,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/17956\/revisions\/17958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}