Adventure Capital

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Julie Kleinman. Adventure Capital

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Adventure Capital

Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris

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When I first asked Lassana what he meant when he referred to his departure from his home village as “leaving on adventure” (partir en/à l’aventure) and to himself and his comrades as adventurers (aventuriers),41 he explained it this way: “We’re all looking for a way to get out of struggle (la galère) and into happiness (le bonheur). But some are not cut out for adventure, and they stay in la galère. But I’m an adventurer. My father was an adventurer. My father was poor. My mother was poor. But my father told me, if you’re born in misery you can end up with happiness, but if you’re born with wealth you can end up in misery. And he told me my pathway would take me far from our home.” The notion of adventure helped Lassana connect his struggles to a tradition passed down from father to son. It offered a framework for interpreting hard times abroad as well as a sense of belonging to a larger community of adventurers.

Adventure was not just another word for migration: it contained a whole world of West African migrant histories.42 Precolonial trading empires and colonial rule have helped shape a flexible cultural idiom for West Africans voyaging abroad. Like all idioms, it is not a deterministic cultural pattern but rather a malleable resource that migrants draw on in different contexts, transforming it as they do so. As Lassana taught me, it provided a template for those who left their families for lands unknown. Sylvie Bredeloup, an anthropologist who has long studied the notion of adventure among West Africans, calls it a form of “moral experience” in which migrants seek personal and social fulfillment through migration.43 Examining how West African migrants understand and express their life course through this idiom sheds light on critical aspects of migratory pathways that are often ignored in policy debates. The adventurer outlook offers a cultural logic and moral template for how life should unfold, and for how people ought to relate to one another.

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