In this article, I examine practices of social detachment among West African migrants in urban Ghana. Faced with pressures arising from expectations of reciprocity, especially from kin back home, some migrants exert considerable efforts to break, if temporarily, with relations of mutual recognition and support, entering what I term migratory aloneness. Far from being an individualizing endeavour linked to the corrosive effects of modernization, this contingent withdrawal from social relations has a continuity with the cultural grammar of West African frontier mobility, wedded to a paradoxical pursuit of social becoming through social detachment. By attending to the efforts and effects of detached relations, which I explore in relation to valuations, predicaments, and the temporality of aloneness, I seek in this article to nuance anthropological arguments about the significance of relatedness in West African migration practices, as well as to contribute to broader efforts to depart from anthropology's fixation on norms of reciprocity and connection.

中文翻译：

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西非移民中的孤独和分离条件


在本文中，我研究了加纳城市西非移民的社会疏离实践。面对来自互惠期望的压力，尤其是来自家乡亲属的压力，一些移民付出了相当大的努力来打破（即使是暂时的）相互承认和支持的关系，进入我所说的孤独移民。这种偶然的退出社会关系远非与现代化腐蚀作用相关的个人化努力，而是与西非边境流动的文化语法保持连续性，与通过社会疏离对社会形成的矛盾追求相结合。通过关注分离关系的努力和影响，我从估值、困境和孤独的时间性的角度来探讨这些关系，在本文中，我试图对人类学关于关联性在西非移民实践中的重要性的争论进行细微差别，并为更广泛的努力做出贡献，以摆脱人类学对互惠和联系规范的执着。