Resumo da comunicação: The prominent place of African migration in the media contrasts notably with the almost complete anonymity of its protagonists. As a result recent African-European migration is represented in rather general terms as the outcome of economic, civil or military processes of crisis, depending upon the origin of the individuals and groups in question. The actual personal and sociocultural reasons behind these migration projects remain largely invisible.

Drawing on ongoing research on the situation of Senegalese migrants in Spain as well as prior ethnographic research in Senegal and Gambia, the text aims at developing a culturally and historically sensitive analysis of the reasons and motives underlying the migration of Mandinka-speaking migrants from the Casamance region in Southern Senegal.

A first set of ideas concerning the imagination and practice of migration in Senegal has been developed in the context of research focusing on the cultural logic and existential significance of divinatory practices such as geomancy and cowrie divination-practices frequently employed for coming to terms with and facilitating migration projects. In the present paper, these initial observations concerning the current dynamics of migration in Senegal and Gambia are reconsidered through conversations with Senegalese migrants in Spain. Due to this, the reflection is characterized by an increasingly dialogical and retrospective mode of analysis, moving back and forth between different settings, voices and theoretical perspectives reaching from the logic of kinship in post-subsistence household communities to the political economy of the European labor market.

Currículo Resumido: Knut Graw (PhD) works as lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA) and the Interculturalism, Minorities and Migration Research Centre (IMMRC) at the Catholic University of Leuven. He has conducted research on the sociocultural and existential significance of divinatory praxis in Senegal and Gambia. His current research focuses on the situation of Senegalese migrants in Spain and the cultural dynamics and transfers in the African-European borderzone. His theoretical interests reach from ritual analysis and migration theory to ethnographic phenomenology and globalization studies.