‘Our Baka brothers obviously do not speak French’: Siting and scaling physical/discursive ‘movements’ in post-colonial Belgium

Abstract

This paper argues that a space-sensitive sociolinguistics can instruct contemporary anthropological approaches to globalisation how to more radically consider place and scale constructs as products and processes of social and discursive action. The case considered here is the month-long protest of African associations against an exhibition of Baka ‘Pygmies’ from Cameroon in a natural heritage site in Belgium. This case is subsequently dealt with in a ‘multi-sited’ and a ‘scale sensitive’ ethnographic description. The paper concludes that an alternative analytics of diaspora and globalisation needs to bring down the siting and scaling that occurs in ‘glocalities’ to their fragmented materiality.