Anna Lisa Jacobsen
    Making Morality:
    Individual and Social Processes of Meaning Making in a Somali Diaspora

My dissertation contributes to the new body of literature concerning morality that moves past Durkheimian understandings of the moral to examine daily practices and actions involved in maintaining moral structures. Importantly, beyond simply reproducing a moral homeostasis, I believe that in many societies individuals are changing their moral worlds through the simultaneous processes of creative production and reasoned action. To explore this thesis, my dissertation unpacks two important and inseparable components of the Somali moral world: space and religion.

First, I argue that the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya, is being mapped onto a global Somali moral geography. With the pronounced absence of a functional state in Somalia, and living illegally in Kenya, Somalis find this place-making project to be essential. Eastleigh is also a transition space. It is in many ways the last stop between two opposites: “the abroad”, which is morally polluted, and home (Somalia), which although morally pure, is currently still too dangerous. As a moral “border town” of sorts, it has become a place where individual behavior and individual acts of piety are under constant scrutiny. Moreover, it has become a place where individual acts and conversations are also becoming new performances and new statements about what it means to be a moral Somali.

Secondly, I analyze ways in which Somali judgments of morality hinge on a person’s faith (iman). When someone is not fulfilling her duties of piety and/or to her family, her iman drains. With a light or weak iman, individuals are susceptible to various forms of mental and spiritual illness. In this second half, I look in detail at how some Somali women encourage spirit possession as an ethical and religious responsibility and a path toward spiritual and moral health, while others find it to be a sin and a sign of moral corruption. I conclude with a case study of a mental/spiritual illness that only affects those individuals who are not fulfilling their moral obligations. This disease, buufis, which is defined as the excessive desire to go abroad and manifests as an anxiety disorder, crystallizes the very complicated nature of life for Somalis in exile. Through buufis, we can observe the complicated connections among morality, space, self, and society.

Thanks to the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, The American Philosophical Society Lewis and Clark Field Scholar Grant, and various Washington University travel grants, I spent 21 months (2005-2008), living in Nairobi conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Somali refugee women.

Key words: refugees, Diasporas, morality, Islam, individual and social healing, trauma, gender, statelessness, Somalia, Kenya.