Chelsie Yount Selective Solidarity: Children and Middle-Class Moralities in Transnational Senegal University of Pennsylvania Press 196 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN 9781512827576
Chelsie Yount
On Selective Solidarity: Children and Middle-Class Moralities in Transnational Senegal
Interview of
October 30, 2025
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In a nutshell
Selective Solidarity is an ethnography about middle-class Senegalese families in Paris. It foregrounds the experiences of the French-born children of educated immigrants from Dakar, to consider how young people learn to take part in economic relations. Analyzing everyday exchanges of language, food, and gifts in Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar, the book examines how children grapple with the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, moral expectations they encounter at home and abroad. It then asks what their practical struggles can tell us about the ways middle-class decline in Europe is impacting kinship connections in the African diaspora.
Through fine-grained analysis of children’s and families’ daily lives, Selective Solidarity reveals how the racialized effects of middle-class decline in France radiate outward, reconfiguring transnational family connections and reproducing global inequalities of mobility within Senegalese families. The Senegalese parents I worked with all arrived in Paris fluent in French, on student or family visas. While they had held privileged positions back in Senegal, this offered precious little protection in the face of escalating tensions surrounding Islam and immigration in France. Middle-class Senegalese described feeling like they were under constant pressure to regulate their behaviors to communicate belonging in France, in the hopes that their children could avoid being categorized alongside stigmatized, lower-class immigrants.
In addition to participant observation in Senegalese apartments in Paris, I accompanied families to Dakar on children’s summer vacations from school. Prolonged economic crisis in West Africa has made money and other resources sent from abroad critical sources of support for families. Remittances surpass the total sum of development aid that international donors provide the country. Whether or not migrants – and their children – recognize their kinship relations in Africa is critical to the material reproduction of Senegalese households.
At its heart, Selective Solidarity is about children’s experiences sharing food and giving gifts in Paris and on trips to Dakar. This book considers questions that are central to experiences of family life in global capitalism, focusing on middle-class (downward) mobility to highlight the ways socioeconomic relations are redefined as resources are stretched thin. Global inequities are made palpable to children as they travel between France and Senegal, shifting between stigma and prestige on their summer vacations. Highlighting the uneven terrain of transnational kinship, Selective Solidarity examines families’ attempts to navigate tiered migration trajectories as heightened tensions surrounding migration reconfigure class structures globally.
The wide angle
The book is located, in its theory and methods, at the intersections of linguistic and economic anthropology. Inverting the classic concept of “moral economy,” Selective Solidarity develops a theory of “economic moralities,” that is, normative expectations regarding material circulation. I focus on economic moralities, plural, to emphasize the multiplicity of moral pressures that shape economic relations. Directing attention to moralities rather than economies also helps avoid the inadvertent reproduction of dichotomous portrayals of “moral economies” as opposed to some “real” or unmarked, market economy. Instead, it invites a cross-scalar analysis of the ways that social actors alternate between diverse moral positions in unfolding interaction, reproducing economic practices across contexts and scales.
To do so, it draws on the tools of linguistic and semiotic anthropology. Linguistic anthropology, with its long history of analyzing language in unfolding interaction, is equipped with nuanced concepts (like interdiscursivity, indexicality, and semiotic ideologies) for examining the ways that economic moralities may be drawn on in conversation to shape resource flows. Audio recordings and transcript analysis allowed me to examine the subtle ways economic moralities become palpable in families’ everyday interactions, shaping participants’ uptake of the situation and influencing exchanges of resources.
I came to study the ways moral language moves money, via the study of food. In 2008, I did a master’s thesis at the EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Paris, on eating practices in Senegal. Carrying out fieldwork in neighborhoods across Dakar, I realized that, rich or poor, families were eating roughly the same dishes every week (ceebu jën and two-marmite dishes, like yassa and mafé). Bourdieusian distinction applied only to certain details (whether a household could afford quality fish, whether a cook used bouillon cubes with artificial red coloring). Food was not an index of personal identity. Instead, what mattered to people in Dakar was who ate with whom, who was cooking, who a household was feeding (supporting), which households were collaborating to cook and eat together. Moral discourses concerning food were focused on the expectation to share with anyone present at meal (or snack) time. People explicitly describe virtuous food sharing as functioning in similar ways to the circulation of wealth or monetary support, comparing eaters around the communal dish to society, where adults who work must feed children, elders, and the unemployed. In a sense, the book is the result of years of puzzling over the moral discourses that Senegalese used to explain and shape acts of food sharing.
A close-up
While my colleagues might zero in on one of the concepts the book examines (economic moralities, scales of solidarity, Facebook families, etc.) I hope that a reader who is just browsing might do the opposite. That is, if one were to simply flip through the pages, I hope some detail of the empirical material might catch their eye first – the photo of the overflowing bookshelves of a “Senegalese intellectual” in Paris or a family story of a summer trip to Dakar – so that the banal details of everyday life might provide a hold to grasp on to as it dives into more theoretical ideas.
My Senegalese interlocutors are such astute observers of social life in Dakar and its Parisian diaspora that I hope their quotes stand out to someone flipping through. In the introduction, for example, Nafi’s idea of a “bush to banlieue (suburb)” type of immigrant – one who came directly from rural Africa to the poor suburbs of Paris – and thus, who lacked the cultural capital, class privilege, and education that facilitated “integration” in France for the middle-class Senegalese I worked with. The titles of chapters 3 and 4 are quotes from discussions in Senegalese families, children’s and parents’ reflections on their own and others’ expectations regarding exchanges of food, gifts, and money. A Senegalese mother complained that her children are “sometimes too generous” (Ch. 3) in redistributing ice cream bars to their friends outside. The chapter then considers how her teasing of her son’s generosity was overlain worries that he get caught up with the “wrong crowd” in Paris. “What did you bring me?” (Ch. 4) was a quote from Badara, a high-school boy in Paris, who expressed frustration at the demands for gifts (sarice) that he and his family receive from relatives in Senegal. The chapter examines his story of one vacation in Dakar when he was forced to give his cousins clothes from his own suitcase before leaving to go back to Paris. It considers how youth grapple with economic moralities, not only in events like the act of distributing items from Badara’s suitcase, but also in the telling of the story afterward, which reveals children’s perceptions of the moral logics that legitimate requests for gifts and money in Senegal.
Lastly
The book is called “Selective Solidarity,” not because the middle-class Senegalese I worked with in Paris were particularly picky about the people with whom they were willing to share. On the contrary, the book exists thanks to the generosity and hospitality of all the Senegalese families I met. Rather, I mean that all solidarity is selective solidarity. Whether at the level of the state or interpersonal relations, the rights and responsibilities associated with “solidarity” can never be extended indiscriminately and are always contingent on group membership.
I hope that the book urges us to rethink value-laden concepts like “solidarity” to consider how these moral notions are working to shape the circulation of material resources in specific ways, asking which sorts of practices, carried out by which types of people are condoned, valued, and legitimated by the powers that be, and which people and practices are questioned, critiqued, and discouraged in the everyday language that surrounds them.
I hope that the book urges readers to rethink some of the banal moments of family life, to consider how practices like eating and sharing food are tangled up with societal assumptions about family and economic relations, who should take care of and provide for whom. I hope it urges readers to critically question concepts that like immigrant “integration” or “middle class-ness” itself, to consider how these can be used to exclude and limit people’s access to resources. And finally, I hope that the book encourages us to consider the many ways that children are already taking part in (transnational) economic relations.
If we accept this book’s premise that the material exchanges that make up children’s and families’ everyday lives are fundamentally economic, we are forced to reconsider the relationship between so-called “microeconomic” and “macroeconomic” processes. The household appears at the center of the global economy, fleeting and forgettable moments of family life providing the foundation for larger-scale resource flows, like migrants’ remittances that make up 10% of Senegal’s GDP.
