Résumés > Local lives, global shifts: Identity-making processes among Djiboutian women

Jeudi 6 novembre 2025 - 14h45-15h30

Ibtissem BATTOUM, PhD Student, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Enjeux Contemporains, University Lumière Lyon 2.

Identity-making processes among Djiboutian women living in both urban and rural contexts reveal complex negotiations shaped by social constraints, cultural inheritances, and global influences. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Djibouti, this study examines how identity is constructed and continuously reshaped within these intersecting dynamics.

Far from a binary opposition between tradition and modernity, women’s narratives highlight diverse and creative strategies of adaptation that articulate cultural continuity alongside aspirations for change. These identity-making practices unfold through the reinterpretation of gender roles, representations of femininity, positions within kinship networks, and relationships to the body. The discourses illustrate the ongoing negotiation between individual and collective identities, balancing social prescriptions with desires for transformation.

The identity-making processes of Djiboutian women appear fluid and dynamic, shaped by socio-economic transformations, the rise of digital technologies, and evolving intergenerational relationships. In the face of these upheavals, women deploy strategies of adaptation and circumvention while navigating familial and communal expectations. The narratives reveal their ability to navigate diverse spheres of change - material, such as access to urban infrastructure or digital tools; discursive, through new ways of speaking about self and gender; and symbolic, in shifting cultural values and social roles - to transform and circumvent obstacles
without always rupturing or confronting. These identity-making practices reflect an ongoing self-fashioning, situated between the affirmation of cultural heritage and the pursuit of alternative possibilities. Embedded in wider processes of social transformation, local reference points are continually rearticulated in dialogue with global influences.

By focusing on an understudied field site, this research in Djibouti contributes to broader debates on contemporary forms of identity-making, meaning-making, and social cohesion in postcolonial societies undergoing transition.