The work of being stuck: Caring masculinities in Mali and Burkina Faso

This article draws on comparative ethnography undertaken in a Malian train station where trains no longer circulate, and a market in Burkina Faso where the flow of customers has ebbed away. In doing so, we explore how workers deal with protracted economic and security crises that have eroded their working lives and thrown the meaning of their labour into question. In both sites, the primarily male workers perpetuated their routines, not only to sustain their workplaces but also to maintain both a sense of a meaningful working life and their masculine identity as breadwinners. They thereby aim to preserve the hope that trains and customers might one day return, restoring their work lives to their previous productive states. We focus on how workers engage in various rhythms of care to ‘stay put’ amidst an uncertain present, and an even more precarious future. Through acts of mutual support – assisting fellow workers, giving intergenerational advice, offering emotional support through religious care and food-sharing, and tending to the material conditions of their workplaces – they create a network of care grounded in both social and physical infrastructure. By analysing the ways in which workers care for each other and their space of work, this article sheds light on the ways masculine affective caring underpins their struggle to ‘stay put’ and continue deriving value from labour, even when this may appear difficult or impossible from the outside. In doing so, this dual case study illuminates ambiguous relationships between work and meaning, crisis and normalcy, and masculinity and care.