Vernacular Resilience and conflicting temporalities in Côte d’Ivoire: Between resistance, resignation, débrouillardise and hope

Building on critical scholarship on multiple resiliencies, this article takes temporalities seriously as the basis for its analysis. While disasters are usually described by resilience scholars as moments of temporal rupture, the article engages with different notions of temporalities with respect to long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices in Côte d’Ivoire. It involves looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience, drawing on a combination of ethnographic, historical and constructivist methodologies to identify alternative and subaltern forms of resilience. It shows how the everyday and emergency blur and become indistinct, revealing the outcome of long processes of slow violence. These are the outcome of racial colonial governance and post-colonial state neglect. Vernacular resilience takes the form of the distrust of the racial and the institutional other and is about cultural resistance. The ecological crisis should not underscore the importance and wealth of water and a way of living. However, the cultures and practices of débrouillardise clearly show the tension between human and ecological time, leading to a breach in the collective governance of resources. Finally, vernacular resilience also takes the form of an imaginary, a hope in the future.