African Studies Program

Permanent link for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/21

African Studies Homepage

Browse

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

A Snapshot of Happiness: Photo Albums, Respectability, and Economic Uncertainty in Muslim Senegal
(Cambridge University Press, 2014-02) Buggenhagen, Beth
Young women who live in the improvised urban spaces on the outskirts of Senegal's capital city, Dakar, extemporize their respectability in a time of fiscal uncertainty through personal photography. The neighbourhood of Khar Yalla is an improvised, interconnected and multilayered space settled by families removed from the city centre during clean-up campaigns from the 1960s to the 1970s, by families escaping conflict in Casamance and Guinea-Bissau, and by recent rural migrants. As much as Khar Yalla is an improvised neighbourhood, it is also a space of improvisation. When women pose for, display, and pass around portraits of themselves at key moments in their social life, whether in the medium of social networking sites or photo albums, they reveal as much as they conceal the elements of individual and social life. They index their social networks and constitute their urban space not as peripheral, but as central to the lives and imaginations of their siblings and spouses who live abroad. Photographs actively shape and construct urban spaces, which are often loud, unruly and fraught spaces with vast inequalities and incommensurabilities. How women deal with economic and social disparity, within their own families, communities, and globally, is the subject of this article.
Are Births Just “Women’s Business?” Gift Exchange, Value, and Global Volatility in Muslim Senegal
(American Anthropological Association, 2011-11) Buggenhagen, Beth
Through global circuits of wage labor and capital, the Murid way has become an economic force in the Senegalese postcolony amid conditions of protracted global volatility. In this article, I analyze women's actions within these global circuits. Women create value by giving gifts during the celebration of births and marriages, gifts that are the product of and the motivating force behind Murid global trade. Female ritual activities, on which male honor rests, draw women into conflict with the Murid clergy, which views women's actions as customary and not part of its modern, austere, and global vision of Islam in Senegal.
Fashioning Piety: Dress, Money, and Faith among Senegalese Muslims in Post 9/11 New York City
(American Anthropological Association, 2012-04) Buggenhagen, Beth
Many Senegalese women migrate to make a living and build themselves up. The distance enables them to resist daily demands on their income and makes it possible for them to save and to invest in long term projects such as home building, their children's education, and family and religious celebrations. Yet, social criticism often blames women for the problems of marriage: such as the high divorce rate, infidelity, and financial squabbling between spouses. In this paper, I focus on the religious aspects of women's migration; I argue that Murid women deflect criticism of their wealth earned abroad by investing in the signs and symbols of a Muslim Sufi congregation. By visiting (ziyara), dressing up (sañse), and donating generously to shaykhs (addiya), Murid women display their wealth, convey the strength of their social networks, and construct themselves as candidates for salvation. Murid women engage in the global economy and preserve their distinctively Murid vision of the world and their place in it. Is it possible to understand their global engagement as a form of cosmopolitanism, as a practice and a form of consciousness, which is rooted in history and which is universal? The restructuring of the Senegalese state under neoliberal reform and its aftermath in the 1990s and into 2000 has made Muslim global networks important to livelihoods at home and yet, Muslim networks have come under scrutiny globally as the U.S. led Global War on Terror lingers on.
Islam and the Media of Devotion in and out of Senegal
(American Anthropological Association, 2010-11) Buggenhagen, Beth
Few devotees of the Muridiyya, a Sufi congregation that emerged in colonial Senegal at the turn of the 20th century, have the opportunity to glimpse or touch their spiritual masters. Exalted Murid figures rarely leave their compounds in rural Tuba, and access to them is restricted to high-ranking initiates such as Muslim scholars, government officials, and business leaders. Ordinary disciples are more likely to view religious figures in the variety of media circulating in and out of Senegal. The desire for and appreciation of mediation to facilitate proper practice and proximity to the divine distinguish Murid adepts from their Sunni counterparts. The electronic mediation of devotional practices produces feelings of nearness to spiritual leaders for disciples in Senegal and abroad. Through visual practices related to electronic media, devotees receive religious merit and grace that lead to spiritual and material enrichment and create their spiritual community.
Picking up the Thread: Recasting Dogon Ideas of Speech in the Work of Geneviève Calame-Griaule
(American Anthropological Association, 2006-06) Buggenhagen, Beth
Taking into account the significant body of critique built up around the Dogon corpus, I return to Geneviève Calame-Griaule s ethnography of speech among the Dogon, Ethnologie et langage: la parole chez les Dogon (Words and the Dogon World), to appreciate its role in moving language to the center of ethnographic research. Calame-Griaule s contributions included attention to the full range of communicative practices, giving theoretical weight to her interlocutors embodied linguistic practices, emphasizing the Dogon positioning of speech in the physical and social body, and stressing the importance of analyzing how context renders speech both meaningful and efficacious. Calame-Griaule departed significantly from the Dogon school by focusing not on language and cosmology but rather on language in context that is, everyday talk. Calame-Griaule s work reveals a conception of the types of linkages possible between sign relations and language and materiality. In addition to recasting Calame-Griaule s ethnography in relation to developments in anthropology and linguistics across the Atlantic, I also consider her theoretical insights into dialogicality and context in relation to her particular subjectivity within the Dogon school and among her Dogon interlocutors.
Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households
(Brill, 2001) Buggenhagen, Beth
This paper analyzes the disjuncture between the projected prosperity of male migrant traders of the Murid Sufi order and the actual ability of these traders to maintain the social relations that engender wealth. I focus on an exchange of bridewealth that ultimately resulted in a collapsed marriage to show how households are made and unmade across time and space by diasporic practices. I aim to show how two decades of neoliberal reform in Senegal have had unintended consequences for the prospects of social production. The movement of male traders into transnational trade networks to shore up a stagnant local economy and to reproduce the social and moral order has unanticipated consequences for women's authority. Women claim male earnings not only to run the household, but also to finance the family ceremonies-baptisms, marriages and funerals-and the social payments that accompany these occasions. Women also seek commodities obtained through male trade to exchange in life-cycle rituals. For women, foreign commodities, rather than undermining the production of blood ties, are the very means of making those ties a social fact. In Murid families, the rejuvenation of domestic rituals through access to male earnings abroad sets in motion the production of women-headed households and ultimately of lineages.
Question and Answer Session One. Symposium: "A Contested Resource: Oil in Africa"
(The African Studies Program, Indiana University, Bloomington and the Indiana Consortium for International Programs, 2013-03-22) Buggenhagen, Beth
Question and Answer Session: Politics, Power and Poverty: Who Wins in Africa’s Resource Boom?
(The African Studies Program, Indiana University, Bloomington and the Indiana Consortium for International Programs, 2013-09-13) Buggenhagen, Beth

Browse

Browsing African Studies Program by Author "Buggenhagen, Beth"