Beth Buggenhagen Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/25244

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Review of Sufism and Jihad in Modern Senegal: the Murid Order by John Glover
(International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2008) Buggenhagen, Beth
The Senegalese Sufi way, Tariqa Murid, has been the subject of extensive scholarly research. Where historians of Islam in West Africa have conventionally used French conquest as their starting point, Glover focuses on continuity and transformation over a longer time period to understand the emergence of this Senegalese Sufi way as a reform and revival movement. Thus his study addresses the development of the Murid way in the context of the rise of reformist Islam, Wolof civil wars, and the impact of the transatlantic trade in slaves. Glover is interested in the multiple histories through which one can tell the story of Murid modernities. Neither an alternative to nor aligned with colonialism, in Glover's conception Murid modernities speak to the incorporation of the tariqa into local, regional, and global circulations through trade, labor, military service, cash crop production, and taxes.
Review of Navigating the African Diaspora, by Donald Martin Carter
(International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2012) Buggenhagen, Beth
In this strikingly told tale, anthropologist Donald Martin Carter offers his readers a beautifully written story of exile, personal and collective. In it, Carter tells the story of diaspora, not one, but many throughout history and how they are linked through a pervasive experience of invisibility. Carter tells us, "This project is the result of an itinerant scholar traveling the byways of academic life" (p. xiii). His work, through narrative exposition and field based research, is to make the connections he sees visible to others. Throughout the book, Carter seeks to expose his personal experience of "navigating diaspora" and to think about how the collective experience of diaspora is represented. Navigating the African Diaspora goes beyond the analysis of the political economy of migration to look at the meanings these journeys create for those on them and those seeking to understand.
Ahmadou Bamba
(Oxford University Press, 2005) Buggenhagen, Beth
In his lifetime Ahmadou Bamba acquired a following of disciples who would become known after his death as the Muridiyya, a Muslim Sufi way. Sufism is an esoteric dimension of Muslim practice and thought in which disciples seek the path to divine union in this life. The Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Babou suggests that at the time of Bamba’s death in 1927, estimates of Murid disciples totaled about 100,000.
Review of Cloth in West African History by Colleen E. Kriger. AltaMira Press, 2006
(Museum Anthropology Review, 2007) Buggenhagen, Beth
As Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider argued so powerfully in their 1989 volume Cloth andHuman Experience (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), Western scholarship had, up to that point, under-analyzed the centrality of cloth and clothing to politics and to processes of social production. Weiner and Schneider recognized that cloth had been largely disregarded by scholars in part because unlike other forms of value—hard objects such as metals, coins, and stones—soft objects like cloth, feathers, and fibers had been considered ephemeral and fragile, poor conveyers of social histories and individual and collective identities. Yet it was cloth’s potential for decay and loss that made it such an ideal object through which to express the continuities and discontinuities of human life. Likewise, Colleen E. Kriger, an historian as well as a fiber artist, places cloth and cloth producers at the center of a global history into which West Africans were drawn, in part through textiles. Eschewing analysis of fibers based on a single linguistic community, locale, or artisan, Kriger argues that attention to the spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, and embellishing of cloth reveals a social and spatial complexity of production that spanned geographical regions. Moreover, Kriger emphasizes that it was the visual and tactile acumen of African artisans and consumers that shaped the market for fabrics, yarns, and trimmings into which European and Muslim traders endeavored to enter over the pre-colonial and colonial period.
Review of African Textiles, by John Gillow. Thames and Hudson, 2009
(Museum Anthropology Review, 2011) Buggenhagen, Beth
John Gillow’s African Textiles: Color and Creativity Across a Continent surveys the production of cloth and clothing across the African Continent. Each of the five sections covers a region of the African continent (West Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa). Importantly, all of the examples covered are handcrafted. Gillow does an impressive job of including not only woven textiles, but tied and dyed and beaded textiles as well as leatherwork and other examples of clothing wrought from skins. African Textiles includes a glossary, resources for further reading, a guide to museum collections, and a map of the continent.
Review of Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas
(Museum Anthropology Review, 2014) Buggenhagen, Beth
This work is a book review considering the title Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas edited by Susan Cooksey.
Review of The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies
(Museum Anthropology Review, 2016) Buggenhagen, Beth
This work is a book review considering the title The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies edited by Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury.
Dak’Art 11th Biennale of Contemporary African Art
(African Arts, 2016) Buggenhagen, Beth
What does it mean to produce, circulate, and display art in a global context from the view-point of Africa’s westernmost city, Dakar? One of the ten major biennales in the world, the Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art, is an international exhibition featuring contemporary art produced by artists based on the continent and in the Diaspora. Cura-tors Elise Atangana, Abdelkader Damani, and Ugochukwu Smooth Nzewi organized the eleventh edition of Dak’Art under the theme of “Producing the Common.” This theme took the notion of “Tout monde” from Martini-can writer and poet Edouard Glissant, which promotes a vision of a world of flourishing cultural diversity in unanticipated directions underscoring perhaps the global relevance of the experience of precarity and improvisation.
Area Studies and the Challenges of Creating a Space for Public Debate
(Africa Today, 2016) Buggenhagen, Beth
Scholarship in the African humanities—art history, cultural anthropology, history, literature, religion, and so forth—has transcended disciplinary ways of knowing, transformed scholarly conversations from a focus on difference between Africa and the West to an emphasis on connections and convergence, and emphasized the universality of the particular. Today, the African humanities must confront another limitation in scholarly discourse about Africa: the presentist priorities of schools of global studies. If it appears that claims to particularistic knowledge of social and historical processes and linguistic competence are falling on deaf ears, it may be because the logic of securing “America’s Place in the World,” the topic of the spring 2016 symposium in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, no longer depends on knowledge of cultural processes produced by academics based in the university system. The United States moved on in the fall of 2014 from cultural tactics such as the Human Terrain Systems (HTS), developed by the US Army in 2006, to technical interventions like drones—interventions that do not rely on human sentiment or error, and big data like computational social sciences and predictive modeling (Gezari 2015). HTS embedded anthropologists (though the major scholarly association, the American Anthropological Association, rightly opposed HTS) and other social scientists with military units to provide regional expertise and cultural knowledge to aid military intelligence gathering and policymaking. In this new climate, dominated by technological solutions to social and political problems, largely managed by the Department of Defense, how can scholars of the African humanities based in the university system continue to make a case for the knowledge that we produce, which prioritizes humanistic understanding and humane values? It is these values, I argue, that foster public debate on the central issues of our time.
African Artistic Practices and Discourses in and out of Sweden. A Conversation with Ethnomusicologist Ryan T. Skinner
(Africa Today, 2017) Buggenhagen, Beth; Skinner, Ryan T.
Sweden has long been known for its tolerance and openness. During the twentieth century, Swedish missionaries paved the way for Africans to migrate to Sweden, Swedish political figures campaigned for decolonization, and by the 1970s, Sweden was attracting people fleeing war-torn areas such as the Horn of Africa (Kubai 2016; Kushkush 2016). Yet recently, Sweden has had to contend with a sharp increase in the numbers of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Once a nation with one of the most progressive stances on migration, it reversed its immigration policy in 2015, in part responding to the unprecedented numbers of families migrating to Europe from Syria, West Africa, and elsewhere. Sweden began to control its borders with Denmark and to admit only the minimum number of refugees required by its EU membership (Russo 2017). This contemporary conjuncture has fueled debates in Sweden over race, racial identity, and national belonging.

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