Muslim Families in Global Senegal: Money Takes Care of Shame
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Muslim Families in Global Senegal: Money Takes Care of Shame
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253223678 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2012 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Muslim Families in Global Senegal
Money Takes Care of Shame
By Beth Buggenhagen
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 Beth A. BuggenhagenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35710-6
CHAPTER 1
GLOBAL SENEGAL
WOMEN'S WEALTH, ISLAM, AND GLOBAL VOLATILITY
By early 2000, it was evident that families were frustrated with more than twenty years of policies of economic and political liberalization in Senegal. These reforms aimed at economic growth, implemented under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank starting in the 1980s, had been accompanied by substantial unemployment, shortages of food and other necessities, rural-urban migration, an urban housing crisis, and the declining availability and affordability of health care and education. As many Senegalese men faced the declining value of the agricultural potential of their land and the inability of the state to secure their social welfare, they sought moral renewal through submission to Muslim shaykhs.
The Muslim clergy responded to this fiscal and moral uncertainty by denouncing what they deemed to be inflated bridewealth payments and costly family ceremonies, especially women's practice of exchanging locally woven and dyed cloth, a measure of women's wealth and worth, and calling for an Islamic family law through which limits would be set on these payments. Additionally, religious associations, nongovernmental organizations, and others who professed an interest in national development characterized these practices as belonging to the realm of cosaan, Wolof for "custom" or "tradition," rather than Islam. Certainly, debates over Islam and the historical practices that predate its spread in West Africa are prevalent in the region and common elsewhere in the Muslim world as well (Cooper 1997:xxxiii). These debates have a considerable impact on women's lives. In Senegal, cloth became a contentious object of debate because—through its use in dress, display, and bestowal—it made forms of women's wealth and value visible, displaying the hidden potential of women as producers and bearers of history.
Importantly, the social criticism of women's dress and exchange practices took place in the context of protracted fiscal uncertainty. As much as women's practices were portrayed as traditional, and thus out of step with an Islamic modernity calling for moral austerity and reform, they were at the same time contemporaneous with economic and political shifts. Women's practices were not merely a response to or a way of making do in difficult times—what many scholars of Senegal have referred to as an economic crisis (Boone 1992; Cruise O'Brien 1988; Ebin 1992, 1993; Mbodj 1993) following the implementation of structural adjustment programs (SARS). To call these hard times a "crisis" and the varied responses "practices of making do" perhaps misses the point, for Senegalese men and women had endured some thirty years of so-called crisis by the time of this writing. To focus on the temporary nature of the notion of crisis is to overlook the unfolding practices through which men and women create new productive possibilities, of which women's dress and exchange practices are a part, even under conditions of fiscal volatility and restraint (Makhulu et al. 2010).
As African modernities across the continent have faced fundamental challenges in the wake of neoliberal restructuring and, in the case of Senegal, further entrenchment in globalized economic processes, ritual and religion have reemerged as critical junctures where men and women struggle over the terms of sociality (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). And this is apparent in the debate over women's ritual practices and religious authority in Senegal. The moral terms in which economic realities are apprehended has been an enduring theme in the ethnography of Africa (Apter 2005; Bastian 1996; Bohannan 1959; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, 1997; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Guyer, ed., 1995; Hutchinson 1996; Piot 1999; Shipton 1989; Weiss 1996). To understand the fiscal and moral terms in which Senegalese men and women sought social fortunes and futures, I sought to untangle the multilayered discourses of conservation and change in the Senegalese postcolony.
As I witnessed the gradual movement of most of the adult children in the Géer household and in Khar Yalla in general, who went overseas during the 1990s as students, wage laborers, and traders, I became interested in the lives of the women they left behind. How did they engage in processes of social production? How did they constitute the bonds of kith and kin and secure their future, as increasing numbers of family members left the country? It might seem that the productive activities in which many Dakaroise engaged were limited in scale—that they were merely strategies for getting by and making do in the face of inadequate economic resources. Indeed, scholars of Senegal have deftly accounted for the exceptional ways in which Senegalese se débrouillent (make do) (Mottin-Sylla 1987; Mustafa 1998; Ndione 1994; Roberts 1996). However, these strategies for creating vast social networks of reciprocal exchange, glossed as tradition, were not only enabling women to get by. They indexed fundamental changes in cycles of domestic production and reproduction that were under way, which were wrought in part by the vast outward migration of Senegalese men and, increasingly, women in the context of global economic volatility.
Economic hardship, not only the lack of employment but also the absence of productive possibilities, from constituting families through marriage and home building to achieving social distinction, sent many men and women abroad in search of wage labor and capital. The majority of young people who left were traders and devotees of the Muslim Sufi way, the Murid tariqa. Ninety percent of women and men in Senegal are Sunni Muslims, and the majority belong to one of four Sufi orders in the country—the Layanne, Tijaniyya, Qadiriyya, and Muridiyya (Villalón 2004). Many claim that the Murid order is the fastest growing in part due to its economic success. More than any other Sufi order, Murids have woven cargo and currency through the official and unofficial spaces of the global economy to become an economic force in the Senegalese postcolony. Along these same routes, Murid migrants in New York City and other global cities have circulated the media of social production, including cloth, portraits and videos of family ceremonies, and religious offerings, texts, and images. Murid men and women have constructed and adorned domestic interiors and exteriors, bodies and fashions, and their sacred city of Tuba to defy the potential for loss that is inherent in the desire to circulate valued objects, to invest value in others, and to project themselves and their vision for their community into the future.
The debates over the politics of social production, women's ritual practices, and religious authority can be understood as struggles over the nature of value. These struggles over the constitution of social and moral orders took place in an era that was marked by the contradictory rise of both the market and new modes of regulation of global Muslim networks, related to the United States–led global war on terror. Yet Senegalese Muslims have created value over the longue durée of currency instability and global volatility through participating in what Jane Guyer (2004:128) has referred to as "repertoires" of fiscal performance, including offerings to shaykhs, operating at the interface of regulated and unregulated economies on a global scale, partaking in microfinance projects, and bestowing cloth wealth in family ceremonies.
MURID GLOBAL CIRCUITS
To be a Murid (disciple) is to be part of a tariqa (way or path) of esoteric practice through which one seeks to achieve divine union in this life through the guidance of a spiritual master and learned scholar, who is known as a shaykh. For the 5 million adherents to the Murid tariqa, this Sufi way offers not only the promise of eternal prosperity but also access to the forms of trade and production of worldly wealth. The Murid tariqa has connected the teachings of its founding figure, the scholar Amadou Bamba Mbacke (ca. 1851–1927), concerning labor, sacrifice, prosperity, and salvation, to the struggle and strife of migrant life. At the turn of the twentieth century, men and women in northwestern Senegal who were seeking to evade French colonial rule, to acquire agricultural land for the production of peanuts as a cash crop, and, ultimately, to secure their salvation congregated around Amadou Bamba, whom they regarded as a locus of divine grace (Robinson 1991). Bamba proffered a soteriology in which agricultural labor in the service of a shaykh was an essential mode of spiritual discipline, thus enabling Sufism to become a mass movement (Babou 2007a). Murids rationalized peanut production for export and pioneered new lands in rural eastern Senegal, and thus "the old social order," wrote the political scientist Donal Cruise O'Brien, was reconstituted "on a new, religious basis" (1971b:15). Casted members of Wolof society, former slaves, and warriors found new patrons in the Murid shaykhs (Copans 1980:226; Klein 1998:199), and royal families regained their former status through marriages with the religious elite (Cruise O'Brien 1971b:35). Subsequently, those whose mothers descended from the freeborn assumed the highest positions within the Murid way (Bop 2005:1107).
In the postcolonial period, following the drop in price for peanuts (Senegal's main export) in the world market, a series of devastating droughts, locust infestations, and a massive famine that plagued the Sahel in the 1970s, rural Murid disciples, like many West Africans, migrated to urban areas to search for work and, eventually, overseas, some as university students and others to trade African art in European and North American cities (Babou 2002; Carter 1997; Cruise O'Brien 1988; A. Diop 1985; M. Diop 1981; Diouf 2000; Ebin 1993; Salem 1981; Stoller 2002). Murid disciples succeeded in transitioning to trade in the urban areas by assisting each other and seeking out new patrons in the Murid way (Babou 2002; Creevey 1970; Cruise O'Brien 1988; Diouf 2000; Ebin 1986; Irvine 1974; Mustafa 1998). These patrons offered advice, housing, credit, capital, and legal services to newly arrived urban migrants. Murid migrants continued to patronize their rural shaykhs through the formation of urban dahira (circle) associations and religious offerings aimed at building the great mosque in the sacred city of Tuba to fulfill the vision of Amadou Bamba.
Throughout the postcolonial period, the rural-urban migration continued and, eventually, Murid disciples extended their networks of trade overseas, first to France and then across Europe to the United States and a number of global cities. Murid traders rarely went abroad as individuals. Their sojourns were part of larger family strategies, which were frequently financed by women's participation in rotating savings and credit associations. Furthermore, women were instrumental in building the reputations of honor that underpinned the men's trade through their exchanges in family ceremonies. Trade took place often in the unregulated sectors of local, national, and global economies. Traders relied on trust, family networks, and religious solidarity to succeed in obtaining credit and capital and in building clientele.
Today, the sacred capital of Tuba is the center of an expansive import-export economy as a result of Murid industry, which is linked through the port of Dakar to an immense market. Murid merchants control the major markets in and around the capital city, including its largest cloth market, Marché HLM (named after Habitations à Loyer Modéré, the state-financed housing project for the middle class) (Mustafa 1998). Dakar does not fit conventional criteria as a global city—it is not a financial capital, nor is it a locus of technological innovation, and it has just one newly installed call center. Scheld (2003) has shown that this capital city in the global south is a hub of cultural and economic innovation, which is inscribed through the migrant bodies that filter through it and the extensive global reach of its massive import-export economy.
By the 1990s, Murid disciples had shifted their investments from agriculture to real estate, cement, and transportation. As in remittance economies elsewhere, real estate speculation and construction flourished following the decades of rural-to-urban migration. Real estate development was led in part by Murid successes abroad since overseas traders built new homes with cash, unwilling or unable to secure loans from banks in Senegal with their prohibitive interest rates. These houses were constructed in piecemeal fashion; with each trip home, additional truckloads of sand, gravel, cement, and rebar arrived on migrants' properties (Buggenhagen 2001; Melly 2010). Some of the most common stories of thievery in Dakar during my fieldwork revolved around neighbors who were accused of stealing sand from another's pile, bowl by bowl, night after night. Despite the appearance of prosperity in Dakar, promoted by real estate developers who targeted Senegalese abroad and supported by the volume of construction activity as evidenced by piles of brick, rebar, and sand throughout the city, many of these newly constructed dwellings in the city center and its outskirts were more like sandcastles: their half-built structures were worn down by the elements after years of inactivity. Some of these were like homesteads, their cement outlines on the outer reaches of Dakar preventing the land from reverting back to the government under the National Domain Law of 1964, although these homes were often razed as soon as they were discovered by the state. Among the builders were also young women who went abroad and invested their earnings in apartment complexes in the urban periphery of Dakar (Tall 1994). In addition to participating in real estate speculation, many young men also spoke of building family homes, which they constructed for potential brides, existing wives, or their parents, whom they sought to transport to the city from the countryside.
Young men and women not only invested their wealth in real estate and in building family homes in Dakar, they also endeavored to invest their earnings in the development of the spiritual metropolis of Tuba (Ross 1995) whose central mosque and the homes that radiated from this sacred center aimed to realize the prophecy of the founding figure of the Murid order, Amadou Bamba, that Tuba would be a spiritual center. In the 1990s, due to this construction, Tuba emerged as the second-largest city in Senegal and a locus of rural-rural migration (Gueye 1999). As young women gave generously to their religious associations, young men who aspired to invest in homes on the land in and around Tuba were supported by land grants awarded by shaykhs, which were employed to maintain and recruit new disciples to bolster their positions with respect to the central hierarchy. Thus, there was pressure to expand the sacred domain of Tuba beyond the boundaries initially granted to this independent administrative district by the French colonialists in exchange for the residents' cultivation of peanuts. Additionally, many sons from rural Murid villages around Tuba replaced the millet stalk homes of their fathers with cement buildings as a symbol of their success abroad. In turn, these fathers, who had once controlled the lineage through the allocation of peanut fields, lands that had long since dried up, came to rely on their sons' remittances of cash. These male elders became merely symbolic, serving as placeholders for land that would otherwise revert back to the government if it was unoccupied. Through the National Domain Law of 1964, one goal of which was to combat traditional landlordism (Irvine 1974:17), the state had nationalized 95 percent of its territory, prohibited land sales, and assumed the sole right to grant title to land (Galvan 2004:134).
Male and female disciples also gave offerings of cash, addiya, to shaykhs through which they entered into a circuit ofbaraka (blessings or grace); these blessings were thought to be spiritual and material at once for, through them, disciples gained access not merely to eternal prosperity but also to this-worldly wealth. Addiya initially contributed to the building of the impressive Murid mosque in Tuba and have since funded the expansion of Tuba's infrastructure as it has been transformed from a small rural village into a major residential, commercial, and spiritual center where many disciples seek to be buried to avoid intercession so that they can enter directly into heaven. For them, Tuba both ties heaven and earth together (Ross 1995) and also incorporates global locations into its center. The realization of these homes in Tuba places transnational traders at the crossroads of heaven and earth, where profits meet prophets and prayers meet prosperity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Muslim Families in Global Senegal by Beth Buggenhagen. Copyright © 2012 Beth A. Buggenhagen. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsNames and RelationshipsPrologue: Welcome to Khar Yalla1. Global Senegal2. Homes and Their Histories3. The Promise of Paradise4. A Tale of Two Sisters5. A Lamb Slaughtered6. Home Economics7. Only TroubleEpilogueGlossary of Arabic and Wolof TermsNotesReferencesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
A lively, insightful, and important study of exchange practices between Senegal and a circuit of global trade. The innovative focus is on the meanings, not the social and economic functions, of exchange.
A first-rate ethnography of Muslim women in Dakar. . . . provides not only a wealth of detail but extremely fine-grained analysis of women's exchange networks, both in the domains of commerce but especially in ritual contexts.