Masquerades of modernity : power and secrecy in Casamance, Senegal
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Masquerades of modernity : power and secrecy in Casamance, Senegal
（International African library, 36）
Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, c2007
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-216) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How do those on the margins of modernity face the challenges of globalization? This book demonstrates that secrecy is one of the means by which a society on the fringe of modernity produces itself as locality. Focusing on initiation rituals, masked performances and modern art, this study shows that rituals and performances long deemed obsolete, serve the insertion of their performers in the world at their own terms. The Jola and Mandinko people of the Casamance region in Senegal have always used their rituals and performances to incorporate the impact of Islam, colonialism, capitalism, and contemporary politics. Their performances of secrecy have accommodated these modern powers and continue to do so today. The performers incorporate the modern and redefine modernity through secretive practices. Their traditions are not modern inventions, but traditional ways of dealing with modernity. This book will interest anthropologists, historians, political scientists and all those studying how globalisation affects peripheral societies. It shows that secrecy, performed as a weapon of the weak, empowers their performers. Secrecy serves to mark boundaries and define the local in the global.
Table of Contents
- Part I Introduction
- Power of Secrecy
- Part II Transitions
- Jola Initiations, Gendered Localities
- Out of Diaspora, Into the Forest
- The Politics of Representation
- Part III: Trajectories
- Mandinko Initiation: The Making of an Urban Locality
- Secrecy, Sacrilege and the State
- Part IV Traces
- Masquerade and Migration
- The Art of Tradition
- Writing Secrecy.
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