In the postcolonial period, Murids (disciples of the Sufi path of Amadou Bamba Mbacke) expanded their trade networks across Europe and into the US, whilst negotiating control over land and production in Senegal’s globalised groundnut economy. Examining women’s participation in these networks, Muslim families in global Senegal presents an ethnography of the transmission of social value through cloth, life-cycle rituals, and religious offerings. Beth Buggenhagen focuses on the social context of cloth and clothing to contribute to debates about Islam, custom and social reproduction in the setting of economic volatility. Through the examination of marriages, alliances, feasts and gift-giving in one family, she aims to illuminate the ties between families in Senegal and elsewhere. The narrative that emerges is densely woven, multilayered, and not easily encapsulated. It incorporates useful insights into the enduring questions around marriage and migration, land and labour, Islam and commerce, households and relations of production, that require a careful engagement with understandings of capitalist transformation and social change.
The first three chapters are focused on the connections between shifts in social production, the constitution of households, and changing forms of value. This part of the book outlines some of the key transformations in Senegal’s economy, including the alienation of land from lineage holders, currency instability, plummeting prices for groundnuts, drought and famine. The second and larger part of the book tells the story of the Géer family, focusing on the divergent paths of two sisters and on other family dynamics to narrate exchange practices including those in the marriage process, the hajj, and naming ceremonies.
The display and distribution of cloth is not, Buggenhagen argues, motivated by personal vanity and the display of wealth, but instead it makes Senegalese women’s social networks visible. Through these social ties, women create enduring forms of value and negotiate difficult financial circumstances. The book reveals the formidable power of the networks of women’s associations when Madame Géer, the mother of the household in one of Dakar’s quartiers populaires, secures the funds firstly to send her son to Paris for medical treatment and then for three of his brothers to be sent successively as the possibility of kidney donation is explored.
The book shows that dress and gift exchange practices are not relics of a pre-Islamic era, but are instead the outcome of capitalist transformation and associated changes in migration, wage-labour and trade. In this sense, forms and modalities of dress and exchange have adapted to the new situations of upheaval. The circulation of cloth wealth creates value alongside other Senegalese Muslim practices, including the offerings to land-owning shaykhs in relations of patronage and entry into regulated and unregulated economies at the global scale. These forms of value, the author argues, are not only a response to crisis, which has dominated Senegal’s political economy through the waves of liberalisation, but they also create new productive possibilities beyond ‘making do’.
There is a substantial and diverse body of literature from scholars like Jean Copans, Mohamed Mbodj, Mamadou Diouf and Claude Meillassoux that mediates between rich empirical detail at the local level and patterns of political and economic development in modern francophone West Africa and the world. Empirically the book contributes to some of this work. There are strands of enquiry that are highlighted in the earlier chapters around the effects of microfinance and NGO-led development, US-led regulation of Islamic practices and the changing role of the state, while the book’s characterisation of economic change is ambiguous at times, keeping competing perspectives of development in the narrative background. The concept that only ‘money takes care of shame’, when the mother of the household incurs mounting debts from high spending on religious celebrations, opens up an unsettled tension between the title of the book and some of its key findings. On one hand, the neoliberal NGO discourse focuses on the ‘empowerment’ of women by moving them from ritualised exchange practices towards individual accountability and business management training; and on the other, such ‘traditional’ relations defined by women’s crucial role in circuits of exchange are shown here to create value and wealth, confronting the instability of the longue durée. That said, this is undoubtedly a rich and engaged contribution to our understanding of the social organisation of Senegal’s economic sectors.