The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco

The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco

Eric GableUniversity of Mary Washington

I wish to contribute to a growing body of literature on what constitutes African

modernities in rural societies by asking what it means when Manjaco urban

migrants embody and perform cosmopolitanism in rural homelands in Guinea–

Bissau. Much of this literature explores how seemingly “traditional” cultural prac-

tices in such societies—witchcraft, ethnicity, “autocthony”—are in fact recent

responses to a globalizing capitalism and the rise of the rationalizing modern

nation-state (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992;

Geschiere 1997; Piot 1999; Weiss 1996; Werbner 1996, 1998). My specific point

of departure, however, is James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity (1999),

which is innovative in treating modernity as a form of consciousness and not a

gloss for an objective condition (this or that quantity of exposure to market forces

in this or that time frame). Rather than using “modernity’s malcontents” to mount

cultural critiques of the world system’s inequities, Ferguson scrutinizes African

subjects who seem more sanguine about what used to be called “modernization.”1

In so doing, he considers how the dichotomies of an earlier Western social science

about “modernization” in Africa—dichotomies that contrast the village to the city,

as “traditional” to “modern,” or localist to cosmopolitan—are replicated in the lo-

cal vernacular among Copperbelt Zambians he encountered in the late 1980s. The

“folk wisdom” among such Zambians was like “an out-of-date sociology text-

book” (Ferguson 1999:83). “Modernization theory had become a local tongue”

(Ferguson 1999:84), and it was a tongue that they spoke not only in words but also

in gestures, in styles of dress, and more generally, in all aspects of comportment

in its most prosaic forms.2

Ferguson notes a fascinating twist in this indigenous “textbook,” stressing

that in the context of to-and-fro migration, many Copperbelt Zambians employed

both “cosmopolitan” and “localist” styles (and recognized them as such), much

as a person might wear two wardrobes or speak two languages. Localist and cos-

mopolitan styles were not necessarily constrained to place. Urban Zambians could

be localist in orientation and style; localism could become a platform for political

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 385–415, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.C© 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissionswebsite, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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386 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

and moral critiques.3 However, although Zambians could be localist in cosmopoli-

tan settings, they tended to imagine cosmopolitan comportment as inappropriate

for the village and to associate cosmopolitanism with the kind of selfish individ-

ualism that is socially destructive (Ferguson 1999:211–213). Cosmopolitanism

was associated with “anti-membership,” with a “certain sort of individualism,” a

freedom from “claims and expectations” (Ferguson 1999:212), which, from the

localist perspective, was a “slap in the face” (Ferguson 1999:221). In turn, Cop-

perbelt Zambians envisaged “localism” as a countervailing, more communitarian,

less selfish (if from our perspective, invented) “tradition.” Migrants that Ferguson

met who found themselves “obliged” by straitened circumstances to return to the

village or who expressed a desire to return eventually tended to extol the virtues

of localism (1999:82–83). Even cosmopolitan Africans who liked their new lives

in the city retained a “sentimental” attachment to home places they rarely saw or

visited (Ferguson 1999:83; see also 1997:139). Urban and rural Zambians imag-

ined the village to be a purer place, or at least as a place that should be purer, than

the city. As a result, Ferguson repeatedly emphasizes (e.g., 1999:84) that “every-

one,” villager and migrant alike, thought that cosmopolitan style “would surely be

rejected by rural society” (1999:113). Zambians in the city might choose to act as

either cosmopolitans or localists, but citified migrants who returned to the village

were compelled to put on the garb and mimic the mannerisms of the villager.

From this and other evidence, Ferguson argues that the Copperbelt vernac-

ular of modernity and Western vernaculars are nearly the same. In the Western

vernacular (Ferguson calls it a “myth” to remind us that it is a native concept not

an objective appraisal), there is inevitably a certain kind of consciousness about

the relationship between historical change and identity. The myth of modernity

entails an assumption that the past was significantly different from the present, a

tendency to stress the gap between the present and the past, and a desire to escape

the constraints of tradition or to return to tradition’s comforts (Appadurai 1996).

The Western vernacular is, in short, at once a discourse of progress and of nos-

talgia (Robertson 1990, 1992). This myth of modernity is also often spatialized,

the city standing for progress, the country (or the village) standing for tradition,

with history itself imagined as the movement of people from the country to the

city (Ferguson 1997). In Western vernaculars, depending on how one wants to

perceive modernity (and moderns tend to be deeply ambivalent), the village can

either be a stifling, constraining place one longs to leave and the city a glittering

dream, or the village can be imagined as a good place that you were forced by

bad circumstances to abandon (Berman 1970, 1982). Yet, in even the most robust

narratives of progress, for the city to transcend the village as a moral location is

rare. Instead, a characteristic feature of the myth of modernity is that the coun-

try becomes a site of nostalgic fantasies from which to launch countermodern

critiques of “progress” (see Williams 1985).4 Ferguson found the same kinds of

conceptualizations of modernity at play among the Zambians he encountered in

the Copperbelt in the late 1980s. There too, he discovered a tendency to imagine

MODERNITY IN MANJACO 387

history in spatial terms—a desire for progress leavened by nostalgia, a tendency

to construe the village as morally superior.

Manjaco whom I came to know in Guinea–Bissau in the late 1980s embodied

and imagined cosmopolitanism in rural home places in a very different way. For

them, locality and cosmopolitanism were not imagined as separate or opposed

moral spaces. They did not associate the village with a constructive communal-

ism. Nor did they equate cosmopolitanism with a uniquely destructive desire for

individuality.

I will illustrate this by juxtaposing celebrations of cosmopolitan worldliness

with localist celebrations of personal accomplishment enacted during funerals.

I focus on the funeral because it is arguably one of the most self-consciously

performed of a range of ceremonial practices that Manjaco associate with their

identity as a people in a place.5 It is perhaps the most ritualized, and therefore

the most hedged in by tradition, of a range of mimetic acts—“matters of dress,

styles of speech, attitudes, habits, even body carriage”—that Ferguson associates

with the “task of ‘going home’” among migrants who wish to continue to signal a

commitment to the village and the society it stands for (Ferguson 1999:83).

As we shall see, the format of the funeral allows for assertions of individuality

that are routinely portrayed as destructive, but destructiveness is imagined as an

enduring, by no means recent, feature of social life, whether traditional or cos-

mopolitan. Because of this (and in contrast to the situation Ferguson describes),

Manjaco returnees are not compelled to disguise their cosmopolitanism in the

mufti of tradition if they want to find a space for themselves among “rural allies”

in the village. Rather, as the funeral opens up a space for emigrants to celebrate

their personal freedom of movement and their capacity to leave the village at will,

cosmopolitanism can become the costume of choice at home as well as abroad.

In enacting their accomplishments at funerals, Manjaco emigrants make room for

cosmopolitanism as a part of what they consider to be “tradition” rather than its

opposite. This, I would suggest, is the kind of cosmopolitanism-as-tradition that

is pervasive in West Africa (see, e.g., Appiah 1991; Diawara 1998; Diouf 2002;

Piot 1999). It reveals an “ethos of modernity” that is very different from the di-

chotomizing modernity that is a quintessential feature of both Western vernaculars

and of the predominant discourses of social science.

Roots are Routes

West Africa, particularly coastal West Africa, as Keith Hart (1982) points

out, is a place where labor migration has been an enduring feature of the polit-

ical economy arguably for as long as there has been capitalism in Europe and

the Americas. Because Manjaco were among the first labor migrants in the re-

gion that comprises the Casamance (in Southern Senegal), the Gambia, and the

rivers of Guinea–Bissau, they are, in a sense, quintessentially West African. In

1792, the British colonists in Bolama, in southern Guinea–Bissau, would not have


survived if were it not for seasonal Manjaco migrants who worked willingly for

wages (Beaver 1968). The peanut and rubber booms of the mid to late 19th cen-

tury depended heavily on Manjaco labor (Bowman 1997; Carreira 1983; Chagas

1910; Harms 1975; Mark 1985; Swindell 1980). Concurrently, Manjaco became

a prominent presence in the Euro-African urban enclaves that emerged out of this

trade. In 1856, a Manjaco “named Domingo” was the spokesperson (porte pa-role) appointed by the French in the entrepot of Carrabance on the Casamance

(Roche 1985). Meanwhile, further up river in Sedhiou, the sergeant of the garri-

son of native troops was a Manjaco (Bertrand-Bocande 1849). Characterizing the

“rivers of Guinea” as a whole, the intrepid trader and amateur geographer Bertrand-

Bocande (1849:340) noted that Manjaco typically worked as sailors or stevedores

for Portuguese merchants on the coast. Becoming “fluent in their language,” they

“made others consider them as Portuguese in the French and English colonies”

(Bertrand-Bocande 1849:340).

By the early 20th century, Manjaco were a significant presence in urban

enclaves where they worked not only as stevedores but also as prostitutes and

household help. To this day, Manjaco tend to migrate as laborers either in agricul-

ture or in the lower rungs of the ladder in the cities of West Africa and Europe.

They do stoop work in vegetable farms in Madeira, Portugal, and Spain; they are

house painters and plasterers or they sweep streets and clean toilets in Paris, Mar-

seilles, and Lisbon. Some have other professions. A kinsman of my host in the

village was a striker on the Toulouse soccer team. I knew of another man who was

a prominent photographer in Dakar. I met many mechanics and factory workers. A

few of the Manjaco I have met or heard about had small businesses—a commonly

voiced aspiration at the time was to own a fleet of bush taxis—but it was exceed-

ingly rare for a Manjaco to engage in the kinds of occupations associated with the

petit bourgeoisie. There were no Manjaco shopkeepers as far as I knew, although

there were Manjaco union members, soldiers, and police officers. By and large,

Manjaco began working in the world of precolonial and colonial-era capital flows

as laborers, and that is where they continue to work in the new world of millennial

capitalism.

Because they have traveled and because they acquire the accouterment of

travel, such as languages and clothing, Manjaco have made claims to a kind of

cosmopolitanism for as long as we have written records for the region. Thus, it

is not surprising that in their own conception of themselves, they talk as much of

routes as roots, to borrow from James Clifford’s (1997) playful contrast. Indeed,

the funeral and what they do with death signals this most emphatically.

Nothing could seem more enduringly “traditional” than a Manjaco funeral:

crowd-filled days of drunken dancing to the incessant rhythms of the funeral drums;

cattle slaughtered, their carcasses left on ostentatious display in the bloodstained

sand of the household courtyard; the corpse wrapped in locally woven cloth like

a fat mummy. The cloth-covered body is carried to a communal tomb where it

will be stripped before being stuffed into a small hole in the ground to join the


Figure 1Ancestor carvings splattered with blood from a recent sacrifice.

desiccated remains of its forbearers. He will have become yet another individual

consigned to the generic ground, eventually to emerge as a revered ancestor, who,

as Manjaco put it today, will “work for the company now.” His carved white-faced

and suite-coat-clad image, perhaps with pens poking out of his pocket, will join

a cluster of carvings that represent the collective employees of the household as

corporation (see Figure 1).6


As we might expect of a people for whom tradition is an outgrowth of mi-

gration, Manjaco funerals are so lavish because, for a long time now, Manjaco

who live abroad signal their commitment to home by paying for such ceremonies.

Because far more Manjaco live more or less permanently abroad than there are in

Guinea–Bissau, there have been more funerals than bodies to bury, as emigrants

who die and are interred in distant places like Paris and Dakar return, if only

ritually, to households of origin in rural villages.7 During the colonial era, when

Manjaco were “crossing the river” (as they put it) from villages in Portuguese

Guinea, which were rich in wet rice fields and oil palm groves, to the Casamance

or Gambia to farm peanuts for cash or to Dakar to work as stevedores and house-

hold help, every effort was made to circumvent colonial laws of hygiene to bring

the actual body back to the home village.

However, as borders became better patrolled and as they traveled farther in

search of remunerative work, Manjaco made their accommodations to circum-

stances. To make up for the body’s recalcitrant absence, they have replaced literal

corpses with virtual analogues. In contrast to neighboring West African groups

who continue to insist that proper divination of the causes of death requires a

corpse to carry on a bier and interrogate, Manjaco use a lightweight and notional

simulacrum. A head-shaped bundle and a funeral cloth draped over a vaguely

corporeal form is enough to do the trick. Likewise, village-based gravediggers

continue to receive their traditional share of the meat from the cattle slaughtered

by the households to commemorate the death. They still get their liter of rum, even

though they no longer need to inoculate themselves against the nausea of stuffing

the stinking corpse into the close and polluting space of the tomb. Long-distance

death continues to be treated as if it were local and tactile. As a result, in the rural

region I am familiar with, although home village populations have declined by

more than half in the last 50 years, household ancestor shrines are packed. Houses

look like mausoleums. Empty of the living, Manjaco houses are full of the dead.

Death has become a kind of repatriation.

One could say that the history of commemorated death in Manjaco might

be written as an attempt to recover (as a performance in which emigrants had to

participate) at least the idea of the body against the resistance of distance. In the

summer of 2000, in a shantytown in Lisbon, I attended a gathering of expatriate

Manjaco who were lamenting the loss of a middle-aged comrade. As one of my

companions punched numbers into his cell phone so that I might speak to a friend

in Guinea–Bissau, he emphasized that, to announce this death, they would make

arrangements to hand carry the clothing of the deceased to the villagers as a physical

sign of a person’s passing. This bundle of clothing that travels, the uyeman (sacred

thing), is what makes it possible to hold a “real funeral” in the village—with all

of its excessive conspicuous consumption.

The offspring and consociates of the deceased not only pay for all the cattle,

palm wine, and rum that are consumed in the home village, they also transform the

space of the funeral ceremony into a theater of cosmopolitan accomplishments.


The household courtyards where the dances to the dead are held and the ancestor

shrines where the carved effigies of the illustrious forbearers are kept become

stage settings for emigrants to celebrate themselves. If the mortuary ceremony is a

ritualized repatriation, the celebrations of cosmopolitan accomplishments that are

a routine part of the funeral are often enacted and embodied in explicit opposition

to what the local household and home place seem to stand for: travel as opposed

to stability, antagonistic individuation as opposed to social solidarity. It is as if

emigrant Manjaco wish to use the funeral as a setting for celebrating a fundamental

tension between the desires of individual persons and the imperatives of corporate

sociality.

Emigration and the Broken Land

Yet Manjaco are well aware that emigration, and by extension the personal

desires that fuel emigration are destructive and dangerous—a fact they commu-

nicated to me by talking about the destruction of the village landscape. Katama,

where I lived for 18 months in 1986 to 1988, is the largest of the six villages

of the “land” of Bassarel. From any one of Katama’s scattered compounds—the

clusters of zinc-roofed houses or smaller thatched huts—it is hard to see more than

three or four neighboring compounds. Surrounding the compounds are groves of

oil palms and palmettos interspersed with tall silk cottonwood trees, mangos, and

stands of thorn trees (acacias). In the late afternoons, during my first months in the

village I would sit on the veranda, marveling at the groomed tangle of trees that

made it seem as if my house was the only house in a benevolent wilderness. To

me, the landscape looked wonderfully natural, if meticulously managed. Mangos

and silk cottonwoods are planted; oil palms and palmettos grow spontaneously,

multiplying as other plants are pruned away. None are without a purpose. Even the

thorn trees, which are a painful nuisance when they grow in low thickets, provide a

fruit that the herds of wandering goats feed on during the dry season. Of the other

trees—the silk cottonwoods, the oil palms, the palmettos, the mangos—every one

of them had a use. It was as if a man barely had to leave his compound to tap a

palm for wine or to cut palm fruits for a sauce.

From my veranda I would watch groups of children roam the landscape,

carrying between them a 20-foot-long pole with which they would knock down

bunches of palmetto fruit. Cutting the top off the green fruits, they would stick

their thumbs into the opening and suck out the sweet gelatinous pulp. The villagers

also harvested the fruit. They cleared a space on the ground and set hundreds of

these fruits in a compact mass on the ground: within a few months each would

sprout a tuberlike root—the palmetto heart that they called “Manjaco bread”—a

frequent snack that they roasted during the busy months of the harvest season. The

silk cottonwood provided shade, and most had been planted as enduring boundary

markers between the upland fields of one house and another. I was told that in

earlier eras the straight bulky trunks of such trees had been used to carve canoes—

the transport of choice in this land cut by brackish meanders. Manjaco would


paddle as far as Dakar in them. Under the cottonwood in my yard, the women

swept its leaves into a great pile between the finlike projections of the roots of the

giant tree, mixing the leaves with other refuse—cow dung, trash—and throughout

the wet season it sat, a fecundating compost pile to be spread over the rice fields

in the dry season.

But where I saw a lush garden disguised as a forest, Manjaco saw the cancerous

signs of decay. An older man who was paying an extended visit to the village after

a 30-year absence remarked to me as we sat together on the veranda: “When I

was a boy, you could sit here and see Pitchilal [a village a half kilometer away].”

Remembering how it was when he was a boy he exclaimed, “The land was clean.

Now it is dirty. The people have gone, the land is dirty.” Katama, with its scattered

compounds, had about 350 inhabitants in the late 1980s. According to the official

census taken in the early 1950s when this man was a boy, there were close to

650 people living in the village then. In those days, the land was “clean” because

people, houses, and rice fields dominated the landscape, not “dirty” clumps of trees

and patches of weedy bush.8

Many Manjaco, like this man, would point at the tree-covered landscape, or

to a patch of scrub forest, or to tidal marsh where they claimed that as children

they had “swum” in diked wet-rice fields, and tell me that “the land has broken.”

The “land has broken,” they would explain, in part because there were years of

drought right after the revolution and perhaps, in larger part, because a flood of out

migration (which began during the revolution in the early 1960s and continued after

independence in 1974) had transformed wet rice fields into sandy scrub lands or

brackish marsh.9 The fields people farmed in the late 1980s were far less extensive

than they had farmed in the past, although available arable land was more than

sufficient for the current population. Almost all of the fields they currently farmed

were what they called watershed fields (blek)—wet rice fields in sloping swampy

land above the high tide mark of the brackish water meanders that wind their

way through the landscape, feeding into the “rivers of Guinea.” Most significantly,

Manjaco only intermittently farmed what they called river (brik) fields—lands

reclaimed from brackish mangrove swamp by building a dike below the high tide

mark.10 The dike kept the brackish tides out. Eventually salt was leached out of

the soil by the rains and the field could be farmed.

River fields are more productive than watershed fields. They are also notori-

ously hard work. Each year a man must begin preparing such fields in the middle

of the dry season rather than early in the wet season as with watershed fields.

As an elder who had once farmed such fields put it, “an owner of a river field

can never be far from home” because he must constantly be prepared to repair

damage to the dike, which is a year round worry. Work in the river field is also

notoriously taxing. It is “heavy” work. The mounds on which the rice is planted

must be higher, the soil itself has a much higher clay content so it is literally

heavier than the more sandy soil of watershed fields. By the late 1930s, many

of such fields were no longer in use. By the 1960s, well before the drought that


began after independence and lasted until the mid-1980s, almost none of them

were.

In the past, river fields were opened up as young men, initiated as a group

into adulthood as an age set, prepared to set up autonomous conjugal households.

These men cooperated to build a dike, “cutting” the river so that a certain stretch

of mangrove swamp would no longer be inundated by the destructive brackish

water tides. The men who cooperated in the work of building a dike divided up the

fields. Each man got his separate “share;” yet to maintain river fields also required

cooperation, for once any part of the dike was breached by brackish water, the

entire line of fields eventually became useless for farming. Emigration is seen as

the cause of the abandonment of such fields. As young men opted not to work river

fields by leaving the village, it was harder for those who remained to maintain

them. Dikes crumbled, the soil salted up; the fields became infertile. The land was

“broken.”

That the “land” was “broken” also harked to Manjaco attitudes about the

current state of social relations, for “land” referred not only to forests and fields,

but more importantly to the community of people who inhabit and farm that piece

of earth. To Manjaco the wholesale exodus of people from the villages to other

lands—to the Casamance, to Dakar, to Paris, to Bissau, or to Lisbon—meant that

it was hard to make villages work as communities, as “lands” in this broader

sense. Emigration, or rather the inequitable distributions of modernity’s benefits it

entailed, bred envy and exacerbated interpersonal tensions.

As I listened to Manjaco talk about emigration, I was initially struck by

their anger at absent kin. Inhabitants of the village spoke disparagingly of family

members who had left for brighter prospects in Paris, Lisbon, or Dakar. Typically

they talked of the (rarely named and therefore generic) kinsman who is always

dodging requests from those he left behind but who is also constantly requesting

help from his kinsfolk in the village. Usually the emigrant was a scapegoat to be

blamed for destroying the community, even if some emigrants repatriated large

sums of money, often for ceremonies. The extent of the villagers’ dependence on

emigrants’ largesse was made clear to me when I learned from the young man

who kept track of village finances that in 1986, when Bassarel held its initiation

ceremony, held once in a quarter century, emigrants provided 8,000,000 West

African Francs or something in the order of $23,000. This was a huge sum by village

standards—roughly 23 dollars per capita if it were divided up among those living

in Bassarel at the time. Absent emigrants kept the village going—as evidenced

by the ubiquitous zinc roofs of the houses and by the frequent (and clandestine)

arrival (at some house or another) of a truckload of illegally imported rice.

Yet, the largesse of migrants was not only rarely acknowledged by stay-at-

home people but routinely denigrated, as I discovered to be the pervasive subtext in

the letters exchanged between emigrants and those at home. Armando, the host of

the house where I lived, was the village postman. He not only sorted and delivered

mail but read and composed letters for his neighbors. He did this work at night in


the privacy of the room that was also my office, so I listened as Armando wrote

down a fellow villager’s perfunctory greetings followed by halting requests for

money, or I watched as a letter was opened with eager anticipation only to hear

Armando’s low voice reading a reply that an earlier request could not at the moment

be fulfilled.

Often the letter from a distant emigrant would contain a request in a round-

about way, so that the message would be suitably opaque to strangers’ ears. On

one occasion, for example, a distant daughter who had been laid off from a job

in a canning factory asked her father to “baptize” a written request for assistance

at a local shrine. In the letter, she explained that her “name was on the list” for

an upcoming position in the factory, but a diviner had told her that “someone is

working behind my back.” Indeed, after waiting at the “factory gate” for several

days, her name had finally been called “but someone else took my place”—stealing

her very name. The daughter closed the letter by asking her father to “return to that

place” (i.e., to an unnamed shrine) and pour cane rum for her there. “You know

what to say” (she did not want to spell it out). She had enclosed 1,000 CFA—at

the time about $3.00—enough to buy the initial offering of cane rum but no more.

She apologized: “I have no work. I have no money.”

Often Armando borrowed my tape recorder so that a villager could listen to

the message on a cassette that had just arrived in the mail. On one occasion, Justino,

who tended the village’s small store where he sold cheap cane rum for an absent

Cape Verdian landlord, exclaimed after he had listened to a sister-in-law’s high-

pitched whine: “My brothers—let them kill themselves. I don’t care.” We were

walking together along the path back to the store and he explained: “They live in

France, have cars” and “eat whiteman’s food every day. Now they are fighting.

They want me to listen and help. Let them die. I have my wife; I catch my dinner

with my fishing net. They never help me. Let them kill each other.” He stopped

to urinate by the side of the path, but as he unzipped, the bitter words kept going:

“They’ve become like whites. They won’t help their family. I’ll throw this cassette

away. . . . They never send me money, nothing.”

If emigrants occasionally asked stay-at-home people to act as go-betweens

in their family squabbles or in dealings with local spirits, villagers also seemed

to insinuate that they might use such spirits and ancestors as convenient agents to

enforce their will, if tenuously, on their more fortunate kin who had escaped the

restrictions of rural life to emigrate abroad. Reminding them in letters that “our

fathers remember you,” and that they “watch over you,” and so forth, they would

then make their various requests. Consider an excerpt from a discussion I had with

one of the younger and poorer household heads, in which he explains to me how

an ancestor forces the living to install an effigy in his honor.

You are a father and you have sons. Some of those sons go away—go to Senegal, toFrance. You have fed them, cared for them. Now you are dead. Your sons who areat home write a letter. “Our father has asked to have an ancestor post planted in hishonor.” The letter asks you to send money for your father, [and] if you do not send


money, this is bad. You, who work in an office, you might one day go blind. . . . Yourbrothers may have gone to the spirit shrine carrying a bottle of wine. . . . Or one dayyou arrive at work and before you can enter the door, your boss says: “Out!” You askyour boss why, but you know why: Your father waits there under the ground. He whohas fed you, provided the oil (that makes you attractive), that has led you to your job.If you have money, you send it. You go to your boss to ask for your money. You signyour name. He gives you your money. You send it. You feel happy in your soul. Yourwork will go well. Some are paid a wage; others are not paid a wage. Some stay athome and are sad. Who will help them work the fields? You have left.

Here the accusative “you” is the emigrant who has escaped the house and

forgotten, temporarily, the tie he has to the brother who stays behind. The young

man who told me this had no one to help him in the fields. He depended on money

his several brothers who resided abroad could send him. One of the expatriate

brothers had recently nearly been killed in an auto accident and the children of an-

other had suffered lingering illnesses. They had eventually consulted diviners and

been told to “remember” one of their mutual fathers by installing an ancestor post

in his honor. The agent of this remembering—the one who suggests, persistently

and persuasively that one see a diviner, the one who, in fact, sees a diviner at your

request and then relays or interprets the message for you—is the stay-at-home per-

son. Thus, I assumed that the population explosion in homeland ancestor shrines

reflected the success that those at home have had in extracting funds for rituals

of repatriation in home villages even as those emigrants spend their whole lives

abroad. Because of encounters with stay-at-home people such as this, I came to

take it for granted that the exaggerated lavishness of funerals reflected the guilt, or

should I say fear, that those who had left the village for better prospects felt about

those who stayed behind and who could act as their go-betweens in interactions

with local spirits.11

Praising the Self through Others

The villagers I became acquainted with in the late 1980s invariably empha-

sized that a funeral or a ceremony to plant an ancestor post was expensive (anyat)when they recounted the quantities of cane rum that would have to be purchased

and the animals that would have to be bought for slaughter. However, compared to

a new zinc roof for a house or cement for flooring, such ceremonies might count

as fairly cheap. Indeed the Manjaco whom I met in Lisbon tended to downplay

the costliness of the burdens that repatriating the dead placed on them. Nor did

they act or talk in ways that revealed the kinds of tense guilt, fear, or conflict I

would have expected. When I, for example, remarked to my friend who had his

cell phone perpetually pinned to his ear, that it must be very hard to afford that

trip to deliver the bundle of clothes to the inhabitants of the ancestral home, he

scoffed. A round-trip plane ticket was less than five hundred dollars, cheap, really,

and hardly a burden. The trip home would count as a kind of vacation.

Most emigrants of any means made frequent trips home to pay visits to local

spirit shrines or to participate in funeral ceremonies. At funerals, emigrants would


join in with fellow household members in dances that accompanied the praises

of their ancestors. They paid the drummers to beat out their personal accomplish-

ments; they danced in pantomimes meant to embody these accomplishments. As

with most of funerary ritual, such dances focused on men and their personal char-

acters. Women danced, but only as a group, moving from one end of the courtyard,

which was the veranda where the drums are set up, to the other, which was the

gateway leading out of the courtyard. This dance is known as a “running” dance,

and the women shuffle or trot at different tempos. Picture it this way: an endless

film loop of a crowd on a sidewalk at rush hour, some of the crowd in a hurry,

others ambling, all preoccupied, yet, despite the chaos, managing not to collide

as they pass back and forth. The dance is the visual equivalent of a Philip Glass

piece: a certain voice endlessly repeated but at different speeds. The women’s

dance expresses their collective grief.

By contrast, the men’s dance in praise of the ancestors is more agonistic and

individuating. The dance, called “rage” (fongat), begins as men of a particular

lineage rush into the courtyard as a group and claim it with sweeping whirling

gestures that clear the courtyard of spectators. The drumming is much faster and

louder. Soon most men are worn out. Only the best dancers remain, whirling, almost

colliding. Manjaco today dance with a stick to make slashing gestures whereas

in the old days (uwal uyek) they used swords, making them literally dangerous

to unwary spectators. Nevertheless the swirling dancers, getting ever closer to the

boundaries of the cleared space, force the audience to focus their attention on the

dancers. As the dancers pause to refresh themselves, their female kin, their mothers

or fathers’ sisters or their sisters come out to the dancers to embrace them, kneel

before them, or cover their shoulders with cloth, or they will use the cloth to fan

them and wipe their brows. Ostensibly, the men dance to glorify the names of their

ancestors. However, they also glorify and individuate themselves as the mass of

dancers thins out through time to single dancers.

Men can individuate themselves still further by paying the drummers to sound

out their personal praises or by getting an agemate to play their praises on the

flute as they pantomime the story the music conveys. Before I turn to particular

performances, it is worthwhile to comment first about praise names in general.

I learned the meanings of the praise names routinely used in Katama from

the chief of the funeral drummers. He had memorized a congeries of names,

house by house, that reached back to the beginning of the 20th century. All of the

praise names are compact alliterative phrases—fragments of a longer narrative—

that characterize the person by alluding to a particularly dramatic moment in his

life, or more generally, an activity that the person performs that is distinctive or

noteworthy.12 In the lifetime of a person, such phrases will be further compacted

until all that is left is a word—the “name” by which a person will be known. In

general, “praise” entails competitive comparison, and names often refer to the act

of boasting or bragging. A common praise name, “You all stop your bragging, let’s

really see” (Dawatan upiitch Jakaten) uses the root piitch (brag). But there is also


the parallel construction, using brik (river) in place of praise. For example: “stop

your brik, let’s farm” substitutes brik for piitch. Indeed river is the iconic term for

the act of bragging or aggrandizing the self or indeed by metaphoric extension to

“praise name” oneself. Thus, the common way to ask someone their praise name

would be to say “your ‘river’ name how is it said [katim brik jaum]?” River refers

synecdochally to two possible “praiseful” activities—the “opening” of new rice

fields in saltwater tidal marsh or crossing a river (pepat brik), that is, emigrating

to seek one’s fortune.

Both activities were options for a young man at the threshold of adulthood

in the early 20th century. But by mid-century farming became less of an option.

Indeed the praise names I collected for Katama reveal a shift in the choices men

made from the former activity to the latter. For men who came of age in the early

20th century, there are several instances of names referring to river fields and

agricultural work. Examples include: “I pass (you all) in diking the river.” “You

all brag of farming have you measured your fields?” “Stop trying to farm, I gave

birth to farming” (Dawutan kajar mambokan kul); “You cut a dike, you try to

imitate me” (Dateb pebank dajokanin); “You bragged of river fields; I cleared it”

(Dupiitch brik manjintan bul). By the 1930s and 1940s these names using the word

“river” to refer to farming gave way almost entirely to names using “river” to refer

to emigration. The most common praise name for this era—the name “chief of

the drummers” glossed as “the migrant’s name, just” (kayung pepat, rek)—“He

left infancy to take up the paddle” (Aruki upot akarom katong)—implies that by

the early colonial era, emigration had become a de facto rite of passage for young

Manjaco men. “River,” that shorthand for praise, which once drew its connotative

power from constructing dikes in salt marsh to create wet-rice fields, became

simply an allusion to “crossing the river” or emigrating.

Even early on the praise names for migrants signaled a certain ambiguity about

the endeavor. Some asserted that emigration was a laudable act. For example, a

name that refers to the migrant as “Conquers gunpowder” (Kambat uchuof uruut),

uses the rhythm and syllabic structure of the great hunter’s praise name, “Conquers

the Grass Eaters” (Kambat gre petat), while harkening to that crucial commodity—

gunpowder—that youths acquired for their elders’ funerals. Another asserts that

to get a political title it helps to “Know the River” because, as the drummer told

me, trade goods were necessary for bribes and gifts. “To seek (a title) you must

know the river” (Dulau kanjan dame brik). Yet others allude to darker appraisals of

migration’s costs. In about 1910 or so an aristocrat amassed many barrels, but was

careless with fire near the storehouse, and he blew himself up. His praise name

“Gunpowder from afar destroys the man” (Uchuof uruut achoka nint), in turn,

became a more generic name, given to unfortunate emigrants who did not return

from their voyage. Another name given to several casualties of migration—“The

river’s water destroys the man, [his skin] returns to the earth” (Milik brik achoka

nint, kawita katia)—echoes the funeral phrase that is drummed for women who

die in their childbearing years—“The red [or black] skin returns to earth.” Yet


other laments to those who died abroad are compact evocations of emigration as

an ideally temporary sojourn transformed into something more permanent: “I’m

in the river, I’m stuck, I’m stuck” or “I’m long in the river, please remember

me.”

Whether such drummed phrases refer to the act of emigration or to other

activities, Manjaco recognize two kinds of praise names. One they call a distin-

guishing name (kapitch pepiitch), the other they call a disparaging or complaining

(kakanar) name. Both stress competition and conflict among consociates. Both

exalt antagonism. What is perhaps most revealing about the names is the close

link that Manjaco make between praise and destruction. In general, a distinguish-

ing name refers—in often exaggerated (occasionally comical) terms—to glorious

victories and vanquished foes. Thus, for example, that popular name for a suc-

cessful hunter, “Beats the Grass Eaters,” has its humorous analog, the name of a

renowned palm-wine tapper who “Beats the Elders” with strong wine that makes

them stagger.

Typically a disparaging name is an insult or affront, recast and flung back

at the insulter. It transforms mockery into challenge and enshrines antagonism

between peers. Disparaging names are prevalent praise names for holders of po-

litical titles. The name of one such titleholder Dapumanin, for example, means

“You all close your eyes at me” and refers in a quick image of embodiment to a

public that refuses to accept his authority. Another example is, “White’s Ears are

Whiter.” First used in the 1940s, “White’s Ears are Whiter” became a common

praise name in the region where I did field work, and it referred to any educated

Manjaco, such as a teacher, a bureaucrat. It originated as an insult—one man ac-

cusing another, who was a low-level clerk in a government office, of putting on

airs by dressing and acting like the Portuguese. “Ears” can refer to appearance,

but “ears” may also refer to intelligence. The clerk, so the story goes, responded

to the insult by claiming that that “the white’s ears were whiter” (i.e., a white

will always look more white than any Manjaco), but that he, the Manjaco clerk,

was, in fact, smarter and more educated than the Europeans who were his osten-

sible superiors. Contrast this “disparaging” name to a “distinguishing” name for a

colonial-era clerk, a name that was used in the late 1980s as a generic praise name

for educated emigrants—“Little Twigs, You Hear Them in Cacheu”—Cacheu re-

ferring to a Portuguese enclave 50 miles north of Bassarel and well beyond the

range of the talking drums. Here, the “little twigs” are a humorous play on the

differences and similarities between drumsticks and writing implements. When

Manjaco sent long distance messages exclusively by drumming, the stronger the

arm, the bigger the stick, the louder the sound. But an educated man had only

to write a letter and his quiet message would be “heard” in the distant district

capital.

Now that you have a sense of Manjaco praise names, here are two mimetic

performances (and the praise names associated with them)—one to the generic

farmer, another to the generic emigrant—that were performed at funerals I


witnessed in the late 1980s. I want you to note the juxtaposition that Manjaco

make between praise and destruction, as if that juxtaposition were an inevitable

human condition.

Consider first, the popular pantomime men perform known as “the farmer’s

dance.” The dancer literally plows away at the dirt of the courtyard, flinging sand

from his fulcrum shovel (the long-handled wet rice “plow” unique to this part

of Africa). The dancer begins slowly, pausing to position his shovel, stressing in

that gesture the “heaviness” of the work. At this point women may come up to

him and make planting gestures in front of his poised shovel. Or they may bend

down to look at the fulcrum shovel, making admiring noises as they do. But after a

few deliberate cuts into the sandy soil the dancer begins to move more frantically,

shoveling spasmodically at the ground, spilling the sand in all directions, moving

faster and faster but without precision. As he works thus, the women come up to

fan him or to cloak him in cloth. At which point he stops.

The drummed praise name that accompanies this performance is, “You all

carve mounds; they crumble,” and it refers to a particular event. A great farmer

is a man who can build mounds with a fulcrum shovel faster than his peers.

During work parties organized among the young unmarried men of the village,

the young men lined up in a field and raced one another to see who was best.

Such races were said to be good, because they “make you forget the pain of the

work.” But they also were bad, because the slower men, in trying to catch up, often

built their mounds sloppily, “ruining” the field and making it less productive. The

pantomimed performance that accompanies “You all carve mounds; they crumble”

captures in mimetic gesture the moment when a victorious farmer taunts his peers

who, in struggling to catch up, are making a mess of their work.

Similarly emigrant’s pantomimes play on this theme of social destruction

entailed in personal success. The “emigrant’s dance” is a mimesis of what might

count as the exaggerated lassitude of a flaneur. The “dancer” dresses in a suit

(see Figure 2). And he walks in a casual way around a bottle of “whiteman’s

wine”—brandy or whiskey. Again, the women will come up to cover him in cloth

or to embrace him, and he will pay them for their complement with a glass full

of the brandy. Here the drummers might be beating out several praise names to

emigrants. One such, for example, harks to a praise song that was composed in

the early 1960s for a ruler’s son who returns from his sojourn abroad riding a

motorcycle. The refrain, “[the motorcycle sound], the goats break their bonds,”

refers to the young man’s triumphant entrance into the village at the height of the

harvest season when everyone must tether their livestock lest they wander into the

rice fields and graze on the ripe grains. Tethering livestock is the perfect image of

individual responsibility to others in the community. You constrain what is yours

for the benefit of others. The song therefore offers a compact encapsulation of

the one of the paradoxes of praise. The emigrant’s triumph is socially destructive:

because of the jarring noise his motorcycle makes, the goats break their tethers

and wander into the neighbors’ fields to eat.


Figure 2Emigrant’s dance.

Another performance for men who served in the military involves the pan-

tomiming of parade ground gestures (see Ravenhill 1980 for similar practices in

Baule). In one such performance I observed, a middle-aged man, named Jorge,

who had served in the Portuguese army during the revolutionary war for indepen-

dence, paused to pay the drummers and began to orate, rather than simply act out,

his accomplishments.13 Consider Jorge as he stands in front of the drummers as if

at attention. He begins to speak, almost as if he were reciting a poem in a Manjaco,

but a Manjaco heavily laden with Portuguese terms:

I was the first, the bestNo one was better than meI know every border of Guinea.I fought on every frontier.

He pauses as the drums repeat his words in tattooed rhythms on hollow wood.

Then he begins to speak again:

Me, Jorge Teixeira. Nobody else.I was primeiro cabo.I was their leader.You talk of generals, commanders of the battalion.Me, Jorge, the best. No one was better.


He goes on like this, speaking, pausing to let the drums catch up, and he

finishes his praise poem to himself:

My passport is complete, my papers are complete.I can go anywhere.Me [he pats his chest for emphasis]! Methe primeiro cabo.

What Jorge enacts when he chants that his passport is complete or what the

emigrants perform when they strut in their awkward suits and toast each other

with “whitepeople’s wine” at the funeral is the mimetic equivalent of what many

Manjaco—men Jorge’s age, men who were much older, and also younger men—

did daily (see Figure 3). Of the 40 or so household heads in the village where I

stayed only a few dressed routinely in localist garb. One man I knew well had a

pointed goatee in the style of the young warriors of the 1930s. He wore a long

Muslim-style tunic, and when he strode barefoot through the village, he carried

a machete cradled in the crook of one arm. His name was Faran Bale (“Francois

Bullets”), a name his peers had given him to memorialize his long sojourn with

Senegalese recruits in the French army—first in France during the Second World

War and then in Indochina before the French defeat by Vietnamese nationalists.

This experience, underscored by the machete he carried everywhere, gave Bale

his heroic aura. Most elders did not have lives nearly as noteworthy, nor were

they nearly as theatrical in their presentations of self as Faran Bale, but when they

tried to be, they pretended to a certain worldliness. Some clothed themselves in

talismans of their own time abroad. For example, one elder I visited occasionally

almost constantly wore his denim-colored coveralls with the Esso emblem stitched

above a breast pocket. Others donned borrowed finery. The recently deposed king

of the Manjaco, for example, rarely ventured from his courtyard without wearing

a raincoat or one of the several suit jackets that his children in Paris (so he said)

had sent him as gifts. These everyday acts of self-presentation added up to what I

believe is a vision—of Manjaco, by Manjaco—of a world informed by capitalism

and nation-states, by borders and boundaries, by histories fraught with unfairness,

yet also limned with the fact that they too are at home in that world.

Modernity’s Contents?

Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity was the only ethnography that I had

brought with me to Lisbon on my excursion to the shantytowns there, and as I

read it at an outdoor cafe in between visits with Manjaco, I found his descriptions

of Copperbelt Zambians so familiar. This is what provided the impetus for this

article. How can we compare Manjaco and Copperbelt Zambians? On the face of

it Manjaco and Zambians seem so alike. Ferguson had encountered “his” Zambians

at a time of extreme economic contraction, at a moment of sudden collapse. I too

had met “my” Manjaco when Guinea–Bissau, once a land of revolutionary promise,

had plunged into a similar abyss.14 The Manjaco I came to know had as much to


Figure 3Youth wearing straw boater of his own construction.

feel abjection about as did the Zambians whom Ferguson had met. Manjaco were

at least as cynical, at least as troubled by paranoid visions of a world (including

kin) out to get them. But, if Ferguson’s Zambians became localists or disguised

themselves in the garb of “tradition” when they returned to the village, my Manjaco

(facing similar threats, having similar needs—for allies and for protection) wanted

to act like or to become cosmopolitan. The Manjaco I encountered like to travel and


brag about it. They leave the village; yet they feel compelled to do their bragging

back home to an audience that is local and willing to applaud. They seek praise

for their worldliness, even when such a pursuit can be dangerous, even when their

worldliness can make more enemies than friends.

When I read Expectations of Modernity I was troubled by some of the as-

sumptions that undergirded the book. To me, the Zambians Ferguson described

were far too instrumentalist to be plausible to me.15 They acted localist to get

something in return. Manjaco, by contrast, seemed to act in ways that only made

sense in terms of those larger more amorphous kinds of attitudes anthropologists

have long associated with personhood, or again, with that older term ethos, as an

embodied attitude—as “moods and motivations” in the sense Geertz (1973:94)

defines ethos. But more of ethos later.

But what bothered me more about Ferguson’s analysis was that I felt he

had smuggled back an all too predictable critique of modernity into a seemingly

innovative ethnography of misrecognized subjects. He had raised the possibility

that Africa was full of village cosmopolitans, yet just as he was giving them a place

in our collective portrait gallery, he erased them again, asserting that they had to

disguise themselves as localists to survive. The village, in short, had triumphed

over the city, just as it tended always to do in standard countermodern critiques of

modernity. Zambians may have been rewriting old textbooks on modernization,

but they were also enacting the theatrics of the malaise of modernity.

That a critique is commonplace, however, does not make it wrong. Never-

theless, as I read Ferguson, I found myself more and more irritated that a group

of people were becoming, as the narrative of the book unfolded, a lot more like

the usual victims of modernity’s march than I had initially thought would be the

case. Indeed, their modernity, or rather the trouble they had being cosmopolitan

in the village, harkened to a particular vision of history—one that is contained in

a standard Western conceptualization of modernity itself, a scheme that is widely

deployed in Africanist anthropology. It is a vision of history that tends to have

little room in it for village cosmopolitans. They are a kind of logical scandal.

In this scheme, history is used, as I have argued elsewhere, as a wedge to

cleave apart two worldviews (Gable 1995). It stands for the when and how of the

onset of capitalism, the beginning of colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state,

or it refers to “recent” “transformations” of the same—of the rise of millennial

capitalism or neoliberalism, for example. History, in this sense, is rarely good,

usually bad, so an analysis of historical transformation becomes a form of culturalcritique in the sense that George Marcus (1986) popularized the term.16 A typical

narrative tactic in this kind of critical social anthropology is to treat what used to be

considered as the most lurid and disturbing of African traditions as symptoms of the

malaise of modernity itself. Thus, Max Gluckman would argue in the early 1960s:

Throughout Africa . . . fears of witchcraft have burgeoned and magic has blossomed.Struggles for increasingly scarce land, competition for jobs and houses in thetowns, conflicts due to cultural disintegration, fights for power between old and new


leaders—all of these have loosed greed, envy, hatred, spite, in unrestrained relation-ships. Fears and accusations multiply in response, and medicine and fetish cults mul-tiply to meet these fears. [1963:143]

Gluckman anticipated much of current Africanist writings on modernity,

where according to Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, for example: “Witches are

modernity’s prototypical malcontents” because they “provide—like the grotesques

of a previous age—disconcertingly full-bodied images of a world in which humans

seem in constant danger of turning into commodities, of losing their life blood to

the market and to the desires it evokes” (1993:xxix). For them, these witches, or

more accurately, those who see evidence of witchcraft lurking in every market

transaction, every workplace, every election, “embody all the contradictions of the

experience of modernity itself, of its inescapable enticements, its self-consuming

passions, its discriminatory tactics, its devastating social costs” (Ibid: xxix). Their

longstanding goal has been to demonstrate how the most bizarre and lurid of prac-

tices and beliefs in Africa—mystic warriors, Tswana prophets, witches, people

paranoid about the trafficking in body parts—are not relics of a “primitive men-

tality” but rather contain implicit critiques of the cannibalistic excesses of the

capitalist system.

As such, contemporary Africanist social anthropology replicates, often un-

thinkingly, dichotomizing political critiques of modernity that have a long pedigree

and parallel the vernaculars of modernity in the Western tradition. Their interven-

tions are countermodern (or at least countercapitalist) critiques in which the village

often becomes the metaphor of choice for Africa as a whole and in which agents of

the village’s ruin are the usual impersonal suspects—a stifling colonialism, a can-

cerous capitalism. Although countermodern critiques are coming under increasing

scrutiny among a newer generation of Africanist social anthropologists who see

them as a kind of misplaced proxy war that we in the academy have routinely fought

against capitalism (see, e.g., Sanders 2003), they migrate into even the subtlest of

analyses, because they are, in a sense, already embedded in the dichotomizing

tradition of social anthropology’s version of modernity.

Ferguson’s work is a telling example of the power of this discursive frame

because, to his credit, he focuses on Africans who want to be modern—that is, on

subjects who are far more recalcitrant when it comes to getting them to speak as

countercapitalist proxies. Ferguson looks at Africans who are largely invisible in

the work of Jean and John Comaroff: Africans who want to claim “equal rights

of membership in a spectacularly unequal global society” (2002:565) and who

express or embody this desire through mimetic appropriations of cosmopolitan

styles and thereby enact or embody the optimistic narrative of modernity. But,

desire as they might, Ferguson’s Africans must relinquish their modernist dream.

One symptom of this is in the figure of the erstwhile cosmopolitan who returns to

the village and takes on the style of localists because it signals a commitment to a

moral code that is communitarian not selfish. As such, according to Ferguson, the

“telos of modernity” is reversed and therefore revealed to be the pernicious myth


we knew it was all along. As such too, seemingly bad subjects—that is, Africans

who succumb to modernity’s charms—are revealed to be good subjects after all:

both critics and victims of capitalism’s juggernaut.

Yet Ferguson also discovered in conversations with Zambians in the mid-

1980s a confounding blurring of neat distinctions between good village and bad

city. The Zambians he met tended to characterize all Zambians, rural and urban

alike, as selfish (Ferguson 1997). In the 1980s even the rural was rotten and this

disturbed him. For Zambians to blame themselves was a “striking inwardly di-

rected critique” (Ferguson 1997:145), a far cry from a more familiar (and useful)

critique that “once attributed urban social evils to an origin outside and external

to an African society conceived as authentic, morally pure, and essentially rural”

(Ferguson 1997:150). The upshot is that Ferguson needs to characterize the Zam-

bians he encounters in the mid-1980s as transformations of Zambians in earlier

eras who “opposed indigenous rural virtue to imported urban vice” (1997:139). To

explain why this would be the case, Ferguson uses history to posit a shift in atti-

tudes that makes sense given a recent and traumatic reversal in economic fortunes

in Zambia in particular and in Africa more generally. Africans have lost confidence

in even the possibility of progress. They feel a pervasive sense of “abjection,” and

this has translated itself into a malignant malaise that is the opposite of class con-

sciousness. Ferguson offers no evidence for an earlier form of consciousness. By

asserting that there was such a view, he can claim (as if it were an ongoing fact)

that Zambians oppose cosmopolitan to localist, as they oppose selfish to virtuous

(see, e.g, Ferguson 1999:211–213), even when the ethnographic data he collects

obviates this dichotomy in the “ethnographic present.” The end result is an asser-

tion that the shift in attitudes is recent and a product of the even more crushing

weight of capitalism’s juggernaut. Such a reading of the evidence may be justified.

It is also comforting—old truths out of the mouths of new subalterns.17 Modernity

contains (a certain) history. It is the good village and the bad city all over again.

Beyond Modernity

More recently, however, Ferguson has offered his own critique of Africanist

anthropology’s preoccupation with the lurid and its tendency to erase Africans

with cosmopolitan pretensions from its narrative landscapes of the village. In

this critique, there is plenty of room for Manjaco village cosmopolitans. In “Of

Mimicry and Membership” (Ferguson 2002), he argues that we avert our gaze or

we ignore African cosmopolitans because they are politically off-putting. As a

result, Ferguson asserts, we fail to account for them ethnographically and likely

have done so for a very long time. Worse yet, according to Ferguson, this is an

attitude we have shared, often unwittingly, with colonial administrators.

I would concur with Ferguson here. I count myself guilty of the very charge

Ferguson makes, and I also have ample evidence that colonial administrators in

Guinea–Bissau were effecting precisely the same kinds of erasures long before I


arrived on the scene. For example, 50 years before I began fieldwork in Bassarel,

Antonio de Carvalho Viegas, the Governor of the colony, warned future Colonial

officers about the Manjaco—a people who were a particular nuisance because they

were constantly crossing the border into Senegal’s cities where, as he saw it, they

were culturally corrupted:

In general, the colonizer judges the Manjaco from individuals of the race who livetogether with the white. Nothing is more misleading. The smart Manjaco—puttingon the air of civilization that is belied by his ridiculous taste in fashion—constantlyquestioning, shrewd in small matters, is only the Manjaco who has lived in the urbancenters. . . . The other, the one that represents the majority, the one of economic value,the one that works and gathers the palm nut is as savage . . . [as any primitive]. [Viegas1936:131]

Viegas wanted his Manjaco to stay put in the villages of their births—to farm

and toil, adding to the colony’s wellbeing. As for Manjaco who had been to Senegal

or even Europe, these were not only dangerous, but also “ridiculous.” It is hard to

tell what annoys and troubles Viegas most—their “taste in fashion” or that they

are “constantly questioning . . . shrewd.” What is clear is that these Manjaco made

for bad colonial subjects.

As with Viegas, and the ethnographers that Ferguson cites, when I encoun-

tered such cosmopolitans in the village I worked in, I too was put off by what I

considered to be pitiful attempts at worldliness. Yet these people bothered me be-

cause they came across as poseurs, not because they seemed insufficiently critical

of capitalism, colonialism, or the state. I would say that my feelings were almost

entirely aesthetic rather than political—a by-product of what I started to refer to

as “the anthropologist’s dress code” (Gable 1995, 1998, 2002a, 2002b). I could

not help but feel that they were bad ethnographic subjects. Because they seemed

like “bad copies” (Gable 1998), they bored and embarrassed me.

I felt embarrassed by the elders in their overcoats and odd head gear (a

Tyrolean hat, a fedora, a bright yellow plastic hardhat): they seemed so pitiful

decked out in their tokens of travel. I was enervated by the middle-aged men in

sports coats with too-wide lapels cut out of cardboardlike material, all of whom

seemed eager to speak French with me even after it was clear that I could not speak

French well enough to understand what they were saying. Equally off-putting were

the teenagers at the Saturday night dance, shuffling awkwardly to the not-quite-

latest tune from Senegal or Zaire played on a battery-powered record player.

I soon found Manjaco who seemed to share my annoyance. They were a group

of young men who were becoming increasingly influential in local politics and were

among the founders of the Club for the Development of Culture (Gable 2000). The

“Club,” as it was commonly known, had a twofold agenda with regard to what they

called culture. They wished to protect certain elements of culture that they found

constructive (e.g., dance, cooperative labor) from disappearing and to expunge

certain elements that they deemed destructive (e.g., funeral divination, witchcraft

accusations, the inflated cost of certain “traditional” sacrifices). As such the Club


was at once cosmopolitan and localist. Their localism was excitingly nostalgic and

quintessentially the kind of nostalgia that modernity often generates.18

One evening, as I was drinking palm wine with the founders of the club, my

companions introduced me to a language game called “Pure Manjaco” to illustrate

how profound was the destruction of Manjaco “culture.” The point of the game

was for one person to try to tell a story without using any words that were not

of native origin. Telling me about the rules of the game, one of the men laughed,

“We’ve already lost. ‘Pure’ is French—it should be ‘clean’ (ujint) not ‘pure’ (pir).”They all laughed because they were in on the joke that you could never get very far

without using a foreign word. They pointed out that even the simplest terms were

no longer local. “Only some of the oldest women say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in ‘clean’

Manjaco. The rest say ‘wau’—that’s Wolof, or ‘no’—that’s French—or ‘nao’—that’s Portuguese.” As we drank palm wine, we debated the pedigrees of ambiguous

terms. For example, power (ufawa) was a word the missionaries used to translate

into Manjaco: “I am the power and the glory.” It was a word they claimed was

“old” Manjaco, but of which my companions were suspicious because it was used

mainly by Manjaco residents in English-speaking Gambia. Armando, the circle’s

de facto leader, held out his wine gourd to imitate an elder in midlibation. “Listen

to the elders at the spirit-shrine. They never finish their speech with just Manjaco

words. It is never—‘that is all’ (beleng, Manjaco); it’s always—that is all, all tu,(French), all rek (Wolof).” To Armando the way that the elders used foreign terms

to embellish their orations was a clear sign of their sense of cultural inferiority. The

elders thought that the city was so much more powerful or better than the village.

Another sign of such cultural inferiority, to Armando and his companions, was

the fact that few adult Manjaco had Manjaco names. Marcel, the school teacher

joked that even names I might have thought were local—San or Sampiir, for

example—were only mispronunciations of Jean and Jean-Pierre. To Marcel, this

naming practice was an unfortunate habit of colonialism: “The Portuguese could

not pronounce or write our names, so they made us take ‘white’ names when we

paid our taxes.” Marcel went on, “now we are free, but we still have Portuguese

names.” He pulled out his identity card for emphasis. “When I have a child I will

give it a Manjaco name.”

On another evening, it just so happened that Marcel, Armando, and the others

met in my room to listen to tape recordings I had made in which the village funeral

drummer recited the names (along with their meanings) of Manjaco who had lived

and died long before Jean, Domingo, and the like became the monikers of choice

for Manjaco men. Marcel, especially, had wanted to hear the recording, because

on the next day he was going to act as the “name-giver” in a ceremony for the

newborn child of a kinswoman. As we listened to the tape, Marcel scribbled in

silence.

The following morning, I accompanied Marcel to the ceremony. I stood in

the house courtyard with the guests as the naked newborn was brought out into

the light of day and his name announced. It was Frederico. Later, I asked Marcel


why he had not chosen a Manjaco name. Marcel explained, “the child’s father is in

Dakar. He might be ashamed to have a boy with a Manjaco name.” He also added

that Frederico would sound good in French or in Portuguese and so would serve

the boy anywhere he ended up.

Thus did Manjaco localists reveal themselves to be homegrown cosmopoli-

tans. In making fun of elders who could not perform a ceremony without speaking

French or in playing the game of linguistic purity, the youths of the Culture Club

flirted with the romantic paradigm of localism, but in the end they did not live it.

Have Manjaco ever lived such a paradigm? If they have, we would have to look

well past the era of Viegas, indeed as far as or farther than the era of the peanut and

red rubber booms of the mid–19th century to find such Manjaco. No matter when

we looked in the traces left to us of a Manjaco past, we would find Manjaco there to

greet us, “constantly questioning . . . shrewd,” speaking Portuguese and dressed in

styles they would have taken to have been cosmopolitan. And that, for me, makes

the question of the history of the development of this tradition of cosmopolitanism

moot.

Much more significant than trying to recover a moment when the good village

existed and stood in sharp contrast to the bad city (either in the Manjaco imagination

or in “fact,” in the sense social anthropology makes of fact) is to describe the way

Manjaco seem to manage the contradictions of modernity with such aplomb and

without, I might add, succumbing to abjection. Although they may believe that

their homeland has been “broken” by outmigration that has gotten out of hand,

they also take it for granted that migration has also been a way of life for a very

long time, and with it the tendency to borrow and return with the foreign as a

sign of one’s sophistication. Manjaco in the Culture Club had decided to retain the

option of a kind of international citizenship just as Jorge had crowed at the funeral,

“my passport is complete.” They played games with the language of localism, but

when push came to shove they opted for the passport. This, I came to belatedly

believe was a perspective that was quintessentially Manjaco.

This perspective allows for critiques of capitalism, but not from the counter-

modern vantage of social anthropology. As we have seen above, many Manjaco

accuse emigrants of a ruinous selfishness and assume that the flood of emigra-

tion is destructive of rural homelands. Yet the Manjaco I knew did not treat this

selfishness as something new or special. They did not supply a familiar historical

narrative, nor did they set up familiar dichotomies. Rather, for Manjaco in general,

as I have illustrated through a sketch of praise names, a consistent and enduring

feature of this tradition has been a kind of cultural enshrinement of the pursuit of

personally enhancing and often gloriously destructive fame. As a result (or at least

as a corollary), they are at once less likely to blame social ills on “outside forces”

and more comfortable with treating destruction as an inevitable outcome of per-

sonal endeavor (see Gable 2000). That Manjaco recognize emigration, and indeed

fame more generally, to be socially destructive yet personally enhancing—and to

celebrate this in the funeral ceremony—does not seem likely to be a recent shift in


attitudes that can be linked to recent shifts in economic conditions or to abjection.

History does not help us here. Nor are Manjaco attitudes neatly dichotomizing in

the form that is naturalized in countermodern critique. Instead, in what amounts to

their indigenous sociology, Manjaco reiterate a recurring image of conflict between

a self and a society. It is an image of conflict that blurs the distinction between

altruism and antagonism. It is an image of conflict that is celebrated at the very

site—the funeral—where the person finds his place in the corporate group. It is also

an image of conflict that lends itself to blurring not only distinctions in space, but

to distinctions in time as well as between modernity and tradition. Manjaco cos-

mopolitans are at home in the village. That is a part of their tradition as they imagine

their tradition to be. And my guess is that this makes them very West African.

By claiming that Manjaco are very West African or that the attitudes that the

funeral enacted, are “quintessentially Manjaco,” I am saying that there is something

about these attitudes that is cultural in the sense U.S. anthropologists in the Boasian

tradition used the term. By referring to a Manjaco “ethos of modernity,” as I did

at the beginning of this article, I am signaling my affinity for this tradition and

specifically alluding to the work of Clifford Geertz who pioneered what we might

now label as a “culturalist” approach to modernity in his several booklength and

shorter works on modernization in “out of the way places.” In these works Geertz

consistently argued that “whatever its outside provocations, and whatever foreign

borrowing may be involved, modernity, like capital, is largely made at home”

(1968:21). By exploring modernity in Indonesia and Morocco, he tried to show

how societies might experience the same or equivalent histories, yet interpret them

in dramatically different ways, revealing in the process the contours of culture. A

Javanese Muslim or bureaucrat or leader of a nation-state might seem to occupy the

same moment in history and the same sociological subject position as a Moroccan

Muslim, bureaucrat or leader, but they would remain above all else a Moroccan or

a Javanese. Cultural difference would trump social subject position.

Culturalist readings are currently out of fashion because theories of culture

often replicate or mimic racialist theories of difference. Or culturalist readings seem

so wrong because such theories seem to make no room for plural subjectivities, for

contestation, for agency. Who reads Geertz these days? Who would admit to liking

Ruth Benedict, whose portrait of Japanese modernity in Chrysanthemum and theSword (1946) anticipated Geertz’s own work? Yet, if we want to make sense of

Africans who look a little too much like us for comfort without turning them into

reiterations of our own story of modernity and without resorting to a universalizing

instrumentalism, we might try to read more Geertz and less Gluckman. Because

there is a great deal more to the cultural than history.19

Notes

Acknowledgments. A version of this article was presented at the 12th Triennial In-

ternational Conference on African Art, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, April 25–29 2001. I

have benefited from the comments of Rachel Gelder, Michelle Johnson, Bob White, and


the anonymous referees of this journal and by an invigorating correspondence with Ann

Anagnost. The article is based on research I did in Guinea–Bissau from 1986–88, where I

was assisted by Armando and Gabriel Urinque, and a brief field trip to Lisbon in the summer

of 2000, where I was helped by Pierre Gomes.

1. The reference to “modernity’s malcontents” comes, of course from Comaroff and

Comaroff (1993).

2. Ferguson’s work is innovative in taking seriously the fact that many Africans think

of history (and remember that history always contains a vision of the future as well as

the past) in terms of the kinds of visions of progress or failure to progress that used to

be associated with “modernization”—in short, in treating modernity as a meaning rather

than a moment. In 1986, George Marcus argued that the ethnographies-as-cultural-critiques

that were to characterize the future of the discipline would be “either oriented explicitly

to locating their subjects within the framework of historicist world-system perspectives

or probing the nature of historical consciousness in their subjects’ lives” (1986:165 n. 5).

Modernity as a moment is the former, modernity as meaning—as a way of imaging the

world—is the latter.

3. For a similar, but more narrowly political perspective, see Geshiere and Nyanmjoh

2000 on “autochthony.”

4. Because this is the case, we “have to shift our perspective from nostalgic theory to

a theory of nostalgia” (van Dijk 1998:155).

5. For fruitful appraisals of the ways funerals have become increasingly important

in the politics of ethnicity and autochthony in contemporary Africa, see Geschiere and

Nyamnjoh 2000, and Cohen and Odhiambo 1992.

6. For a more detailed description of Manjaco carvings, and especially the figurative

innovation that occurred in the 1930s through the 1950s, see Gable 1996, 1998, 2002b.

7. By the mid–20th century roughly half of those who counted themselves as Manjaco

lived and worked in Senegal or France, most in urban areas, rather than in the Portuguese

colony, to the chagrin of Portuguese colonial administrators, who took the Manjaco tendency

to migrate as an insult to national pride (Carreira 1962).

8. Census records reveal the extent of Manjaco outmigration. In 1917 and 1921 the

population of Katama, the core village of Bassarel, hovered at a little over 600. In 1951

it was still barely over 600. In the period that the national population had doubled, the

population of Katama had stagnated. And this was more or less the case throughout the

various Manjaco “lands.”

9. Antonio Carreira, one of the most sociologically astute administrators Portuguese

Guinea produced, studied the flow of emigration before the revolution. Using “passbook”

records for 1948 to 1950, Carreira noted that nearly 2500 Manjaco were crossing the

border legally into Senegal during this period. Ninety percent were men, almost all youths

(1962:755). In the region that contained Bassarel, Carreira noted annual migration ran

at about 8.5 percent of the total population (1962:759) or roughly one-third of the adult

male population (1962:740). The data Carreira collected for the years after 1950 reveal a

crucial shift in the pattern of emigration. Increasingly, women were joining the exodus,

and migration became the first step toward a permanent change in residence. During this

period, the total population of the Manjaco region (which included the Brame ethnic group)

declined from 83,333 to 72,796, a drop of 12.6 percent. However, the population of males

declined by only 9.6 percent while the population of females dropped by 15 percent. With

young women leaving in greater numbers, birth rates also fell dramatically (by 17 percent).

With more and more women going abroad, young Manjaco men would not have to return to

their natal villages to find brides. In 1960, it was estimated that some 60 thousand Manjaco

were resident in Senegal. Their numbers increased during the revolution. However, with


independence they did not return, nor did the urge to emigrate decrease. Thus, it is not

surprising that, of the male heads of households resident in Katama at the time of my

fieldwork, only one had not been a migrant.

10. In Bassarel in 1986, there were a few small parcels of river land in production.

These were protected by short dikes that could be maintained by a few men.

11. If the emigrant who “won’t help their family” was often a target for bitter re-

crimination, then the very people who would complain in one moment about their absent

kin would say in the next instant that they too wanted to emigrate. A young man who was

telling me he would leave for Senegal as soon as he finished his coursework at the lycee

in the district capital added, “Later I’ll buy my own bush taxi. I’ll be rich. I’ll charge the

emigrants twice as much and the villagers only half!” He was dressed in a style they called

tough (nawoyo), which had become the rage among the teenaged boys. His hair was shaved

to the skin on the sides of his head, leaving a tuft of hair on top that was cut flat and square.

He wore his tattered shirt inside out, and when I asked him why, he explained “a shirt worn

like this, it shows that you don’t care. The girls, they see you, they know you’ve got money

in your pockets.”

12. Unless a man received a titled field or became a member of an exclusive society

such as the gravediggers, the drummers, or the diviners, these would be the names by which

a man would be remembered.

13. Manajco, for the most part, avoided fighting for the Portuguese or for the rev-

olutionaries. From the perspective of the revolutionaries they evinced a certain lack of

patriotism that continued to be a troubling characteristic well into the independence era. In

a way, they were like Guinea–Bissau’s Kulaks (see Gable 2003).

14. Nowadays in anthropology, when we compare two fieldwork encounters and find

them to be divergent we can account for such divergence in a variety of ways. One way

would be to scrutinize the motives, both conscious and unconscious, of the authors of

the ethnographic accounts in question. Ethnographers are authors; they write, as Geertz,

Clifford, Marcus, and others made us all see in the 1980s, “fictions.” “My Manjaco,” like

Ferguson’s Copperbelt miners, can be read as fictional characters in the stories that each

of us constructs, reflecting our biographies, our preoccupations, and our libraries. They are

parcels in our cultural baggage. The reader is free to unpack them as such and should at least

assume that these ethnographic subjects will be infected with our desires and repulsions.

Likewise though, they are our honest attempts at marking, by way of illustration, the complex

of experiences we had while in the field that make us think that we can speak for and about

these others. We, alas, are the flawed instruments of ethnography. Ethnography can be a

window into the lives of others and it can also be a mirror. So, in a way that is similar to the

political philosopher William Connelly, who talks about “my Hegel” to signal this double

quality of any form of interpretive scholarship, I write about “my Manjaco.”

15. See Metcalf (2001) for a thorough critique of instrumentalism in current social

anthropology in the context of theorizing globalization.

16. The role of history in anthropology is a fraught one. Social anthropologists in

Africa are generally quick to dismiss the work of their colonial era ancestors as ethnog-

raphy without history, specifically ethnography that created images of “timeless” societies

undamaged by colonialist and capitalist incursions. But worse than this kind of erasure

(which was an effort to recover social and cultural practices before the scorched earth of the

colonial encounter to supply material for cultural critiques of the excesses and arrogances

of the colonial era) to my mind is an exaggerated faith in shopworn (generally Marxian)

historical paradigms among Africanist anthropologists today. The desire that guides much

of this work is to discover (or at least posit) a moment in the past where the modern began

and to posit dramatic shifts in local forms of consciousness as a result (see Gable 1995 for


a critique of Jean and John Comaroffs’ “colonization of consciousness” motif as typifying

this genre).

17. Or in an alternative effort to historicize the contrast that Copperbelt Zambians draw

between village and city, Ferguson links shifts in stylistic loyalty to “booms and busts of

the urban economy and consequent shifts in the rural-urban balance of power” (1999:231).

The upshot, according to Ferguson, is that if the economy is bad, then urbanites need rural

allies and therefore act like localists to get them. An economic bust precipitates an “across-

the-board resurgence of localism” (Feguson 1999:231) that bleeds even into the city itself

where “it is old-fashioned localism that prevails . . . while the ‘up-to-date’ cosmopolitanism

is pressed to the wall” (Ferguson 1999:250). By contrast, if the economy is good, then

urbanized Copperbelt workers do not have to go home and they can be as cosmopolitan as

their bank balances and sense of style allows.

18. Anthropologists have routinely shown that the desire for cultural purity is itself a

product of the modern condition and that nostalgia is a discourse of modernity not a discourse

outside modernity. In the discourses of nostalgia, culture is imagined as something in danger

of destruction, something about to be lost, or in need of protection often from “foreign”

influences or by the forces that progress is assumed to generate. Given that nostalgia is a

feature of modernity, it is not surprising that we find nostalgia as discourses all over the

world in the age of globalization.

19. Perhaps just as persuasive as Geertz on this score would be Sahlins (e.g., 1999).

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ABSTRACT This article asks what it means when Manjaco urban migrants em-body and perform cosmopolitanism during funeral ceremonies in rural homelandsin Guinea–Bissau. The format of the funeral allows for assertions of individualitythat are routinely portrayed as destructive, but destructiveness is imagined as anenduring, by no means recent, feature of social life, whether traditional or cos-mopolitan. Manjaco returnees are not compelled to disguise their cosmopolitanismin the mufti of tradition if they want to find a space for themselves in the village.Rather, as the funeral opens up a space for emigrants to celebrate their personalfreedom of movement and their capacity to leave the village at will, cosmopoli-tanism can become the costume of choice at home as well as abroad. In enactingtheir accomplishments at funerals, Manjaco emigrants make room for cosmopoli-tanism as a part of what they consider to be “tradition” rather than its opposite.This cosmopolitanism as tradition is pervasive in West Africa. On the basis of an“ethos of modernity,” it is very different from the dichotomizing modernity thatis a quintessential feature of both Western vernaculars and of the predominantdiscourses of social science. [modernity, cosmopolitanism, ritual, West Africa]

The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco

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