Conclusion: Guinea-Bissau Yesterday. . . and Tomorrow

Introduction

I had the pleasure of commenting on the articles in this issue when they were first presented as papers at the 2006 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, and the remarks that follow remain true to the character of those comments while acknowledging that the original papers have been reworked and updated. These provocative articles, coupled with my experiences doing ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau—first among Manjaco in the village-cluster of Bassarel more than twenty years ago, and more recently (and briefly) among immigrant Manjaco in Lisbon—have led me to reflect upon anthropology's relationship to recent history, and to what anthropologists can contribute to an understanding of Guinea-Bissau: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Anthropology has a peculiar relationship to events, especially events that affect whole nations or regions. Anthropologists wish to be current, and we want to illuminate the big picture. And yet we have to acknowledge that there are inherent constraints in our work: the investigations we engage in are usually time consuming, our reports are therefore always belated, and our conclusions are the product of an intimate engagement with relatively few people who are, moreover, often situated on the periphery or at the margins of the state. Thus, even when the articles in this issue were first presented, "today" was already history because their focus was on the period after the war of 1998–99, which began as an attempt by the military to oust President Vieira and ended up as a protracted conflict (largely restricted to the capital, Bissau) that destroyed important infrastructure, caused NGOs to cease operations throughout the country, and led to the mass exodus of at least a quarter-million people from the capital city to seek refuge as "guests" in rural villages (see Vigh 2006).

Just as anthropology has a peculiar relationship to time that makes it hard for us to be current in the journalistic sense, so too are we rarely among the elite "insiders" when momentous events occur. Our interlocutors are usually rural or, if they are urban, they are poor or otherwise disenfranchised. Thus, of the authors represented in this issue, Joanna Davidson (119–41) and Marina Temudo (47–67) have lived with and listened closely and with remarkable acuity to Diola and Balanta farmers near the northern and southern borders of Guinea-Bissau, paying close attention to conflicts between youth and elders and frictions between autochthones and allogènes (see Geshiere & Nyamnjoh 2000)—between locals and outsiders; Lorenzo Bordonaro (69–92) and Henrik Vigh (143–64) have spent much productive time in the company of young men clinging to scant hope in the Bijagos "praça" of Bubaque and at the edges of the "praça" in the capital of Bissau; Michelle Johnson (93–117) has paid sympathetic attention to Mandinga men and women living, with increasing self-consciousness about the problem of identity, as Africans and as Muslims in Lisbon. Our collective sample of the inhabitants of Guinea-Bissau is small, if arguably representative of the majority of the nation's inhabitants. Yet we (and this is also true for much of Africanist anthropology) do much more studying down (peasants and proles) than up (presidents and generals).¹

The concentration on the political and economic margins is perhaps all the more acute for those of us who study in Guinea-Bissau because it is such an out-of-the-way place even for Africa. A country that was for a short period, at least officially, a colony of Portugal, the poorest and for a time the most politically retrograde of the European empires; and a country that is not quite the poorest in the world but close to the bottom—Guinea-Bissau is a small sliver of West Africa that in some ways is its own little world. Yet perhaps in some senses it is also exemplary of the region. Because Guinea Bissau was the most marginal of the Portuguese African colonies, it developed little in the way of a colonial anthropological archive. A handful of administrators wrote mostly superficial reports on indigenous societies in the pages of the Boletim...