Muslim Families in Global Senegal: Money Takes Care of Shame

1. Global Senegal

14 muslim families in global senegal Women’s Wealth, Islam, and Global Volatility Byearly2000,itwasevidentthatfamilieswerefrustratedwithmore than twenty years of policies of economic and political liberalization in Senegal. These reforms aimed at economic growth, implemented under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank starting in the 1980s, had been accompanied by substantial unemployment, shortages of food and other necessities, rural-urban migration, an urban housing crisis, and the declining availability and affordability of health care and education. As many Senegalese men faced the declining value of the agricultural potential of their land and the inability of the state to secure their social welfare, they sought moral renewal through submission to Muslim shaykhs. The Muslim clergy responded to this fiscal and moral uncertainty by denouncing what they deemed to be inflated bridewealth payments and costly family ceremonies, especially women’s practice of exchanging locally woven and dyed cloth, a measure of women’s wealth and worth, and calling for an Islamic family law through which limits would be set on these payments. Additionally, religious associations, nongovernmental organizations, and others who professed an interest in national development characterized these practices as belonging to the realm of cosaan,1 Wolof for “custom” or “tradition,” rather than Islam. Certainly, debates over Islam and the historical practices that predate its spread in West Africa are prevalent in the region and common elsewhere in the Muslim world as well (Cooper 1997:xxxiii). These debates have a considerable impact on women’s lives. In Senegal, cloth became a contentious object of debate because—through its use in dress, display, and bestowal—it made forms of women’s wealth and value visible, displaying the hidden potential of women as producers and bearers of history. Importantly, the social criticism of women’s dress and exchange practices took place in the context of protracted fiscal uncertainty. As much as women’s practices were portrayed as traditional, and thus out of step with an Islamic modernity calling for moral austerity and reform, they were at o n e g l o b a l s e n e g a l global senegal 15 the same time contemporaneous with economic and political shifts. Women ’s practices were not merely a response to or a way of making do in difficulttimes —whatmanyscholarsofSenegalhavereferredtoasaneconomic crisis (Boone 1992; Cruise O’Brien 1988; Ebin 1992, 1993; Mbodj 1993) following the implementation of structural adjustment programs (SARS). To callthesehardtimesa“crisis”andthevariedresponses“practicesofmaking do”perhapsmissesthepoint,forSenegalesemenandwomenhadendured some thirty years of so-called crisis by the time of this writing. To focus on the temporary nature of the notion of crisis is to overlook the unfolding practices through which men and women create new productive possibilities , of which women’s dress and exchange practices are a part, even under conditions of fiscal volatility and restraint (Makhulu et al. 2010). As African modernities across the continent have faced fundamental challenges in the wake of neoliberal restructuring and, in the case of Senegal, further entrenchment in globalized economic processes, ritual and religion have reemerged as critical junctures where men and women struggle over the terms of sociality (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). And this is apparent in the debate over women’s ritual practices and religious authority in Senegal. The moral terms in which economic realities are apprehended has been an enduring theme in the ethnography of Africa (Apter 2005; Bastian 1996; Bohannan 1959; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, 1997; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Guyer, ed., 1995; Hutchinson 1996; Piot 1999; Shipton 1989; Weiss 1996). To understand the fiscal and moral terms in Dakar Mbacke Kaolack Thiès Louga Linguère Tuba Tambacounda MAURITANIA MALI GUINEA GAMBIA SENEGAL GUINEA BISSAU Senegal R. Atl a nt i c O c e an Senegal 16 muslim families in global senegal which Senegalese men and women sought social fortunes and futures, I sought to untangle the multilayered discourses of conservation and change in the Senegalese postcolony. As I witnessed the gradual movement of most of the adult children in the Géer household and in Khar Yalla in general, who went overseas during the 1990s as students, wage laborers, and traders, I became interested in the lives of the women they left behind. How did they engage in processes of social production? How did they constitute the bonds of kith and kin and secure their future, as increasing numbers of family members left the country? It might seem that the productive activities...