For the Bamana of West Africa, as socio-cultural (and I might add quite functionalist) arguments would have it, it is the various professional groups, nyamakalaw, that promote social and political cohesion. Jow, the collective name for the secret societies, brotherhoods, or initiation associations, are defined according to their object relations as “institutions that wield power [nyama] by concentrating it into material objects (boliw) and launching it, under control, out into the world”(Colleyn 2001: 168). Komo, a secret male initiation society of priests, elders and blacksmiths form the central nexus of these social institutions and are the sole actors in the formation and dealings of the boliw. They are experts in the transformation and manipulation of the formless-dealers in the excesses of dangerous materials.

Nevertheless, I do not wish to over-emphasize the culture-object space where we find “subjects making objects making subjects”(Pinney 2005: 269) although that is not to reject that Bamana boli objects have this social power of reproduction and stabilization that has been commented upon and analyzed at length elsewhere. It is an argument that instead calls for the rejection of the insistence on the indexicality of the object, where “images are not simply, always, a reflection of something happening elsewhere”(Pinney 2005: 266). Instead, I will argue for matters of matter-the potency of materials outside of subject/object relationships–and that which “exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects…”(Brown 2001: 5). It is then also an argument against ideal notions of matter or consumption that leave no remains and focuses instead on the “wavy meaning” of objects, the vaporous vibrations given off by the object as lurking spaces that are left un-incorporated, un-digested into things;“cataracts of objects never fully assimilable to any ‘context’”(Pinney 2005: 269).