Les Dieux du territoire: penser autrement la généalogie (review)

Based on long-term fieldwork among the Kasena of Burkina Faso, with repeated visits to the villages of Kaya, Tiébélé, Pô and Koumbili between 1981 and 1998, this book presents a classic ethnography of a ‘stateless’ society. It focuses on the social and ritual construction of space and the role which particular places of power, namely sacred groves and earth shrines, play in social cohesion and lineage identity. Seven dense chapters, in which the ‘ethnographic present’ dominates and the prose, (at least for the non-francophone reader) is rather demanding, offer detailed, solid analyses of the basic elements of Kasena society – lineages, clans and matrimonial alliances, and their complex relations with ritual territories.

Carefully exploring local terminologies and ritual practices, the author discusses the founding of villages around sacred groves by groups of patrilineal kin and matrilineal relations; the creation of a complex, flexible ritual geography with ‘open’ boundaries and overlapping territories protected by earth shrines and/or hunting cults; the social organization of ‘houses’, lineages and clans, whose history of migration and settlement is commemorated in sacrifices at a variety of shrines in the group’s previous locations; and the spatial and ritual dimensions of the ‘sacred’ chieftaincy which the Kasena had developed before the onset of colonial rule. Liberski-Bagnoud challenges the overemphasis of kinship and genealogies in the work of Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody, and convincingly insists that the classical dichotomy of societies based on the bonds of ‘blood’ versus those based on ‘territory’ is of little help in understanding the real workings of the traditionally decentralized societies of the West African savannah and elsewhere. It is unfortunate, however, that she decided to publish her 1991 doctoral thesis with only minor revisions, neither engaging with the growing literature on the contested and conflict-ridden history (and present situation) of savannah societies nor with the recent discussion on the social construction of space, African frontiers and land tenure.