SOCIO-RITUAL STRUCTURES AND MODERN MIGRATION AMONG THE MANJAK OF GUINEA BISSAU
Ideological reproduction in a context of peripheral capitalism
Wim van Binsbergen
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SOCIO-RITUAL STRUCTURES AND MODERN MIGRATION AMONG THE MANJAK OF GUINEA BISSAU Ideological reproduction in a context of peripheral capitalism Wim van Binsbergen |
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In the wake of Marx’s classic
analysis of the ideological dimension of the capitalist mode of
production (Marx 1973; Marx & Engels 1975), a number of
leading ideas have developed in the Marxist approach to religious
phenomena: religion is seen as (a) ideological reproduction, (b)
a structure of material production and exploitation sui generis,
or (c) as a structure of ideological production (cf. Van
Binsbergen & Geschiere , 1984a: 270f).
Ideological reproduction has received the most attention in
theoretical and descriptive analyses so far. From this
perspective, religion is seen as the ideological projection, into
the celestial and the unreal, of processes of control,
appropriation and exploitation that constitute Man’s social
life — and particularly relations of production such as
actually existing between humans. By reflecting these relations,
and by endowing the phantasms (ancestors, deities, spirits of the
wilds, etc.) that constitute these reflections, with a unique,
exalted sense of reality and power,[1] the relations of production are
underpinned and carried over to new generations (e.g. in rites of
passage), and to other parts of the world (e.g. through the
spread of world religions, in conjunction with the spread of
capitalist and bureaucratic secular structures).
In the simplest form of this pattern there exists a certain
correspondence between the relational structure underlying the
relations of production, and the relational structure defining
the religious sphere: e.g. authority relations between elders and
youths, or between the sexes, in real life, may be reflected in
local ideas concerning the relations between deities and human
beings. Here the Marxist approach[2] differs only in idiom from
classic structuralfunctionalist approaches as developed in
mainstream anthropology of religion.[3]
However, relations of production in contemporary societies are
usually complex and internally differentiated. They tend not to
pertain to one unique mode of production, but to combine a
limited number of different modes, each with its specific
internal logic as revolving around the central relation of
exploitation that constitutes that mode of production; modes of
production are linked to each other through a social and
historical process of articulation. In such articulation the
central relation of exploitation that characterises a dominant
mode of production seeks to impose itself upon other, preexisting
modes in such a way as to make the latter subservient to the
reproduction of the former. Class alliances between the
exploiting ‘classes’ in each of the various modes of
production involved constitute a standard form through which
articulation is effected.[4] In this complex situation (for
which often the term social formation is used; cf. Terray 1969)
religion has many options besides simply reflecting, in some
onetoone correspondence, the relations of production that make up
one of the constituting modes. Various articulated modes can be
reflected within one religious system, which then becomes
virtually as heterogeneous (in terms of socioritual
organisation, conceptualisation and history) as the relations of
productions that are involved; if this is the case, not one set
of symbols, collective representations concerning the unreal,
causality, misfortune etc. permeate the total religious sphere,
but a limited number of different sets.[5]
These sets are mutually irreducible, and the logic of each may
tune in with the logic underlying one particular constituting
mode of production within the social formation. However, besides
such ‘multiple correspondence’, the religious sphere
may contain elements which question, protest against or negate,
rather than reflect, relations of production in any of the
constituting modes. Finally, in a social formation religious
elements may not just display specific relations (of reflection,
protest or negation) with specific constituting modes of
production — such ideological relations may also be
developed vis-à-vis the total structure of articulation that
makes up the social formation as a whole. Thus, certain religious
institutions and religious movements in nineteenth and
twentieth-century Africa have been claimed to reflect, within a
given social formation, neither an encroaching capitalist mode of
production, nor preexisting modes upon which capitalism tried to
impose itself, but the very process of the articulation of these
modes (van Binsbergen 1981: 42f, 258f).
However, to the extent to which the religious sphere is not a
simple ideological reflection of relations of production, but
often assumes a great deal of autonomy vis-à-vis such relations,
religion can be more than ideological reproduction. It may take
on an impetus of its own, and (in the hands of elders, kings,
priests, cult leaders) may stipulate a circulation of producers
and an appropriation of their surpluses which begin to constitute
relations of exploitation in their own right, sui generis.
Territorial and regional cults in South Central Africa have been
described in such terms, both by Marxist and by nonMarxist
writers;[6] but hundreds of other examples
from many historical periods and other parts of the world could
be quoted as cases in point.
This capacity of religion to give rise to forms of production and
exploitation that do not manifestly spring from nonreligious
relations of material production and that more or less create
their own (semi)autonomous field, or ‘region’ (in
Werbner’s sense; cf. Werbner 1977) could only be realised
because religion is not only a structure of ideological
reproduction but also a structure of ideological production: it
is not only capable of reflecting and reiterating the logic and
the concepts that underlie material relations of production, but
is also eminently capable of producing new logics, new concepts,
new notions of causality, — or presenting such existing
ideological elements in a new light.
This form of ideological production is well documented, in Africa
and elsewhere, for the case of exceptionally gifted religious
innovators, prophets, preachers.[7] Attempts to relegate the
latters’ activities in the field of symbolic and conceptual
production (i.e. innovation) to their specific class situation
within complex and changing social formations[8] may have been illuminating, but
they do contain a certain onesidedness. Contrary to such
structurecentred determinism which abounds both in Marxist and
non-Marxist social science, religious innovation represents forms
of experimentation and free variation which are inherent in the
very nature of symbols and the religious order, and not to be
explained away by reference to whatever broad groups, classes and
historical processes to which the individuals involved may
belong.
Moreover, it would be a mistake to think that ideological
production in religion only occurs in the context of the
inimitable activities of these great religious personalities.
Ideological production is a constant and ubiquitous aspect of
religious phenomena. All members participating in a religious
system are involved in such ideological production in a variety
of ways. It is already a case of ideological production when the
standard, overall causal explanations of misfortune as defined
within a certain religious system, are invoked by the
participants in their attempts to explain the details of a
specific case that befalls them. Since religion by definition
deals with the unreal and is largely concerned with nonempirical
referent, the participant’s interpretations of particular
empirical facts in the light of culturespecific religious notions
tend to display much more divergence, individual idiosyncrasies
and creative vagaries than is commonly assumed by anthropologists
of religion. Given the human tendency for symbolic and
philosophical experiments, consensus and hence uniformity and
unanimity in the religious sphere are mainly achieved (as a more
or less exceptional state — cf. Fabian 1984:....) when
religious elements are subjected to social control. Admittedly
the medium of internalisation safeguards a measure of uniform
reproduction of religious form and content by a participant
without necessitating the constant scrutiny by other
participants. It is my contention, however, that the bulk of
religious uniformity is achieved, in the African case at least,
as an effect of the ad hoc social control mutually exerted by
participants upon the overt, interactional, empirical expressions
of their religion: verbal and musical utterances that (as forms
of interaction involving more than one participant) are made,
commented upon, and possibly sanctioned; concrete material
objects (shrines, paraphernalia, offerings, payments) and
dramaturgical arrangements (rituals, seances) that can be seen
and discussed by others. Such continuity and uniformity as a
local religious system may display, is primarily anchored in
these empirical referents. This is why my casestudy of Manjak
religion, in the present paper, will primarily describe these
empirical, visible aspects. Most of a religious system however
goes beyond them, in the way of implicit meanings, symbols,
imagery, notions of causality that are only imperfectly phrased
(if at all), and that underlie the material objects and
dramaturgical arrangements in ways most participants would be
unable to spell out — and most researchers would be unable
to grasp except through several years of fieldwork. In these
intangible ideological aspects there is — to the distress of
anthropologists looking for structure — room for immense
free variation and lack of continuity — creativity, in other
words. In the field of divination, we may find that the
participants apply, simultaneously, rival interpretations of the
same empirical referents (illness, death, ecological and
meteorological disaster); and even if we succeed in explaining
this rivalry as a reflection of various individuals’ of
groups’ antagonism in the economic or political field, the
essential leeway provided by the very nature of ideological
production should not be explained away in the analyst’s
attempts at social-structural ‘contextualisation’.
Likewise, the modern study of ritual would stress the creative
communicative patterns in ritual, where officiants and clients
— often belonging to different linguistic and ethnic groups
— struggle to arrive at some revelatory or therapeutically
effective message which, while partly using a recognizable
selection of preexisting symbolic means, in its specific
combination and dramaturgical presentation could be called unique
to the event at hand, and therefore essentially new and
unpredictable.[9]
On the face of it, there would be little that is specifically
Marxist in such an approach to religion in terms of ideological
production. It is rather in the mainstream of cognitive and
symbolic anthropology, particularly in the more recent
praxeological variant. On closer analysis, however, a number of
particularly interesting research themes open up here: the
relationship between ideological and material production; the
relationship between ideological production and ideological
reproduction; the conditions under which the ideological sphere
either manages to realise its autonomy or becomes dependent upon
such forms of material production as would physiologically, if
not logically, appear to form a precondition for all symbolizing;
the extent to which the laws that may turn out to govern
ideological production (some of these laws have been discussed,
under totally different headings, by praxeologists, or by
structuralists seeking to formulate something like a universal
grammar of symbols and their transformations) are comparable to
the laws which Marxist analysis has sought to formulate for
material production and exploitation; the extent to which changes
in the ideological field may historically be related to changes
in material production and reproduction etc.
If the Marxist approach to religion is to make progress, it
should begin to address these research questions in earnest.
Within a wider institutional and
policy setting prompting research into the therapeutic —
particularly psychiatric — effectiveness of autochthonous
West African religion, the above outline of possible themes and
relations informed my recent field work among the Manjak of
Northwestern Guinea Bissau.[10] Against the background of
presentday village society, its productive system, social
organisation and political structure, my research was directed at
contemporary economic and symbolic structures involving
deities’ and ancestral shrines, and oracles as administered
by specialists who often combine divination with somatic curative
action.
In the present paper I shall concentrate on the position and
religious activities of Manjak labour migrants who, hailing from
the administrative divisions of Calequisse and Caió in Cacheu
district, spend very substantial portions of their lives in urban
centres in Senegal and France, while maintaining close ritual and
therapeutic ties with their area of origin.[11] These ties involve a spectacular
expenditure of time and foreignearned money on the part of the
migrants concerned, and bring out clearly the exploitative nature
of local gerontocratic power. Against a more general background
of the articulation of capitalism and several noncapitalist modes
of production, I shall attempt to answer as a central question:
in what respect can these migrants’ rituals be interpreted
as xideological reproduction?
While thus my emphasis is on ideological reproduction we shall
briefly consider to what extent can these ritual structures
really be relegated to such an underlying pattern of relations of
production; they might as well be considered as structures of
exploitation sui generis, without specific and detectable links
with such material structures of exploitation as make up the
local economy and social organisation. Finally, while a change in
ideological content and function (such as the institution of
divination, and the specialists administering it, appears to have
undergone among the Manjak in recent years) represents an obvious
case of ideological production, one major set of data gathered in
the course of my research will largely remain outside the present
argument: the way in which the Manjak rituals at shrines and
oracle huts can be said to assume therapeutic effectiveness, by
creatively presenting to their migrant clients revelatory
insights and guidance that may contain solutions for the
spiritual predicaments the migratory experience had landed them
in (cf. van Binsbergen & de Jong, forthcoming). For the
structure of my argument this has the unfortunate effect that the
emphasis, in the theoretical introduction, on ephemeral and
praxeological aspects of ritual (as distinct from analysis in
terms of enduring social, economic and ritual structures) will
not yet be backed, in this paper, by an extensive casestudy, but
should merely be read as a statement of intent for future work.
The Manjak (Manjacos, Yagos)
ethnic group is found on the peninsula defined by the Cacheu
river, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mansoa river.[12] They are the dominant ethnic
group in the districts (seccaos) of Calequisse and Caió, both
belonging to the Cacheu region. Occupying the central part of the
peninsula, they are virtually closed off from the Atlantic by
their neighbours the Feloop (a subgroup of the Diola) to the West
and Northwest, while the Braam (Mancagne) form the Manjak’s
neighbours to the southeast. Further eastward, the Braam give way
to such ethnic groups as the Papél, Balanta, Mandinka (Malinké)
and Fula (Peul, Pular). To the northeast, beyond the old harbour
town of Cacheu (once the colonial capital of Portuguese Guinea),
lies the inaccessible area of the Cobiana ethnic group.
There is a close affinity between the Manjak, Braam and Papél,
in language, agricultural production, religious system and
hierarchical sociopolitical organisation. All three ethnic groups
display the remnants of small precolonial kingdoms that used to
enjoy considerable colonial protection in the Portuguese era and
that were dissolved after the PAIGC (Partido Africano da
Independencia da Guiné e do Cabo Verde) proclaimed territorial
independence in 1973. Significantly, the areas involved were
among the latest to be liberated from Portuguese occupation.
Given a similar ecology, the Feloop’s system of production
has many common features with the Manjak’s, but the former
lack a history of statehood; their language is not intelligible
to Manjak speakers. Neither is the Cobiana language; while the
Coboiana group remains one of the least studied ethnic groups of
the country, and no definite pronouncement could yet be made
concerning their historical forms of sociopolitical organisation,
there are indications that they form a surviving pocket of an
older population preceding Manjak and Feloop settlement in the
area.[13]
On the peninsula, the Cobiana area was liberated at an early
stage of the liberation war, and from here considerable guerilla
activity was waged against Portuguese strongholds at the towns of
Cacheu and Canchungo (then called Teixeira de Pinto). The rural
areas in the rest of the peninsula, and foremost the Manjak
population, have since retained a certain aloofness visÖvis
PAIGC politics. Office in local party branches is largely held by
nonlocals, and also in nationallevel politics are the Manjak
underrepresented. The onetime activities of a Dakar-based
political party, opposed to the PAIGC and mainly organised along
Manjak ethnic lines, has however not led to marked animosity or
antagonism on the part of the national political centre as
regards the Manjak.
In the religious domain, such autochtonous forms of religion as
will be discussed in this paper still form the dominant idiom
— with a remarkable degree of interethnic participation
across linguistic and socio political boundaries. Of the world
religions, only Christianity (in the form of Roman Catholicism)
has managed to superimpose itself upon (rather than replace)
these authochtonous forms. The inroads of Islam, so conspicuous
elsewhere in GuineaBissau and neighbouring countries since the
nineteenth century, on the peninsula have remained limited to a
handful of trading families at the district centres, although
Muslim presence in the town of Canchungo has already warranted
the building of a mosque there.
Agricultural production among the Manjak combines a number of
main types of cultivation: an annual cycle of paddy-rice
cultivation on irrigated fields adjacent to brackish,
mangrovecovered rivulets cutting deeply inland (a spectacular
form of cultivation found, with minor variations, all over the
Upper Guinea Coast stretching from the Gambia to Sierra Leone);
annual cultivation of dry forest gardens and small garden plots
inside the village, on which bananas, cassava and yams are
cultivated; and finally orchards, situated in or near the
villages, and yielding palm kernels (from which palm oil is
prepared), palm wine, cashew nuts, cashew wine and lemons. Fowls
(chickens, guineafowls) form the main domestic animals. Nowadays
goats and pigs are rarely raised in the villages. The few head of
cattle found there today are invariably owned by the elderly male
heads of extended families. There is only an underdeveloped
local, regional, national or international market of agricultural
produce. Most families experience great difficulties in keeping
up their daily food supply in which rice is the staple. The
nearfamine conditions which have existed in GuineaBissau for a
number of years now, are also encountered here. Fish and
shellfish, either caught by female members of the household or
bought at the local market, form the most frequent source of
animal protein. Hunting is insignificant nowadays.
Stores, either stateowned or private (and in the later case
mostly run by Muslim traders from the eastern part of the
country), very occasionally offer rice for sale and act as local
marketing venues for cashew nuts. A trickle of local (i.e.
district level) trade in food crops, palm wine and domestic fowl
(exclusively used for ritual purposes, which however may include
human consumption; see below) as a source of cash is somewhat
supplemented by petty commodity production: pottery, basketry,
bandweaving, the preparation of salt, cashew wine and palm oil. A
varying but significant proportion of the local households are
involved in this petty commodity production at a small scale. In
addition to the local market concentrated at the praça (the
district centre’s main square, which also serves as physical
marketplace and where all state services are located: school,
clinic, party branch office, staff houses etc.), these products
sometimes find their way to the region’s central market held
at fiveday’s intervals in Canchungo, to the national capital
of Bissau, and via, the smuggling circuit, to Senegal (especially
palm oil). Allweather dirt roads ensure the communication between
Canchungo on the one hand and Calequisse and Caió on the other;
between the latter district centres, which are only 15 km apart,
the only direct connection is by canoe. Excellent tar roads
connect Canchungo with Cacheu, Bissau and the rest of the
country, — the eastern part of which has a much more
developed economic circulation in the hands of Muslim, primarily
Fula, traders. Transport at the peninsula is provided by Manjak
and Fulaowned pickup trucks, which (except in the frequent times
of national petrol shortage) run regular services across the
country, and of which at least one comes to either district
centre every day.
In this way a significant volume of commodities is brought into
the Manjak area: canna (rum, produced mainly in state
distilleries in the capital and further to the east); clothing,
utensils, furniture, building materials, medicaments, and some
rice and preserved food stuffs, from Bissau, the east, or
Senegal; pigs, goats and cashew wine primarily from the
Balanta-dominated Bula region north of Bissau; and some cattle
from the east again. Although my research did not include a
quantitative assessment of production and circulation, it seems
safe to conclude that much more is being imported into the
districts of Calequisse and Caió than is exported; and most of
the imports serve a local consumption instead of being an
investment in local production.
To some extent, this imbalance might be attributed to
intervention on the part of the national state. On the one hand
the state has peopled the two district centres with officials
whose modest salaries are locally spent, primarily on items of
consumption; on the other hand the state operates (via some of
these officials: the local Comité d’Estado) a system of
price control which, especially with regard to such vital
commodities as rice, textile and canna, may influence the balance
of rural trade (although not, as a rule, in the interest of rural
areas). However, the number of resident state officials is very
limited (it lies in the range of one hundred for both districts
combined); and much of the local flow of trade is effected
outside state control. Migrants’ cash income, realised
outside the Manjak rural area but spent inside, is therefore the
main explanation for the imbalance.
The Manjak area has long been recognized in the literature as
remarkably migrancyprone, as compared to other parts of Guinea
Bissau.[14]People from Calaquisse and Caió
are found, in capitalist employment or in ‘informal
sector’ relations of production leaning on to capitalism, in
all urban centres of Senegal, as well as in France, where they
are particularly numerous in the automobile industries around
Paris. Today, especially on weekdays outside the planting season
(June September), Manjak villages do in many respects convey the
impression of a typical labour reserve: a preponderance of the
elderly and of young children, a slight underrepresentation of
women in childbearing age and a marked absence of youths and
adult men. While permanent inhabitants of the village go about
their daily productive activities, they contrast strongly with a
leisured minority of visiting migrants, conspicuous in their blue
jeans, fancy shirts, fine shoes and sun glasses if they are men
— their elegant Senegalese bubu dresses and turbans from the
same bright material if they are women. Surrounded by choice
symbols of their migrant status (a wireless set, a stereo
cassette recorder, an industrial worker’s hard hat or a
wrist wallet), they recline under the eaves of a house, engaging
in conversation with such local relatives as can be spared from
domestic or agricultural work. Or, — even more typically
— they are seen performing a ritual at one of the ancestral
shrines or deities’ shrines with which Manjak villages
abound, or carrying full bottles of canna to the sacred groves
just outside the village, or waiting at the praça for a
roundtrip by pickup truck to Canchungo, where they will buy
another sacrificial animal and yet more canna for rituals at
their home village. On weekends, this small outlandish group is
eclipsed by the more numerous locals who, from their jobs or
secondary school in Bissau, Canchungo or elsewhere in Guinea
Bissau, take every opportunity of visiting their home village.
These weekend commuters are on the average younger, their much
shabbier attire leaves no doubt as to their residence within the
national boundaries, and once back home they are much more
readily reintegrated into the social and productive activities of
the family. It is not from them, but from the distant migrants to
Senegal and France that Manjak villages finance their import
imbalance — largely used for the purpose of ritual
obligations as we shall see.
The production described above is
realised in a rural society whose most conspicuous unit is the
village; local social organisation further comprises, at levels
above the village, initiation regions (each consisting of a
handful of neighbouring villages), and the now defunct kingdoms
(each consisting of several initiation regions). Internally, each
village is segmented into up to a dozen ward, each consisting of
compounds occupied by extended families. Manjak ritual
organisation largely revolves around shrines distributed over
these social units at their successive levels, and therefore both
social and ritual organisation will here be described in the same
section of my argument.
The main feature of the initiation
region is a Sacred Grove: a stretch of meticulously preserved
virgin forest access to which is restricted to men who have gone
through the initiation rites which are held, for every initiation
region, once in about twenty years. In the Sacred Grove the
initiation region’s central deity is venerated. While that
deity has a specific proper name for each initiation region, its
essential identity is that of the Land in general. In everyday
verbal usage, this deity is equated with the sacred grove where
its shrine is located. The central concept is the Manjak
religious system, uchaay, commands a complex semantic field
comprising, among others, such meanings as God, Land, deity,
spirit, devil, sacred grove, forest; in the remainder of this
paper, I shall translate the term by Sacred Grove, implying all
the nuances spelt out here.[15]
The cult of the Sacred Grove reaches its paroxysm during the two
months’ period of initiation, when all uninitiated young men
above the age of seven or eight years go through a training
ordeal inside the Sacred Grove under the direction of a number of
initiation specialists recruited from among the mature and
elderly men of the initiation region. Not only uninitiated actual
inhabitants of the initiation region but all uninitiated youths
hailing from the villages concerned and presently living in other
initiation region, in towns in GuineaBissau, in Senegal and even
in France are called upon, and an amazing number still heed the
call.[16] Moreover, all initiated men from
the initiation region are expected to be present and to make
substantial offerings of canna and sacrificial animals during at
least some days of this two-months’ period. The villages
then teem with hundreds of returning relatives and visitors, and
all resources are drained in order to provide these masses with
meals and shelter.
The cult of the Sacred Grove is however far from confined to the
time of initiation; instead, it is a continuous, daily concern of
all initiated men in the villages of the initiation region.
Elderly men convene at the Sacred Grove virtually on a daily
basis, in order to pour libations, to sample the palm wine and
canna left over once the Land has had its share, to sacrifice
animals and consume their meat, and to perform chicken oracles.
They converse on social and ritual matters, and in general have a
good time together. In these congenial surroundings, sheltered
from the gaze of women and boys, the mature men daily engage in a
process of social interaction in which honour and power are
assessed and redistributed, and claims to office are made,
supported or rejected. The high frequency of social and ritual
action at the Sacred Grove is guaranteed by the fact that any
officering at a lower shrine wherever in the initiation region
(i.e. royal shrine, village shrine, ward shrine, a
compound’s ancestral shrine or an oracle hut)) must
invariably be reported at the Sacred Grove, along with a suitable
gift of palm wine or canna. The very many rituals which can be
seen to be performed in a village from day to day always have an
invisible complement at the Sacred Grove. Initiated men visiting
a village will always first retire, with their hosts and a
suitable libation, to the Sacred Grove, which thus in many ways
forms the ritual equivalent of a traditional men’s club or
public house in Western Europe. When particular important matters
are at hand, e.g. rain ritual or the election to a major office
within the community, activities at the Sacred Grove also take on
a clublike, corporate aspect in that all men concerned are under
the obligation to be present there, failing which one has a
considerable fine to pay, again in the form of canna or palm
wine.[17]
The most important rituals however, involving the most expensive
sacrificial animals (fullgrown pigs, heads of cattle) tend to be
directed exclusively at the Sacred Grove, without lesser shrines
being involved. Women and noninitiated men (e.g. non-Manjak, in
the Portuguese era — and in the course of my research —
even Europeans) who are not entitled to enter the Sacred Grove,
may appeal to a local elder to sacrifice there on their behalf.
These rituals invariably have to do with the discharge of
contractual relationships humans enter into with deities,
foremost with the Sacred Grove. The form and rationale of these
rituals is best described when, below, I discuss Manjak oracles
and sacrifices.
While in the older works on the Manjak the kingship is presented
as the pivot of sociopolitical organisation (cf. Carreira 1947),
the dismantling of this institution since 1973 has been so
effective that little more than vestiges of it remain in the
sphere of production and land tenure. The kingship still has
specific incumbents, and in at least one case a traditional king
has managed to attain a formal position of power within the new
political and judicial structures controlled by the PAIGC. In the
ritual sphere, royal families continue to attend to their royal
shrines, which are located not in the Sacred Grove but in a less
secluded place adjacent to their compounds. This royal cult
however no longer mobilises people from all over the territory of
the former kingdom, and such partial control as the kings
appeared to have had over the cult of the Sacred Grove in the
past, has now disappeared.
Under the luscious beauty of their
giant kapok trees and mango trees, Manjak villages stand out as
extensive and wellshadowed parklike arrangements, separated from
the surrounding forest by a broad circle of paddyfields affording
wide view. In addition to this physical delineation, a village is
characterised by the following features: it has a village
headman; a part (kor ) traditionally set apart to accommodate
this official; and a central open place (benii ). At the benii,
always marked by some particularly imposing sacred kapok trees,
we find the village shrine, likewise called benii: a thatched
hutlike construction without walls; in its centre we see a small
miniature palissade within which the shrine’s spirit (uchaay
) is said to dwell — although at other times this spirit is
said to house in the surrounding kapok trees. Earth from within
this palissade is the main substance used in amulets worn by the
villagers.
Although there do not appear to exist corporate rituals focussing
on the benii (instead of the Sacred Grove), the benii is the
scene of important rituals staged for individual villagers (in
times of illness, or when twins come of age). Also is the benii
the scene of the village’s major burial ground. Here the
highly respected members of the guild of gravediggers perform
their duties; administering the final ritual interaction between
a human being and the Land (notably: burial), they are best seen
as a prominent type of landpriests. After a burial, inquests are
also held at the benii. The empty bier, carried on the heads of
bearers supposed to be in trance, is then used as a divination
instrument answering questions concerning the cause of death,
possible sorcery connotations, and the distribution of the
inheritance.
Since major ritual, judicial and localpolitical functions are
discharged at the level of the men’s assembly in the Sacred
Grove (catering for several neighbouring villages), the social
significance of the village as a social unit today appears to be
less central than its conspicuous delineation in the landscape
would suggest. The village headman used to be prominent in the
old royal hierarchy before it was dissolved. Even today this
officebearer is the guardian of the Cassara shrine (see earlier
note) that, covered with cloth of a colour peculiar to each
village, features in annual ritual competitions between villages
belonging to one ancient kingdom. The allocation of land, a
privilege of the king as the greatest landowner, and the
organisation of royal tribute labour, used to take place
primarily at the village level; and still today, after the
dissolution of the kingdoms, a village’s fields lie next to
one another, quite distinct from the fields of neighbouring
villages with whose inhabitants the village in question may
entertain very close social, marital and ritual ties. All this
suggests that as a unit of social organisation the village lost
most of its functions with the breakdown of the ancient political
system, which in terms of control over land and the appropriation
of surplus labour could well be considered a tributary mode of
production.
With the abolition of tribute
labour, the virtual dissolution of the ancient royal hierarchy
and the appropriation of ancient royal land by individual elders,
the vital unit in the production system today has become the
pekiin or ward. Each ward (cf. figure 1) occupies a contiguous
stretch of land within the village’s residential area;
boundaries between ward are marked by roads, orchards, gardens or
fences. The ward is a strictly exogamous unit.[18] The recruitment of its male
members has vague patrilineal connotations, but there is no claim
of common apical patrilineal ancestors shared by all members of
the ward. It is usually possible to point out one agnatic core
within a ward, but this does not preclude that other inhabitants
generally and publicly known to be matrilateral or even affinal
relatives of the members of this agnatic core enjoy full rights
of membership of this residential unit. Except for ritual
purposes (the veneration of ancestral shrines, and the very
restricted rights of pouring libations there) little stress is
laid on genealogical knowledge.[19]
Meanwhile, the pekiin is a productive unit in that the
cultivation of the main crop, paddy rice, is realised in
collective labour by all pekiin members under the forceful
direction of the pekiin head — who, it must be admitted,
usually prides himself in being an untiring cultivator himself.
The planting season (JuneSeptember) has a major rallying aspect:
not only do all actual residents of the pekiin take part in
production, but in addition virtually all migrants normally
dwelling elsewhere in GuineaBissau, and a large proportion of
those in Senegal, in this period return to the pekiin and (as
young men and women) take a lion’s share in the
inconceivably heavy toil in the flooded paddyfields.
Finally, the pekiin is a socioritual unit in that it tends to
have its own central place, called benii like the central place
at the village level, and physically and functionally hardly
distinguishable from the latter: sometimes major rituals are
performed at the pekiin’s benii, and people may also be
buried here.[20] The main difference between
village benii and ward benii is that the latter turns out to
cater for a much smaller group of people. At the ward benii also
the slid drums are kept which, collectively owned by the members
of that social unit, play an important role in funerary
ceremonies, including, several years or decades after
someone’s demise, the public erection (accompanied by a
major sacrifice and extensive libations) of an ancestral shrine
at one of the compounds in the ward.
Although the fact that the village is segmented into ward is
unmistakable at the most superficial inspection of the
residential space, the functional distinction between these two
levels of social organisation (village and ward) is so blurred
that as a researcher one is tempted to regard the village simply
as a maxineighbourhood, or the ward as a minivillage. In a
continuous process of fission and fusion, waxing and waning, ward
would appear to grow into villages and villages to decline into
ward, with supposedly a redistribution of social, ritual and
political features which however is not yet adequately documented
in my data — and which may have become just as blurred due
to the dissolution of the old kingdom organisation.
In addition to the type of open, thatched, shrine described above
for the benii, at the ward level two other types may be found.
First there are shrines of land deities located away from the
central place and lacking the corporate connotations of the benii
shrine; these shrines may look like miniature huts, but they may
also have a more rudimentary shape: marked by nothing more than a
shrub, a wood log, or a simple shallow hole in the ground
suitable for libation. Guardianship of these shrines is owned by
individual by virtue of their being pekiin headman. Sometimes
such a shrine’s deity is merely considered the special
guardian of the ward in which the shrine is located; others
however are venerated far beyond the ward, as benevolent spirits
specialising in granting rain or human fertility in
exchange for animal sacrifices.
Secondly most ward contain one, and seldom more than one, oracle
hut (pubol ), constructed and owned by an individual oracle
priest (napene), who usually is not the pekiin headman. These
oracle huts and the divination that takes place there are so
crucial to the religious system of the Manjak that they deserve a
section of their own (see below).
With regard to the other forms of agriculture than paddyrice
cultivation, and to petty commodity production as summarised
above, Manjak relations of production are regulated not at the
level of the pekiin, but at that of the extended families. Each
pekiin consists of up to half a dozen of such families, each
characterised by their own dwelling compound. The extended family
is bound together by coresidence and commensality. It is headed
by a male elder, who owns the family’s life stock if any,
and who administers the family’s rice granary. This elder
also officiates at the ancestral shrines that (in the form of a
collection of armthick wooden sticks planted in the ground) are
found in every Manjak compound.
Women make a vital contribution to production (agriculture, petty
commodity production, and domestic work in general) at the level
of the extended household, and since marriage constitutes the
main procedure to gain control over an adult woman’s labour
power, some remarks about the Manjak marriage system are in order
at this point.
While the ward is exogamous, there is a marked degree of
intravillage endogamy, and most marriages are contracted within
the initiation region. Given the extent of migrancy, this
statement must be modified so as to include marriage partners not
actually dwelling in the rural area, but having their village
home in a particular village and initiation region. Continuity in
marriage patterns, and the tendency for initiation regions to
coincide with matrimonial areas (Meillassoux 1964) within which
the biological reproduction of the population largely takes
place, is reflected in the practice of daughters marrying into
their mother’s village, thus, as the Manjak say,
‘returning the gourd’.
Marital payments are slight, often not exceeding a few liters of
liquor presented by the soninlaw to his wife’s father or
guardian. After a transitional period (up to a few years) in
which the wife stays in her father’s ward where her labour
(and part of that of her visiting husband) is controlled by her
family, marriage is virilocal; rapidly the wife is incorporated
into her familyinlaw, to such an extent that she will stay
there until her death, even in times of absence of her husband,
and after his death. Her labour power is controlled by the elder
of her husband’s ward — who delegates most of this
control to his senior wife. Under conditions of migrancy,
husbands aspire to the creation of neolocal nuclear households
away from home: in Bissau, but particularly in Senegal and
France; polygamy, as is widely practised, enables men to combine
urban and rural marital interests and aspirations.
Oracle huts are located at some
distance from their owners’ compounds, often set apart from
the latter by a fence. They are very different from pekiin
shrines: they have thick clay walls and a narrow entrance, and in
their dark main compartment (the other, smaller compartment being
reserved for the invisible oracle deity) easily up to six people
may be seated. Here also the altar is found, where surrounded by
a collection of shells, antilope horns, gourds etc. a libation
basin can be seen, retaining a semifluid sediment of earlier
libations of palm wine, canna and blood of sacrifical animals.
The divinerpriest (napene ) caters for individual clients from
anywhere except his own ward. There are considerable differences
between napenes. Some only act as diviners revealing the causes
of a client’s misfortune and stipulating necessary ritual
action (sacrifice at the Sacred Grove, the erection of an
ancestral shrine, etc.), without themselves engaging in somatic
treatment. Others combine divination and treatment, thereby
laying a personal claim on the client’s material resources
in excess of the chicken and the bottle of canna that are the
inevitable expenses of divination. Although in theory the
divinerpriest should spend all revenue from treatment (often a
considerable sum per case) on sacrifices and libations for the
benefit of the oracular spirit, in practice much of this money is
invested on such secular items as a corrugatediron roof, clothing
and electronic consumer goods. Methods of divination also vary:
while divination always includes a chicken oracle (the inspection
of a fowl’s entrails), some napenes combine this with direct
pronouncements allegedly uttered by the spirit in some
ventriloquial spirit language unintelligible to ordinary human
beings. Some divinerpriests require the client to come to the
oracle with already a clear assessment of his own predicament,
while others do not want the client to give any personal
information on the case, and instead base their diagnosis and
direction solely on divination and revelation. But whatever the
specific forms (whose description and analysis falls outside the
present argument), the napene’s art occupies an absolutely
central function in the religious system of the Manjak. In order
to explain why this should be so, more should be said about the
Manjak’s view of ritual obligations.
With the exception of simple greeting rituals which travellers
and migrants perform at the local shrines, most rituals are a
response to specific misfortune, and form part of the following
chain of interpretation. First the problem at hand (drought,
epidemic, infertility, illness) is to be interpreted as the
manifestation of a specific deity or ancestor seeking ritual
attention. If an ancestor is thought to be involved, it is
usually one who has not yet been honoured by the erection of an
ancestral shrine — a costly affair which is always postponed
until the ancestor shows his impatience through the sending of
misfortune. If a deity is thought to be involved, the misfortune
is most often attributed to that deity’s impatience to see
one living up to the terms of a contract one (or one’s
forbears) has entered into with that deity: in the past one has
asked health, fortune, offspring, a nice job in Senegal or
France, from the deity, in exchange for the promise of a major
sacrifice; and even if the deity can be said to have granted the
request, the promised sacrifice is never made before several
years have gone by and before a specific case of grave misfortune
or ill health has convinced one that the deity is getting
impatient.[21]
Whatever somatic treatment a napene may offer (and such treatment
implies that he induces his client to enter into a sacrificial
relationship with his own oracular deity — in addition to
any other deities with which the client may already be engaged in
contractual relationships), the napene’s first task is
invariably to provide an answer to the question as to which
specific deity or ancestor causes the client’s specific
misfortune, and to stipulate how this invisible being can be
placated. Since every human being is entangled in a close web of
ritual obligations vis-à-vis several members of the preceding
generation, and in any number of (partly long forgotten)
contracts with deities, such a diagnosis is no easy matter; but
at any rate it can safely be assumed that no human being is ever
completely innocent of ritual neglect.
Napene cater for misfortune that is considered to be the personal
affliction of one individual. The secluded intimacy of the oracle
hut allows for private conversations where, in addition to the
client, only the latter’s spouse and/or very close kinsmen
are allowed to be present. Napene consultation poignantly
reflects Manjak notions of privacy and secrecy (which at times
may drive a researcher to his wit’s end).
However, in some cases (covering only a definite minority of all
sacrificial events going on in a village or family), one can
dispense with the napene’s services. Prominent elders
(particularly the officiants of the cult of the Sacred Grove, the
priests of lesser land spirits that have their shrine in some
ward, and ward headmen in general) are sufficiently competent and
confident in ritual matters to stage rituals without first
consulting a divinerpriest. This pattern applies in the following
cases: collective instead of individual misfortune (drought,
epidemics); minor sacrificial contracts and/or minor cases of
ritual neglect typically involving junior members of the village;
and more serious cases of individual misfortune involving an
elder himself. In these cases, the bypassing of the napene does
not mean that no divination is carried out. Rather, the elders
stick to the minimal divinatory requirements that attend all
sacrifices (including those stipulated by napenes): a chicken
oracle has to assess whether the deity’s or ancestor’s
general feeling in the matter at hand is positive
(‘white’, in the Manjak oracular symbolism — the
colour black signifies the alternative case); after which the
urine oracle has to show whether the deity or ancestor, having
already expressed his overall agreement, subsequently accepts or
rejects the specific sacrificial animal selected for him (in the
case of acceptance, the animal urinates immediately before one
proceeds to killing it).
These minimal divinatory requirements may indicate the
uncertainty, powerlessness and tediousness that pervade relations
between Man and the supernatural among the Manjak. The
supernatural is difficult to approach.[22] While many sacrifices are
rejected (as shown by the animal’s failure to urinate), some
sacrifices may be, at best, just tolerated by the supernatural,
but they never ingratiate Man with the supernatural — there
is always the danger of falling short to unknown and demanding
expectations on the part of some forgotten deity in distant
parts. Ritual among the Manjak is a thoroughly joyless, miserable
duty, in which one never reaches a state of blissful
accomplishment. Although humans engage in contracts with deities
as if they were equals, these relations ultimately convey a sense
of onesided dependence on some whimsical and tyrannical power
— a striking reflection of the model that underlies Manjak
gerontocratic relations between youth and women on the one hand,
and elders on the other. Therefore, for Manjak women and youth
ritual contains a double bind: it does not release them from the
clutches of everyday life (in which they are dependent upon and
exploited by gerontocratic elders), but rather reinforces their
predicament, first because no ritual can be completed without an
elder officiating in it, secondly because the relations with the
supernatural can be said to be an ideological reproduction of
gerontocratic arrogance. This is the reason why I do not consider
Manjak rituals to have much therapeutic value for others than the
elders themselves.
There are historical indications [23] that when elders stage rituals
without consulting a napene, we have to do not with elders
usurping the napene’s professional prerogatives, but with
elders insisting on their historical ritual competence in the
face of a recent expansion of the napene’s competence and
prerogatives. Of old, the napene formed part of the kingdom
hierarchy; as members of a hereditary guild, their activities
were to a considerable extent controlled by and subservient to
the politicoritual powers of the king. Elders at the village and
ward level were also part of the same hierarchical
differentiation of functions. With the dissolution of royal power
the hierarchical structure collapsed (no doubt under the
additional influence of individualising tendencies brought by
ever increasing capitalist encroachment — through labour
migration and the cash economy), and the napene more than ever
before took on the characteristics of divinatory and therapeutic
entrepreneurs, catering for misfortune that was more than ever
before conceived as a strictly individual matter. In this they
were less than before checked by the cult of the Sacred Grove
(which was no longer associated with royal power), while also the
social control exercised by the napene guild organisation was
slackened.
Having thus summarised
contemporary social, economic and ritual structures among the
Manjak, we may now ask ourselves what is the place in this
village society, of migrants who have their places of work in
Senegal or France. This discussion will highlight migrants’
rituals as a major form in which the articulation of capitalism
to preexisting modes of production presents itself in this West
African periphery — in a way that reproduces not so much
capitalism, but the local modes.
Manjak rural society today can still serve as a textbook example
of a viable gerontocracy. The codes of gerontocratic power
continue to be respected not only by young men residing in the
village but also by those living as labour migrants at distant
places of work under relations of production and under social
conditions very different from those prevailing in the village.
An amazingly large proportion of these migrants keep up contacts
with home. They send remittances, clothes, building materials and
electronic consumer goods, try to attend the local initiation
festival as held once every twenty years, and also in other years
visit their elders, bringing canna and more endurable gifts. This
vitality of the Manjak gerontocratic system is puzzling. Marriage
payments among the Manjak are too insignificant to form the basis
of the elders’ power over young men, as they do in many
other African societies. (cf. Rey 1971; Geschiere, in press). One
could further invoke in this connection a number of socioeconomic
explanations which have been advanced for other African cases
involving a high rate of migrancy: ‘the elders control the
youths’ access to land, and the latter cannot risk rural
ostracism given the insecurity of their urban footholds as
migrants’; ‘the migrants’ wives and children are
left in the care of the village elders, in a subtle captivity
ensuring the migrant’s continued respect and financial
remittances’, etc. In the Manjak case explanations of this
nature appear to lack conviction. Many Manjak migrants have
acquired Senegalese or even French citizenship, and have thus a
rather secure foothold abroad. Many are less than committed to
the independent state of GuineaBissau, its disaster economy, and
its ruling party the PAIGC, and would not dream of retiring in
their home area although many ultimate do retire there. Many
consider village life an ordeal that one can only endure for a
few weeks a year, if that; and although many have left (some of)
their wives and children at home, others have their dependents
safely outside the elders’ control, in relatively
comfortable houses in Senegal and France (cf. Diop 1981).
It is not simple economic necessity that drives Manjak men back
into the arms of their elders. The initiation, as youths, into
the cult of the Sacred Grove, their more gradual and less
dramatic exposure to the cults of lesser deities and ancestors,
and the ensuing socialisation into notions of obligation,
neglect, dependence and fear, may have much to do with the
migrants’ continued observance of rural ties that are not an
obvious asset to them. However, I would shrink from invoking such
an ideological factor as an independent variable, and would
rather admit that my exploratory research among the Manjak does
not yet allow me to provide a full analysis on this point. Social
control mutually exerted by Manjak migrants at their distant
places of work, sometimes taking a formal organised form, may
provide part of the explanation, particularly as regards those
migrants who keep up such intensive ties with their village that
every year they participate in the planting season.
Many migrants in Senegal, and all migrants in France, do not
retain productive rural ties of this nature, and their home
visits tend to be at intervals that are much longer than one
year. What is very striking in those cases is that, when a home
visit finally occurs, there is invariably a major ritual
obligation that in the migrant’s mind forms the most obvious
reason for the arduous and expensive trip. Migrancy is of course
a condition conductive to all sorts of somatic and mental trouble
.[24] When (often after vain appeals to
Western doctors, psychiatrists, social workers etc.) these
complaints are put before some Manjak diviner residing at the
distant place of work,[25] they are interpreted as spiritual
or ancestral manifestations due to ritual neglect or obligations.
Sometimes money sent home for the purchase of canna and
sacrificial animals may be considered a sufficient remedy, but in
most cases the migrant sees no alternative but to return home
personally. He will bring gifts for his living rural kinsmen, but
his main expenditure apart from his return ticket will be ritual:
literally dozens of liters of canna, several pigs and/or goats, a
considerable number of chickens to be used for oracles. Most of
these items are only available at Canchungo if at all. One does
not buy them all in one go, but item after item, making the
expensive and tedious taxi ride to Canchungo time and again, in
the course of weeks that may easily become months, as one’s
ritual obligations find ever new and unexpected extensions
through the divinations at the oracle huts and the Sacred Grove
of the home area.
The expenses incurred would be truly astronomical if the migrant
were to abide by the official exchange rate of the GuineaBissau
currency. Many migrants however manage to change their French or
Senegalese currency at the black market (the border town of São
Domingo, where longdistance taxis enter from Senegal and deliver
the migrants at the pedestrians’ ferry to Cacheu, is famous
in this respect), thus reducing their costs very considerably.[26] But even so, the migrants’
home visit is traumatic. He is constantly aware of being at the
mercy of oracle priests, elders, taxidrivers, Canchungo traders,
and the Guinean economy as a whole — a painful contrast with
the relative comforts of his distant place of work. As his ritual
obligations turn out to ramify in unexpected directions, his time
budget and finances begin to give out. Nor do the many rituals in
which the migrant is involved, in any symbolic and psychological
way seem to create a marked catharsis, some redeeming reimmersion
in the culture and society he was born in. On the contrary, the
prolonged dependence, for the fulfillment of ritual obligations,
on both human and supernatural authority figures against whose
whims and directions not the slightest appeal is possible, in
addition to rural health conditions and the effects of ritual
overconsumption of alcohol, create a state of stress from which
the migrant can only recover after having left his village home
again. He is discharging a painful and costly duty which has
little intrinsic gratification to offer. The fact that his
coming home has primarily been defined in terms of ritual
obligation and neglect, spoils what might have been a rural
vacation into a race for spiritual and financial survival. The
migrant’s gain seems to be not so much that he is confirmed
as a member of the rural society and culture, but that he earns
the right to leave again and to stay away for some years at
least...
It is no longer necessary to argue
that labour migration is a particularly effective form in which
the articulation between capitalism and noncapitalist modes of
production is brought about.[27] It is more opportune here
(concluding a descriptive argument that started out with a
theoretical statement on religion as ideological reproduction and
production) to ask ourselves how, precisely, and primarily at
which point do migrants’ rituals in Manjak society today
affect the structure of articulation of modes of production
— and from there to proceed to an assessment of the
limitations of the answers the preceding argument will
suggest.
My summary of rural production and economic circulation in
contemporary rural Manjak society had a purpose beyond
ethnographic redundancy: it enables us to distinguish, albeit
tentatively, the articulated modes of production that make up
this social formation. Obviously the encroaching capitalist mode
of production, whose local protagonists are the migrants, does
not confront one monolithic noncapitalist Manjak mode of
production, but a complex of articulated structures, in which at
least two constituent modes of production are immediately
manifest: one more properly ‘domestic’ mode, revolving
on the central exploitation of youth and women by elders; and
another one, revolving on the exploitation of producers engaged
in a domestic mode of production, by royal courts. The latter
type of exploitation, amounting to a tributary mode of
production, used to be effected through the appropriation of both
land and surplus labour.
Both modes of production have their structures of ideological
reproduction peculiar to that mode: ancestral shrines
underpinning the elders’ authority in the case of the
domestic mode; and royal shrines underpinning royal legitimacy
and exalted power over the fertility of the land in the case of
the tributary mode. But this does not exhaust the complexity of
Manjak religious structures — the cult of the Sacred Grove,
the cult of the benii shrines, of other lesser deities at the
ward level, of the oracular spirits associated with the pubols,
and finally the cult of Cassara, are not easily fitted into such
a suspiciously attractive picture of onetoone correspondence
between production unit and ritual expression.
Underlying these several cult complexes, two major types of idiom
can be detected: a ‘land’ idiom and a ‘sky’
idiom. The sky idiom is only represented by the cult of Cassara;
its features are the motton of a High God, emphatic moral concern
(a preoccupation with sorcery), somewhat colour symbolism,
movable shrines, an annual calendar, and association with the
village level which — as have argued — is more a social
and political than a productive unit. The land idiom is
represented in the other cults mentioned; its features are a
pantheon of leccer deities localized in the landscape, virtual
absence of moral concerns (deities are allegedly prepared to
enter into any sort of contract, harmful or not to humans, with
or without commotations of sorcery [28] and when they punish they do not
do so for moral indignation but for wounded pride), restricted
colour symbolism (the only significant colours are balck and
white in which divination is encoded; further the greyish red
colour of clay pervades everything connected with these cults),
immovability, a twentyyears cycle (in the case of the Sacred
Grove) or no conspicuous cycle at all (in the case of the other
shrine cults), and rather than the specific association with one
specific level of sociopolitical organisation, a hierarchical
structure encompassing all levels. The latter feature is further
brought out by the fact that all rituals at lesser shrines are
echoed by ritual at the Sacred Grove. Manjak believe, moreover,
that the lesser deities themselves report all rituals directed at
them, to the Sacred Grove.
The difference between these two idioms is so striking that one
might be surprised to find them in one and the same culture. We
have here a clear example of two ideological logics that are
mutually so irreducable that one would be tempted to connect each
with a different logic of production and exploitation within a
social formation composed of several articulated modes of
production.
It requires no great effort of imagination to identify paddyrice
cultivation as the counterpart, in the sphere of material
production, of the ‘land’ idiom. The objection that we
have already identified a domestic mode of production underpinned
not by the Sacred Grove and lesser deities but by ancestors, is
easily resolved when we call to mind the striking distinction, in
the regulation of agricultural production, between paddyrice
cultivation (nowadays organised at the ward level), and other
forms of agricultural production (organised at the
compound/nuclearfamily level). This distinction will appear to be
even more relevant once we realise that irrigated rice
cultivation (although these days organised at the ward level)
requires the concerted efforts of a much larger community even
than the ward, not so much for the annual preparation, planting
and harvesting at the individual paddyfields, but particularly
for the maintenance of the complex irrigation system. These
concerns go far beyond the very small group that is bound by
common ancestors, and must ultimately be attended to at even a
higher level of social organisation than the village: the
initiation level, normally composed of villages whose paddyfields
are located in the same valley or at the same rivulet. There
really seems to be a case for the identification, in the Manjak
social formation, of a third mode of production, like the
properly domestic one based on the exploitation of women and
youth by elders, but differentiated from the latter in that the
‘classes’ involved in the ‘rice’ mode of
production are not primarily defined by kinship and domestic
roles as discharged in closelyknit extended families, but by
membership of broad age groups with specific tasks in the
ricegrowing process. The elegance of this argument is further
enhanced by the fact that, on the ideological level, the paroxysm
of the cult of the Sacred Grove is initiation, which regulates
the relationships between age groups.
I do not think that we have to construct, within the local
economy, again a fourth mode of production for which the
‘sky’ idiom of Cassara could then be argued to serve as
a structure of ideological reproduction. The Upper Guinea coast
has been exposed to intercontinental circulation since the
fifteenth century. During the sixteenth century the coastal area
was a major source of slaves for the transatlantic trade (cf.
Rodney 1970; Curtin et al. 1978: 231f). Although much more
specific data are needed, I would suggest that the Cassara
complex should be taken, not as a reflection of a separate mode
of production, but as an ideological expression of the
articulation of the local social formation to an encroaching
mercantile capitalism.[29]
Migrants, in this picture, represent the articulation of the
emerging social formation with a later development of the
capitalist mode of production: industrial capitalism, revolving
on the exploitation of labour by capital. Born and bred in the
Manjak villages but selling their labour power at a distant
capitalist labour market, they perfectly fit in the picture of
peripheral capitalism: their labour is overexploited (Meillassoux
1975), first because its surplus value is appropriated by
capital, and secondly because their own domestic community does
not enjoy the full interest on the investment it has made in the
biological reproduction of these workers since they were
conceived and born.
Through autochthonous rituals, these migrant workers are brought
to spend a large part of their capitalist wages in their home
communities. At first sight, it would look as if thus the
overexploitation of their labour is reduced: after all, in this
way the domestic community reaps some of the fruits of its
investment in these migrants’ unproductive years as infants
and boys. One could even attempt to estimate the value of pigs
and canna involved, but unfortunately the migrants’ exchange
fiddles make this a spurious exercise.
Such a financial cost/benefit
analysis would, however, distract us from the crucial question:
what, in the sphere of material production and the attending
relations of production, is really being reproduced by the ritual
structures in which the migrants are so active?
Part of the canna and most of the sacrificial animals’ blood
runs away in the ground, and the rest of drink and meat is
consumed by the elders, — with some limited share for other
villagers if the ritual happens to take place not in the Sacred
Grove but inside the village. Biological or physiological
reproduction of the labour power of the elders and possibly other
villagers hardly seem to be the point here — although the
nutritional value of meat and canna cannot be denied. What these
rituals reproduce, to an excessive extent, is a relation of
gerontocratic exploitation.[30] They make the elders and their
prerogatives eminently visible, both in a direct form (elders
officiate at the rituals and consume drink and meat), and in a
symbolic form (yielding to the demands of deities and ancestors
means yielding to powers that closely resemble living elders).
Giving in to the demands of deities and ancestors, the migrants
in their rituals in fact ideologically reproduce the two local
modes of production that, after the dismantling of the tributary
mode, are still viable: the ‘domestic’ mode and the
‘rice’ mode. Instead of being the local propagators of
capitalism in any direct sense, or even becoming the agents of
modernisation and liberation, the migrants apparently have no
choice but to be the overzealous servants of the ideological
structures (including such concepts as deities and ancestors, and
such attitudes as fear and insecurity) upon which the ancient
modes of production are partly based. It is as if the
migrants’ relative and temporal immunity from gerontocratic
control during their stay at distant places of work, has to be
bought by ostentatious symbolic submission to this control during
the short time they spend at home.
Peripheral capitalism in itself is not being manifestly
reproduced in this context — or it should be that the
migrants’ potlatchlike (cf. Diop 1981) ritual displays of
wealth and ritual zeal induces other potential migrants to
actually depart for Senegal and France, or induces elders to
grant their permission for such departure more readily. This
however is again a wrong interpretation. The migrants are not
welcomed home as people who have made the grade abroad, but as
pitiable patients who come to seek ritual redress, and as
negligent observers of ritual obligations who come to make up for
their shortcomings. There is no triumph whatsoever in the
migrants’ excessive ritual action. Moreover, a ritual
display of wealth is scarcely necessary: the material display in
the form of expensive outlandish clothes, stereos, pictures
showing welldressed people in a wellfurnished home abroad, does
already enough to create incentives for potential migrants and
their elders.
A further look at the napene’s role in the migrants’
ritual activities might suggest that such an interpretation in
terms of ideological reproduction of ancient but still vital
modes of production might yet have its limitations:
The napene’s art today is not totally subservient to the
upkeeping of the ritual structures of the ‘land’ idiom
and the ancestral idiom. In addition to ushering people into
chains of ever more expensive rituals directed at the Sacred
Grove, the benii, the ancestral shrines etc., the divinerpriests
try very hard to make the client enter in a specific, expensive
relationship with his own oracular spirit, with whom the client
usually had no previous relationship or contract. In this way,
the oracular spirit becomes not the servant and messenger, but
the business rival of the Sacred Grove and the other, lesser
spirits. In recent decades, divinerpriests’ fees seem to
have increased, their private secular investment of these fees
has become common practice, and a number of divinerpriests are
alleged to have begun to experiment with lucrative types of
somatic treatment for which they do not have the proper
traditional training nor the solemn initiation, and which is no
longer effectively controlled by the napenes’ guild. In the
hands of the napene, Manjak ritual structures appear to have
taken on the characteristics of an exploitative structure sui
generis. Of course this structure can only thrive at the fringe
of the more general religious notions and actions that make up
the various cults, but it is no longer wholly dependent upon the
latter but has taken on a dynamic of its own. Migrants caught in
this structure are not just engaged in the ideological
reproduction of ancient modes of production — they are also,
in part, directly exploited by (and thus can be said to
reproduce) specialists’ ritual structures that no
longer bear a particularly close relationship with the
ideological dimensions of Manjak modes of production.[31][32]
Finally, in order to do justice to the serious therapeutic
concerns of some of the napenes with whom my research has brought
me into contact, I should like to stress that this
‘divinatory racket’ variant is not the only possible
limitation that the notion of ideological reproduction encounters
in the Manjak case. As a client, even more than as a researcher,
I have seen certain napenes creatively manipulate the symbolic
and dramaturgical material that is present in the Manjak
religious system today, with such virtuosity and profound human
concern that, rather than confirming their clients in some form
of exploitation (by elders, napenes, distant capitalists, or some
articulated combination of them all), they bring about genuine
revelation and liberation.[33] A Marxist approach ultimately
aimed at the liberation of consciousness, should be prepared to
acknowledge such similar potential in other, authentically
African, forms of ideological production.
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[1]
This clearly is a Marxist rephrasing of Geertz’s famous
definition (1966) .
[2]
For Marxist analyses of the religious dimension of pre-capitalist
modes of production, cf. Bonte (1975), Houtart (1980), Auge
(1975), and Bare (1977).
[3]
A classic statement of correspondence along
structural-functionalist lines is Fortes (1959). On the
significance and limitations of the correspondence thesis in the
anthropology of religion, cf. Werbner 1977; van Binsbergen 1981.
[4]
Cf. Rey 1971, 1973; van Binsbergen & Geschiere, in 1984b; on
the ideological problems of such an approach, as well as its
potential, cf. van Binsbergen (in press).
[5]
Cf. van Binsbergen 1981; van Binsbergen & Geschiere (in
1984a: 274-8) succinctly propose an ethnographic and historical
method (such as used in van Binsbergen 1981) for the analysis of
religion in complex social formations.
[6]
Cf. Werbner 1977; Schoffeleers 1979; van Binsbergen 1981.
[7]
From among the massive literature on prominent African religieus
innovators, cf. Sundkler (1961), Mitchell & Turner (1966).
[8]
This theoretical caveat, representing a different position from
the one I took earlier (cf. van Binsbergen 1981), ties in with
such work as Buijtenhuijs (1984) and Coulon (1984).
[9]
My emphasis on such experiments might seem to introduce,
idealistically, an autonomous field fo human intellectual
activity, independent from the constraints of material
production. But on the contrary, Man’s ability to experiment
and to create provides the very basis for technological and
organizatory innovation, and hence for the emergence of new
relations of production and new modes of produc- tion; just as
everyday material production provides the most obvious context
(in the way of models, contexts, challenges) for symbolic and
philosophical thought, experiment, and innovation.
[10]
For recent studies in this vein, cf. Fabian (1984), Devisch
(1984), and general comments in van Binsbergen & Schoffeleers
(1984a).
[11]
After preparatory trips in November 1981 and November 1982,
fieldwork was carried out (mainly through the medium of the
Creole language, the national lingua franca i.e. a Manjak
interpreter was used only in the first few weeks - in the Cacheu
region, GuineaBissau, from April to August 1983, at the request
of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, and within the
wider framework of that Ministry’s mental health planning
policy (cf. de Jong 1983). In addition to his extensive
administrative and logistic support, and the contribution of
relevant clinical case material not used in the present argument,
the psychiatrist J. de Jon g for about two weeks shared in the
field-work so as to augment the data with depth interviews of
rural psychiatric patients. Further, I wish to register my
indebtedness to local authorities in the Cacheu region; to the
people of Calequisse; and to the African Studies Centre, Leiden,
who funded the project and graciously granted me leave of absence
in order to carry it out. For preliminary accounts of the Manjak
research, cf. van Binsbergen (1983a; that paper contains a very
extensive bibliography of possible use to other researchers) and
(1983b). A more extensive report is in preparation (Van
Binsbergen & de Jong, n.d.). Given the limited period of
field-work the present analysis must be considered as
provisional, awaiting further research.
[12]
For an interesting account of Manjak migration as seen from
France, cf. Diop (1981). Regrettably, this author has never set
foot in the Manjak area of origin; yet his reconstruction, based
on data gathered in France, of contemporary Manjak village
society is basically sound. A spate of publications provide a
background on West African labour migration to France; cf., e.
g., Bergues (1973); Diarra (1968); Diop (1968); Minces (1973);
Papyle (1973). Van der Klei (1984) is a penetrating analysis of
migration and modes of production in a neighbouring area not
unlike the Manjak’s.
[13]
A 1950 census estimated the number of Manjak in Guinea-Bissau at
just over 70,000, or 14.3% of the territory’s population of
just over 500,000 (Poelhekke 1979-80:21). Allowing for a
substantial increase of the national population as well as
increased Manjak migration to Senegal and France, the present-day
Manjak population in GuineaBissau could be estimated at
90.000-100.000, r,lost of whom live in the Cacheu region. In
addition, an increasing number of Manjak have come to form a
permanent (as distinct from migrant) population in Senegal
(Casamance and Cap Verde regions, including Dakar), especially
since the Guinean liberation war. The ethnographic literature on
the Manjak is surprisingly abundant and interesting; cf. Brito
1952; Carreira 1946, 1947a, 1947b, 1948, 1953, 1956, 1960, 1961a,
1965, 1967; Correia 1958; Crespo 1955; Diop 1981; Lopes 1943,
1945; Meireles 1948. 1949, 1952, 1960; Mota 1954: 308f; Nogueira
1947; Pires 1948; Reis 1947; Santos Reis & Courtinho da Costa
1961. On the Manjak in Senegal, cf. Diallo 1964; Mbengue 1971;
Mendy 1969; Sow 1969.
[14]
My oral historical data, tying in with the exceptional position
of the Cobiana central deity of Mama Jombo as described by
Carreira (1961b: 529); cf’ note 23.
[15]
Cf. Carreira (1956; 1960); Diop (1981), and the references cited
in that work.
[16]
In Creole, the Manjak word uchaay is usually translated by iran,
while some informants, extensively exposed to Roman Catholicism,
may prefer the translation shatan. The latter word plainly means
‘devil’, while iran refers to any spiritual being that
represents a mode of existence independent from humanity
(therefore, souls of the departed are not irans): the spirits
associated with sacred groves, clan shrines and
diviner-priests’ shrines, but also sorcery familiars.
Usually, the concepts uchaay and iran are not supposed to
encompass the notion of a EIigh God, called Deus in Creole, and
Nasin Batsi (Y.ing of the Sky) in Manjak. This distinction
between deity and EIigh God, so well geared to Christianity, may
well be due to Christian influence. Likewise, Roman Catholic
missionaries have equated Christ with the Cassara figure from the
Manjak pantheon. Cassara is the messenger of Nasin Batsi who once
a year (in April) visits the world in order to expose, chase and
kill the witches. Cassara’s material incarnation is a
ceremonial bier covered with cloth in a colour peculiar to each
village. During the week of Cassara villagers enjoy collective
meals at the dancing-ground adjacent to the headman’s house.
Cassara’s bier (with which entranced youths dance and run
about on this occasion) is considered to be an oracle capable of
detecting and chasing witches. Anyone dying in this period will
not be mourned: he or she is considered a witch slain by Cassara.
[17]
Thus, during the initiation ceremonies in the Sacred Grove of
BoTimat, near Calequisse, in April/ June 1983, at least fifty
youths participated, including a considerable number from
Senegal, and even a few boys flown iI1 straight from France where
they had been born.
[18]
Palm wine is perishable and only available during part of the
year (October-May) . Rituals are performed the year round, and
therefore canna is an essential substitute for palm wine, even
though the latter, as direct, unadulterated produce tapped
straight from the trees, is held to be symbolically superior. For
ritual purposes one liter of canna (a standard minimum quantity
for most ritual occa- signs) is equated with five liters of palm
wine; as a commodity, palm wine is somewhat cheaper than this
ritual equation suggests: while a liter of canna sells at peso
180-200, a liter of palm wine only fetches peso 20-25. For the
peso exchange rate, cf. note 27.
[19]
The only case of intra-neighbourhood marriage that came to my
attention was in the village of Bajob, in a context dominated by
Christian and cosmopolitan influences which did not preclude that
rumour attributed such great misfortunes as befell the spouses,
to their breach of marriage taboos.
[20]
The Manjak pekiin may be an example of the deme, a concept
Murdock tried rather in vain to introduce in social anthropology
(Murdock 1965).
[21]
It is unclear yet which factors govern burial at either the
village benii or the ward benii.
[22]
For sacrifice prompted by sacrificial obligations stemming from a
human’s contract with a deity, the Creole language uses the
apt expression of torna boka, ‘to return the mouth (which
has made the promise) ‘ .
[23]
Mama Jombo, the main Sacred Grove of the Cobiana ethnic group,
turns out to be much more easily approachable than the Manjak
equivalents, e. g. the Sacred Grove of Calequisse. The minimal
divinatory requirements as discussed, for the Manjak, in the t
ext, scarcely apply at Mama Jombo’s shrines (she boasts
five, all situated closely to one another). This accessibility
may be an important reason (but what causes it in the first
place?) for Mama Jombo’s very extensive inter-ethnic and
international clientele, including not only Guineans from the
peninsula (among whom Manjak) and beyond, but also Diola
villagers from Senegal, and Europeans. Efficiently, the priests
deal with the clients in the Creole language - while Manjak is
the only language tolerated by the Manjak deities at their
shrines. On one occasion, I found the waiting area of the Cobiana
shrine so crowded that the impression was conveyed of a modern
bureaucratic institution.
[24]
My own oral-historical data, in conjunction with Carreira’s
account (espec. 1947) .
[25]
Cf. Collomb & Diop (1969); Diarra (1966).
[26]
Such diviners are found in the major centres of Manjak migration
both in Senegal and in France, and not by accident. Thus, in
April 1983 I personally witnessed, in the town of Canchungo, part
of the initiation (bupene) of a diviner who was specifically
initiated so as to take up, immediately afterwards, a divination
practice in France.
[27]
According to the official exchange rate, one Guinea-Bissau peso
equalled c. US$ 0.025 (first half 1983); exchanged on the black
market for French and Senegalese currency, its value is said to
decrease to c. US$ 0.003. Full-grown pigs, priced at peso 10,000
and more in Guinea-Bissau and even heads of cattle, which may be
twice as costly -, may thus come within the reach of the average
returning migrant.
[28]
Cf. Amin (1974); Amselle (1976); Gerold-Scheepers & Van
Binsbergen 1978; van Binsbergen & Meilink 1978b.
[29]
On closer analysis, many cases of misfortune involving lesser
defies may turn out to have rather more extensive sorcery
connotations than would meet the eye at first. In a way, sorcery
interpretations would seem to form an embarrassing and hidden
secondary layer underlying the participants’ more overt (but
still rather secretive) interpretations in terms of ritual
reglect. But even so the deities involved are largely considered
to be morally indifferent - except the Sacred Grove of Bekasha,
near Caiomét (between Caió and Calequisse), which punishes
sorcerers and whose priest provides a somatic treatment for bone
fractures thought to be caused by sorcery.
[30]
For a related argument, cf. van der Klei 1984.
[31]
For theoretical elaboration, and descriptive parallels from
Zambia, cf. van Binsbergen 1981.
[32]
While locally the ritual structures of the Manjak bear close
resem- blance to those elsewhere on the Upper Guinea coast, e. g.
among the Feloop, other Diola groups, the Balanta, Braam etc.,
only the Manjak seem to incorporate these structures so
effectively in the context of migrancy. Apart from the fact that
Manjak are more than the other groups in Guinea-Bissau (but not
much more than c.q., the Diola of Senegal) involved in labour
migration, (cf. de Jonge et al. 1978) I cannot explain this state
of affairs; and of course, this explanation is too partial as
long as their relatively excessive rate of migration itself is
left unexplained. A comparative analysis of migra- tion and
ritual on the Upper Guina coast would be most illuminating in
this connexion. It would also help to assess the present-day
situation of migrants’ rituals among the Manjak as either
transitional and ephemeral (with the napenes’ sui-generic
exploitation as a develop- ment that may increasingly dominate
the Manjak ritual scene in future), or rather (as I suspect) as
more ancient and permanent. Diop (1981) does give a history of
Manjak migration, showing that it is by no means a phenomenon
that started only a few decades ago. The case material I
collected also suggests that the migrants’ rituals as
described here have a considerable history.
[33]
Meanwhile it is remarkable that my data do not reveal the
slightest trace of prophetism, which elsewhere in Africa is such
a significant ideological response to labour migration, and which
has been recorded in the nearby Casamance region of Senegal
(Girard 1969).
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