Adeline Masquelier

Teatime: Boredom and the Temporalities of Young Men in Niger

ABSTRACT To fight boredom, un(der)employed young men in Niger have joined fadas (youth clubs) where they listen to music, play card games and strike up new friendships – or nurture old ones. Membership in these organizations cuts across social divides, educational backgrounds and religious affiliations, affirming the spirit of egalitarianism and comradeship that drives these largely urban projects. At the fada, conversation routinely takes place around the making and sharing of tea, a ritual idle young men have come to value greatly as they struggle to fill their days with purpose and direction. Whereas elders largely condemn fadas as futile, self-indulgent, and occasionally criminal endeavours, samari (young men) defend their pastimes, claiming that they engage in meaningful activities. In this essay I explore the temporalities of teatime at the fada. Rather than focus on what is lost under conditions of crisis and privation, I consider instead what is produced, and in particular how value, exchange, and affect emerge in the context of daily routines at the fada. In the absence of other temporal markers punctuating daily life, the practice of preparing and consuming tea becomes a key happening, enabling samari to carve out meaningful temporalities and reconfigure their relation to the future. RESUMÉ Pour combattre lennui, les jeunes nigériens sans emploi (ou en situation de sous-emploi) simpliquent dans des clubs de jeunesse (fadas) où ils jouent de la musique, jouent aux cartes et lient de nouvelles amitiés ou entretiennent danciennes. La composition des membres de ces organisations transcende les clivages sociaux, les parcours scolaires et les affiliations religieuses, affirmant lesprit d’égalitarisme et de camaraderie qui anime ces projets essentiellement urbains. À la fada, la conversation sengage ordinairement autour dune tasse de thé, dont la préparation et la consommation en commun constituent un rituel fort apprécié de jeunes inactifs qui tentent de mettre du sens dans leur vie quotidienne. Face aux réprobations dune majorité danciens qui voient dans les fadas une occupation futile, complaisante voire criminelle, les samari (jeunes hommes) défendent leur passe-temps en soutenant quils sadonnent à des activités utiles. Dans cet essai, lauteur explore les temporalités du rituel du thé à la fada. Plutôt que de mettre en exergue les aspects pénalisants des conditions de crise et de privation, lauteur sintéresse à ce qui en sort, et notamment l’émergence des notions de valeur, d’échange et daffect dans le contexte des activités quotidiennes à la fada. En labsence dautres repères de temps pour ponctuer la vie quotidienne, la pratique de la préparation et de la consommation de thé devient un événement important qui permet aux samari de créer des temporalités porteuses de sens et de reconfigurer leur rapport au futur.

Powers, Problems, and Paradoxes of Twinship in Niger

Among Hausaphone Mawri communities of Niger, twins are powerful yet dangerous beings endowed from birth with extraordinary abilities. While they are welcomed by parents who interpret multiple births as lucky, twins are feared because they kill offenders and perceive things which normal people cannot see. Twins are also fiercely jealous of each other. Defusing this rivalry entails treating both children identically, lest they hurt each other. This essay explores how the Mawri deal with the paradox of double births through practices that emphasize the magical powers of twins or, conversely, stress their vulnerability. It also discusses how, with the emergence of reformist Islam, the meanings and implications of twin births are being reassessed through debates over morality. (Twinship, West Africa, Islam, reformist movements) Soon after my arrival in the Hausa-speaking town of Dogondoutchi in Arewa (southern Niger) to conduct fieldwork, my neighbor Houre took me to the house of Salamatou and Abarshi, who were celebrating the birth of their twin girls. Outside the walled family compound, the men who early that morning had come to share the joy of the new father and to receive kola nuts were now gone. The two rams slaughtered in celebration of the twins birth had already been cut up and their meat apportioned between different family members and patrons. The courtyards messiness betrayed the unusual degree of activity that had taken place in the last few days. In one corner, two women were engaged in the careful division of cooked millet balls into communal portions that, with sauce, would be later served to guests. Upon entering the room where the new mother sat surrounded by the female friends and neighbors who had come to attend the naming ceremony, Houre and I deposited our monetary contributions into the mothers hands before sitting on a mat next to the barber who would soon shave the infants hair. In a corner, a young schoolgirl was busily tallying the gifts of money in a rumpled notebook, the Carnet de Sante (immunization record) of Salamatous first-born (a girl who had died in infancy), that would help the young mother keep track of each visitors contribution.(1) Meanwhile, we were each handed a small plastic bag filled with fried cakes covered with powdered sugar, the usual counter-gift whose lengthy preparation had absorbed the neighbors and co-wives of the parturient for most of the morning. As is customary for a biki (birth celebration), the walls of the crowded and stuffy room were decorated with the colorful handwoven blankets Salamatou had received as wedding gifts. A couple of griots (praise singers) standing in the doorway were singing the praises of the newly named babies, Hassana and Housse, each of whom lay in a pair of arms, unaware of the turmoil generated by their recent arrival. One of the babies is so much bigger than her sister, I remarked to the woman sitting next to me. Shhh! she exclaimed before I had a chance to finish. You must never say this! Lets hope they havent heard you. Puzzled, I asked her why I should hope that the babies had not heard what I assumed to be an inoffensive comment. If she feels jealous, she will try to kill her twin, the woman answered softly before she was asked to trade places with the midwife, who, following conventions, would hold one of the babies while her pagan hair was shaved away. I soon became too immersed in the aski (shaving) performance to pursue inquiring about twinship, but later found ample confirmation that in Mawri society twins are powerful beings endowed from birth with special capacities that make them at once, more than human and less than human (Turner 1969:47). These special capacities, the practices that have traditionally surrounded the treatment of twins, and the emergence of a new moral framework for dealing with the problem of twinship are discussed here. This article explores how the experience and interpretation of twinship have recently become the focus of local debates over the meaning of Islamic identity, marriage, and morality. …

The return of magic

George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (Eds.). 2001. Witchcraft dialogues . Anthropological and philosophical exchanges . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 344 pp.

Islam, Polygyny and Modern Contraceptive Use in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa

26.00. ISBN 0 89680 220 5. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Eds.). 2003. Magic and modernity . Interfaces of revelation and concealment . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 390 pp.

The Bloodstain: Spirit Possession, Menstruation, and Transgression in Niger

22.95. ISBN 0 8047 4464 5. Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (Eds.). 2001. Magical interpretations , material realities . Modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa . London: Routledge, 253 pp.

Some Further Thoughts on Knowledge, Practice and Morality

25.95. ISBN 0415 258677. Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications of backwardness and primitivism, the concept of magic has been reclaimed from its prior function as a negative trope in the constructions of the exotic other and recast to elucidate a wide variety of social processes and practices. Like other once maligned but now rehabilitated conceptual tools of the anthropologists kit – fetishism and syncretism are two that come to mind – magic has gained a new lease on life to judge from these three recent publications focused on the occult and its ever visible place in contemporary societies the world over. If the volumes under review can be said to share anything, it is precisely an interest in the newly discovered use of magic as an analytical category as well as the intent to contribute to the framing of this renewed anthropological interest. Despite their divergent analytical foci and their distinct uses of interchangeable terms such as the occult, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment to describe local realities, all three propose approaches to the problem of magic that are both enlightening and rewarding for their attention to peoples lived experience. All three also present collections of generally well-written and interpretively provocative essays that cover a wide range of issues from a wide range of cultural or historical spaces.

Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis

Francophone sub-Saharan African countries have some of the highest fertility rates and lowest contraceptive prevalence rates in the world. As of the latest Demographic Health Survey (DHS) available for each country, total fertility rates range from 4.2 births per woman (Gabon 2000) to 7.0 births per woman (Niger 2006). Modern contraceptive prevalence rates range from a low of 3.2% (CAR 1994) to a high of 13.4% (Gabon 2000). In response to the increasing concern at the international level regarding persistent high fertility in this region, as evidenced by the Ouagadougou Initiative, multiple parties – donors, governments, and NGOs – have renewed their interest in identifying the potential levers of change in relation to contraceptive use in this group of countries.

Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger

Examining the varied reactions of people to the blood-stained wrapper of a spirit devotee during a bori possession ceremony in Niger, I explore how dirt and disgust are more complex than neat structuralist models of purity and pollution often used to explain them. Understanding menstrual blood in situational terms, and looking at the reactions as shaped more about complex dimensions of agency in the course of possession, secrecy, revealing things known but not spoken, and forms of attention allows us to grasp better the varied kinds of disgust some people expressed after the incident.

Why Katrina's Victims Aren't Refugees: Musings on a “Dirty” Word

This contribution to a debate on Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte discusses the valuable theoretical perspective offered by Michael Lambek as he focuses on spirit possession as an embodied experience that lasts well beyond its manifest moments. By grounding the immediacy of possession in the embodied texture of the everyday, Lambek renders tangible what is often taken as an intangible dimension of the religious experience. His insights into the various forms and circumstances through which knowledge is understood, circulated and applied in spirit possession enable him to talk about this tradition as an alternative form of knowing that always operates in the context of Islam and whose practical significance is only demonstrated in the concreteness of social action.

Women and Islamic revival in a West African town

Contributors: Mariane Ferme, University of California, Berkeley David Guss, Harvard University Wolfgang Kempf, University of TUbingen Jim Kiernan, University of Natal, South Africa Klaus-Peter Koepping, University of Heidelberg, Birgit Meyer, Amsterdam School for Social Research David Mosse, University of Wales Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University, USA Charles Stewart, University College London Peter van der Veer, University of Amsterdam Richard Werbner, University of Manchester Lale Yalsin-Heckmann, University of Bamberg