Florence Bernault

Carnal technologies and the double life of the body in Gabon

There is enormous reluctance in the West today to envision the body as a mere organic entity. The reduction of the flesh to reified matter – and its corollary, potential circulation in the market – is usually interpreted as a major threat to the core principles of social life. Scholars of many disciplines have documented how people across the world continue to resist emptying out the body, dead or alive, from sacred animacy and personal or social significance. In this exploratory essay, I take seriously the remarkable ability of the human body to retain these qualities in congruent fashion, and to combine them with market value. I propose to use the heuristic device of carnal technologies to explore how people invest such diverse forms of agency and value in human flesh. To ground the notion in empirical facts, I explore the long-standing spiritual and technical processes that used the body for making charms and medicine in Gabon (Equatorial Africa). After the 1880s, French colonialists both altered and confirmed local technologies. While trying to trivialize Gabonese bodies, the French re-sacralized their own as the fetish of colonial rule. The penal system helped to detach the mystical value of Gabonese body parts from the personal and social significance of the person, and encouraged the appraising of the person and her body in cash. As a result, the sacred agency of the body became increasingly predicated on its very organic existence, and on its ability to hold commodity value. The final section of the essay discusses the notion of carnal technology in comparison with biopolitics, biotechnology and biovalue.

SPACE, POWER AND HEALING IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon ca. 1850–1940 . C HRISTOPHER G RAY . Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Pp. xxii+275.

T HE Anglophone literature has conceptualized the history of the African ‘space’ through two major approaches. Fine-grained reconstructions of land disputes have helped to illuminate colonial changes in the political and economic control over residential and productive units, and to assess the local (im)possibilities for Africans of accumulating landed property and/or penetrating the new plantation and market economy. More recently, environmental studies have encouraged historians to uncover how fundamental alterations in the relationships between communities and their physical environment have been shaping ancient and recent struggles for identities and socio-political resources. Meanwhile, renewed attention to cognitive notions of space by anthropologists on the one hand, and literary critics on the other, has delineated deep structuring principles in the ideological construction of space among Africans and colonizers. Few historians have followed through, however, and historicized such imaginaries. Among those who have done so, and have traced peoples conceptual, commemorative and moral visions of land, fewer still have ventured beyond the boundaries of specific locales and societies. By reconstructing a longue duree history of the disruptions in both the physical and cognitive spaces of the Gabonese rainforest, Chris Grays book stands as a major attempt to bridge these gaps.

65 (ISBN 1-58046-048-8).

Violence is a murky issue to research and to theorize: this introduction suggests that it has also often been approached differently by anthropologists and historians. In the pages that follow, we reflect on the ways in which both disciplines have worked to interpret violent events in Africa, whether in the deep past, during the colonial era or in more recent periods. To better contextualize these disciplinary advances, we intersperse them with brief reviews of general theories on violence. The three articles featured in this special section, while dealing with very dissimilar case studies, provide common insights on three main themes. The first engages with the paradox of the contingency and continuity of violence, and with the unevenness of perpetrators, victims and targets. The second deals with the refractive meanings attached to violent events. The third probes, underneath the apparent turmoil of violent acts, the deep moral and cultural frameworks of action that underwrite them. We have composed this introduction around these main questions.