François G. Richard

Recharting Atlantic encounters. Object trajectories and histories of value in the Siin (Senegal) and Senegambia

The Atlantic era marks a turbulent period in the history of Senegambia, defined by dramatic reconfigurations in local socio-economic conditions. These ‘global encounters’ have often been equated with the subjection of African societies to the whims of an expanding capitalist economy. While the long-term effects of the Atlantic economy cannot be denied, conventional histories have often prioritized macro-trends and generalized process, thus glossing the complex mosaic of experiences that constituted the African Atlantic. By contrast, a closer look at how different categories of objects were consumed and circulated over time may provide more nuanced assessments of the impact of global forces on coastal societies. This article examines how these material entanglements took place in the Siin (Senegal), by following the social trajectories of several classes of objects in space and time, and charting their enmeshment in regimes of value, patterns of action, forms of power and historical experience. Combining these empirical insights with a broader theoretical reflection, the paper attempts to draw out the implications of rethinking the historical space of the African Atlantic through a more intimate engagement with the historicities, contingencies and materialities that fashioned African historical experiences. While this shift in conceptual priorities inevitably creates new silences, I suggest that it also re-establishes Africans as cultural and historical subjects, firmly grounded in world history, and that this perspective can provide a point of departure for the production of alternative historical imaginations and subjectivities.

TOWARD A SYSTEMATIC BEAD DESCRIPTION SYSTEM: A VIEW FROM THE LOWER FALEMME, SENEGAL

This study examines a glass bead assemblage from surveyed and excavated portions of the Falemme (Senegal) to present a classification system for the analysis of archaeological beads in Africa and beyond. Although bead classification poses special problems, it is argued that such analysis is worthwhile, as beads may shed light on the dynamics of production, exchange and consumption in the past, on processes of culture change and continuity, and, most particularly, on chronological assessment. Focusing on the latter, the typological analysis helped us extract diagnostic information from the 474 mainly European-made beads, which complements and nicely supports the temporal sequence derived from imported trade materials and local ceramics.

“In [Them] We Will Find Very Desirable Tributaries for Our Commerce”: Cash Crops, Commodities, and Subjectivities in Siin (Senegal) During the Colonial Era

Located at the heart of Senegal’s old peanut basin, the small province of Siin was long regarded by French administrators as an ideal terrain for the advancement of colonial commercial interests. With its sophisticated agriculture and “peaceful” peasant population, Siin would supply cheap cash crops for international markets while receiving metropolitan products in return. To convert local peasants to commodity farming, however, required the deployment of colonial technologies promoting new ideas of property, social relations, and moral economies. The material world was a key theater in the fashioning of colonial subjects, as taxation, commodification, and monetization labored to bring local villagers within the fold of the market. At the same time, colonial projects were mediated by local institutions and cultural imaginations, revealing, beneath legal codifications and customary relations, the negotiated, tense character of colonial empire building. Written and archaeological archives afford an initial look at the emergence of cultural experiences in Siin among local institutions, market forces, and colonial governance and the materialities framing these encounters.

Hesitant geographies of power: The materiality of colonial rule in the Siin (Senegal), 1850–1960

This essay draws on archival and archaeological sources to examine historical matters of power in the Siin province (Senegal) and their inscription in village landscapes. It focuses specifically on the entanglements of the longue durée binding Siin’s Serer peasantry and the ‘colonial state’. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, the article suggests that historical archaeology is in a prime position to study the construction of colonial rule in African settings, and to shed light on the workings, logics, and ambiguities of state power on imperial margins. Going beyond arguments of domination and resistance, it seeks to examine the intended and unexpected effects of colonial government, how it transformed the lifeworlds of rural Africans while creating conditions for the emergence of new modes of social action.

The Politics of Absence: The Longue Durée of State–Peasant Interactions in the Siin (Senegal), 1850s–1930s

Historical anthropology has transformed our understanding of colonialisms, by portraying a complex archipelago of social worlds rife with ambiguities, cultural intertwinings, and unstable power fields. While these “tensions of empire” were often played out on material terrains, one may wonder the extent to which they are manifested in archaeological situations. Using textual and material archives, this essay examines the intersection of colonial policy and local practice in Siin (Senegal) during the colonial period. These encounters produced complex materialities and social strategies that offer glimpses into the subjectivities, plural experiences, possibilities, and contradictions fashioned in the region under French colonial rule. The chapter confronts material traces left of past political landscapes with clues scattered across written documents, ethnographies, and oral memory to interrogate the mutual constitution of “the State” and subject populations, and, more broadly, the nature and historicity of colonial power in Senegal. It seeks to elucidate the workings, limitations, and ambiguity of state practices and political authority in relation to African communities’ capacity to elude or ignore colonial injunctions, while accounting for the combined influence of the state and market forces to frame the social possibilities and sensibilities of local populations, to turn them (not always deliberately) into the artisans of their own rule.

The Ruins of French Imperialism: An Archaeology of Rural Dislocations in Twentieth-Century Senegal

This chapter draws on the results of long-term archaeological survey and oral histories to examine the intersection of rural migrations, colonial rule, and economic impoverishment in the Siin region of Senegal during the twentieth century. The Siin is today the theater of acute rural anxiety, a ‘peasant malaise’ carved by the combined effects of ecological crises, declining land productivity, degrading life conditions, adverse food prices, and state withdrawal over the past 40 years. These worrisome circumstances, however, have roots in a longer colonial history of agricultural commodification, which sparked considerable human displacement. While much has been written on long-distance seasonal migrant labor in Senegal, smaller-scale movements have received more limited scholarly treatment, even as they subtly reshaped the contours of regional social worlds. The chapter charts some of these internal mobilities and transformations, paying special attention to how peasant senses of place were made and unmade, and the processes of economic dispossession that engulfed rural communities. Engaging with recent literature on ruins and ruination, it connects the material waste littering Senegal’s rural landscapes to a broader history of imperial decay, whose effects still pulse in the present.

Materializing Colonial Pasts: African Archaeological Perspectives

This volume brings together a collection of original analyses of African colonial worlds that illustrate the relevance of African archaeologies to the study of colonial materialities in other archaeological contexts, and to the related fields of anthropology and history. This introduction outlines critical and theoretical problems framing the book, and offers background on the conversations informing its interventions. I situate the volume in relation to three broad intellectual fields: (1) how, historically, African archaeology has grappled with colonial situations; (2) archaeology’s implication with questions of colonial modernity, and more recently, with themes and perspectives inspired by postcolonial theory; and (3) anthropologies of colonialism, and the foregrounding of embodied practice and materiality in the making of colonial worlds. This review identifies zones of mutual engagement between archaeological, historical, and anthropological studies of colonialism. African archaeology, I argue, stands out by its interdisciplinary commitments, theoretical insights derived from African cultural contexts, and hybrid knowledges, which, in turn, can productively mesh with archaeological work on colonialism elsewhere. Concurrently, archaeology’s particular take on temporality and materiality can also contribute to histories and anthropologies of colonial contact in Africa, especially by materializing ineffable histories that challenge common perceptions about colonialism and bring into view the persistence of its legacies in the present. In this sense, archaeological scholarship on colonialism carries resonance beyond the past into the political present of postcolonies.

Traveling Theory: Mark Leone, Slavery, and Archaeology’s Critical Imagination

Abstract This article presents considerations inspired by Mark P. Leone’s keynote address at the African Diaspora Archaeology Network Forum convened at the 2012 Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Leone’s reflections raised poignant historical and conceptual questions, with relevance for the historical archaeology of African experience and critical scholarship on African diasporas. In a more disciplinary reading, the symposium offered a fascinating look at Leone’s intellectual method and theoretical project, with relevance for the history of archaeological thought.