Muslim Families in Global Senegal is an engaging account of the struggles, at once moral and material, which Senegalese families face to ensure social reproduction in the current context of fiscal instability and religious reforms. It contributes a nuanced understanding of gendered economies in a Muslim society and is highly suitable for classroom adoption due to its relatively short length and the clarity of its presentation. Beth Buggenhagen brings to this ethnography a sustained history of research in Senegal as well as a keen understanding of the Murid diaspora and its role in the Senegalese economy.
Over the past half-century, the modalities of wealth production and circulation have changed radically in Senegal. Once the primary site of production, the home is now the primary site of consumption. Since the decline of peanut monoculture, the land has ceased to be the main source of livelihood for Senegalese families who rely instead on remittances from junior men living abroad. Buggenhagen opens her account with a description of Khar Yalla, the Dakar neighborhood where she conducted her ethnographic research and which bears the telltale signs of the transformations she is documenting: originally a semi-urban district settled by Dakarois displaced by colonial urban policies, Khar Yalla has become a quartier of absentee landlords and is often designated as a ‘shadow city’, given the number of residents who engage in extralegal activities to make ends meet. It is also where the Géer family, which occupies center stage in Buggenhagen's ethnography, lives.
The Géers are a typical household, struggling to create value – material, spiritual, and otherwise – through various forms of investment that ultimately reveal how, behind the façade of wealth, ‘real wealth is absent’ (p. 198). The mother, Sonka Géer, actively strove to generate honor for the lineage through complex strategies of gift-giving such as ndawtal, a competitive display and bestowal of cloth held during life-cycle ceremonies. Like countless other Senegalese women who concretize their wealth and worth by engaging in ostentatious gift-giving, she paid no heed to religious and political leaders' as well as male kin's denunciation of ndawtal – and other forms of ceremonial exchange – as wastefulness. Initially, Sonka was largely successful at maintaining her respectability and authority through ritualized displays of wealth; she was a member of some forty women's organizations yet knew how to hold back from the pressure of giving – a tactic known in anthropological parlance as ‘keeping-while-giving’. However, when her husband returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca and it became time to repay the debts incurred through her participation in reciprocal networks of exchange, she could not satisfy her partners' expectations that she return more than she had received. Her failure, Buggenhagen suggests, exemplifies the predicament of many Senegalese families who spend excessively but know little about the conditions in which the wealth they depend on is earned abroad. Meanwhile, her foster daughter Bintu's refusal to enter into an arranged marriage with an overseas migrant and her son Abdoul Aziz's frustration with women's investments in the gift economy evidences a wider pattern of gendered and generational disjunctures in the Senegalese vision of what drives social production.
Buggenhagen expertly traces how the material basis of social reproduction and the capacity to sustain the social networks that generate wealth through social exchange have shifted in past decades as Senegalese at home and abroad confront the possibilities and constraints of the current neoliberal moment – and the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’. Her examination of gendered efforts to ensure social reproduction in the context of reformist Muslims' calls for moral austerity and fiscal restraint, and NGO's appeals for investment in human (and specifically women's) development, makes an important contribution to the literature on gender and Islam in Africa. Commonly portrayed as timeless, unproductive, and out of step with reformist Muslim values, Senegalese women's practices of gift-giving are adaptive strategies for confronting challenges while seizing opportunities. Buggenhagen's focus on the trials of the Géer family enlivens the narrative and brings depth and intensity to the ethnography.
As lively and interesting as Muslim Families in Global Senegal is, it is not flawless. The narrative is filled with unnecessary repetitions. At times, it lacks the most minimal sense of direction. I also wondered why the reader has to wait to Chapter 6 to find out what motivated the choice of the book's subtitle. ‘Money takes care of shame’, we learn on p. 145, was what Sokna Géer uttered upon realizing that she would not be able to pay back all the debts she had incurred to finance (and celebrate) her husband's trip to Mecca. Even then it was not entirely clear to me how money actually ‘took care’ of the shame Sokna presumably experienced when confronted with her family's newfound fiscal insolvency. Buggenhagen mistakenly assumes that these issues, which are at the heart of her argument about the moral terms through which Senegalese apprehend economic realities, are self-evident. Sokna's experience of shame would have been a useful point of departure for exploring further the productive tension between the moral and material dimensions of wealth as well as the implications of ‘shame’ in contexts where honor, spiritual merit, and religious virtue are so central to women's understanding of value.
Despite these shortcomings, Muslim Families in Global Senegal provides valuable insight into our understanding of how Senegalese men and women variously participate in the global circulation of value.
