Introduction
In Conakry, the capital city of the Republic of Guinea, a dance and social gathering called ‘sabar’ has gained unprecedented popularity in recent years for wedding parties. Sabar, derived from a Senegalese genre of the same name,Footnote 1 is a celebration in Conakry characterized by the quality of excess – manifested in hypersexualized dancing, lavish displays of wealth and electric amplification. Sabar's rise to popularity in Guinea coincided with the liberalization of the country's economy and the opening of national borders in the wake of state socialism (1958–84)Footnote 2 – events that have ongoing repercussions for Guinean citizens. Conakry sabar, I suggest, grapples affectively with such exposure to global capitalism and to the socio-cultural and economic changes it has engendered within Guinea. Average urban citizens discursively frame the experience of neoliberal reform either as a lamentable outcome of socialism's demise or as liberation from the socialist state's strict policing of national borders and everyday life.Footnote 3 While people openly discuss these twin poles of abandonment and liberation, they rarely talk in more depth about feelings associated with the lived realities of political-economic transformation. In a society where emotional restraint is a virtue, sabar's position as a foreign cultural import affords participants particular leeway to dramatize collective affect and to publicly question shared conceptions of value in this changing society.Footnote 4
Guinean sabar embodies a complex amalgam of hopeful affects (excitement, powerfulness) and ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai Reference Ngai2009) (uncertainty, powerlessness) that mark young urbanites’ engagement with their country's transformation from state socialism to liberal capitalism.Footnote 5 If precarity describes a condition of exclusion felt by many labourers in post-Fordist economies (see, for example, Allison Reference Allison2012; Reference Allison2013; Millar Reference Millar2014) – a condition of not being able to realize the good life – it is also the condition par excellence of many post-socialist citizens whose ability to create stable lives was dramatically and suddenly upended (e.g. Verdery Reference Verdery1996; Humphrey Reference Humphrey2002; Volkov Reference Volkov2002; O'Neill Reference O'Neill2014; Ghodsee Reference Ghodsee2017). Across the African continent, and indeed all over the globe, neoliberal economic policies have produced increasing inequality and uncertainty through the shrinking of social welfare programmes and the privatization of public resources (see, for example, Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006; Ganti Reference Ganti2014: 94). In Guinea, a socialist past gave way to a jarring period of neoliberal reform in the late 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Campbell and Clapp Reference Campbell and Clapp1995), followed by continuing economic and political crises in the 2000s.Footnote 6 This article demonstrates how affective, energetic encounters – as opposed to stable objects of material or linguistic coherence – are key sites for investigating the lived experience of uncertainty ethnographically. It is based on over a decade of engagement: twelve months of participant observation and interviewing in Conakry's dance scene from 2010 to 2013, three years of dance apprenticeship and language study in Conakry from 2002 to 2005, and additional fieldwork among Guinean artists in the US from 2006 to the present. My fluency in Conakry's lingua franca, Susu,Footnote 7 was important to this research, as I was able to overhear conversations and comments surrounding events and practices that people avoided discussing when questioned directly.
Lamine's sabar 1: striptease
The wedding of Lamine LamahFootnote 8 was a big deal among performing artists in Conakry. Lamine is the son of the late Kerfalla Lamah, a renowned director and choreographer in one of Guinea's national troupes, and the founder of a large private company in the capital. Lamine inherited the directorship of the company when his father passed away, and he is well respected among the city's artists. His marriage in February 2013 to an American woman was punctuated by a sabar party. Artists from troupes all over the city flocked to the event, both to support Lamine and his new wife and to experience what they expected to be a well-funded celebration.
At the party – which was a typical high-end Conakry sabar, meaning that there was plenty of food prepared, a backup generator, and many artists invited – I sat close to the drummers, snapping photos. Dancers captured the space one by one, seducing the audience with fiery jumps and sexy gestures, swinging arms and legs to mimic the classic Senegalese style. As the drums heated up, a tall, sturdy dancer named Bebe ran into the circle. She was wearing orange earrings dangling to her shoulders, a tight T-shirt with a red-lipsticked mouth emblazoned on the front, and a wrap tied loosely around her waist. She had been wearing jeans, but as the night progressed, many of the top dancers changed into looser clothing that allowed them to move freely and to expose themselves when performing suggestive movements. Bebe began with some classic moves, then squatted, thrusting her knees in and out while accepting tips from admirers and peers. The ring teemed with women and ‘woman-like’ (gine daxi) men;Footnote 9 apart from the drummers, few cisgender Guinean men dared enter the circle to perform.Footnote 10 Bebe stood up and pulled her shirt off, revealing a black push-up bra. She tapped her feet in an open stance, and then with one motion threw off her wrap to reveal her thighs – a part of the female body that is typically covered in Guinea. Clad only in blue underwear and a bra, she ran towards the percussionists. Before they could escape, she jumped on one of them with her legs open. She fell backwards as he tried to free himself and, with legs flailing in the air, they disappeared from view into the tangle of drums. While some observers, especially young female dancers, were amused by the spectacle, others looked uneasy or openly expressed disgust at such transgressive female conduct that has become increasingly common in Conakry sabar in recent years.
Bebe's striptease represents an extreme version of the hypersexualized theatrics typical of sabar in Guinea; however, even more suggestive displays are common to sabar in Senegal (see, for example, Neveu Kringelbach Reference Neveu Kringelbach2013: 86–90). No other dancer stripped down to her underwear that night (although it is a regular occurrence in Conakry sabars) but many mimicked sexual acts in their dance moves or showed thighs through open skirts as they danced. While the hypersexual nature of sabar makes it the subject of moral scrutiny wherever it is performed, even in Senegal,Footnote 11 in Guinea the dance is controversial both because of its suggestive nature and because it is foreign and has become an emblem of contrast with locally derived cultural forms. Sabar and other women's dance parties in Senegal are typically analysed by anthropologists as liminal spaces where women are empowered to dramatize their sexuality. Suggestive dances, in these analyses, are an expression of resistance to patriarchal authority (Heath Reference Heath1994) or a kind of inversion of normal social roles that helps women ‘build up confidence in female power linked to sexuality’ (Neveu Kringelbach Reference Neveu Kringelbach2013: 87; for a related example in the DRC, see Braun Reference Braun2014). This angle is not entirely irrelevant to Guinean sabar, but female empowerment, as I will demonstrate, is only one element of the complex semiotic encounter that sabar constitutes in Conakry.
In Guinean sabar ceremonies, stripping generates both discomfort and excitement in the crowd. ‘Women didn't used to act like this!’ some people complain. Others just shrug and note dismissively that dancers can make big tips when they take their clothes off. Young women are often energized by the act and either give money to the performer or begin to dance suggestively themselves. Stripping in this context makes the dancer appear at once desperate and powerful – grasping for attention and money while also demonstrating her ability to transgress religious and cultural norms at will. As women are called upon to adopt the role of breadwinner in an economy in which husbands often cannot provide, female artists embrace new opportunities to make money and support their families. In conversation, however, they often lament that they are being forced by poor conditions to act outside the boundaries of normative femininity.Footnote 12 At sabar parties, hypersexualized dancing, money throwing and electrification are all instantiations of a quality that I refer to as ‘excess’ – a quality with no lexical term in Susu, which extends and decentres the culturally salient quality of bigness (xungboe). By actively probing the threshold of a positive quality (i.e. when does bigness become too much?), these manifestations of excess perform ambivalent public feelings at the heart of the lived experience of political-economic transformation and demonstrate how embodiment can be central to an anthropology of precarity.
Excess: the sensuous quality of uncertainty
The quality of excess saturates Guinean sabar parties. Embodied in showers of money, sound amplified until speakers are cracking, and frenetic, lascivious dancing, excess tests the boundaries of bigness (xungboe) – a lexically salient quality that is coveted in Conakry and in Mande societies more broadly (e.g. Ferme Reference Ferme2001: 159–86; on being ‘little’ in Mande, see McNaughton Reference McNaughton1988: 153). Bigness can materialize as corpulence, which indexes financial means and social influence, and powerful people are referred to as ‘big people’ (mixi xungbee in Susu, or grand[e]s in French). Bigness is also a quality built into aesthetic systems in Guinea: multiple layers of boldly coloured starched fabric enlarge the figure both physically and figuratively; percussion involves a similar aesthetic of loudness and polyrhythmic layering; and dancers are encouraged by their teachers to increase the volume of their movements – to ‘make their moves big’ (pas ra xungbofe).
Anthropologists often pay attention to qualities when they are labelled and collectively deemed to signal positive value (see, for example, Munn Reference Munn1986; Keane Reference Keane2003; Chumley and Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013; Harkness Reference Harkness2015). But what happens when people feel that their shared understanding of how to obtain desirable lives is under siege? I demonstrate in this article how attention to qualities that materialize in action without being named can reveal emergent dimensions of social life and offer empirical traction on the active production and reformulation of shared value.
My use of the term ‘value’ throughout this article is most closely aligned with Nancy Munn's (Reference Munn1986) definition of value as the transformative potency of actions. For Munn, value is not just another word for shared importance, nor does it denote congealed labour, as in Marx's famous formulation. Rather, Munn defines value as the potential of actions to produce (positive or negative) transformations in the world (see also Graeber Reference Graeber2001: 43–7). Embodied qualities then evidence those socially recognized potentials (an example in her ethnographic context of Gawa is lightness indexing positive potential and heaviness indexing negative potential). While I espouse Munn's basic definition of value as generated through action, I push the idea further by investigating embodied qualities that are unsettled and not firmly positive or negative. These qualities, which I call ‘emergent’, are part of precarious social-scapes and index the ambivalent process of reformulating which kinds of actions generate desirable transformations in the world.
Excess in Conakry is one such ‘emergent quality’ that is affectively salient but not lexically salient, that is not named or consciously categorized but experienced. Unlike in cases where qualities unequivocally signal either positive or negative value (for instance, in Munn's account, buoyancy, lightness and swiftness are set against heaviness and slowness), excess is fundamentally ambivalent. It is not the antonym of a desirable quality, but rather a degree of a desirable dimension – a degree that has exceeded a definitively positive value threshold to signal the uncertain potential of relatively new social actions and configurations. Excess is too much of a desired quality, not its opposite, and the sentiments it arouses are not as clear as those surrounding oppositional categories. In the sabar circle, excess manifests via multiple sensory experiences – including stripping, money throwing and electrification – which are not found together in other Conakry ceremonies. Their combination, I suggest, embodies both the thrill and the extreme uncertainty of Guineans’ engagement with liberal capitalism, and brings into ethnographic focus the idea that emergent phenomena are those that ‘exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action’, even if they are not (or not yet) consciously defined, classified or rationalized (Williams Reference Williams1977: 132). A focus on manifestations of emergent qualities illuminates embodiment as being central not only to alternative modes of ‘knowing’ (e.g. Mauss Reference Mauss and Mauss1979 [1934]; Lock Reference Lock1993; Foster Reference Foster and Foster1996) or to understanding socio-cultural reproduction or maintenance, as in habitus (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977), but to theorizing the lived experience of rapid social transformation.
Sabar and ballet: producing a ‘stable alterity’
They put us in jail for playing sabar and announced on the radio that we had sabotaged Guinean culture! (Mbemba Bangoura)
While sabar is a widespread cultural phenomenon in Conakry that has become popular since the end of socialism among people of all ethnic and class backgrounds for wedding parties,Footnote 13 it is made possible thanks to highly skilled musicians, singers and dancers, most of whom train daily in troupes called ‘ballets’ across the city.Footnote 14 Conakry sabar is not exclusive to professional artists, but a detailed analysis of its production must be rooted in an ethnographic understanding of the ballet scene. Ballet in Conakry emerged out of a complicated political history, which I and others explain elsewhere (Straker Reference Straker2009; Cohen Reference Cohen2016a; Reference Cohen2016b; Dave Reference Dave2019) but that I will outline briefly here. Guinean dance troupes from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s were part of the state's apparatus for communicating both subtle and didactic messages to the population, and for producing embodied orientations to the world that have endured long after the end of socialism (see McGovern Reference McGovern2017).
During the First Republic (1958–84), the Guinean state developed a hierarchical nationwide training system funnelling the best artists into national companies, and performing artists were celebrated as ideal socialist subjects in newspapers, on the radio, and in regular arts festivals where thousands of troupes competed (see PDG-RDA n.d.: 88; Cohen Reference Cohen2012). Despite the fact that Guinea's socialist state persecuted many innocent people (see, for example, Bâ Reference Bâ1986; Kaké Reference Kaké1987), performing artists recall socialism fondly as a time when their profession was officially recognized and average people did not want for basic goods and services. In their periodizations of recent history, the most significant break they emphasize is between socialism and what came after it.Footnote 15 In artists’ narratives, post-socialism is alternately characterized by loss (of state support, of meaning, of aesthetic coherence, of power) and by freedom (to move, to make money, and to create art as one pleased). Thirty years after Guinea's initial move away from socialism, this ambivalent experience of political-economic transformation is evidenced in urban aesthetic practices, one of the most significant of which is sabar.Footnote 16 Sabar parties both perform and negotiate public feelings that are discernible through embodied actions but have little outlet in the more codified realms of discourse and formal choreography, either because they are not fully conscious or are considered inappropriate, or both.Footnote 17
Sabar's beginnings
Mbemba Bangoura is one of the Guinean drummers who first introduced sabar in Conakry. He has since become one of the most well-known Guinean drummers in the world and has lived in the US for over two decades. One afternoon in 2012, I sat with Mbemba on his tile porch in Conakry as he recounted the early days of Guinean sabar. According to Mbemba, a group of Senegalese women in Conakry asked him and some of his fellow drummers to play their traditional rhythms for the arrival of their president, Abdou Diouf, in Guinea in the early 1980s. The women sang the sabar rhythms and the Guinean musicians imitated on djembe drums. After the president's visit, the genre began to catch on among Guineans in Conakry, and soon Mbemba and his colleagues were being called to animate sabar parties all over the city. Not only was this a challenge to the traditional Maninka praise singers (griots/griottes) who had hitherto been hired to animate many urban wedding celebrations, it also confronted a national culture industry that had been carefully engineered to match the political vision of the socialist state.Footnote 18
The state-run ballet that Mbemba and his group worked for was not supportive of this new cultural and entrepreneurial venture and had the drummers thrown in jail for animating sabar parties. Mbemba recalled that it was announced on the radio that they had ‘sabotaged’ Guinean culture. They were released after only a few days, making it clear that the gesture was only symbolic. However, the dramatic state response to the adoption of a ‘foreign’ practice offers a glimpse of how sabar has long been construed as a sign of the danger of foreign cultural intrusions in Guinea. These events did not dissuade Mbemba's group from playing sabar, and they continued to expand the genre, which gained traction in Conakry especially after the death of Sékou Touré in 1984.Footnote 19 At first, they had borrowed instruments from their ballet for use in sabars, but after having the instruments confiscated repeatedly, they began to use the money that they made at sabars to purchase drums. Equipped with their own materials, Mbemba explained, they became ‘independent’ and the directors no longer tried to stop them from pursuing this new direction, although it put them at odds with ballet officials and in competition with griots.
Three decades later, sabar has become one of the most popular dances in the capital, and is no longer connected to resident Senegalese. Its popularity, however, does not override its status as a stigmatized non-local cultural form. Instead, I suggest that sabar's status as a cultural import fuels its local appeal. During the socialist period, ballet became emblematic of the budding nation, and dances and rhythms from various ethnic groups were staged in a display of national unity typical of state-sponsored folk dance ensembles in socialist countries from the 1950s to the 1970s (cf. Shay Reference Shay2002; Taylor Reference Taylor2008). While some of the dances that were included in Guinean ballet repertoires were not native to Guinea, the overarching logic governing what could legitimately belong in ballet choreography was (and continues to be) based on narratives of autochthony and/or cultural heritage. Mande expressive forms, for example, are sometimes accorded belonging in Conakry's ballet lexicon even if they originated within the boundaries of neighbouring nation states.Footnote 20 As in most discourses of autochthony (e.g. Harrison Reference Harrison1999; Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009), the division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in Guinean ballet has as much to do with signification and power as it does with literal historical connections to place or ethnic ownership.
When I spoke with ballet practitioners in Conakry about sabar either in interviews or informally, they almost always highlighted its foreignness. In an interview I conducted with an elderly ballet directress named Jeanne Macauley, who was a celebrated dancer during the socialist period, I brought up the topic of sabar and she immediately cut me off: ‘No! Sabar, I have nothing to say about that. It's not my culture. Sabar is from Senegal … I can't explain sabar to you! So if you ask me about sabar you will make me worry. I will worry!’ Even young artists who claimed to appreciate sabar and attended sabar parties regularly focused on its foreignness in interviews. One such dancer named Fatou described how she knows how to dance sabar, but refuses to teach it in classes because she is not Senegalese. A prominent male dancer named Aly suggested that he likes the genre because it reminds him that each culture is rich and distinct, noting that Guineans could never dance sabar like Senegalese. Others treated sabar as an emblem of youthful disrespect. A young transmigrant drummer named Laulau who was visiting Guinea from his home in Japan during my fieldwork used sabar as a metonym for lack of respect and discipline among post-socialist youth. ‘The current generation, they aren't disciplined, there is no respect,’ Laulau complained. ‘They don't see what has come before. If I just started [drumming] I will respect [those who know more] so that I too can learn. But that is not in the current generation. They just start to hit the drum. It's like, only sabar, just sabar! There's no respect.’ Implicit in this critique is the idea that youth are forsaking their socialist-trained elders and disavowing the practices of discipline and collective sacrifice that the socialist generation so esteemed.
In contemporary Conakry, sabar maintains physical, cultural and symbolic distance from Guinean ballet dance, which was developed to index national pride and Guinean revolutionary ideals (much like rumba in Cuba; see Daniel Reference Daniel1995). This condition of what Brian Larkin calls ‘a stable alterity’ (Reference Larkin2002: 752) – by which sabar's outsider status keeps it safely distant from local cultural forms – makes sabar a prime site for engaging, and attempting to contain, feelings associated with loss, vulnerability and precarity that the post-socialist era has invited. Semiotic containment efforts are, however, always complicated – they create, as Judith Irvine observes, ‘a kind of present absence’ (Reference Irvine2011: 17) by directing attention to the object of containment. While sabar maintains symbolic distance from ballet, it has become thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural fabric of the city, and its popularity stems in part from its transgressions.
While there are many other ceremonies in Conakry, they may roughly be divided into two groups: those that are mostly performed by people of the ethnic group from which the ceremony derives; and those that do not delineate insiderhood through ethnicity.Footnote 21 This distinction is significant because the ceremonies with no ethnic referent, which tend to be organized by youth, delineate insiderhood instead through shared experiences of urban life (villagers visiting Conakry, for example, often express disdain for these gatherings and cannot easily join in as they can with ethnic dances). Sabar and another ceremony called dundunba are the two central non-ethnic dance parties popular in Conakry today, and they accomplish different things. Dundunbas are the ceremonies most closely connected to organized ballet. They take place in the afternoon, are carefully timed to end at the evening call to prayer, and professional artists are the main participants. In contrast, sabars take place only at night and are attended by many people who are not artists. Dundunbas require few monetary transactions and no technological fixtures in order to be successful. Professional dancers and drummers are motivated to attend sabars, on the other hand, by the potential for income generation as much as interest in the genre.Footnote 22 As ideal types in the local collective imagination, dundunba and sabar occupy oppositional categories. During more than four years of participation in Conakry's ballet scene, I attended scores of sabars with ballet dancers, and sometimes danced myself, as I had learned basic sabar from Senegalese teachers in the US. In Conakry, however, I became far more proficient in dundunba than sabar, as I rehearsed in ballets daily where the dances present in dundunba ceremonies are taught. My own training therefore reflected the bracketing of sabar as foreign in Conakry.
For artists, dundunba ideally connotes respect, dignity and social unity. The means for signalling these virtues are contested in dundunba circles, especially between generations trained in the socialist and post-socialist eras (see Cohen Reference Cohen2016b). The ideal typical virtues associated with the dance, however, remain central to both cohorts. Dundunba also signifies masculinity,Footnote 23 and although women have now appropriated its once exclusively male movements, dundunba is not associated with female sociality, unlike sabar, which is historically a women's dance in Senegal. As ideal types, dundunba and sabar oppose each other at every turn: dundunba is done during the day, sabar at night; dundunba is based on gifting, sabar on monetary exchange; dundunba is male, sabar female; dundunba is national, sabar foreign; dundunba is respectable, sabar lewd. While dundunba is not immune from internal upheavals and anti-aesthetics, sabar as a category has allowed dundunba to maintain a more distanced relationship to the ugly feelings that sabar invites.
Manifesting excess
Sabar parties in Conakry overwhelm the senses. Participants engage in acts of amplification and accumulation (instantiations of bigness) that reach tipping points at which they signal impossibility and/or produce uncomfortable affects. Amplified sound, for example, is distorted through old equipment and often cut abruptly by electrical failure. Acts of throwing money with abandon – performing a fantasy of capitalist accumulation – contrast sharply with daily experiences of material shortage. Dance solos rev up into frenetic encounters that sometimes end in striptease. Occasionally, music and dance disintegrate into an odd combination of discomfort (indexed by pained facial expressions and shouting) and laughter, after a dancer literally tackles the drummers, sometimes in her underwear. In these moments, the threshold of desirable bigness is transgressed in different ways, drawing attention to uncomfortable collective feelings that exist alongside the thrill and empowerment that are on the surface of the expression. In the following pages, I describe ethnographically how these scenes unfold in Conakry sabars.
Lamine's sabar 2: throwing money
At the sabar party celebrating Lamine Lamah's wedding, guests arrived – as they do for all sabars – wearing immaculate gowns and men's outfits made from the most coveted shiny fabrics overloaded with expensive embroidery. Women guided pointy high heels over pebbled ground, their large headwraps competing for attention in the crowd. Dancers and spectators occupied yellow plastic chairs encircling a dance space the size of an Olympic swimming pool, with drummers, a guitarist and several singers at one end. Dancers entered the ring one by one to perform solo, swinging their legs and arms in broad, quick strokes and jockeying for attention as the music grew faster. When the dancers had been soloing for a while, a griotte would interject a song, inviting guests out to dance slowly and offer money as she sang praises and popular songs.
When it was time to honour the special male guest or ‘godfather’ (parrain in French) of the sabar, his friends gathered at one end of the ring, encircling him. He was a tall dark man who was a popular member of a group of virtuosic effeminate sabar dancers. As they began to move slowly across the circle, he was in the centre of the pack, wearing a light blue outfit made of the highest-quality cloth called bazin riche, embroidered around the neck with shiny white and red thread and decorated with fuchsia, lime green, yellow and blue squares.Footnote 24 Matching lime green leather slippers completed the ensemble. Flanked by his friends and supporters, the distinguished-looking parrain walked slowly to the music, showing off his expensive outfit, interjecting a subtle flourish here and a toss of the head there. He lowered his eyelids, raised an eyebrow and pulled out a thick stack of new cash from his pocket. As the griotte sang his praises, a large metal platter was presented before him and he began to dish out crisp 500 and 1,000 franc notes. He did this slowly and deliberately, interjecting sassy graceful moves. His friends cheered him as the griotte elaborated on the good deeds of his ancestors in between verses of a popular song. By the end of the song, the platter was full.
Money ‘spraying’ is a common practice across Western and Central Africa and is productively analysed by anthropologists as a means of self-fashioning and reputation building (Barber Reference Barber and Guyer1995; White Reference White2008; Newell Reference Newell and Trager2005; Reference Newell2012). Sasha Newell describes it as an act that projects ‘the fantastic onto the realm of the social’ (Reference Newell and Trager2005: 139), allowing the performer to enlarge himself socially by enacting a fantasy image. Nomi Dave (Reference Dave2019) suggests that when someone performs wealth and receives praise, they are recognized in a way that transcends the individual – that reproduces and recognizes the collectivity. Throwing money, as these authors have shown, is a hopeful and productive performance of social grandeur. By throwing money, people become bigger socially.
While money spraying is a performance capable of generating social bigness qua reputation, however, actually achieving the status of big man or woman in Conakry also involves becoming financially stable and being able to support others. At a time in Guinea when it has become painfully clear that the vision of rapid development and economic growth offered first by the socialist state and then by neoliberal adjustment regimes has not come to fruition, the drama of capitalist opulence embodied in money throwing also indexes the extreme uncertainty of gaining financial stability in contemporary Conakry. The money sprayed at sabar parties is collected and split between drummers and singers at the end of the night (dancer income is separate and based on tips). The act of spraying is therefore also a drama of precarity for the musicians receiving the money, as their incomes fluctuate significantly depending on how many artists are there, who throws the party, and which distinguished guests are present.
While some people in Guinea have experienced economic liberalization and globalization as the ability to accumulate resources without constraint, most have gained an acute awareness of disparities: (1) between local conditions and standards of living in the global North; and (2) between those who have gained access to power and resources and those who have not (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999; Mains Reference Mains2007). While being asked to be a distinguished guest is considered an honour in Conakry sabars, average people grumble privately if they are chosen for the role because they know that it will deplete their already meagre cash reserves, and local spectators are all aware of this fact. There is insecurity in the spray for all but the wealthy, as people distribute what they don't have, and as artists on the receiving end scrape together a living in a hustler's economy.Footnote 25
At sabars, all distinguished guests – artists or not – spray money, but a trained dancer has the wherewithal to create exaggerated gestures that call explicit attention to the separateness of this performance from regular life. A dancer, for example, may raise her eyebrows masterfully while lowering one eyelid in a facial gesture of haughty success; or stop and move her shoulders in a slow figure eight and flip her head as she tosses a bill, using these embellishments to demarcate the act of throwing bills from simply handing them over in a market. It is precisely this separation – between the fantasy of largesse and the reality of its fraught attainment – that makes money throwing into a public spectacle of insecurity, hitching a ride with aspiration.
Electricity and powerlessness
The quality of excess is again materialized in sabar parties through electrification. While dundunbas and all other dance ceremonies involving percussion in Conakry are performed acoustically, sabars utilize an amplified electric guitar, a PA system for the singers, and electric lighting to make the dancers visible in the dark. The drums are also sometimes amplified by a singer's microphone held inside or next to a djembe drum during a solo. While acoustic djembe drumming is already extremely loud (a xui gbo – its voice is big), its amplified sound literally exceeds the threshold of the PA system's capacity, resulting in sonic excess – frequent screeches, buzzing and distortion of the sonic material. This is not a cultivated sound, as in heavy metal music, where distortion is an important feature of the genre (Wallach et al. Reference Wallach, Harris, Greene, Wallach, Berger and Greene2014: 11). Rather, the sensorial experience created at sabars is akin to that of pirated video and audio recordings, which are marked by poor transmission and ambient noise (Larkin Reference Larkin2004), creating a sound that indexes inadequacies both technical and social. Instead of electrified sound being simply bigger than acoustic sound and therefore better on a smooth valuative gradient (the bigger the better), failures of channel and provisioning get in the way of such a clear intensification of positive value.
During the socialist period, everyone in Conakry had electricity, but it was extremely modest – a single 25 watt bulb in each household (McGovern Reference McGovern2013: 220). Since the end of socialism, electricity provisioning has been unpredictable and socio-economically uneven in Conakry: it is available more frequently in wealthy neighbourhoods. At the same time, Guineans have become increasingly aware of cultural and political realities outside national borders, and their desire for, and sense of entitlement to, regular and abundant electricity has grown. While in the socialist period Guineans were taught that shortage had a social and ideological purpose,Footnote 26 now it is simply interpreted as state failure. In the sabar circle, lack and uncertainty are evidenced at once through the sonic excesses signalling technical breakdown as well as through sudden outages that index broader infrastructural failures.
During my fieldwork from 2010 to 2013, electricity was highly irregular in Conakry, and it was almost impossible to predict when the electricity would be on and for how long, especially in poor neighbourhoods. Due to this irregularity, the host of a sabar party usually also prepared a backup generator to keep the party going even if the electricity went out. Only relatively wealthy patrons could afford to sidestep the grid entirely by planning a party with exclusively generated power. The source, quality and evenness of electricity at sabars therefore betrayed socio-economic inequality in the cityscape.Footnote 27 The topic of the state's failure to provide regular electricity is central to everyday politics in Conakry (e.g. Economist 2013; Diallo Reference Diallo2017; Barry Reference Barry2017), as in many other African contexts (cf. Mains Reference Mains2012; Degani Reference Degani2017), and there were regular protests around these issues during my fieldwork in Conakry.
Even when a generator is waiting in the wings, the period between grid failure and generated power is pregnant. A flicker and ‘ziiooop’ sound signal the imminent transformation of the audio and visual experience. When the microphone is suddenly severed, sighs of disappointment fill the ring. ‘Ade ahhhh!’ – ‘Not this again!’ Disappointment turns to anger as people suck their teeth loudly and curse the government. Cracks of the djembe drums – which would exemplify sonic ‘bigness’ in a non-electrified landscape – sound weak and strained. The dancer soloing continues to swing and spin in the dark in a stubborn effort to keep the party alive. When the electricity cuts out, the ring is flooded with literal and metaphorical darkness, silence and powerlessness. In the loaded pause between grid and generator (or grid and grid, or grid and the end of the party, as the case may be), regular people are reminded of Guinea's dismal ‘place-in-the-world’ (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006) and the limits of modernity's relativism.
Conclusion: precarity's emergence
Precarity
To live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here … We might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours. (Tsing Reference Tsing2015: 3)
Bigness in Guinea is still a key quality indexing personal success. To be a big person is to be respected and financially stable – signalled by big bodies, big clothing, big names and generous acts (described in Susu as having a ‘big heart’). But social bigness is elusive in a neoliberal economy in which the mechanisms for becoming a grand[e] that were available to the previous generation are no longer viable. In the three examples above – stripping, money spraying and electrical amplification and outage – performances of desirable bigness in sabar circles reach thresholds at which they generate ambivalent affects and call attention to impossibilities. If value arises in actions that transform, and qualities signal the potency of those actions, as Munn suggested, what does it mean in Conakry sabar that bigness as a quality is repeatedly pushed beyond its capacity to unambiguously signal positive value?
Guinean dance is always ‘big’. Directors tell their students to make their movements bigger (pas raxungbofe) – to claim the space in which they dance through jumping, expanding the stance, opening the fingers outward and smiling broadly. In a common Guinean sabar solo, a good dancer will call attention to herself through energetic moves punctuated by sexy flourishes. In a solo that devolves into a striptease, the dancer accelerates quickly from energetic moves to sexy asides to another act entirely – one that most observers think exaggerates the sexiness of the dance to the point of ‘ruin’ (kannae). Many Guinean artists describe such spectacles as ‘dirty’ (nɔxi) or simply note ‘She exaggerates!’ (A exaggererma!, combining Susu and French) with a negative inflection.
What does it take to make a living – to be noticed and stand out from the crowd – in a gig economy? When dancing well is not enough, what kinds of actions will propel artists into the lives they desire? This is an open question in Conakry, and artists are inventing dance practices that defy or test the boundaries of qualities that the generation before them considered definitively positive, such as collectivity, bigness and control (see, for example, Cohen Reference Cohen2016b). Qualitative bigness is no longer enough to propel social bigness, either for individuals or for the nation as a whole. During socialism, pathways to success for artists and many other youth were fairly direct. Going through school was likely to produce a secure government job, and developing one's skills as an artist through hard work led to upward mobility in a state-run system of troupes, at the apex of which were the prestigious national ballets that travelled the world regularly. In post-socialist Guinea, those pathways have become increasingly insecure.
By examining stripping, money throwing and electrical interruptions together as instantiations of excess in sabar ceremonies, I posit active and embodied encounters as important sites where collective value is deliberated. If the good life is ideally stable, but getting there is profoundly insecure, sabars in Conakry dramatize that uncertainty through actions that generate shared affect. This is a socially productive drama that shapes the reality in which it circulates by probing the qualitative contours of positive value in precarious times.
Emergence
Contemporary secular urban ceremonies and artistic genres in Africa are emergent in Raymond Williams’ sense – they exert force on conceptions of the desirable and make possible collective feeling, but they are not rationally or consciously calculated to produce such effects. As I have argued, one of the mechanisms for exerting such force is the embodiment of emergent qualities. In situations of rapid transformation, people embody emergent qualities before, or instead of, settling on lexically salient ones. When the basic condition of being is precarious, a condition of emergence – and the ambivalent feelings that accompany it – may replace more stable models of indexing shared value (through words, objects or representations).
To paraphrase Sianne Ngai (Reference Ngai2009), nagging unpleasant feelings, while often not the subject of philosophical inquiry, can offer rich material for understanding social and political predicaments of restricted agency. In Conakry, sabar is a site of foreign vulgarity at the heart of local senses of what matters. It is at once elevated as being worthy of wedding celebrations and denigrated as culturally other, feminine and unserious – and therefore bracketed as a space of untrammelled affect. While anthropological accounts of both money throwing and hypersexual dancing on the continent tend to focus on social uplift and empowering inversions, I explore the fundamental uncertainties – and downright ‘ugly feelings’ – that are captured in these performances.
For Guinean artists, like many other Africans, the neoliberal era has meant radical exposure to the vicissitudes of global markets and to the uncertainty of private provisioning. This experience of economic liberalization and state retreat has both negative and positive value potential in Conakry. It is an experience of worlding – of becoming global in a way that is both vulnerable and hopeful (Simone Reference Simone2001; Ong and Roy Reference Ong and Roy2011), the possible outcomes of which are as yet unsettled. The fundamentally ambivalent quality of excess in sabar parties reflects this precarity that surrounds the Guinean present and illuminates the unconscious and embodied ways in which feelings transcend the individual (on public feelings, see Durkheim Reference Durkheim2001 [1912]; Gordon Reference Gordon1997; Berlant Reference Berlant2011; Cvetkovich Reference Cvetkovich2007; Reference Cvetkovich2012; Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2017a). As Durkheim reminds us, to feel together is central to what it means to be part of a collective. To feel ambivalently is what it means to live in precarious times.
The urgency of sabar in Conakry – both for participants and for theory – is precisely its ability to articulate emergence or becoming in cultural practice. Like other cultural performances, sabar parties do not merely reflect a coherent social world; they also play a part in its very constitution. By examining how the trusted quality of bigness is extended repeatedly beyond its capacity in sabar parties, I show this performative process in action as bigness is stretched into an emergent quality – one that captures life and form in dialectical relation (see Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2017b: 64–5). Conakry sabar begs us to consider how qualities that manifest not in lexical terms, but in embodied, affecting encounters, can index ‘value-in-the-making’.
Acknowledgements
Research and writing of this article were supported by the National Science Foundation, the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Yale University and Colorado State University. I am grateful to Mike McGovern and Perry Sherouse for their patient readings and incisive critiques, and to Paul Kockelman for his guidance. I thank my wonderful colleagues at Colorado State for their support, and especially Jeff Snodgrass for many productive conversations. The late Barney Bate was a great source of inspiration to me and I hope that he would recognize something of his intellectual legacy in these pages. Thanks to the many Guinean artists who participated in my socialization as a dancer and in my formal fieldwork, and to Kristine Schantz who generously opened her home to me in Conakry. Finally, I am grateful to linguist Brad Willits, who tirelessly fields my questions about Susu language and orthography.
