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Title: | Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households |
Author: | Buggenhagen, Beth Anne |
Year: | 2001 |
Periodical: | Journal of Religion in Africa |
Volume: | 31 |
Issue: | 4 |
Pages: | 373-401 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Senegal |
Subjects: | Muslim brotherhoods gender relations diasporas household income bridewealth households Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Religion and Witchcraft Women's Issues Cultural Roles Family Life economics Mourides Sufism |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1581466 |
Abstract: | The author analyses the disjuncture between the projected prosperity of male migrant traders of the Murid Sufi order in the village of Tuba, Senegal, and the actual ability of these traders to maintain the social relations that engender wealth. She focuses on a bridewealth transaction leading up to the ceremony for a marriage - which ultimately failed - in autumn 1999 between a Murid disciple trading between Italy and Senegal and a 'commerçant' family in Dakar, in order to show how households are made and unmade across time and space by diasporic practices. She also shows how two decades of neoliberal reform in Senegal have had unintended consequences for the prospects of social production. The movement of male traders into transnational trade networks to shore up a stagnant local economy and to reproduce the social and moral order has unanticipated consequences for women's authority. Women claim male earnings not only to run the household, but also to finance family ceremonies and the social payments that accompany these occasions. Women also seek commodities obtained through male trade to exchange in life cycle rituals. For women, foreign commodities, rather than undermining the production of blood ties, are the very means of making those ties a social fact. In Murid families, the rejuvenation of domestic rituals through access to male earnings abroad sets in motion the production of women-headed households and ultimately of lineages. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. |