Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T18:30:33.916Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Death and the Left Hand: Islam, Gender, and “Proper” Mandinga Funerary Custom in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Michelle C. Johnson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This article explores Islam, gender, and “proper” Mandinga funerary “custom” in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, specifically the contradictions and debates between men and women about Mandinga custom and Islam as they play out in the ritual of shaking with the left hand, wailing at funerals, and visiting healers to investigate the nature of particular deaths. It suggests that far from constituting a “crisis of modernity,” these contradictions and debates have long been central to how Mandinga imagine themselves in a changing world. They have become intensified, however, in the transnational era, in which continuity among identity, place, and death has been ruptured.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , September 2009 , pp. 93 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Workingin the Present, edited by Fox, Richard G., 137–62. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Gay. 2002. “Dying Away from Home: Quandaries of Migration for Elders in Two Ethnic Groups.” The Journals of Gerontology 57B (2): S79–S95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloch, Maurice. 1971. Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice, and Parry, Jonathan, eds. 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Brenner, Louis. 2001. Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power, and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Brenner, Louis, ed. 1993. Muslim Identity and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Brooks, George E. 1993. “Historical Perspectives on the Guinea-Bissau Region, Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” In Mansas, Escravos, Grumetes E Gentio: Cacheu na Encruzilhada de Civilizações, edited by Lopes, Carlos, 27–54. Bissau: Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa.Google Scholar
Bruner, Edward M. 1986. Experience and Its Expressions. In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Turner, Victor W. and Bruner, Edward M., 3–30. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, Edward M. 2005. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Carreira, Antonio. 1947. Mandingas da Guiné-Portuguesa. Lisbon: Sociedade Industrial de Tipografia Limitada.Google Scholar
Cátedra, María. 1992. This World, Other Worlds: Sickness, Suicide, Death, and the Afterlife among the Vaqueiros de Alzada of Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Central Intelligence Agency. 2008. The World Fact Book: Guinea-Bissau.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Alisera, JoAnn. 2004. An Imagined Geography: Sierra Leonean Muslims in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Joanna. 2004. “Wombs and Tombs: Some Symbolic Dimensions of Burial Practices among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau.” Paper presented at the 2004 American Ethnological Society meetings, Atlanta, Ga., April 22–25.Google Scholar
de Sainte-Maurice, Ana. 1997. Identidades Reconstruídas: Cabo Verdeanos em Portugal. Oeiras: Celta Editora.Google Scholar
Denny, Fred. 1988. “‘God's Friends’: The Sanctity of Persons in Islam.” In Saint-hood and Its Manifestations in World Religions, edited by Kieckhefer, Richard and Bond, George D., 69–97. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Denny, Fred. 1994. An Introduction to Islam. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Douglass, William A. 1969. Death in Murélaga: Funerary Ritual in a Spanish Basque Village. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile. 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Eickelman, Dale F. 1977. “Ideological Change and Regional Cults: Maraboutism and Ties of ‘Closeness’ in West Morocco.” In Regional Cults, edited by Werbner, R. P., 3–28. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Einarsdóttir, Jónína. 2004. Tired of Weeping: Mother Love, Child Death, and Poverty in Guinea-Bissau. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Gable, Eric. 2006. “The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco.” Cultural Anthropology 21(3): 385–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1960. The Religion of Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack. 1962. Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Alma, and Graham, Philip. 1993. Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Granqvist, Hilma. 1975. Birth and Childhood among the Arabs: Studies in a Muhammadan Village in Palestine. New York: AMS Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Hermione. 2006. Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hertz, Robert. 1907. “Contribution a une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort. Année Sociologique 10: 48–137.Google Scholar
Hertz, Robert. 1973. “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity.” In Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification, edited by Needham, Rodney, 3–31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Holtzman, Jon D. 2008. Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota. Boston: Pearson Education Inc. Google Scholar
Jackson, Michael. 1989. Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Michelle C. 2006. “‘The Proof Is on My Palm’: Debating Ethnicity, Islam, and Ritual in a New African Diaspora.” Journal of Religion in Africa 36 (1): 50–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Michelle C. 2007. “Making Mandinga or Making Muslims? Debating Female Circumcision, Ethnicity, and Islam in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. In Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context, edied by Hernlund, Ylva and Shell-Duncan, Bettina, 202–23. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Michelle C. 2009. “Culture's Calling: Race, Gender, and Cell Phone Use among Guineans in Portugal.”Google Scholar
Killian, Caitlin. 2006. North African Women in France: Gender, Culture, and Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambek, Michael. 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayote: Local Discourses on Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Launay, Robert. 1992. Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
MacGaffey, Janet, and Bazenguissa-Ganga, Rémy. 2000. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Machado, Fernando Luís. 1998. “Da Guiné-Bissau a Portugal: Luso-Guineenses e Imigrantes.” Sociologia: Problemas e Prácticas 26: 9–56.Google Scholar
Masquelier, Adeline. 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Metcalf, Peter, and Huntington, Richard. 1991. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, J. A. 1996. “A Cultural Given and a Hidden Influence: Koranic Teachers in Kano. In The Politics of Cultural Performance, edited by Parkin, David, Caplan, Lionel, and Fisher, Humphrey, 237–74. Providence, R.I.: Berghan Books.Google Scholar
Middleton, John. 1982. “Lugbara Death.” In Death and the Regeneration of Life, edited by Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan, 134–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monteil, Vicent. 1964. L'Islam Noir. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Google Scholar
Needham, Rodney. 1967. “Percussion and Transition.” Man 2: 606–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Needham, Rodney, ed., 1973. Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Quinn, Charlotte A. 1972. Mandinga Kingdoms of the Senegambia: Traditionalism, Islam, and European Expansion. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, Susan. 2003. “When the Field Space Comes to the Home Space: New Constructions of Ethnographic Knowledge in a New African Diaspora.” Anthropology Quarterly 72: 55–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanneh, Lamin. 1997. The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Scaffer, Matt, and Cooper, Christine, eds. 1987. Mandinko: The Ethnography of a West African Holy Land. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Jane Idleman, and Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. 1981. The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Soares, Benjamin. 2005. Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Stafford, Charles. 2000. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Stoller, Paul. 2002. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wieschhoff, Heinz A. 1973. “Concepts of Right and Left in African Cultures.” In Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification, edited by Needham, Rodney, 59–73. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar