Masquerades of Modernity

How do those on the margins of modernity face the challenges of globalization? This book demonstrates that secrecy is one of the means by which a society on the fringe of modernity produces itself as locality. Focusing on initiation rituals, masked performances and modern art, this study shows that rituals and performances long deemed obsolete, serve the insertion of their performers in the world at their own terms. The Jola and Mandinko people of the Casamance region in Senegal have always used their rituals and performances to incorporate the impact of Islam, colonialism, capitalism, and contemporary politics. Their performances of secrecy have accommodated these modern powers and continue to do so today. The performers incorporate the modern and redefine modernity through secretive practices. Their traditions are not modern inventions, but traditional ways of dealing with modernity. This book will interest anthropologists, historians, political scientists and all those studying how globalisation affects peripheral societies. It shows that secrecy, performed as a weapon of the weak, empowers their performers. Secrecy serves to mark boundaries and define the local in the global.

ISBN 0748633197   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780748633197 (What's this?)   Pages 256 Publisher Edinburgh University Press   Published in Edinburgh Imprint Edinburgh University Press   Series title International African Library Format Hardback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 26 Oct 2007   Width (mm) 156 DEWEY 306.09663   Academic level Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

Pt. I		Introduction
1		Power of Secrecy		3
Pt. II		Transitions
2		Jola Initiations, Gendered Localities		25
3		Out of Diaspora into the Forest		54
4		Politics of the Sacred Forest		74
Pt. III		Trajectories
5		Mandinko Initiation: The Making of an Urban Locality		97
6		Secrecy, Sacrilege and the State		128
Pt. IV		Traces
7		Masquerade of Migration		155
8		The Art of Tradition		173
9		Writing Secrecy		185

De Jong's work covers a diverse array of subjects in the Casamance region of Senegal, a multi-ethnic region in the sway of global modernity, including initiation ceremonies, age-sets and gendering, Islamisation, state formation, civil unrest, and the commoditisation of performance as 'heritage'. [It offers] a solid and thought-provoking engagement with contemporary theoreticians. Nicolas Argenti, Brunel University -- Social Anthropology 17/4 De Jong's work covers a diverse array of subjects in the Casamance region of Senegal, a multi-ethnic region in the sway of global modernity, including initiation ceremonies, age-sets and gendering, Islamisation, state formation, civil unrest, and the commoditisation of performance as 'heritage'. [It offers] a solid and thought-provoking engagement with contemporary theoreticians. Nicolas Argenti, Brunel University

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