Adeline Masquelier

• Ph.D. in Anthropology
• Professor (Full) at Tulane University

Based on ethnographic studies conducted in several African countries, this volume analyses the phenomenon of deliverance – which is promoted both in charismatic churches and in Islam as a weapon against witchcraft – in order to clarify the political dimensions of spiritual warfare in contemporary African societies. Deliverance from evil is part and...

This book explores the range of vibrant cultural production and political activism of youth in Africa today, as expressed through art, music, theater, and online media.

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the possession of schoolgirls by spirits based on ethnographic research conducted in the district of Dogondoutchi, Niger. Besides pointing to the struggles girls face in a country where women's education remains controversial, possession brings attention to a past Muslim religious authorities have tried to silenc...

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of incidents of mass possession among schoolgirls in Niger. Possession by revengeful spirits dramatizes the controversies surrounding women's education. During exorcism, possessing spirits speak of the homes they lost when trees were cut to build schools. Spirits were part of a sacred topography disrupt...

After discussing the fraught connection between fadas and politics, this chapter focuses on the case of a young man who aspired to a career in politics as an example of "zigzag politics," a tactical navigation of the political landscape that requires one to shift directions whenever necessary so as to canvas all possible options. It argues that the...

This chapter considers the role of hip-hop in the constitution of young men's Muslim identities through the analytical prism of ambivalence. It describes how young men's attempts to navigate between contradictory moral requirements plays out in the context of their engagement with hip-hop. Though young often men say rap music is not part of Islam,...

This chapter examines the fada as an aesthetic project through which locality is materially and socially produced. It considers the inscriptions young men design on the walls against which they sit in the street and argues that, by making their presence visible in public space, these wall writings turn the street into a key locus of male sociality....

This chapter explores "street ethics" as a dimension of the everyday at the fada by considering practices of self-making, such as bodybuilding, through which young men earn respect while reinventing themselves as watchmen. The concept of street ethics puts the accent on the moral ambiguity of projects, such as bodybuilding, that test the limits of...

This chapter shifts the focus to the women of the fada and attempts to pull them out of invisibility. It argues that although the fada is viewed as a masculine space, women are critical to the definition of masculinity and to the fada itself, as an institution whose continued existence hinges on the performance of female labor and social engagement...

This chapter considers how young men's dress performances are bound up in the definition of youth as both a stage of life and a lifestyle manifested by particular experiences of belonging and exclusion. It demonstrates how young men use dress to perform a range of improvisational identities so as to map out alternative life trajectories, at times t...

In a recent essay Samuli Schielke has argued that there is “too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam.” Schielke wants to make a simple point, namely that while considerable attention has been paid to Muslims who lead pious and moral lives, far less attention has been paid to those Muslims whose engagement with Islam is fraught with ambiguity and...

Through a critical discussion of contemporary discourses on hip-hop, I examine how young Nigerien men cultivate a reflexive understanding of the world and of their place in it and constitute themselves as ethical subjects, and I highlight the role of various aspirations, tensions, and ambiguities in the making of these moral subjectivities.

No abstract is available for this article.

In The Walking Qur'an, Rudolph Ware explores the history of Qur'an schools in West Africa. Focusing on embodied knowledge, he demonstrates how these institutions produce “Walking Qur'ans,” living replicas of the holy book. Despite his bias against reformist Islam and his neglect of the wider social context, this is an important contribution to Isla...

CLEO CANTONE, Making and Remaking Mosques in Senegal. Leiden: Brill (hb €137 – 978 90 04 20337 2). 2012, 436 pp. - Volume 85 Issue 1 - ADELINE MASQUELIER

Francophone sub-Saharan African countries have among the highest fertility rates and lowest modern contraceptive prevalence rates worldwide. This analysis is intended to identify the factors driving contraceptive prevalence in this population. In addition to testing the usual correlates, we have included three other variables potentially related to...

Francophone sub-Saharan African countries have among the highest fertility rates and lowest modern contraceptive prevalence rates worldwide. This analysis is intended to identify the factors driving contraceptive prevalence in this population. In addition to testing the usual correlates, we have included three other variables potentially related to...

JudithScheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Pp. 286. $99.00 cloth. - Volume 46 Issue 1 - Adeline Masquelier

ABSTRACT To fight boredom, un(der)employed young men in Niger have joined fadas (youth clubs) where they listen to music, play card games and strike up new friendships – or nurture old ones. Membership in these organizations cuts across social divides, educational backgrounds and religious affiliations, affirming the spirit of egalitarianism and co...

THE GLOBAL CIRCULATION OF VALUE - Muslim Families in Global Senegal: Money Takes Care of Shame. By BethBuggenhagen. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012. Pp. xi+242. $70, hardback (isbn978-0-253-35710-6); $24.95, paperback (isbn978-0-253-22367-8). - Volume 54 Issue 2 - ADELINE MASQUELIER

BadranMargot, ed. Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law. Washington DC and Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2011. x + 324 pages. Cloth US$60.00 ISBN 978-0-8047-7481-9. - Volume 47 Issue 1 - Adeline Masquelier

Dress, young men in Niger often claim, is about self-expression, not conformity to religious or cultural norms. Although they identify as Muslim, many young men—regardless of whether they are religiously observant - eschew “Islamic” attire to adopt mass-produced Western clothing. In contrast to the previous generation for whom dress signaled a spec...

You must cover your body because it is God's command. God will send angels to light up the graves of women who cover their heads with veils. According to a hadith, the woman who does not veil will never smell the smell of paradise. [… ] Every time she comes out of her home uncovered, she shares the sins of all the men who look at her.

Dress and fashion practices in Africa and the diaspora are dynamic and diverse, whether on the street or on the fashion runway. Focusing on the dressed body as a performance site, African Dress explores how ideas and practices of dress contest or legitimize existing power structures through expressions of individual identity and the cultural and po...

Examining the varied reactions of people to the blood-stained wrapper of a spirit devotee during a bori possession ceremony in Niger, I explore how dirt and disgust are more complex than neat structuralist models of purity and pollution often used to explain them. Understanding menstrual blood in situational terms, and looking at the reactions as s...

Against the backdrop of intensified global flows, liberalization of national politics, and deepening economic crises, a state-controlled, ostensibly monolithic Islamic tradition has evolved into multiple modes of Muslim religiosity in Niger. Young men, as they negotiate their "youthfulness" through the adoption of distinct dress styles and practice...

In this article I explore the semantics of sweetness among the Hausaphone Mawri of Niger. I show how the various configurations of sweetness meaningfully unify the contexts of prostitution, spirit possession, and obstetrics for some Mawri struggling to make sense of changing social realities. These interrelated experiences of production and reprodu...

This chapter evaluates how young people use the Mexican telenovela Rubí to make sense of changing conceptions of intimacy and courtship. Rubí is a gripping Mexican television serial centered around the poor but beautiful and ambitious Rubí and her obsessive determination to achieve wealth. It was seen by many as mirroring the struggles between inte...

In the small town of Dogondoutchi, Niger, Malam Awal, a charismatic Sufi preacher, was recruited by local Muslim leaders to denounce the practices of reformist Muslims. Malam Awal's message has been viewed as a mixed blessing by Muslim women who have seen new definitions of Islam and Muslim practice impact their place and role in society. This stud...

In this article, I discuss how the spread of Islam in the town of Dogondoutchi, Niger has profoundly transformed the local imaginary, helping fuel perceptions of witchcraft as a thoroughly Muslim practice. I suggest that it is because witchcraft is seen as a hallmark of tradition that Muslims, despite their claim to have embraced modernity, are acc...

In Niger, women have long been seen as embodiments of virtue (or wickedness). Of late, with the rise of reformist Islam, their role as upholders of purity has become key to the definition of moral community. Debates over the control of female sexuality and the ordering of social spaces have intensified. While such debates are characteristically fra...

The Law of the Lifegivers: The Domestication of Desire. René Devisch and Claude Brodeur. Langhorne, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999. 268 pp.

Spirit possession ostensibly solves problems by freeing the object of possession from certain responsibilities, yet it also creates a whole nexus of unavoidable obligations as the human host learns to cope with the social, financial, and moral demands of her powerful alter ego. Rather than simplifying situations, possession complicates them by intr...

In this article, I discuss how the spread of Islam in the town of Dogondoutchi, Niger has profoundly transformed the local imaginary, helping fuel perceptions of witchcraft as a thoroughly Muslim practice. I suggest that it is because witchcraft is seen as a hallmark of tradition that Muslims, despite their claim to have embraced modernity, are acc...

Dogondoutchi, December 2004. It is Saturday night in this small rural town of southern Niger.1 On a vast vacant lot where neighborhood boys routinely play impromptu games of football in the late afternoon and where, less frequently, girls in party uniforms dance to welcome political candidates campaigning for votes, a massive crowd of people has as...

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a controversy emerged in the U.S. public sphere over the use of the word refugee to characterize the displaced residents of New Orleans. In this article, I explore the significance of the concept of “the refugee” for U.S. citizens, and I discuss what the failure to find an appropriate term to describe stranded...

Through a focus on the problems associated with bridewealth and wedding expenses in Dogondoutchi, a predominantly Muslim town of some 38,000 Hausa speakers in rural Niger, I discuss the predicament of young Mawri men who, in the double pursuit of marriage and maturity, often struggle to satisfy contradictory sets of moral and financial requirements...

"A magnificent volume! It offers brand new perspectives on body politics and identity or subjectivity formation in the post-colonial world." -- Dorothy Ko, Barnard College While there is widespread interest in dress and hygiene as vehicles of cultural, moral, and political value, little scholarly attention has been paid to cross-cultural understand...

In this article, I explore how some Hausaphone Mawri in postcolonial Niger materialize their experience of modernity. I examine the fundamental role that space plays in local perceptions of modernity by discussing stories people tell about what happens on the road. In particular, I focus on their attention to the road as part of a complex economy o...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Geneviève Calame-Griaule asks the reader in her preface to keep in mind that the texts published in Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigérien were collected some twenty to thirty years ago during five successive trips [End Page 211] to the village of In Gall and Tegidda-n-Tesemt,...

Among Hausaphone Mawri communities of Niger, twins are powerful yet dangerous beings endowed from birth with extraordinary abilities. While they are welcomed by parents who interpret multiple births as lucky, twins are feared because they kill offenders and perceive things which normal people cannot see. Twins are also fiercely jealous of each othe...

Public Culture 13.2 (2001) 267-291 Etienne LeRoy, L'odyssée de l'état Filip De Boeck, Postcolonialism, Power, and Identity For the regular visitors to the Dogondoutchi dispensary in the late 1980s whose persistent search for health was repeatedly frustrated by the inadequacy of the medical supplies, the empty shelves of the state-sponsored facility...

Everyday Spirits and Medical Interventions: Ethnographic and Historical Notes on Therapeutic Conventions in Zanzibar Town. Tapio Nisula. Saarijarvi: Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 1999. 321 pp., appendix, bibliography, glossary.

Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo. Judy Rosenthal. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. xii. 282 pp., illustrations, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.

Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power. Paul Brodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvi. 240 pp., Illustrations, glossary, notes, bibliography, index.

North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity. Sonia Ryang. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.248 pp.

Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. THOMAS J. CSORDAS, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xii + 294 pp., contributors, illustrations, notes, references, index.

Among Mawri communities of southern Niger, deaths are occasionally blamed on blood-sucking spirits whose deadly appetite is unleashed by human greed. Identifying the agency behind the crime involves focusing on certain objects the circulation of which once wove a link between victims and culprits. This article examines how gift-giving figures in lo...

This contribution to a debate on Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte discusses the valuable theoretical perspective offered by Michael Lambek as he focuses on spirit possession as an embodied experience that lasts well beyond its manifest moments. By grounding the immediacy of possession in the embodied texture of the everyday, Lambek renders tangibl...