Paper long abstract

Recent work on materiality has demonstrated the usefulness of abandoning any analytical distinction between persons and things. In this paper I build on these insights in order to discuss the production and sale of bogolan cloth in San, a provincial town in Mali.

San bogolan is not consumed locally, but sold to traders in Bamako, and most of it exported to various locations outside Mali. For this reason it has often been classified as a commodity, an object made for commercial reasons only, and therefore devoid of any cultural meaning or value.

Contrary to this view, I show how commercially produced cloths can be seen as distributed persons in Gell's sense of the term, that is, as material extensions of the persons who made them. As such, the cloths embody not only their makers' personhood. They are also aesthetic "traps", expressing the social efficacy of these makers and attempting to draw others into commercial exchange.

Paper long abstract

The earth granaries of the Dogon from Mali constitute a prominent characteristic of their built environment. These gendered domestic containers that either form the compound enclosure or stand individually within it, objectify local epistemologies about the self, the society and the environment life cycle. By looking at daily bodily storing practice in millet granaries which are called guyo ana, I examine the dialectic of the 'full' and 'empty' that generates an ontology of hope and scarcity in a particular context of food shortage. Beyond its remarkable conservation capacities, the millet granary as the property of men holds in a manner of a Pandora's box, secret knowledge about its content. Once opened and emptied, fear and despair are released out of the container but hopes for a future harvest of plenty always remain at the bottom. I propose that Dogon earth granaries as symbols of life and death materialise a particular philosophy of containment that is grounded into ambivalent hopes and delusions towards nature as well as expectations towards Western technology to re-fill bodies and containers.

Paper long abstract

My paper will discuss the changing concept of time among Bamana village women as they register the impact of globalization, the importation of watches, and the possibilities of recording exact time in writing. I will examine this issue through an analysis of mud cloths whose named patterns locate the viewer in several different kinds of time. The paper will begin with Guanjò ni tile or "the time of Guanjò," a pattern located in a non-specific past time frame. It will then discuss the invention of the Gardi Cercle, a pattern that locates the viewer in the time of the "gardes de Cercle" in the early years of colonization. Finally it will examine patterns such as Bi ma da, or "the mouths of today's people," a design that makes an ironic commentary on the behavior of 'modern' people. I will suggest that the Bamana sense of time as viewed through the abstract patterns of mud cloth has undergone significant changes and has moved from mythic or non-specific time frames to a sense of time much more akin to that of the west under the increasing impact of globalization.

Paper long abstract

Heritage memory and inconsistent temporalities in Djenne, Mali

Charlotte Joy and Michael Rowlands UCL.

We begin with a discussion of the formation of a colonial identity for Mali through identification of a heritage memory with mud architecture. The image in particular of the Djenne mosque in cartes de visites, postage stamps and brochures led to the recognition of Soudanic architecture as a unique architectural form and its identification with nostalgic memory in France. This forms the basis for current UNESCO world heritage status for such architecture in Mali and one of the attractions for the significant tourism that now is a mainstay of the economy. Yet this focus on architecture is full of contradictions both in terms of alternative colonial visual histories of Mali and in the current restoration programmes enacted under the world heritage status