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This paper examines Muslim child-disciples (talibés) who beg on the streets in urban Senegal. It interprets, from the perspective of Wolof farmers, why parents send their sons to live with marabouts (Muslim sages). It then contrasts Wolof understandings of talibés with the discourses produced by children's rights advocates. It argues that while indigenous rights advocates employ "strategic essentialism" to promote minority groups' claims, advocates of women's and children's rights programs minimize discussion of "culture" and offer, instead, a meta-narrative of large-scale structural forces such as poverty, structural adjustment, and population growth—a discourse termed "strategic structuralism." Politically expedient, such rhetoric nevertheless forces narratives about controversial cultural practices into a generic form that is as reductionist as strategic essentialism.

This essay builds on fieldwork in rural Senegal to examine three cases in which elder household heads called on gendarmes to physically discipline rebellious youths. These cases, which revolved around harsh acts of corporal punishment, invite inquiry into common assumptions about African families and states. The first assumption is the common dichotomy drawn between African youths, portrayed as modern and menacing, and African elders, portrayed as “traditional” and hence benign. The second assumption is the dichotomy drawn between the African family, conceived as solidary and nurturing, and the African state, conceived as alien and predatory. In examining these cases of discipline and punishment, this essay reveals the ever‐shifting power relations that link Wolof household heads, dependent junior males, and state agents, and simultaneously introduces new questions about the morality of farmer–state relations and generational conflict. My analysis reveals the spatial geography of Senegal's youth crisis, which takes different forms in rural and urban locales. The anxiety of rural patriarchs is fed by a fear‐mongering media obsessed with youthful anarchy in the cities, and a long‐standing political rhetoric about the threat of rural out‐migration. Elder men in the countryside, who experience diminishing household authority under neoliberalism, make proactive efforts to keep the urban youth crisis at bay. They seek to augment their domestic power by reestablishing links with a state that has long bolstered patriarchy but whose power is currently in decline. By lending patriarchs their coercive force, gendarmes attempt to accomplish through private, indirect means, what the postcolonial state is unable to do: maintain social order by reining in disruptive youths. The harsh disciplinary measures that gendarmes employ are not alien to Wolof culture, but integral to Wolof conceptions of child rearing.

This article examines reciprocal relations among Wolof small farmers in Senegal after the emergence of rural weekly markets (loumas) and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1980s. Contrary to the notion that markets are a force of social dissolution, new trading practices and free market policies have not weakened community relations among small farmer neighbours and kin. Rather, the spatial and temporal patterning of loumas has served to strengthen intra-community bonds. Farmers have, since the formation of loumas, limited their travel beyond their home zones. While at loumas they interact avidly with extralocal merchants, they have not allowed outsiders to settle permanently in local villages. Furthermore, because loumas occur only once a week, farmers continue to benefit from daily, multiplex interactions with one another. After analysing the spatial and temporal organisation of loumas, this article looks at specific examples of small farmers augmenting their economic security during a period of economic restructuration by innovating new modes of reciprocal exchange with one another.