The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco

Abstract

This article asks what it means when Manjaco urban migrants embody and perform cosmopolitanism during funeral ceremonies in rural homelands in Guinea–Bissau. The format of the funeral allows for assertions of individuality that are routinely portrayed as destructive, but destructiveness is imagined as an enduring, by no means recent, feature of social life, whether traditional or cosmopolitan. Manjaco returnees are not compelled to disguise their cosmopolitanism in the mufti of tradition if they want to find a space for themselves in the village. Rather, as the funeral opens up a space for emigrants to celebrate their personal freedom of movement and their capacity to leave the village at will, cosmopolitanism can become the costume of choice at home as well as abroad. In enacting their accomplishments at funerals, Manjaco emigrants make room for cosmopolitanism as a part of what they consider to be “tradition” rather than its opposite. This cosmopolitanism as tradition is pervasive in West Africa. On the basis of an “ethos of modernity,” it is very different from the dichotomizing modernity that is a quintessential feature of both Western vernaculars and of the predominant discourses of social science.

"Aqui ninguém reza por ele!": trânsitos fúnebres entre o Bangladesh e Portugal

“…Mas essa relação entre a morte, as cerimónias fúnebres e os lugares de pertença é visível em muitos outros contextos etnográfi cos, onde a questão das migrações e das diásporas está presente. Nesse sentido temos um recente artigo de Eric Gable (2006), intitulado The funeral and modernity in Manjaco. A partir de uma pesquisa sobre os migrantes manjacos, nas cidades da Guiné-Bissau, Gable argumenta que as cerimónias fúnebres são ocasiões de demonstração de êxito pessoal nas comunidades rurais de origem.…”

Political Economy Approach

“…analysis before, during and after the independence struggle (Cabral 1980(Cabral , 2008 and a few key references published in the late 1980s and early 1990s (including Galli and Jones 1987, Lopes 1987and Forrest 1992, there has been little subsequent research with an explicitly political-economic character. There has been plenty of excellent published research in and on Guinea-Bissau, including, in particular, that which reflects the work undertaken within the ambit of Bissau's Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa (INEP), as well as a number of excellent ethnographies, like those undertaken by Gable (1995Gable ( , 1997Gable ( , 2000Gable ( , 2003Gable ( , 2006 on the Manjaco, and by Temudo on the Southern peninsula of Cubucare (2009, 2009b, inter alia). However, the specific issues of class differentiation and social-productive dynamics have in most cases been either altogether absent or played a secondary role.…”

“…Given the high share of respondents who reported having lost rice paddies due to salinisation, as well as the fact that those initiatives used to mobilise the community as a whole and have not been undertaken for at least ten years, there is certainly plausibility to this argument. Another argument concerns the effect of migration upon community cohesion: some people view migrants as privileged vehicles for the introduction of new consumption patterns and cultural habits, which they feel have been gradually undermining tradition, equality and cohesion (see Gable 1995Gable , 2000Gable and 2006 for an especially pessimistic account of the effect of emigration in another nearby Manjaco village).…”

Circulating Spirits and Dead Bodies

“…In the study of migrations (Gable 2006;Ho 2006;Lestage 2008), death and dying are good examples of the circulation of symbolic universes in which the notion of process is extremely important. Such arguments will be explored through the case study of Guinean migrants in Portugal.1 In social anthropology, the conceptions of death and dying have deserved attention from several authors, such as the classics by Frazer (1934), Hertz (1960), Evans-Pritchard (1948), Vovelle (1983), Ariés (1989), and Vincent-Thomas (1975 and contemporary authors such as Bloch (1971Bloch ( , 1982, Gable (2006) and de Boeck (2008). As João de Pina Cabral (1984) has argued, these authors' approaches to the topic include many elements, from the symbolism of several ceremonial elements to the liminality of funerary rituals.…”