Bulletproofing: Small Arms, International Law, and Spiritual Security in the Gambia

Abstract

Hultin uses international small arms control and its manifestation in the Gambia to describe how anthropologists have focused on the ways local contexts problematize or transcend putatively universal norms (like those found in humanitarian discourses, including small arms control). In the Gambia, spiritual security clashes with the norms and tropes of small arms control. But, at the same time, as this focus has a great deal of merit, it makes for another trope: the trope of incommensurability. This trope is an anthropological forte, but it risks neglecting the aspirational uses of international ideas to form new social identities. To address this point, the chapter develops the notion of the “procedural class” as a facet of the moral topography of contemporary Africa.