Communauté ou réseau. La monétisation des vaches dans les Monts Mandingues (Mali-Guinée)

Abstract

This article describes new manifestations of communal labour in the mountainous Sobara region, 80 kilometers southwest of Mali’s capital Bamako, as a management strategy to cope with – and to take advantage of – rapid agricultural transformation and monetarisation of the economy. Traditionally, the format of the sansène, was a period of three or four days of communal labour. Nowadays it is used in this area as an organisational format to deal with new economic opportunities. Although people seem to avoid calculations on labour costs and accept a cow as remuneration for their labour, it is illustrated that in the practice of everyday life both cows and money are currencies which are used with different meanings and intentions, depending on the context. People’s interpretation of the sansènè demonstrates how they cope with conceptions of « real » time and wage labour in a context where aspects of the market economy are encroaching into the region. It is argued that the chosen strategy aims to exclude money and the idea of wage labour, although economic calculations on profit and social capital seem to be made constantly.