The Politics of Absence: The Longue Durée of State–Peasant Interactions in the Siin (Senegal), 1850s–1930s

Abstract

Historical anthropology has transformed our understanding of colonialisms, by portraying a complex archipelago of social worlds rife with ambiguities, cultural intertwinings, and unstable power fields. While these “tensions of empire” were often played out on material terrains, one may wonder the extent to which they are manifested in archaeological situations. Using textual and material archives, this essay examines the intersection of colonial policy and local practice in Siin (Senegal) during the colonial period. These encounters produced complex materialities and social strategies that offer glimpses into the subjectivities, plural experiences, possibilities, and contradictions fashioned in the region under French colonial rule. The chapter confronts material traces left of past political landscapes with clues scattered across written documents, ethnographies, and oral memory to interrogate the mutual constitution of “the State” and subject populations, and, more broadly, the nature and historicity of colonial power in Senegal. It seeks to elucidate the workings, limitations, and ambiguity of state practices and political authority in relation to African communities’ capacity to elude or ignore colonial injunctions, while accounting for the combined influence of the state and market forces to frame the social possibilities and sensibilities of local populations, to turn them (not always deliberately) into the artisans of their own rule.