What Is in a Name?

Abstract

What Is in a Name? Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi (bio) KEYWORDS Mande, Bamana, Senufo, categories, identities, positionality Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” 2009 In her much-watched and oft-cited 2009 TEDGlobal talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie focuses on the power of storytelling, a power that scholars also hold through the telling and upholding of research narratives. As we think about the past, present, and future of an organization founded as the Mande Studies Association, or MANSA, Adichie’s comments bear consideration. The term Mande in the name Mande Studies Association asserts Mande-ness as central, and it places any other experience or understanding in a secondary position, even if the group’s membership demonstrates openness to other perspectives. MANSA membership and activities span a vast area within West Africa known for its longstanding cultural, linguistic, and social heterogeneity—a diversity that members may appreciate even as the organization’s name suggests otherwise. [End Page 175] In encouraging the group to reflect on the organization’s name and its implications, MANSA past president Joseph Hellweg and Mande Studies editor-in-chief Rosa de Jorio have opened an important discussion. Hellweg and de Jorio have kindly invited me to join others in contributing our perspectives to this reflection. I appreciate this opportunity to explain the research questions that first brought me to western Burkina Faso in 2004 for my dissertation research, my findings drawing from nearly two years of research in the region, and my experiences as a MANSA member since I participated in the organization’s 2008 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. While it is not my place to decide what the group’s name should be, I will demonstrate some of the ways in which the organization’s name promotes certain histories, commitments, and conveniences, orienting it in particular ways and rendering other positions secondary. I also recognize that no name can be entirely neutral, as any name will favor certain interests over others. The process of reflection itself seems critically important, as it encourages the group to think about, articulate, and decide which priorities are most pertinent to recognize at this particular moment. Study of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier” My motivation to study the arts of western Africa began with questions about categories and their implications for understanding which arose through my first experiences with African arts. I was an undergraduate student at the time, holding a work-study job supervised by Frederick John Lamp, who was then a curator of African arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A few years later, as a graduate student, I found myself increasingly puzzled by the apparent mismatch between the then-popular academic critiques of bounded cultural or ethnic groups as all-encompassing analytical frameworks tied to colonial conceptions and the simultaneous persistence of the frameworks in the actual labeling and presentation of the so-called historical or classical arts of Africa. I subsequently became aware of Burkinabe art historian Boureima T. Diamitani’s PhD dissertation on Senufo-speaking communities of western Burkina Faso that invest in and maintain chapters of the organization known as Komo and its arts.1 Diamitani’s dissertation intrigued me. It directed me to an area where I could explore the theory-versus-practice mismatch that confounded me and attempt to discern other bases for understanding. Diamitani’s attention to the presence of Komo in Senufo-speaking communities highlighted the fallacious idea that Komo operates as a Bamana or Mande institution.2 The view of Komo as specifically...