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This discussion of pilgrimage and its gifts, based on ethnographic research in the historically‐rich and deeply Islamic West African city of Kankan, Guinea, concerns the processes of movement of people from this remote region to and from Mecca and the transformative relationship dynamics that surround pilgrims and their families following the hajj. The ‘centre’ in this case study is created, reproduced and reconfigured through the economic processes of personal experiential access and the ability to gift a reminder of that experiential access. Access to the centre transforms religious and cultural perceptions of personhood and comprises a kind of spiritual capital that is transferable. In gerontocratic, patrilineal extended family households of Kankan, participation in pilgrimage creates a new kind of globally implicated person and also may influence the relative status of other members of the household. Relying on two case studies, this paper also highlights potential tensions between two global systems, each ambiguously ‘centred’ in a world far apart from Kankan: local actors negotiate competing versions of identity constructions through Western commodity metaphors and idealized Islamic/Mandé models of intergenerational kinship obligation. Discontent with passively allowing either paradigm to define what it is to be a pious or ‘modern’ person, local actors juggle both sets of identity constructions to profoundly impact the notion of the person and the economy of religious experience.
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Ethnographic research for this paper was conducted over the 12 months of 2003 in Kankan, Guinea, with a Fulbright IIE research grant. I thank Monica Udvardy for her patient guidance in organizing the themes of this research. Thanks, too, to my research assistants in Kankan, Fodé Doumbouya, Sékou Kaba and Lonceney Cissé. I also thank Kader Kaba, for his translation assistance. A very early version of this paper was presented in 2004 at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in San Francisco on a panel organized by Vida Bajc; another version was presented at the Society for Economic Anthropology meeting in 2006 in Ventura. Participants of that seminar were helpful in shaping these arguments, especially Catherine Dolan and Wíni Utari. I also thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for excellent suggestions and encouragement on this research. Because this paper has at its heart themes of intergenerational gifting, I must also thank my generous mother, Kathleen Kenny, for the hours of child care she provided while I wrote this research into a dissertation.
1. ‘Spiritual capital’ is a term recently used in popular literature (Zohar & Marshall, 2004), but the term was first suggested to me as a way to tweak Bourdieu's notions of ‘symbolic capital’ by Sandra Kryst in 2004. Also see Verter (2003) for a similar sociological usage which treats religious knowledges, competencies and preferences as positional goods within a competitive symbolic economy.
2. See Jean‐François Médard (1992) for an interesting twist on the Big Man formula in contemporary, top‐down‐development‐project‐plagued Africa. A number of ideas in this paper about the ‘pay‐offs’ of experiential knowledge are inspired by Médard's insightful analysis of the local African entrepreneur and the state.
3. Examples of this process are discussed by Bourdieu (1979, 1986, 1990). Bourdieu also used the term ‘religious capital’; however, his view of religion was influenced by Weberian analyses of hierocracy legitimation and charisma whereas my use here is more limited to specific qualities, such as piety or morality, that accrete to a person's socially‐constructed identity. A fuller discussion of sociological uses of ‘religious capital’ is available in Verter, 2003.
4. For an exception to this generalization and an example where actual currency is worn as a kind of personal adornment, see my description of the Malinké circumcision ceremonies (Kenny, 2005), where the mother of the initiate and her female relatives pin paper currency from Africa, Europe and the US to their traditional costumes for the dances.
5. For more discussion on culturally perceived construction of new types of personhood, see Meyer Fortes' classic article ‘The First Born’ (1987[1974]). See also Conklin & Morgan, 1996. Moreover, constructing new types of persons within Mande culture occurs with regularity depending on life course and experience (Levin, 2000; Ferme, 2001), and often involves ritualized interventions in the body including circumcision and excision (see Kenny, 2005). Considerations of space and time prevent me from relaying a comprehensive summary of anthropological personhood literature. One trajectory of this literature emerged initially as discussions of the gendered and symbolic dimensions of net bags as an element of material culture in Melanesian ethnography. For example, the collection edited by Lambek & Strathern (1988) makes a number of salient points about personhood and collective identities in the non‐Western context.
6. Local political and economic dynamics appeared to be in danger during the January and February 2007 labour union strikes that pushed the Kanté administration to address its isolationist policies, using unconscionable acts of violence through the military. The situation appears to have stabilized with the appointment of a new prime minister.
7. Dualistic distinctions between the village and the bush are common in West African discussions of place, space, community and identity. For an excellent example, see Leach, 2000.
8. My analysis shows 27 of 88 returnees gifted the hajj upon their return (about 30 per cent). Forty per cent of this sample returned to the Kankan area of Upper Guinea prior to 2000; the remaining respondents had returned since 2000.
9. The names used in this paper disguise the identity of the participants of this study. However, because family names indicate lineage affiliation, I've done my best to alter small details about the two men introduced and discussed here. El Hajj Lonceny Kaba passed away in 2005; Monsieur Traoré was given an earlier draft of this paper (albeit in English) in 2006.