An "impossible" transmission: Youth religious memories in Guinea-Conakry

American Ethnologist

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 576-592

  Berliner, David ^a,b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITÉ LIBRE DE BRUXELLES   (Belgium)

Author keywords

Crisis of transmission; Guinea Conakry; Intergenerational relations; Memory; Pre Islamic religion; Youth

Indexed keywords

EID: 31544459518     PISSN: 00940496     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2005.32.4.576     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. Appadurai, Arjun 1981 The Past as a Scarce Resource. Man 16(2):201-219.
2. Argenti, Nic 1998 Air Youth: Performance, Violence and the State in Cameroon. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(4):753-782.
3. Barth, Fredrik 1975 Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo: Universiteitforlaget.
4. Bellman, Beryl 1984 The Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
5. Berhend, Heike, and Ute Luig, eds. 1999 Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa. Oxford: James Currey.
6. Berliner, David 2002 "Nous sommes les derniers Bulongic." Sur une impossible transmission dans one société d'Afrique de l'Ouest. Ph.D. dissertation, Centre d'Anthropologie Culturelle, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
7. Berliner, David 2005a The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly 78(1): 183-197.
8. Berliner, David 2005b La féminisation de la coutume. Femmes possédées et transmission religieuse en pays Bulongic (Guinée-Conakry). Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 177(1):15-38.
9. Bledsoe, Caroline, and Kenneth Robey 1986 Arabic Literacy and Secrecy among the Mende of Sierra Leone. Man 21(2):202-226.
10. Bloch, Maurice E. F. 1998 How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
11. Borofsky, Robert 1987 Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Construction of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
13. Bourdieu, Pierre 1980 La jeunesse n'est qu'un mot. In Questions de sociologie. Pp. 143-154. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
14. Boyer, Pascal 1990 Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15. Boyer, Pascal 1994 The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
16. Boyer, Pascal 2001 Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
17. Bravmann, René 1974 Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
18. Briggs, Jean 1998 Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
19. Bucholtz, Mary 2002 Youth and Cultural Practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:525-552.
20. Camara, Oumar 1984 Monographie géographique du village de Monchon, Préfecture de Boffa. Unpublished MS, Faculté des Sciences de la Nature, Institut Polytechnique Gamal Abdel Nasser de Conakry, Guinea.
21. Candau, Joel 1998 Mémoire et identité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
22. Casey, Edward 2000 Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
23. Chrétien, Jean-Pierre, and Jean-Louis Triaud, eds. 1999 Histoire d'Afrique: Les enjeux de mémoire. Paris: Editions Karthala.
24. Climo, Jacob, and Maria Cattell 2002 Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
25. Cohn, Bernard 1995 The Pasts of an Indian Village. In Time: Histories and Ethnologies. Diane Hugues and Thomas Trautmann, eds. Pp. 21-30. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
26. Cole, Jennifer 2001 Forget Colonialism? Sacrifices and the Art of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
27. Cole, Jennifer 2004 Fresh Contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: Sex, Money, and Intergenerational Transformation. American Ethnologist 31(4):573-588.
28. Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff 2000 Réflexions sur la jeunesse: Du passé à la postcolonie. Politique Africaine 80:90-110.
29. Connerton, Paul 1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30. Cormier-Salem, Marie-Christine, ed. 1999 Rivières du sud. Sociétés et mangroves Ouest-Africaines. 2 vols. Paris: Editions de l'IRD.
31. Crook, Nigel, ed. 1996 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
32. d'Almeida-Topor, Hélène, ed. 1992 Les jeunes en Afrique. Paris: L'Harmattan.
33. d'Azévédo, Warren 1962 Some Historical Problems in the Delineation of a Central West Atlantic Region. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 96(2):512-538.
34. De Boeck, Filip 1998 Beyond the Grave: History, Memory and Death in Postcolonial Congo/Zaïre. In Memory and the Postcolony. Richard Werbner, ed. Pp. 21-57. London: Zed Books.
35. De Boeck, Filip, and Alcinda Honwana 2000 Faire et défaire la société: Enfants, jeunes et politique en Afrique. Politique Africaine 80:5-11.
36. Dosse, François 1999 La méthode historique et les traces mémorielles. In Le défi du XXIe siècle. Relier les connaissances. Edgar Morin, ed. Pp. 317-326. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
37. Durham, Deborah 2000 Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa. Anthropological Quarterly 73(3):113-120.
38. Durham, Deborah 2004 Disappearing Youth: Youth as a Social Shifter in Botswana. American Ethnologist 31(4):589-605.
39. Elboudrari, Hassan, ed. 1992 Modes de transmission de la culture religieuse en Islam. Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale du Caire.
40. Elman, Yaakov, and Israel Gershoni, eds. 2000 Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
41. Fabian, Johannes 1999 Remembering the Other: Knowledge and Recognition in the Exploration of Central Africa. Critical Inquiry 26(1):49-69.
42. Fortes, Meyer 1970 Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Tale-land. In From Child to Adult: Studies in the Anthropology of Education. John Middleton, ed. Pp. 14-74. New York: Natural History Press.
43. Foucault, Michel 1971 L'ordre du discours. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
44. Gable, Eric 2000 The Culture Development Club: Youth, Neo-Tradition, and the Construction of Society in Guinea-Bissau. Anthropological Quarterly 73(4):195-203.
45. Galland, Olivier 1997 Sociologie de la jeunesse. Paris: Editions Armand Colin.
46. Geertz, Clifford 1983 Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
47. Geschiere, Peter 1997 The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
48. Ginsburg, Faye 2002 Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Production of Identity. In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk, eds. Pp. 210-235. Oxford: Blackwell.
49. Guégan, Marie 1999 Les modes de gestion de la plaine de Monchon avant et après l'installation de la Société Bernas de Guinée. Unpublished MS, Institut de Géographie, Université de Bordeaux III.
50. Halbwachs, Maurice 1994[1925] Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Editions Albin Michel.
51. Harris, Olivia 1995 Knowing the Past: Plural Identities and Antinomies of Loss in Highland Bolivia. In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. Richard Fardon, ed. Pp. 105-123. London: Routledge.
52. Henige, David 1982 Oral Historiography. London: Longman.
53. Herdt, Gilbert 2003 Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
54. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 1997 La transmission religieuse en modernité: Eléments pour la construction d'un objet de recherche. Social Compass 44(1): 131-143.
55. Herzfeld, Michael 1991 A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
56. Herzfeld, Michael 1997 Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge.
57. Herzfeld, Michael 2004 The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
58. Hojbjerg, Christian Kordt 2002 Inner Iconoclasm: Forms of Reflexivity in Loma Rituals of Sacrifice. Social Anthropology 10(1):57-75.
59. Houseman, Michael 1993 The Interactive Basis of Ritual Effectiveness in a Male Initiation Rite. In Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. Pascal Boyer, ed. Pp. 207-224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
60. Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, and Jocelyn Letourneau 1998 Les jeunes à l'ere de la mondialisation: Quête identitaire et conscience historique. Québec: Septentrion.
61. Jing, Jun 1996 The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
62. Keesing, Roger 1982 Kwaio Religion: The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society. New York: Columbia University Press.
63. La Fontaine, Jean 1985 Initiation: Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge across the World. Middlesex, UK: Penguin.
64. Lamp, Frederick 1996 Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention. New York: Museum for African Art.
65. Lapierre, Nicole 2001 Le silence de la mémoire. A la recherche des Juifs de Plock. Paris: Editions Le Livre de Poche.
66. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
67. Lenclud, Gerard 1994 Qu'est que la tradition? In Transcrire les mythologies. Marcel Detienne, ed. Pp. 25-44. Paris: Editions Albin Michel.
68. Letourneau, Jocelyn, ed. 1997 Le lieu identitaire de la jeunesse aujourd'hui. Etudes de cas. Paris: L'Harmattan.
69. Linares, Olga 1992 Power, Prayer, and Production: The Jola of Casamance, Sénégal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
70. Mark, Peter 1992 The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
71. Masquelier, Adeline 2001 Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
72. Mayer, Philip, ed. 1970 Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock.
73. McCall, John 2000 Dancing Histories: Heuristic Ethnography with the Ohafia Igbo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
74. Middleton, Derek 2002 Succession and Change in the Socio-Cultural Use of Memory: Building-In the Past in Communicative Action. Culture and Psychology 8(1):79-95.
75. Middleton, John, ed. 1970 From Child to Adult: Studies in the Anthropology of Education. New York: Natural History Press.
76. Murphy, William 1980 Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in Kpelle Society: Elders versus Youth. Africa 50(2):193-207.
77. Olick, Jeffrey, and Joyce Robbins 1998 Social Memory Studies: From "Collective Memory" to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24:105-140.
78. Paulme, Denise 1956 Structures sociales en pays Baga. Bulletin de l'IFAN 18(série B):98-116.
79. Paulme, Denise 1957 Des riziculteurs africains. Cahiers d'Outre-Mer (Bordeaux) 10:257-278.
80. Paulme, Denise 1958 La notion de orcier chez les Baga. Bulletin de l'IFAN 20(série B):406-416.
81. Price, Richard 1983 First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
82. Price, Richard 1998 The Convict and the Colonel. Boston: Beacon Press.
83. Rappaport, Joanne 1990 The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
84. Rea, William 1998 Rationalizing Culture: Youth, Elites and Masquerade Politics. Africa 68(1):51-81.
85. Ricoeur, Paul 2000 La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
86. Rivière, Claude 1971 Mutations sociales en Guinée. Paris: Editions Marcel Rivière.
87. Rosaldo, Renato 1989 Imperialist Nostalgia. Representations 26(Spring):107-122.
88. Ruë, Olivier 1998 L'aménagement du littoral de Guinée. Mémories des mangroves. Paris: L'Harmattan.
89. Sarro, Ramon 1999a Baga Identity: Religious Movements and Political Transformations in the Republic of Guinea. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University College London.
90. Sarro, Ramon 1999b Football et utilisation identitaire. La "réinvention des traditions" par les jeunes Baga de Guinée. Politique Africaine 74:153-161.
91. Sharp, Lesley 2002 The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
92. Shaw, Rosalind 2001 Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
93. Simmel, Georg 1996 Secret et sociétés secrètes. Aubenas, France: Circé Poche.
94. Smith, Pierre 1984 Le mystère et ses masques chez les Bédik. L'Homme 24(3-4):5-33.
95. Spencer, Paul 1962 The Samburu: A Study of Gerontocraty in a Nomadic Tribe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
96. Sperber, Dan 1996 Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. London: Blackwell.
97. Spindler, George, ed. 1997 Education and Cultural Process: Anthropological Approaches. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
98. Stewart, Michael 2004 Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(3):561-582.
99. Stobart, Henry, and Rosaleen Howard, eds. 2002 Knowledge and Learning in the Andes: Ethnographic Perspectives. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
100. Teixeira, Maria 2001 Rituels divinatoires et thérapeutiques chez les Manjak de Guinée-Bissau et du Sénégal. Paris: L'Harmattan.
101. Teski, Marea, and Jacob Climo 1995 The Labyrinth of Memory: Ethnographic Journeys. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
102. Thorne, Barrie 1993 Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
103. Tonkin, Elizabeth 1992 Narrating Our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
104. Toren, Christina 1999 Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge.
105. Treps, Marie 2000 Transmettre: Un point de vue sémantique. Ethnologie Française 30(3):361-367.
106. Tschuggnall, Karoline, and Harald Welzer 2002 Rewriting Memories: Family Recollections of the National Socialist Past in Germany. Culture and Psychology 8(1):130-145.
107. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 1997 Memory of the World Programme. Electronic document, http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/en/index_mdm.html, accessed May 20, 2005.
108. Vansina, Jan 1985 Oral Tradition as History. London: James Currey.
109. Voeltz, Erahrd 1996 Les langues de la Guinée. Cahiers d'Etudes des Langues Guinéennes, 1. Conakry, Guinea: Université de Conakry, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines.
110. Werbner, Richard, ed. 1998 Memory and the Postcolony. London: Zed Books.
111. Whitehouse, Harvey, ed. 2001 The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography. Oxford: Berg.
112. Whitehouse, Harvey, ed. 2004 Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
113. Whitehouse, Harvey, and James Laidlaw 2004 Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
114. Yelvington, Kevin 2002 History, Memory and Identity: A Programmatic Prolegomenon. Critique of Anthropology 22(3):227-256.
115. Zempléni, Andras 1996 Savoir Taire: Du secret et de l'intrusion ethnologique dans la vie des autres. Gradhiva 20:23-41.