Department of social anthropology seminar with Ismaël Moya

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Ismaël Moya from CNRS. He will present the following paper:

Economy, ritual and urban sociality in Dakar, Senegal


Abstract
An African metropolis such as Dakar, the capital of Senegal, is an obvious vantage point to study social transformation. However, the paradigm of continuity and change tends to overlook that the urban situation (and social transformation in general) is also a vivid context to do ethnography that sheds new light on prevailing categories and compels us to reconsider and reformulate former assumptions on sociality that no longer seems to work. In Dakar, money and relations are two sides of the same coin: there can be no enduring and meaningful relation if money is not involved at one point or another. In this pervasive sociality, agency relies on the conversion of liquidity in relations and vice versa. But only life-cycle rituals (especially birth and marriage), where women honor kinship relations with lavish gifts, successfully manage to synchronize financial relations. In other words, the local economy is subordinated to the ritual system. This ritual system is based on a hierarchical relation between Islam and the ritual agency of women. Albeit not made explicit by the social actors, this hierarchical relation structures the seemingly atomized and chaotic sociality of Dakar. The urban situation thus reveals the fundamental importance of women’s agency and the contemporary relevance of ritual, ceremonial exchange, and kinship in this globalized Muslim society.

Bionote
Ismaël Moya is Chargé de Recherche (associate research professor) at the CNRS and a permanent member of the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (Nanterre, France). He has studied economics and carried fieldwork in a popular suburb of Dakar, Senegal. He then converted to social anthropology and received his PhD (From Money to Values. Women, Economy, Kinship, and Islam in Thiaroye-sur-Mer, Dakar, Senegal) in 2011 at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research areas also include social hierarchies and migration.

All interested are welcome!