Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T10:56:27.281Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From the Margins of the State to the Presidential Palace: The Balanta Case in Guinea-Bissau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Marina Padrão Temudo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Balanta farmers of Guinea-Bissau are often regarded by neighboring communities as “backward” and as a people who have refused modern life-worlds. Despite the fact that these farmers played a very important role in the making of Guinea-Bissau, they were progressively removed from power after independence. However, they also developed original forms of contesting marginality. This article portrays the Balanta as complex historical subjects with strategic agendas. It examines the tensions between centrality and marginality in today's Guinea-Bissau and in the Balanta's own ways of imagining their place in the nation.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , September 2009 , pp. 47 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ardener, Edwin. 1970. “Witchcraft, Economies and the Continuity of Belief.” In Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, edited by Douglas, Mary, 141–60. London: Tavistock Publications.Google Scholar
Behrend, Heike. 1999. Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda. Oxford: James Currey.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, George. 1993. Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Cabral, Amílcar. 1974. PAIGC: Unidade e Luta. Lisboa: Publicações Nova Aurora.Google Scholar
Callewaert, Inger. 1997. “O Surgimento da Prática Ritual Kiyang-yang na Forma de Vida Balanta.” Soronda: Revista deEstudos Guineense 1 (1): 79–119.Google Scholar
Callewaert, Inger. 2000. “The Birth of Religion among the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau.” Lund Studies in African and Asian Religions 12.Google Scholar
Cardoso, Carlos. 1990. “Ki-Yang-Yang: Uma Nova Religião dos Balantas?” Soronda: Revista de Estudos Guineenses 10: 3–15.Google Scholar
Chabal, Patrick. 1983. Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People's War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Drift, Roy van der. 1990. “O Desenvolvimento da Produção e do Consumo do Alcoól entre os Balanta Brassa da Aldeia de Fóia, no Sul da Guiné-Bissau.” Soronda: Revista de Estudos Guineenses 9: 95–115.Google Scholar
Drift, Roy van der. 2000. “Birds of Passage and Independence Fighters: An Anthropological Analysis of Balanta Migration to Southern Guinea-Bissau and Mobilization for the Liberation War.” In Migrations Anciennes et Peuplement Actuel des Côtes Guinéennes, edited by Gaillard, Gerard, 151–64. Paris: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Fanthorpe, Richard. 1998. “Limba ‘Deep Rural’ Strategies.” Journal of African History 39: 15–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fields, Edda. 2001. Rice Farmers in the Rio Nunez Region: A Social History of Agricultural Technology and Identity in Coastal Guinea, c.a. BCE to 1880 CE. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Forrest, Joshua. 1992. Guinea-Bissau: Power, Conflict, and Renewal in a West African Nation. Oxford: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Gable, Eric. 1995. “The Decolonization of Consciousness: Local Sceptics and the “Will to Be Modern” in a West African Village.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 242–57.Google Scholar
Geschiere, Peter, and Rowlands, Michael. 1996. “The Domestication of Modernity: Different Trajectories.” Africa 66 (4): 552–54.Google Scholar
Handem, Diana 1986. Nature et Fonctionnement du Pouvoir chez les Balanta Brassa. Bissau: INEP.Google Scholar
Havik, Philip. 2004. Silences and Soundbytes: The Gendered Dynamics of Trade and Brokerage in the Pre-Colonial Guinea-Bissau Region. Münster: Lit Verlag.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Walter. 2001. “Nourishing a Stateless Society during the Slave Trade: The Rise of Balanta Paddy-Rice Production in Guinea-Bissau.” Journal of African History 42: 1–24.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Walter. 2003. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Jong, Joop de. 1987. A Descent into African Psychiatry. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute.Google Scholar
Last, Murray. 1980. “Conservative Change.” Paper presented at the “Conference on Change in Rural Hausaland.” Session 3: “Administration and Autonomy.” Bagauda, February 29–March 1.Google Scholar
Lopes, Carlos. 1990. “Crise Ecológica e Conflitos Sociais na Guiné-Bissau.” Soronda: Revista deEstudos Guineenses 6: 21–54.Google Scholar
Nóbrega, Alvaro. 2003. A Luta pelo Poder na Guiné-Bissau. Lisboa: ISCSP/UTL.Google Scholar
Peel, John. 1978. Qlaju: A Yoruba Concept of Development. The Journal of Development Studies 14 (2): 139–65.Google Scholar
Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rodney, Walter. 1970. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Rudebeck, Lars. 2001. “On Democracy's Sustainability: Transition in Guinea-Bissau.” Sida Studies 4.Google Scholar
Sarró, Ramon. 2009. The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute.Google Scholar
Shaw, Rosalind. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar