In Niger the past decades have seen growing numbers of adolescent schoolgirls becoming possessed by spirits seeking redress for past harms. During exorcisms a narrative emerges, enfolding humans and spirits in a history of violence and disaffection that wreaks havoc with the linearity of time. In the last century, urbanisation and other transformations accompanying Muslim reformists’ projects of purification have disrupted the spiritscape. When trees were cut down to make space for schools, the spirits were dislodged from their homes. They now haunt the very venues whose emergence contributed to their displacement. Drawing on the incipient anthropology of intangibles, Adeline Masquelier explores the narratives of loss dramatized through the possession of schoolgirls, the wider claims about the past that these narratives authorise, and how these claims call into question a present (and a future) plagued with the past’s legacy.

About the Speaker:

Adeline Masquelier is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University, USA and currently a Senior Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. She is author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger (Duke, 2001). Her more recent book, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Indiana, 2009) was awarded the 2010 Herskovits Award for best scholarly book on Africa and the 2012 Aidoo-Snyder prize for best scholarly book about African women. She is editor of Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface (Indiana, 2005).

She is co-editor, with Benjamin Soares, of Muslim Youth and the 9/11 Generation (School of Advanced Research, 2016) and, with Gaurav Desai, of Critical Terms for the Study of Africa (Chicago, 2018). She recently completed a book on un(der)employed youth entitled Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (Chicago, forthcoming) and is now writing a book on spirit possession in Nigerien schools. Her talk is related to this latest project.