Seminar by Florence Bernault: Colonial Convergences: Assemblages of Power and Fantasy in Equatorial Africa (Gabon)

The longue durée history of personal capacity and spiritual agency in Gabon is the focus of this seminar. Anthropologists and political scientists have been scrutinizing the role of witchcraft in Africa as an agent of everyday life for the last fifteen years and how it is constitutive of African modernities (Geschiere 1997, Shaw 2002, Ellis & Ter Haar 2004, Asforth 2005, Niehaus 2012). However, few scholars have contextualized these convulsions within a longer history of power, capacity and misfortune (Behrent 2011). The argument presented by Florence Bernault in this seminar is twofold. Firstly, Bernault traces how colonialism was a crucial moment for reconfiguring ideas of personal and collective agency. Contemporary dilemmas about human and super-human power in Africa cannot be understood without reconstructing the fierce battles that occurred from the nineteenth century onwards over social reproduction, the value of the human body and the efficacy of machines, objects and charms. Secondly, Bernault does not view colonizers in Africa as global and rational agents but as intimate and intrusive actors in a mutual recomposing of shared cosmologies of power.