ABSTRACT

By revisiting my ethnographic engagement with the Baga of coastal Guinea, West Africa, in this article I analyse, in the first place, the ways in which secrecy and its associated verbal arts (silence, metaphor, gesture) has worked as an ‘imagination trigger’ in a post-iconoclastic religious landscape in the 1990s and early 2000s, inviting people to create in their minds possible scenarios of pre-iconoclastic pastness and notions of ‘double-ream’, or dabal, in Baga language; in the second place, and in sharp contrast, I discuss how Baga of today, belonging to a generation historically removed from the traumatic colonial iconoclasm but facing new and dramatic environmental challenges, are relating to historical knowledge in ways that make the arts of secrecy, so prevalent in the field twenty years ago, less relevant, but that nonetheless highlight the plastic, transformative nature of African systems of secrecy. A particular attention is given to the changing relationship between the ethics of secrecy and the presence or absence of slavery memories in the villages.

摘要

通过重新审视我与西非几内亚沿海巴加人的民族志接触，在本文中，我首先分析了保密及其相关的语言艺术（沉默、隐喻、手势）作为“想象力触发器”的方式' 在 1990 年代和 2000 年代初期的后偶像破坏宗教景观中，邀请人们在他们的脑海中创造可能的场景，即前偶像破坏前的过去和巴加语中的“双令”或 dabal 概念；其次，与此形成鲜明对比的是，我讨论了今天的巴加，属于历史上摆脱了创伤性殖民偶像破坏但面临新的和巨大的环境挑战的一代人，如何以使秘密艺术成为现实的方式与历史知识相关联，二十年前在该领域如此流行，不太相关，但这仍然突出了非洲保密制度的可塑性和变革性。特别关注保密伦理与村庄中是否存在奴隶制记忆之间不断变化的关系。