Matters of Abundance in West Africa’s Past

Archaeologists have often foregrounded scarcity and the accumulation of finite resources as a key principle of economic and political development in the past. In conventional scenarios, would-be leaders sought to secure control over limited supplies of land, labor, food, trade goods, or technology and to convert their hold on resources into wealth, prestige, social stratification, and political authority. Mirroring the tenets of classic economic theory (Dugger and Peach 2009), sparseness is here assumed to be a basic fact of political economy. As indicated by Monica Smith (2012, this volume), however, scarcity is not a universal condition; rather, it is constructed in relation to culture, politics, and history. In this sense, scarcity only tells part of a complicated story, and equal consideration must be given to matters of abundance. Smith’s observations ring particularly true for the West African past. Susan McIntosh (1999), for example, observes that the availability of land, small population levels, and human mobility imparted a distinct shape to political building in pre-colonial West Africa—such that the usual notions of dispossession, appropriation, exploitation of production, property restriction, and uneven accumulation do not quite capture the pulse of political economy (Herbst 2000). McIntosh does not discount the existence of disparity and hierarchy but suggests that they were intertwined with horizontal mechanisms rooted in a broad ethos of abundance, fertility, and complementarity. Ethnographic and historical evidence shows, for instance, that the collective management of property, strategies of wealth redistribution, an ideology of agricultural subsistence, ideas of self-sufficiency, concepts of “fair” access to resources, and the mobilization of people and knowledge played an important role in governing economic relations among different social groups in the post-contact period (Klein 1980).

Taking up Smith’s challenge and McIntosh’s argument, I draw on ideas of “abundance” to elucidate certain aspects of the cultural economy of Senegalese societies over the past 1,000 years or so. While conscious of archaeological phenomena and historical forces operating at the level of Senegal (and beyond), my observations are grounded in the small region of Siin (figure 10.1). Over the course of its history, the province has been variably at the forefront and background of regional cultural and economic transfers, and its archaeological record holds both central and oblique insights for our understanding of Senegal’s past. The second millennium AD was an eventful, transformative period in Siin, which witnessed large-scale population movements, the emergence of centralized polities, linkages with regional and continental trading spheres, and gradual incorporation into worldwide economic networks prior to the advent of colonial rule in the 1850s and 1860s (Barry 1998; Boulègue 1987; Brooks 1993; Curtin 1975; Klein 1968, 1992; Searing 1993). If outside historical forces considerably altered the organization of local societies, they also braided with existing economic institutions to frame the experiences of resident communities. What resulted is a complex interplay of transformations and continuities in local understandings of wealth, labor, and value (e.g., Richard 2009, 2011). Because these transformations achieved various degrees of visibility in objects and architecture, archaeological evidence can shed suggestive, if impressionistic, light into the workings of West African economies. Archaeology is particularly informative about long-term, relatively stable principles of economic life that have left enduring signatures in rural landscapes. Amplified by other sources, material archives hint that a logic of abundance partly organized the circulation of people, things, riches, and power in Siin’s past.

Figure 10.1. West-central Senegal, mid-nineteenth century: ethnic groups and kingdoms.

Figure 10.2. “Traditional” protohistoric provinces in Senegal.

French philosopher Georges Bataille’s writings on economy and sovereignty offer provocative ideas about the non-rational basis of growth and wealth, with relevance to Senegambian societies. Three points seem particularly useful for an analysis of pre-colonial West Africa: (1) the elevation of expenditure to a general foundation of political economy, or at least a set of processes critical to its operation; (2) the importance of destruction, sacrifice, and consumption in the making of social power; and (3) the fact that the principle of excess is not a primitive phenomenon but is found in ancient and modern economies alike.

“Excessive Economies”: Expenditure, Destruction, and Consumption

Bataille’s musings on “general economy” offer a provocative entrée into the workings of abundance and its relationship to the economic process. In his quirky book The Accursed Share, Bataille (1991) proposes a theory of political economy that starts not from the common premises of scarcity, utility, production, and rational calculation but from the opposite premises of excess seen in expenditure, profitless squandering, and consumptive waste. Bataille theorizes that social systems generate surpluses—of energy, goods, and even life. This abundance cannot be completely absorbed and must imperatively be dissipated instead. In a fairly sweeping ethnological gesture, which leapfrogs from pre-Columbian Mexico to the Marshall Plan, Bataille identifies historical examples of economic excess and various modes of release: ritual human sacrifice, the social obligations of gift exchange and reciprocity, potlatch-style tournaments of value, war and destruction, and conspicuous consumption.

I cannot review the subtleties of Bataille’s model here, let alone its sometimes bizarre mix of economic analysis, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics or its philosophical closeness to and distance from other social thinkers. (For instance, while Bataille’s work shows a passing resemblance to Veblen’s interest in non-rational forms of consumption, he did not view excessive forms of waste as pernicious deviations from economic progress but instead as productive, possibly revolutionary activities unto their own; likewise, the importance he accorded to destruction, alongside production, departed from Marxist views; see Brantlinger and Higgins 2006; Stoekl 1985). At a very general level, however, Bataille’s intuitions about the generative nature of expenditure do hit the mark for pre-colonial Senegal, where the destruction, discard, transfer, ostentation, and consumption of material riches played a key role in the economic life of indigenous societies.

While Senegambian political fields were structured in part around elite attempts to hoard precious resources and restrict their movement, these efforts were counterbalanced by strategies of wealth creation centered on the management and display of abundance. What emerges is a complex economy structured along a number of principles, whose most important axioms include: (1) ideologies of wealth based on material investments in labor, social relations, knowledge, and skills—what Africanists have called “wealth in people” (Guyer 1995; Miers and Kopytoff 1977; Miller 1988); (2) regimes of value structured not just on the quantitative accumulation of rare resources but also on the qualitative composition of diverse and abundant resources (Guyer 1993, 1996, 2004; Guyer and Belinga 1995); (3) a system of debt-credit relations, in which goods and services linked people together across social classes into a layered ecology of mutual obligations, reciprocity, and dependence (Searing 1993; see also Shipton 2007); and (4) an aesthetics of spectacle that revolved on public, ostentatious displays and consumptions of wealth that served the interests of power (Norman 2010; more generally, Inomata and Coben 2006). If, over time, elites proved largely successful in playing by the rules of the game and accruing economic clout, the nature of economic institutions introduced a degree of unpredictability into political power. Elite projects sometimes backfired, as prized resources bypassed the prescribed channels of tradition to create new possibilities for non-elite actors.

First Moment: Debt, Labor, and the Emergence of Social Stratification

My first “episode” is a very long one, spanning the length of the first millennium AD and the first part of the following millennium. It corresponds to the building and use of monumental vestiges in Senegal. Though numbers are not precise (and likely underestimates), close to 11,000 earthen tumuli (spread among nearly 1,450 sites) and over 16,900 megalithic formations (clustered into 1,965 sites) have been inventoried in the country, making them by far its most iconic archaeological vestiges (Martin and Becker 1974). These monuments show a great deal of geographic variability (figure 10.2). Tumuli occupy a wide area draping the northwestern part of Senegal (figure 10.3), while megalithic sites tend to cluster in a more confined pocket along the Middle Gambia River Valley. Both monument types are also remarkably heterogeneous with regard to form, contents, and material expression (Cros, Laporte, and Gallay 2013; Gallay, Pignat, and Curdy 1982; Holl and Bocoum 2006; Holl et al. 2007; Joire 1955; Laporte et al. 2012; Thilmans, Descamps, and Khayat 1980). To these, we should add a prodigiously large, uncounted amount of shell mounds dotting coastal and estuarine areas. These anthropogenic formations differ from other monumental remains in that they make up complexes of residential and cemetery remains and will not be examined here (see Linares de Sapir 1971 and Thilmans and Descamps 1982 for partial overviews). Tumuli and megaliths share two key characteristics: they are funerary contexts, and they represent the most extravagant displays of labor mobilization in the pre-colonial past.

Figure 10.3. Mbacké earthen mound, McIntosh Survey 1988–89.

While we do not know much about the societies that produced these vestiges because systematic examination of their links to residential sites and political landscapes is often lacking (but see Gallay 2010–11; Magnavita and Thiaw 2015), researchers have interpreted monumental sites as expressions of social stratification and chiefly power connected to the intensification of commerce between Senegambian polities and the Saharan ecumene (Gallay 2006, 2010; McIntosh 2001; more generally, see Mitchell 2005). This is suggested in part by the nature of inhumations and mortuary assemblages. While some monuments are individual or mass burials, many consist of a “central” inhumation made up of one or a small number of individuals with additional peripheral ones that range from a few bodies to dozens of deceased individuals. Using broad ethnological comparisons across West African societies (Gallay 2010, 2011:114–27), scholars have viewed tomb structure and skeleton arrangements as indications that peripheral bodies likely belonged to servants, slaves, or concubines (though more conclusive evidence would require systematic examination of skeletal morphology, pathology, and trauma and possibly stable isotope analysis between central and peripheral remains). Structural remains also indicate the possible presence of “houses of the dead,” huts of wood and thatch designed to protect the central interments (Cros, Laporte, and Gallay 2013). Tumulus burials often contain rich grave assemblages, including luxurious imports linked to the Saharan trade, such as copper or copper-based objects (ankle rings, bracelets, weapons), gold ornaments, and stone and glass beads (Garenne-Marot 1993; Thilmans and Descamps 2006).

The tombs’ structural asymmetries and the labor involved in their construction support their function as embodiments of social power—in fact, they recall the royal sepultures described by Al-Bakrī for the famed ruler of Ghana in AD 1068 and Valentim Fernandes for Mandinka kings in the early 1500s (Becker and Martin 1982), with their lavish furnishings, human sacrifices, and wooden constructions covered by earthen mounds. The various forms of energy coiled into the tombs suggest complex strategies of power based on wealth transformation, materialization, and ostentation. Moved by a regional “cosmology of externality” (to borrow from Newell 2012:167; also Helms 1988; Sahlins 1985), West Sahelian elites ascribed value to outside objects, locating power in their foreignness. Early leaders sought to harness the power of trade goods and convert them into the most valuable wealth of all—people—which could take the form of labor or social relations of obligation/dependence and patronage/clientelism, such as those contracted with followers, political allies, and kin (people also joined gold, salt, and textiles as the region’s chief export and fueled a vibrant trans-Saharan slave trade, whose extent is still poorly known; Austen 2010). People and labor were, in turn, converted into other kinds of social power materialized through expenditures on monumental tombs, the stockpiling of trade luxuries, and the mass sacrifice of kin, servants, retainers, and slaves obligated to the king in life and death (note the similarity to scenarios presented in Bataille 1991). The conspicuous monumentalization of excess at the time of a leader’s passing stamped the landscape with a most public statement of authority. Tumuli and megaliths, as material testaments of labor, wealth, and connection to a broader world associated with new elites, may have played the role of critical “places” of authority cemented through ritual ceremony at those sites (cf. MacDonald 1998).

While researchers have tended to associate funerary monuments with centralizing elites, some of these burial practices may have also taken root in relatively unstratified social settings. This may have been the case in Siin, where several seasons of survey have yielded no conclusive sign of political centralization prior to the 1400s AD. In surveyed areas, residential landscapes unfolded as (1) a highly dispersed horizon of small, relatively short-lived sites stretching thinly across the region, anchored by (2) a handful of very large, highly localized settlements clustering along the coast and river channels and occupied for long periods of time. These different levels of settlement appear to be horizontally organized rather than hierarchically ordered. Siin’s political landscape at the time likely comprised shifting multi-generational village federations, formed by the coming together of residential sites and unformed as groups of residents broke off from larger communities (Richard 2007:648–49; cf. Kopytoff 1987). In these circumstances, projects of authority concentration among elites might have been counterpoised by a network of heterarchical institutions (e.g., Ehrenreich, Crumley, and Levy 1995).

Establishing clear connections between these settlement systems and monumental vestiges is difficult, however. The Siin does not have megalithic formations; tumuli are common in the countryside, though they tend to be small and widely dispersed. Local farmers distinguish between podom (large burial mounds built in the distant past) and lomb (small tombs associated with historical ancestors) (Becker and Martin 1982:282). Small tumuli are often found in the periphery of pre–Atlantic period habitation sites. A small number of surveyed settlements also featured large sand mounds. It is tempting to view the small size of tumuli and their disproportionate presence as another supporting argument for the existence of horizontally structured societies in the region. In the absence of excavated data, however, the nature of mound deposits in Siin and how they compare with tumuli elsewhere is obscure, as is the character of chronological and spatial associations with different types of residential sites.

More generally, evidence of reuse and secondary burials (Cros, Laporte, and Gallay 2013) evokes corporate funerary concessions, perhaps organized around lineage or clan principles, designed to preserve the memory and legacy of social collectivities—a practice documented historically in Siin (Corre 1883; Debien 1964). Conversely, ethnographic evidence of tumulus burial ceremonies from the late 1940s indicates that the height of the tumulus reflected the defunct’s wealth in cattle or social influence—his capacity to mobilize labor in death through payments in livestock or debt/credit obligations (Lemire, in Joire 1955; see also Aujas 1925). Here again, we observe a logic of “wealth-in-people” and its materialization into visible portable goods, non-portable sections of the built landscape, and tangible manifestations of social relations.

Second Moment: The Atlantic Era and New Politics of Labor Expenditure

The landing of Portuguese caravels on Senegal’s shores in the 1440s sparked a reorientation in the gravity of commerce from the Sahara to the coast (Boulègue 1987; Brooks 1993). Oceanic exchanges grafted themselves onto an economy of both continuities and ruptures. One enduring feature of political worlds before and after the advent of Atlantic contacts was elites’ continued reliance on long-distance trade—and the power of foreign things—for the building and consolidation of political authority. Historical archives are replete with mentions of local kings traveling to coastal trading posts to deal directly with Europeans and exchanging slaves for those precious commodities (horses, weaponry, iron, textiles, manufactured goods) inextricably entangled with practices of statecraft (e.g., Barbot 1992; Becker and Martin 1974, 1977; Thilmans 1971; Thilmans and Rossie 1969) (figure 10.4).

Figure 10.4. King of Kajoor negotiating exchange fees with European merchant (Dapper, Description de l’Afrique, 1686) http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b2300087h.item.f44.

The most salient departure in strategies of social wealth is the abrupt decline of monumental burials, leading to their complete disappearance after the end of the fifteenth century. This disappearance is intriguing against the backdrop of the early Atlantic era, a time of state formation and concentration of royal power. What likely happened is that the new commercial order of Atlantic exchanges generated new ways of materializing wealth that replaced megaliths and tumuli. While local kings moved away from showy displays of labor and wealth hoarding, they did not abandon the logics of wealth-in-people and rituals of consumption. Instead, rulers and aristocratic families refocused their control over working bodies by investing new energy in the mobilization of human capital in the realm of the living (Miller 1988). Large slave retinues were accumulated and paraded as they took part in agriculture, craft production, and military service. At the same time, vast amounts of human life and labor were squandered through the channels of Atlantic slavery, in return for consumer goods (Baum 1999; Lane and MacDonald 2011; MacGaffey 1994; Palmié 1995; Shaw 2002). These new investments also adopted more qualitative expressions, manifested in the cultivation of social and political relations—a wealth in relationships, if you will (Piot 1991, 1996). Thus, the goods of Atlantic commerce were not simply retained and concentrated by rulers but rather were redistributed to noble families and slaves to secure alliances, loyalties, and dependencies (cf. Norman 2012).

The logic of proliferating social relations is also visible in the “bureaucratization” of political administration and the creation of a vast cadre of royal functionaries associated with the management of trade and operations of the kingdom (cf. Monroe 2007). Wealth-in-people was not just accumulative, however. It also rested on a composition of knowledge and skills (Guyer and Belinga 1995). Slaves were valued not just as abstract units of labor but also for their specific expertise as weavers, potters, woodworkers, warriors, and so forth. Concurrently, at least early on, royal power also depended on the management of relationships with grassroots actors and institutions (Galvan 2004:54–59). Effective rule required the conciliation of capricious sacred and spiritual forces (Duchemin 1952), which means it required engagement with different types of expert knowledge controlled by land custodians, lineage heads, earth and rain priests, and ancestral caretakers, whose interests were not always aligned with those of the central power. This knitting together of human resources has left some archaeological traces.

Siin’s residential landscape shows surprisingly little stratification during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which strikes contradictory notes, since this period is described as one of ferocious state centralization (Richard 2012). What is interesting, however, is that if royal capitals do not stand out by their material grandeur, they become gravity centers of political intensity and spiritual energy. Survey around Diakhao, Siin’s long-standing capital, reveals the emergence of a constellation of small satellite settlements in the eighteenth century, which oral traditions associate with craft specialists, slaves, cultivators, and various categories of nobles (figure 10.5). The built environment here materially translates a certain wealth-in-relations or wealth-in-composition, itself the telling sign of power. As I have argued elsewhere (Richard 2010), a similar logic of composition was at play in the reception of Atlantic commodities: African elites were less interested in the accumulation of a limited number of precious goods; rather, they reckoned value in diversity and preferred to buy assortments of different kinds of objects, illustrating the control Africans held over the terms of Atlantic exchange and consumption (Ogundiran 2002; Presholdt 2008; Stahl 2002).

Figure 10.5. Residential landscapes, Central Siin, eighteenth–nineteenth centuries.

Overall, the Atlantic period appears to have presided over a reconfiguration in regional economies of excess, from a visual register of power rooted partially in monumental displays and dissipations of labor to an aesthetics of statehood centered on more contingent performances and mobile signs of social wealth. Elites who took part in this new cosmology of rule converted regional forms of value (cattle hides, cotton textiles, and, later, enslaved people) into imported objects, which were in turn converted into the material, human, and symbolic substance of political power. Thus, the bounties of the Atlantic trade were translated into the accumulation of domestic captives; the constitution of slave armies, cavalry, and weapon arsenals; the acquisition of foreign exotics; practices of conspicuous consumption and feasting; the public performance of ostentatious political rituals; and the redistribution of imported goods to kin, allies, and political clients. These acts, in turn, fueled deeper participation in the slave trade, international commerce, regional diplomacy, and inter-kingdom warfare. This political aesthetics of “stateliness” (MacEachern 2015) pivoted on the “compelling visual presence” (Gates-Foster 2014) of plentiful things, people, and practices. Showy displays of slaves, objects, and followers were material signs recognized by non-elite populations as concrete emblems of authority. They also broadcast legitimate belonging in a shared economy of sovereignty to both rival and sympathetic polities.

Third Moment: Peasants and the “Ambivalence” of Consumption

Having spent a lot of time on elites, I now turn to other social classes and briefly examine how peasants experienced the changing world of goods inaugurated by the Atlantic era. Much historical literature depicts the Atlantic era as a tale of hardening aristocratic grip on the reins of power and economy (Klein 1992; Searing 1993). The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were caught in political dynamics marked by the rise and fall of predatory kings and aristocratic families competing for the products and proceeds of trade. Peasants are often portrayed as the era’s great losers, stuck in an economy of predation, enslavement, food crises, and social erosion that all but robbed them of historical agency (Barry 1998; Boulègue 2013).

My goal is not to contest this picture and the violence of the Atlantic system. There is more than enough historical—and archaeological (DeCorse 2001; Lane and MacDonald 2011)—evidence documenting the intensification of slave raiding and warfare, which led to insecurity, displacement, and famines as beleaguered peasant communities could no longer produce food to ensure social reproduction. Once defined by droughts, uneven rains, and locust infestations, food scarcity was a recurring reality after the 1740s (Becker 1986; cf. Logan 2012). What is more, a decade of archaeological surveys in Siin has produced good evidence of the atomization of social landscapes, marked in the region by unprecedented levels of short-lived residential sites, suggesting considerable human displacement and village mobility after the seventeenth century (Richard 2012).

I do, however, want to focus on aspects of the archaeological record that suggest a more resilient social world than the apocalyptic hellscape suggested in documentary archives, in which there is evidence for a dramatic rearticulation of peasant-aristocrat relations around trade and consumption. One of the great puzzles of Siin’s archaeological assemblages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that they vastly increase in quantity and diversity compared to prior periods and that this increase is registered not only in settlements associated with elites but also in peasant communities. Despite the profoundly uneven character of peasant-aristocrat power relations and unquestionable expansion of royal power over time, a paradoxical effect of the Atlantic economy was that it brought about a greater “democratization” of local consumption, enabling commoners to access a world of foreign objects once restricted to aristocratic circles. Indeed, the eighteenth century witnessed European settlements’ growing reliance on African communities to meet their food demands, which means that peasants would have been able to trade grain surpluses in return for iron, weaponry, dyed cloth and other manufactured goods—items that played a growing role in the making of village life (Searing 1993).

The fact that Atlantic products gradually percolated into other social strata is clear in the archaeological record, where eighteenth- and nineteenth-century village sites consistently feature abundant inventories of bottle glass, beads, metal objects, and tobacco pipes alongside local ceramics—powerful testaments of peasants’ connection to a wider world. For example, the ubiquity of gin bottles on residential sites suggests the development of new non-elite tastes for certain kinds of liquor. Notwithstanding alcohol’s potentially destructive impacts, empirical evidence also indicates that liquor was integrated into local practices of community and value making. The copious presence of nineteenth-century gin bottles on surveyed pangool (spiritual shrines) sites implies that imported liquor was invested in the propitiation of lineage ancestors, the maintenance of solidarities between the worlds of the living and the dead, and the ritual reproduction of social collectivities. More speculatively, the role alcohol plays today and in recent history in the management of services, obligations, and labor transfers suggests a similar role in pre-colonial settings (Gastellu 1981; see also Thomas 1991 on the ritual substitution of goods in colonial contexts).

The broadening of commoner consumption likely presented a threat to the architecture of aristocratic privilege, which rested on the nominal corralling of valuable connections to foreign objects and outside markets (Guyer 2004; also Frink 2009; Gregory 1982, on the role of trade goods in reconfiguring indigenous structures of authority). It provoked the development of new rituals of elite solidarity and consumption. Wary of commoners’ access to relatively cheap trade liquor, the nobility seems to have reacted by regimenting the circulation of wine as a marker of elite taste. This is suggested by deposits in a feasting pit located at the site of Ndiongolor, a known royal residence, where wine bottle sherds completely eclipsed gin bottle fragments, a reversal of usual proportions in material inventories (Richard 2010). The association of wine with performances of state making in oral traditions and with royal elites in nineteenth-century historical literature lends support to this picture.

There is, however, an ironic twist to this historical process. The “relative” climate of material prosperity created by the Atlantic economy confronted Siin’s rural society with a number of contradictions—most important, among the reality (and allure) of expanded consumption, the dangers of dependence on outside markets for social reproduction (as foreign imports gradually redefined cultural, political, and spiritual practices), and a collective ethos of self-reliance and economic autonomy. If a certain abundance of goods contributed to the enhancement of material conditions for peasants during the nineteenth century—the largest villages documented archaeologically in Siin are peasant communities that emerged after the 1850s—it also created initial conditions for their subjugation to colonial rule and the erosion of economic autonomy (Klein 1968; Mbodj 1978). One of French administrators’ great frustrations in the early decades of formal colonial occupation was that Siin peasants remained relatively self-sufficient food producers with very low levels of indebtedness (e.g., Noirot 1896; also Reinwald 1997). For these reasons, they remained fairly disengaged from colonial markets and relatively independent of colonial influence. For French observers, who believed the growing of cash crops and consumption of French commodities were the safest path to “civilizing the Natives,” this was a problem (Galvan 2004; Richard 2011).

In subsequent decades, colonial policies relentlessly targeted agricultural subsistence in an attempt to force peasants’ dependence on resources they no longer produced and obtained instead from colonial merchants. As rural social relations became gradually mediated by cash, debt, and commodities, colonial market penetration gradually eroded matrilineal holdings and kinship solidarities, disrupted subsistence economies, and reworked community relationships and generational dynamics. One disastrous legacy, still visible today, has been the dramatic rise of rural poverty. Where expanded horizons of consumption, mixed with responsible subsistence agriculture, once guaranteed a certain material abundance, a hundred years later it spelled the beginning of food insecurity, debt, and the conditions of scarcity (Lericollais 1999; cf. Twiss and Bogaard, this volume).

Discussion: Brief Notes on Excess beyond Senegal

To what extent do Bataille’s ideas of socially generative excess and expenditure advance our analysis of abundance elsewhere, and, more expansively, how might historical forms of wealth and value production observed in Africa help us think about past economies beyond the continent? Given that Bataille’s views draw heavily on the ethnological literature (some of it, admittedly, a bit dated) of New World indigenous societies—chiefly, the Pacific Northwest and pre-Columbian Mexico—notions of productive waste might be usefully applied to the archaeological examination of political economy in other regions convulsed by Columbian contacts in North America, South America, and the Pacific. By extension, given the applicability to the Siin, an analysis of abundance might also complement the historical and anthropological models of value making used to flesh out the archaeological record of Atlantic Africa. I am thinking of its usefulness for understanding the relationship between materiality and social power in polities featuring rituals of human sacrifice (Monroe 2014; Rowlands 1993) and elaborate feasting spectacles (Fleisher 2010; Norman 2010); about the logics, paradoxes, and perversions of conversion among people, things, and value in times of engagement with broader economic spheres (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010; Ogundiran 2002); and about debt/credit relations and their imprint on material worlds in the context of commercial slavery (Graeber 2011:chapter 6; Lane and MacDonald 2011). Conversely, African case studies can also help to fine-tune, historicize, and contextualize Bataille’s general musings on the economy, if only to recognize the existence of different strategies of expenditure between social classes and their changing articulation with social principles of parsimony or frugality.

One can note interesting convergences between economic trajectories and ways of handling (conceptually and materially) the challenges of abundance in societies of Africa and Native America. Mutual insights can be found, for instance, in the domains of ritual economy (Wells and McAnany 2008), cultural mobilizations of excess labor (Pauketat 2004), and approaches to the management of surplus (see, for instance, Morehart and DeLucia 2015, including chapters by Stahl and Norman on West Africa). One may also stress the broad relevance of African orientations to value creation—especially notions of people-as-wealth and composition across quality/quantity—to the historical experiences of various Native American groups as they negotiated the travails of colonial entanglement (see Turgeon 1997, 2004; Graeber 2001:chapter 5; Loren 2009; Zedeño 2009, for a short selection).

Conclusion

I want to finish with two thoughts. First, what I find uniquely compelling in Bataille’s account of general economy is that it does not accept scarcity as a universal condition and insists that the principle of excess is not a primitive phenomenon but is found in ancient and modern economies alike. Such insistence on the historical specificity of lack and the long-term genealogy of abundance is particularly attractive for researchers working in Africa, where the vocabulary of crisis, poverty, penury, famine, and scarcity is often elevated to a Gospel of historical and existential truth (James 2014; Makhulu, Buggenhagen, and Jackson 2012; Piot 2010; Roitman 2016). Notions of inherent scarcity are also used to naturalize Africa’s anomaly in the great narrative of universal modernity. Taking a long view of economic practices, however, one equally attuned to African cultural responses and adaptations to shifts in resources, stands to historicize conventional wisdom about the continent’s ailments. Such a challenge can be found in Amanda Logan’s (2012, 2016) path-breaking analysis of foodways in central Ghana, which documents the dynamic fate of food practices over the past millennium to demonstrate that the food insecurity problems of the present arose only recently. In a more historical vein, geographer Michael Watts (2013) has “denaturalized” conditions of climatic hazard in Nigeria’s recent past to demonstrate the colonial fashioning of shortage, famine, and lack among local peasantries.

A second point is that Africa is not a cul-de-sac of anthropological theory but instead an origin point. In their book Theory from the South, anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have argued provocatively against the common intuition that Africa has historically been divorced from the world, that the world might actually be evolving toward Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). Their point is that if in recent years Africa has been sidelined in comparative discussions of critical conceptual questions, the African continent was once a rich bed of inspiration for ethnographic thinking, and it should be recuperated as a valuable source of anthropological ideas for the rest of the world. While the argument concerns contemporary times, perhaps it can be reframed to encompass the past. In this spirit, I would like to think that some of the concepts crafted in Africanist workshops—ideas of wealth-in-people, composition, debt/credit obligations, labor expenditure—might hold useful insights about economic process in general and inspire provocative thoughts about the dynamics of abundance and scarcity in societies elsewhere.