Ritual Contingency: Teasing and the Politics of Participation

This article analyzes the naming ceremony of a young girl in a village in southeastern Senegal to show how kola nuts distributed during the course of such rituals provide material channels through which individuals managed inclusion across participation frameworks. Even for those not in attendance, distributed kola co‐constituted states of participation and witnessing, in which recipients could subsequently report about such events as ratified authorities. After being excluded from this naming ceremony, a woman performed a teasing nickname of the child to be named, which was subsequently voiced throughout the community as a form of dissent. Such routines of teasing offer forms of value transformation in which individuals could redirect and recontextualize material objects, and in so doing, articulate claims to community inclusion and participation. Lifetime events offer contexts in which increasingly dispersed social networks evaluate participation and community membership. Although teasing has often been offered in general terms as a form of resistance, an interdiscursive, material analysis has the capacity to show how it serves as a form of social power and value transformation.