Resumen de Peanuts, Pangool, and Places: Constellations of Colonial Capitalism in Rural Senegal
Histories of cash-crop agriculture in Senegal’s peanut basin have foregrounded the sway of market forces—an economic story of supply and demand staging metropolitan industrial needs, commercial entrepreneurialism, and profitable returns with both planned and unplanned developments. The political connivance between commercial crops and French rule is also well documented. The relentless expansion of peanut cultivation in Senegal’s hinterland was promoted by colonial policies and collusions between the French administration and Muslim brotherhoods. African farmers were not idle bystanders to these transformations, as peasant social strategies were centrally implicated in the (re)construction of colonial countrysides. While accounts illuminate the broad structural forces and human institutions involved in the commodification of African rural worlds, they frequently overlook the contributions of a host of other historical actors: the unsung, yet influential, nonhuman agencies that were integral components of farming ecologies, shaped people’s affective belonging to their landscapes, and actively mediated histories of capitalist transformations. In this article I attend specifically to the overlapping roles and material effects of three categories of “inanimate actors” in the adoption of cash cropping in the Senegalese province of Siin: peanuts, pangool (ancestral spirits), and places. Drawing on Adorno’s (1973) concept of “constellation” and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idea of “assemblage,” I examine how the tangible properties of crops, spiritual beings, and rural geography (and the social practices it nurtured) combined to assist and disrupt the operations of capital and government. Peanuts, pangool, and places drew humans and nonhumans into material constellations that cut across the plain of political economic analysis and offset totalizing visions of global capitalism; they reveal alternative tales of power, labor, and intimacy, “understories” that speak to the contingent, hybrid, and unfinished histories of colonial modernity in Africa.
