Faculty Profile

Dr. Beth Buggenhagen
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Member of the African Studies Program and Graduate Faculty at IU
Email: babuggen [AT] indiana.edu
Phone: (812) 855-0617

Education:
PhD –University of Chicago, 2003
BA –University of Michigan, 1993

Beth Buggenhagen has conducted fieldwork in Dakar and Tuba, Senegal, and in the North American cities of Chicago and New York City. Her current research interests include the politics of social production and value, material culture, visuality, gender, Islam, and globalization. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Prophets and Profits: Gender and Islam in Global Senegal, which analyzes the multilayered connections of prophets and profits in the Senegalese postcolony to understand debates over women’s ritual and religious practices, family law and religious authority in an era of economic volatility. The book considers how traders of the Murid Sufi order create long term value through carefully crafted financial strategies including building global trade networks at the intersection of so called formal and informal economies, religious offerings and the circulation of heirloom cloth, a form of women’s wealth and worth. 

In New York City her research has considered the predicament of Senegalese Muslim traders who deal in grey market goods (designer purses, CDs and DVDs). Her work has considered the political dimensions of official and unofficial economies to address topics that are gaining attention within and beyond academia such as Islam, civil liberties, immigration reform, debates over new media technologies, unregulated economic networks and the U.S. led global War on Terror.

Her interest in the relationship between official and unofficial economies and material and visual culture has led her to her next research project, Visualizing the Senegalese Postcolony: Practicing Photography in the Urban Economy. This project takes up the problematic of what social relations produce and are reproduced through visuality (and concealment). The project will be based on archival and field research in Dakar and New York City on the production and circulation of portraiture in the Senegalese postcolony.

Selected publications:
Prophets and Profits. Gender and Islam in Global Senegal. (no date)

Gender, New Media, and Muslim Personhood among Senegalese Muridiyya in New York City. (no date).

2010. with Anne-Maria B. Makhulu and Stephen Jackson, eds. Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatilities and African Subjectivities. University of California Press, Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA).

2010. Killer Bargain: The Global Networks of Senegalese Muslims and Policing Unofficial Economies in the War on Terror. In, Hard Work, Hard TImes: Global Volatilities and African Subjectivities. Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, and Stephen Jackson, eds. University of California Press, Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA).

2008. Beyond Brotherhood: Gender, Religious Authority, and the Global Circuits of Senegalese Muridiyya. In, New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power, and Femininity. Mamdou Diouf and Mara A. Leichtman, eds. Pp. 189-210. Palgrave Press.

2006. Picking up the Thread: Recasting Dogon Ideas of Speech in the Work of Geneviève Calame-Griaule. Anthropology and Humanism 31(1):57-74.

2004. Domestic Object(ion)s: The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Politics of Marriage Payments, Love, and State Privatization. In Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age. Brad Weiss, ed. Pp. 21-53. Leiden: Brill Academic Press.

2001. Profits and Prophets: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households. Journal of Religion in Africa 21(4): 373-401.

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