Mediation and the performance of religious authority in Senegal

In this essay the authors are concerned with one of the myriad ways in which Wolof discourse in Senegal is given a recognizable existence and how the resultant form, namely that of verbal mediation, is deployed to enhance the religious and political authority of important Muslim shaykhs, known locally in French as marabouts, and in Wolof as sri. The form they explore is that of a discourse characterized by verbal mediation or surrogate speech whereby one person speaks as an intermediary on behalf of another. In Wolof the intermediary is known as a ‘jottalikat’. What is remarkable about the specifically Sahelian form of surrogate speech, of which Wolof is but one example, is that both the figure of authority and the ‘jottalikat’ are present and participate together in creating the discourse. The authors argue that what is going on here is the creation of a text and that the dyadic nature of such a text does not simply reflect the authority of the marabout but is in fact constitutive of it. The text analysed involved the visit of an opposition candidate for the Senegalese presidency to the home of a prominent marabout, the caliph of the Tijaniyya Sufi order, in the city of Tivaouane. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract]