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Looters or Heroes? Production of Illegality and Memories of ‘Looting’ in Mali

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Abstract

My paper proposes an ethnographical perspective of the clandestine trade in antiquities in Mali by showing on one side the social organization (techniques, hierarchies, trade chains) of farmers-diggers; on the other side, by analyzing the rhetorics of illegality driven by officially-mandated cultural heritage policies. In particular the paper stresses the function of visuality in the construction of ‘illegal’ subjects and iconographies of ‘plunder’ circulated through national and international press. It shows that such an iconic power of images does befog self-representations of farmers-diggers (risk, courage, loneliness) which constitute the ethical cosmos of digging activities. In such a perspective, the debate over the looting of archaeological objects has become a reiterative product of national rhetorics of legality and illegality opposed to narratives of self-representations of marginality and heroization produced by ‘illegal’ actors.

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Notes

  1. In 1914 the ethnologist Arnold van Gennep claimed against the massive importation of African objects from the continent: “Some expeditions as that of Leo Frobenius made off with thousands of objects from Western Africa and Congo to the point that indigenous workshops of several tribes have disappeared. What a strange way to drive science forward” (van Gennep in Laude 1990 [1966]).

    Translation from French is from the author.

  2. For an overview over the postcolonial archaeological research in the Inland Niger Delta between the 1960s and the 1990s see Panella 2002: 149–154). The concentration of North American, Dutch and French archaeological projects in the Inland Niger Delta (Bedaux et al. 1978; McIntosh and Keech-McIntosh 1980; Bedaux et al. 2005), and the fact that the first available information on local networks referred to it, attracted greater media attention to the Mopti and Djenné regions than to southern ones, such as Bougouni and Sikasso, which yet were equally affected by the unearthing of ancient statuettes (Panella 2010).

  3. A new publication on Djenne Terracotta by Bernard De Grunne is forthcoming. B. De Grunne (forthcoming) Jenne-jeno: 700 Years of Sculpture in Mali. Fonds Mercator.

  4. Heritage studies consider the ‘heritization processes’ as the transformation of material and immaterial culture in ‘cultural heritage’ through a political selection of given historical and aesthetic values.

  5. I presented a first paper on the link between conditionality policies and the fight against plunder of archaeological sites in Mali during the 2008 ASA Annual Meeting Conference (Chicago, 13–16 November 2008): ‘The ‘capital-pillage’ and the Fight Against Poverty in Mali’.

  6. Nevertheless, some considerations make it difficult to automatically dismiss the notion that poverty equals pillage. During the 2004–2005 drought, Djenné (Mopti region, the outpost of the ‘North’), an essential hub of the terracotta’s traffic during the 1980s, was one of the cities that benefited from the World Food Program’s distribution of rice. However, in the years 1994, 2001 and 2006, the monetary poverty rating of the east-southern Sikasso’s region, the ‘grenier du pays’, shifted between 85 % and 81 % whereas the northern region Tomboctou/Gao/Kidal was shifting between 58 % and 29 % (Delarue et al. 2009). Despite this evidence, in 2004, rural development funds allocated to the ‘poor’ north were much greater than those to the Sikasso region. Moreover, Namaké, a wealthy farmer from Bougouni area (Sikasso region) described digging at ancient sites as one of his routine seasonal activities, in addition to gold washing and cotton-farming . When I asked him whether he did any digging during the severe drought of 1983–84, he answered yes, specifying that however the drought did not influence his choice to search for terracotta.

  7. Data on rural actors presented in this article are issued by my dissertation thesis (Panella 2002: 169–187). Nevertheless, they have never before been published in English.

  8. ‘Satimbé’ and the names of the other rural actors are pseudonyms. Information on the social organization of teams presented in this article mainly come from the testimony of Dolo, a rural dealer settled in the Mopti region, from the core-group of his main digging team (the core of which is composed by four diggers), as well as from Satimbé.

  9. The CFA franc was created in 1945; Mali left this currency in 1962 in order to issue Malians Francs before rejoining the FCFA again in 1984.

  10. The Bandiagara Cliffs are a sandstone chain (over 200 km) marked at its end by the Hombori Tondo, Presumably Tellem people have been living in the Bandiagara Cliffs (in particular, Sangha region) between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. They extinguished after epidemics and droughts. Between fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Dogon left the Mande region, in the south, and migrated towards Sangha (Bedaux 2003: 37).

  11. Recruitment of women is not included and diggers are never accompanied by their spouses. Farmers-diggers are used to work on ancient sites very far from their village, which constitutes a major difference with regard to teams working in southern regions of the country (Panella 2010).

  12. Dembelé 1994: 401.

  13. I presented a previous analysis of the cartography of affect imbricated into clandestine digging during the ASA Annual Meeting, (New Orleans, 17–21 November 2009) in a paper titled: ‘Heroes and Looters as ‘imagined communities’. Narratives from the Margins and the Creation of Illegality in the Rhetoric of Malian Cultural Heritage’.

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    Cristiana Panella

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EO.1977.37.3.01. Anthropomorphic female terracotta with a snake spreading from the breast to the stomach (Inland Niger Delta region, Mali) © Royal Museum for Central Africa 2013 (GIF 628 KB)

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Panella, C. Looters or Heroes? Production of Illegality and Memories of ‘Looting’ in Mali. Eur J Crim Policy Res 20, 487–502 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-014-9251-9

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