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Aesthetics of Acquisition: Notes on the Transactional Life of Persons and Things in Gabon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2015

Florence Bernault
Florence Bernault*
Affiliation:
History, University of Wisconsin
*
bernault@wisc.edu
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Abstract

Based on a historical study of older and newer visual regimes in Gabon, Equatorial Africa, this paper examines spectacles as world-manufacturing processes that produce and circulate assets. Visual and aesthetic strategies have often been analyzed as technologies of the self that transform and manifest people's identities. I show here that they also work as a means to create resources and put them into motion. The notion of “aesthetics of acquisition” helps to capture the dynamic energy of visual events and reinsert them into the realms of economic production and material exchange. If spectacles allow people to acquire riches, produce new statuses, and circulate resources, I argue, the process through which this occurs cannot be analytically reduced to a mere commodification of the person. Instead, I explain how aesthetics of acquisition enable institutional and social actors to assume temporary commodity status, a moment and a strategy that I call “transactional life.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 753 - 779
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2015 

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References

1 The official committee for the pageant was appointed in 2000, and organized the first Miss Gabon Pageant in 2001: www.rdpg.org/old//index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=2114 (accessed 1 Dec. 2013). Interrupted in 2010 and 2011, the competition resumed in 2011 for the election of Miss Gabon 2012. That same year, a site opened on Facebook, available at www.facebook.com/pages/THE-MISS-GABON/279570288733052 (accessed 1 Dec. 2013).

2 See detailed analysis in Florence Bernault and Joseph Tonda, “Gabon: une dystopie tropicale,” Politique africaine 115 (Oct.): 7–26. In 2010, the Gabonese economy relied on oil for about 50 percent of its GDP and 70 percent of revenues. The richest 20 percent of the population took over 90 percent of the country's wealth while just under a third of all Gabonese lived in poverty. Data retrieved from The World Fact Book, Central Intelligence Agency, USA: www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gb.html; and Global Edge at Business School, Michigan State University: globaledge.msu.edu/countries/gabon/economy (accessed 1 Dec. 2013).

3 Newell, Sasha, The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption and Citizenship in Côte d'Ivoire. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)Google Scholar. For an original study of the transmission of religious faith through television, see Pype, Katrien, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012)Google Scholar. On Egyptian television's labor of “national pedagogy,” see Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar. I thank Isak Niehaus for this reference and for commenting on an early version of this essay.

4 In English, the word “parade” derives from the French parade (display, show, military parade). The etymology includes the Latin verbs parare (to make ready, to provide, to arrange, to order) and parere (to produce, to bring forth, to give birth to). The latter meaning helps to point out the ways in which aesthetics enact rather than mask reality. Available at: www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=parade&searchmode=term (accessed 7 Jan. 2014).

5 Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983)Google Scholar.

6 I do not refer here to Michel de Certeau's contrast between “strategies” as processes used by those within organizational power structures, and “tactics” as ones employed by the subjugated. I use the terms interchangeably to mean a loosely organized scheme, approach, or plan.

7 I define “transaction” as an exchange process between two or more agents. This process involves things material and symbolic, produced and passed around, bargained, accumulated, destroyed, or taken away.

8 Foucault, Michel, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck, and Hutton, Patrick H., eds. (Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16Google Scholar. For use of this theory in relation with consumption and commodity culture in Africa, see Burke, Timothy, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Thomas, Lynn M., “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa,” Journal of African History 47, 3 (2006): 461–90Google Scholar.

9 The idea of a visual economy is loosely inspired by Keane, Webb's concept of “representational economy,” in “Sincerity, Modernity and the Protestants,” Cultural Anthropology 17, 1 (2002): 65–92Google Scholar, 65, 85; and Meyer, Birgit's article “‘Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana's New Public Sphere,” American Ethnologist 31, 1 (2004): 92–110Google Scholar, 93.

10 Benjamin, Walter, L'oeuvre d'art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité (1935), quoted by Agamben, Giorgio in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 119Google Scholar. The concept of aesthetics of acquisition expands Benjamin's idea to historical situations broader than and away from industrial and capitalist Europe.

11 In 2007, however, Internet cafes were still rare in cities away from the Atlantic coast and the national coverage remained very poor outside of the main urban areas.

12 Taussig, Michael, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Newell, Modernity Bluff, 20.

13 Blacksmith deities helped to transform iron ore into farming tools and weapons. Their work was veiled in secrecy. Florence Bernault, “La chair et son secret: Transfiguration du fétiche et incertitude symbolique au sud-Gabon,” Politique africaine 115 (Oct.): 99–122.

14 On how people in Gabon's neighbor Cameroon saw the visible and the invisible to be part of a same reality, see Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 152–53Google Scholar.

15 I thank Matt H. Brown for this fact and, for their many insights, students in my 2012 seminar on “Non-Traditional Sources for Writing Modern Africa.” For recent studies of African usages of photography, see Sprague, Stephen S., “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” in Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas, eds., Photography's Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 240–60Google Scholar; Geary, Christraud M., In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960 (London: Philip Wilson, 2003)Google Scholar.

16 For instance, Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; and Lindfors, Bernt, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnographical Show Business (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

17 For a recent iteration, see White, Luise, Miescher, Stephen, and Cohen, David William, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

18 Larkin, Brian, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Meyer, Birgit, “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism's Sensational Forms,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, 4 (2010): 741–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Useful here is Appadurai, Arjun's concept of a “tournament of value,” or the ways in which the exchange-value of commodities comes to life in constant contests and negotiations; The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 See, for instance, how Cameroonian elite get “new radiance” by displaying diplomas; Mbembe, Achille, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Africa 62, 1 (1992): 3–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 27.

22 See Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Beaudrillard, Jean, De La Séduction (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1979)Google Scholar. Karl Marx defined commodity fetishism as a historical moment when material goods and their exchange-value became the source and measure of social and moral hierarchies, increasingly masquerading as social relationships: “The Fetishism of Commodity and Its Secrets” [1867], in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Fowkes, Ben, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 163–77Google Scholar.

23 I first reflected on these dynamics while studying the 2006 Brazza Memorial as a “transactional machine,” or a device facilitating cross-currents of political, financial, and diplomatic resources between France and the Republic of the Congo. The idea challenged a static reading of the monument as architectural text, and sought to emphasize its historical agency. Bernault, Florence, “Colonial Bones: The 2006 Burial of Savorgnan de Brazza in the Congo,” African Affairs 109, 436 (July 2010): 67–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 An excellent critique of commodification is Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)Google Scholar. For a critique based in Africa, see Burke, Lifebuoy Men. The idea of transactional life can be compared to Appadurai's idea of “commodity situation,” in which the main socially relevant feature of a thing becomes summarized in its exchangeability (Social Life of Things, 13). My concept, however, puts choice and agency back into the hands of human actors, showing that they, too, can adopt the guise of a commodity.

25 Although inspired by Jacques Rancière's distribution of the sensible, the idea of aesthetics of acquisition insists on the transformative agency of visual arrangements, and the fact that these tactics are not monopolized by dominant regimes of authority. Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004)Google Scholar.

26 Sasha Newell (in Modernity Bluff) recently discussed processes of social and visual inversion among young men in Ivory Coast (bluffeurs) and Congo (sapeurs). The dancing parade that reveals the brands of their expensive clothes helps young people to conceal their lack of means and social status. For Newell, authenticity thus works as performative magic, in which the represented becomes reality itself.

27 Giorgio Agamben recently took a major step in this debate by analyzing early debates within the Catholic Church over the efficacy of sacraments. In the thirteenth century, a new ontology redefined such efficacy as effectus (operativity), a concept that insisted on the inextricability of actio (action) and imago (image). Aquinas, Thomas summarized this view in the formula “Efficiunt quod figurant.” Agamben, Opus Dei, Archéologie de l'Office (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 71Google Scholar. See also Debord's argument that spectacle is the principal productive sector of today's society (Society of the Spectacle, 22).

28 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 75Google Scholar.

29 See also the pubic demeaning of Chinese sex-workers in Cameroon as “damaged goods,” analyzed in Ndjio, Basile, “Shanghai Beauties and African Desires: Migration, Trade and Chinese Prostitution in Cameroon,” European Journal of Development Research 21 (2009): 606–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 From my field research in Libreville, 2006 and 2007. I also encountered the acronym, “V.T.T.” for “Vieilles Tuées-Tuées” (Old Killed-Killed), or aging sex-workers. Since V.T.T. stands in French for Vélo Tout Terrain (mountain bike), it compared these women even more crudely to a commodity and body-machine. I never conducted direct field research with sex-workers in Gabon and do not pretend to give an exhaustive or balanced account of their experience and hardships. I rely on what I was able to observe and indirect data collected during several visits to the field from 2002 to 2012. For a pioneer history of prostitutes in Africa, see White, Luise, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Tonda, Joseph, “Entre communautarisme et individualisme: la ‘tuée-tuée,’ une figure-miroir de la déparentalisation au Gabon,” Sociologie et Sociétés 39, 2 (Fall 2007): 79–99Google Scholar. See also Tonda, Joseph, Le souverain moderne: Corps et pouvoir en Afrique centrale (Paris: Karthala, 2005), 208–19Google Scholar.

32 The growing number of single mothers recently led the Gabonese state to support them with a one-time subvention of approximately 200,000 XFA (US$400) after the birth of their baby. In July 2007, the middle-aged, male driver of the truck I took to southern Gabon criticized Minister of Health and Women Angélique Ngoma for institutionalizing this financial help.

33 “Body-sex” is a translation of the French corps-sexe, used in popular vernacular Gabonese parlance. Tonda, Le souverain moderne, 197–236.

34 I use the verb to mask in the productive sense theorized by Sasha Newell, to talk about a visual performance that is as much about concealment and secrecy as about display. Newell argues that in plays of masquerade and masking, the represented became reality itself. In this sense, masquerades and the reality they call to life becomes an authentic source of power and value, and should not be analyzed as deceit. Newell, Sasha, “Brands as Masks: Public Secrecy and the Counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013): 138–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Field research in Libreville. A similar scene, set in a Djibouti nightclub and featuring white French légionnaires, appears in Claire Denis’ movie Beau Travail (1999). Another is transcribed in Boeck, Filip de and Passart, Marie-Françoise, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (Ghent: Ludion, 2004), 155Google Scholar.

36 A witch (French: sorcier) is someone who uses supernatural forces to attack victims and steal their vital energy. Tonda, “Entre communautarisme,” 2007. On student prostitution in Libreville, see Fanny Essi Obiang, “Les enjeux anthropologiques de la prostitution estudiantine à l'université Omar Bongo,” BA thesis in Anthropology, University Omar Bongo Ondimba, Libreville, 2005. On witchcraft in contemporary Africa, see Geschiere, Peter, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997)Google Scholar; and Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

37 Luise White (Comforts of Home) has studied this aspect of sex-work in Nairobi during the colonial period. For a more recent period, see Cole, Jennifer, Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 In the colonial era, the migrations of male workers to timber camps and new public construction sites opened niches for female prostitution. See Augée-Angoué, Claudine, “Les ‘Veuves Joyeuses’ et le ‘Diable civilisateur’: Notes sur les ébranlements du pouvoir masculin à Mokéko (Gabon),” in Le Gabon malgré lui, Rupture-Solidarité No. 6 (Paris: Karthala, 2005), 105–24Google Scholar.

39 Ms. Joséphine Lebonga, 13 Apr. 2005 interview, in Arielle Ekang-Mve, “Famille nzèbi et stérilité, (Gabon),” MA thesis in Anthropology, University Omar Bongo Ondimba, 2006, 23.

40 Information drawn from field observations and conversations with Gabonese informants in Libreville, Lambaréné, and Mouila in 2006, 2007, and 2012. I also consulted four theses written for University Omar Bongo Ondimba: Paul Missioumbou, “Héritage, contradictions et changements socio-culturels chez les Nzébi. Contribution à l'analyse de la crise de l'institution familiale au Gabon,” MA, Sociology of Knowledge, 1999; Victorine Ngounga Onguinidzamaga, “L'argent et la parenté à Libreville,” MA, Anthropology, 2004; Essi Obiang, “Les enjeux anthropologiques de la prostitution estudiantine,” MA Sociology, n.d.; and Guy Faustin Mbadinga Moucketou, “Solidarité traditionnelle et responsabilité familiale au Gabon,” MA, Sociology, n.d.

41 Briault, Maurice, Dans la forêt du Gabon: Etudes et scènes africaines (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1930), 62Google Scholar.

42 Prince Félix Adande Rapontchombo, “Danses indigènes, Instructions aux chefs des quartiers de Glass,” 6 May 1943, Archives Nationales du Gabon, Fonds Présidentiel, 1634.

43 Young men, however, experienced increasing difficulties in securing wives. On gender roles, conflicts, and expectations in colonial Gabon, see Jean-Baptiste, Rachel, “These Laws Should Be Made by Us: Customary Marriage Law, Codification and Political Authority in Twentieth Century Gabon,” Journal of African History 49, 2 (2008): 217–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Studies of sex-workers and female youth during the colonial period document the growing role of “vagrant” women around timber and mining camps in rural Gabon, and the rise of new moral values among urban youth. Lasserre, Guy, Libreville, la ville et sa région (Gabon, AEF): étude de géographie humaine (Paris: Colin, 1958)Google Scholar; Gray, Christopher and Ngolet, François, “Lambaréné, Okoumé and the Transformation of Labor along the Middle-Ogooué (Gabon), 1870–1945,” Journal of African History 40, 1, (1999): 87–107Google Scholar; Rich, Jeremy, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Jean-Baptiste, “These Laws.” There are surprisingly few published studies of sex-workers in Equatorial Africa, two exceptions being Ndjio, Basile's “Shanghai Beauties”; and “Carrefour de la Joie: Popular Deconstruction of the African Postcolonial Public Sphere,” Africa/International African Institute 75, 3, (2005): 265–94Google Scholar.

45 Misamu, no. 243, 21 Jan. 2002: 13, quoted in Tonda, “Entre communautarisme,” 86.

46 Thomas, “Modern Girl.”

47 Rey, Alain, Le Robert: Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 2 (Paris: Dictionnaire Le Robert Editions, 2000), 2444Google Scholar.

48 Neelika Jayawardane, “Zulu Metrosexuals,” Africa Is a Country, online discussion forum, www.africasacounty.com, 6 Dec. 2012. See also Bhabha, Homi's discussion of the virtues of self-fashioning and mimicking the modern, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar. On the meaning of fashion and parade as displayed in the Congolese Sapeurs, see Friedman, Jonathan, Consumption and Identity (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar. See the critique of mimicry by Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Much can be learned on these questions from Newell's insightful study, The Modernity Bluff.

49 This was suggested by Marx in “Fetishism of Commodity.”

50 Kendrick, Walter, The Secret Museum: The History of Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Penguin Books, 1987)Google Scholar, 57, quoted in Hunt, Lynn A., “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity,” in Hunt, Lynn A., ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 12–13Google Scholar. Pornography literally means “writing about prostitutes” (from the ancient Greek pornê: prostitute, and graphos: writing). Restif de la Bretonne was the first to use the term in French in his 1769 treatise, Le pornographe.

51 In Gabon as elsewhere, purchasing power is increasingly exercised through brand catalogs, Internet sites, and TV programs. The consumers can scrutinize and fantasize about products from the intimacy of their home, something Arjun Appadurai called “the pornography of late capitalism,” in “Gift Trapped,” Magazine of the University of Chicago (Dec. 1999): 36–37.

52 Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 23.

53 Jeffrey Steele, “The Visible and Invisible City,” talk at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 11 Nov. 2012.

54 I watched some episodes with my Gabonese hosts in Libreville.

55 Ballrino-Cohen, Colleen, Wilk, Richard R., and Stoelje, Beverley, eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Besnier, Niko, “Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy Beauty Pageant in Tonga,” American Ethnologist 29, 3 (2002): 534–66Google Scholar; Rahier, Jean Muteba, “Blackness, the Racial/Spatial Order, Migrations, and Miss Ecuador 1995–96,” American Anthropologist 100, 2 (1998): 421–30Google Scholar; Jean-Baptiste, Rachel, “Miss Eurafrica”: Men, Women, Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945–1960,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, 3 (2011): 568–93Google Scholar. Isak Niehaus brought many of these references to my attention.

56 Queen rallies in mid-1980s Liberia, for instance, worked as veritable manufacturers of ethnicity: they combined the celebration of traditional values and modern feminine qualities. Moran, Mary H., “Carrying the Queen: Identity and Nationalism in a Liberian Queen Rally,” in Ballrino-Cohen, Colleen, Wilk, Richard R., and Stoelje, Beverley, eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1996), 147–60Google Scholar. According to Rahier (“Blackness”), the surprise election of a black queen in Ecuador in 1996 seemed to express a greater tolerance towards black people in Ecuadoran society, yet the crowning also celebrated a form of domesticated blackness that did not really threaten the value of national society or the dominant racial/spatial order.

57 The first runner-up (Dauphine) received an undisclosed “prestigious gift,” and the second a luxury watch. In 2007, 3 million XFA was equivalent to approximately US$6,300, a considerable sum relative to the average (2010) daily income of, according to the Daily Mail, about US$12: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1281887/President-Gabon-Ali-Ben-Bongo-Ondimba-sparks-outrage-buying-85million-official-residence--PARIS.html (accessed 2 Dec. 2013). This is not to be confused with the Gross National Income per capita ($6,138 in 2005), which gives a distorted image of ordinary Gabonese's income and real purchasing power. Source: data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx?crName=GABON (accessed 2 Dec. 2013).

58 Apter, Andrew, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Diane Nanyan, “Miss Gabon est de retour après deux années de trêve,” Journal du Gabon, 17 Oct. 2011: www.journaldugabon.com/article.php?aid=112 (accessed 2 Dec. 2013).

60 Radio Television Gabonaise, Channel Two, 5 July 2007.

61 In 2007, a cloud of suspicion marred the collaboration of MOOV and LIBERTIS-GABON when the Miss Gabon Show's anchor insisted that the gifts awarded to the candidates would be given in public, “to avoid past mistakes” (errements du passé). I have been unable to get further information on this.

62 Medza Ovono Queenie Sheryl, Miss Gabon Pageant, Radio Television Gabonaise, Channel Two, 5 July 2007.

63 On Joseph Tonda's idea of “body sex,” see note 33.

64 Since independence, the Gabonese government has sought to create national union through the celebration of ethnic and regional diversity (Bernault and Tonda, “Gabon”). According to COMIGA, the governor of each province serves as an honorary president of the local commission that chooses the candidate to represent their region.

65 Contrary to Apter's findings in Nigeria (Pan African Nation), the choreography replicates the masquerading of native culture by colonial authorities. In 1948, the deputy of Gabon and future president Léon Mba sent a vitriolic letter to the Father Superior of the Catholic Mission in Libreville, St-Mary, to protest a traditional spectacle arranged by a white Father. The priest had summoned girls and women from the mission to be photographed. He asked them to carry a basket on their backs, put corncobs in their mouths, and hold packs of hay on their heads. Léon Mba relayed the villagers’ complaints to the mission. He wrote, “The entire region cannot fathom how, given the stage of French civilization in Gabon, one can force French Negroes to be photographed against their will and without appropriate clothing.” Lettre au Révérend Père Supérieur de la Mission Ste Marie à Libreville, signed Léon Mba, Archives de la Congrégation du St-Esprit, Chevilly-La-Rue, fonds Pouchet 2D 60 1-b-2.

66 Clarisse Odjele, Miss Gabon Pageant, Radio Television Gabonaise, Channel Two, 1 July 2007.

67 On the idea of political liturgy, see Rossatanga-Rignault, Guy, “Au titre des mesures individuelles…: petit catéchisme des liturgies politiques gabonaises,” in Le Gabon malgré lui, Rupture-Solidarité No. 6 (Paris: Karthala, 2005), 11–31Google Scholar.

68 French is one of Gabon's official languages, and the dominant language used in the national media.

69 News, Radio Television Gabonaise One, 6 Aug. 2006.

70 The civil code in Gabon stipulates that a wife must obey her husband. The husband protects her and chooses the residence for the family. Field research in City Hall, 5th arrondissement of Libreville, 12 Aug. 2006.

71 Radio Television Gabonaise, Channel One; fieldnotes, 11 Aug. 2006.

72 Blog La Rue, “Gabon: Les Ministres milliardaires distribuent des dons aux populations désœuvrées,” 1 Aug. 2011, www.gabonlibre.com (accessed 8 Mar. 2013).

73 For instance, today local “cultural groups” (groupes socio-culturels) of female dancers welcome the delegates of the donations with patriotic songs and dances. They usually wear print cotton dresses adorned with party slogans or pictures of the visiting politician. The origin of these associations dates from the colonial period, when French authorities established the ritual of native dances to welcome visits by high officials in the colony. After independence, a “National Women Organization” sponsored by the government (Organization nationale des femmes, ONF) opened local branches in rural towns across the country. See, for instance, Fiche d'activités du contrôleur administratif de Lebamba, No. 30/CF, signed A. M. Boumba-Maganga, 31 Dec. 1962, Archives Nationales du Gabon, Fonds des archives provinciales, Ndendé 14.

74 Gabonese elected senators are usually addressed as “vénérables,” and the deputies as “honorables.”

75 Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 84–85.

76 Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30Google Scholar.

77 Televised performances also open a space where citizens can scrutinize les Grands and exercise a synoptic gaze over the elites. Mathiesen, Thomas “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault's ‘Panopticon’ Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 1, 2: 215–34Google Scholar, repr. in Greer, Chris, ed., Crime and Media: A Reader (London, Routledge: 2010), 506–20Google Scholar.

78 French colonialists later called these power objects (proto-Bantu: *bwanga, from *–gang-, to tie up) “fetishes.” The Gabonese re-appropriated the term and use it widely today. See Ekang-Mve, “Famille nzèbi et stérilité.”

79 Benjamin, Walter, “Little History of Photography,” in Jennings, Michael W., Eiland, Howard and Smith, Gary, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. II, pt. 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 512Google Scholar.

80 Gell, Alfred and Hirsch, Eric, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (London: Athlone Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

81 Larkin, Signal and Noise.

82 Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni, Adventures in the Great Forest of Equatorial Africa and the Country of the Dwarfs, abridged and popular edition (N.Y.: Harper, 1899 [1871]), 399Google Scholar.

83 Pinney, Christopher, Anthropology and Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 75Google Scholar. A large part of the modern pageant's aesthetics derives from Western technologies (digital images, props) that sublimate and metamorphose the beauty queens. In Gabon, the TV anchor talked of “the magic of the election,” adding, “This is something awe-inspiring, as if the Miss came from another planet to be adulated by everybody.” He went on to paint corporate sponsors as quasi-divine agents: the gifts received by the first and second runners-up, he explained, came with their “benediction.” Jean Eric Nziengui Mangala, Miss Gabon Pageant finale on Radio Television Gabonaise, Channel Two, 4 July 2007.

84 See, for instance, the 1923 colonial decree on cannibalism and the making of relics. It was later reworked as Law no. 21–63, 31 May 1963, published in Journal officiel de la République gabonaise, 25 July 1963: 583–610.

85 See Walker, André Raponda and Sillans, Roger, Rites et croyances des peuples du Gabon: essai sur les pratiques religieuses d'autrefois et d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Présence africaine, 1983), 152Google Scholar.

86 André Mary, Le défi du syncrétisme: Le travail symbolique de la religions d'eboga (Gabon) (Paris: Editions de l'EHESS), 89, 147.

87 Tonda, Joseph, “La télévision, le regard des morts, et le pouvoir politique à Libreville,” in Le Gabon malgré lui, Rupture-Solidarité No. 6 (Paris, Karthala, 2005), 61Google Scholar.

88 Ibid., 63. Some precolonial gestures of blessing consisted in spitting on someone and uttering a formula.

89 “Le père Jacques et la légende de la main du drapeau du P.D.G,” undated typescript, Archives Archives de la Congrégation du St-Esprit, Chevilly-La-Rue, Fonds Pouchet 2D 60-9-a-4. In Equatorial Africa, “to tie up” (Proto-Bantu; *-gang-) is an action strongly associated with healing, cursing, and bewitching. The linguistic root gang also appears in the word nganga (ritual expert, healer).

90 Mathiesen, “Viewer Society.”

91 Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L., “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, 4 (1999): 279–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.