My interests converge at the intersection of performance, politics, ritual, and health. My current book manuscript, published articles, and articles in preparation come from dissertation research that I undertook in Côte d´Ivoire from October of 1993 to December of 1997. I was initially interested in francophone theater in Abidjan and took acting courses with Ivoirian theater students
in French at the Institut National de Thèâtre. However, with the death of Côte d´Ivoire´s founding president, Fèlix Houphouët-Boigny in December 1993, theater troupes stopped performing. The political situation also became tense with the emergence of the discriminatory discourse of ivoiritè, or ‘Côte d´Ivoire for Ivoirians´: a means to marginalize mostly Jula-speaking Muslims who supported opposition figure Alassane Ouattara.
Unhappy with the situation in Abidjan, I re-located to the Muslim, Jula-speaking region of Denguèlè and its capital, Odiennè, in the northwest, where I lived for three years. There I began participating in performances by initiated hunters who call themselves Dozos. Eventually they initiated me as Dozo myself. Throughout my stay, I regularly attended their funerals for deceased
colleagues. Here, Dozo musicians performed praise songs to invite other Dozos to hunt to placate dead Dozos´ souls. Dozos´ songs, their hunting, and their ritual offerings amounted to a single sacrifice (saraka) intended to dissuade deceased Dozos from spoiling family´s crops, making livestock ill, and ruining the hunt. Dozo performance was thus, at once, an aesthetic, social, and public health intervention. I will devote a future article and book exclusively to Dozos´ praise songs.
While attending Dozos´ funerals and recording their songs, I also learned of a national movement mobilizing Dozos as unofficial police. The movement protected villages and working-class neighborhoods throughout the country in the absence of reliable police protection. Dozos called their movement Benkadi, or ‘Agreement Is Sweet´ in Jula. Like Dozo musicians, the Dozos of Benkadi made ritual sacrifices to create ‘agreement´ within the community. They patrolled their communities at night against crime but also to enforce public sanitation. Here too, sacrifice, public health, and security converged through performance. In my book manuscript, I argue that Dozo sacrifice offered Benkadi an alternative model for assuring community safety given the state´s abdication of its responsibility to do so in the 1990s. I suggest that the future of Côte d´Ivoire
and any lasting resolution to its recent rebellion will depend upon similar popular enfranchisement in state stability.
More recently, I have begun to pursue the health-related concerns implicit in my earlier work. As an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at Yale University´s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) from 2001 to 2003, I received a CIRA Development Grant to begin research in Odiennè on local understandings of HIV/AIDS from August to October 2002. I discovered that Odiennèka, as local people call themselves, combine public health and biomedical explanations for HIV/AIDS with etiologies derived from Islam, political economy, gender disparities, and colonial history. I conclude that public health campaigns against HIV/AIDS must open a dialogue about these understandings of the epidemic if they are too elicit a collaborative local response to it. Most HIV/AIDS prevention in resource-poor countries, however, centers on the sentinel surveillance of pregnant women. Pregnant women´s blood is taken and tested for HIV to estimate its general prevalence in the population without women giving their informed
consent or being able to receive their results because their names have been de-linked from their sera. In one of my articles now under review, I argue that local dialogue about HIV/AIDS must accompany sentinel surveillance as the foundation for HIV/AIDS prevention in such settings. Otherwise, local people will continue to have little say in establishing their priorities for prevention.
I now have a grant application under review to continue my work on local approaches to HIV/AIDS with the help of university students in Kankan, Guinea within the same Mande-speaking world as Odienné. I have also begun to make contact with Ivoirian immigrants from Odienné now living in Atlanta in order to pilot the research methods I hope to use in Guinea.
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