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"In this innovative new history, Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'òhjåab - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously"--
List of contents
Introduction: a Saharan ontology of the invisible; 1. Principles of provenance: origins, debates, and social structures of l'¿j¿b in the Saharan West; 2. Local wisdom: contestations over l'¿j¿b in the 18th-19th centuries; 3. Colonial logics of Islam: managing the threat of l'¿j¿b; 4. Postcolonial transfigurations: contesting l'¿j¿b in the era of social media; 5. Desert panic: bloodsucking accusations and the terror of social change; 6. Sui generis: genealogical claims to the past and the transmission of l'¿j¿b; Epilogue.
About the author
Erin Pettigrew is Assistant Professor of History and Arab Crossroads Studies for New York University, Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). She is a cultural historian of colonial and post-colonial West Africa with a focus the history of Islam, slavery, race, gender, and nationhood.
