Unmasking the state: Developing modern political subjectivities in the 20th century Guinea

This dissertation uses the 1961--63 Demystification Program of the Guinean socialist government as the focal point for a historical ethnography of a West African postcolonial state. The Demystification Program aimed at eradicating the indigenous religion and accompanying masquerades of Guinean ethnic minorities, including Loma speakers, the subjects of the study. Drawing on both the regional idiom of Muslim conversion and the developmentalist idiom of Marxism, the Guinean state claimed that Demystificatory iconoclasm was a necessary step in the transformation of former colonial subjects into modern national citizens.; With the Demystification Program as prism, the dissertation does the ethnography of one state elliptically, from the point of view of the "mystified" Loma people living on its geographical and cultural margins. It shows how struggles within the dominant ethnic and political blocs of the nation had unintended consequences in the margins. It also shows how the dramaturgy of Guinean state power was enacted in out-of-the-way places not only to bring their inhabitants into line with the dominant culture, but also to serve an exemplary function. The imputed savagery of Loma practices thus became an indispensable foil to the self-presentation of the Guinean nation.; The dissertation's first six chapters present the building blocks necessary to understand the enactment and attendant violence of Demystification in the Loma-speaking region. They analyze the regional sociology of warfare and its links to intergenerational conflict; Loma conceptions of personhood and power; clanship and interethnic fluidity; politics of autochthony and sacrifice; and the multiplex relations between Mothers' Brothers and Sisters' Sons.; The last four chapters show how these elements combined within the context of the state to catalyze the emergence of new forms of ethnic and national identity. They describe the political uses of history; introduction of notions of ethnicized territory in the context of changing land tenure laws; the relations between the Demystification Program and intergenerational conflict; and a flirtation with genocidal violence in the context of the regional (Liberian/Sierra Leonean/Guinean) war. The dissertation shows how Loma speakers came to think of themselves as "a people" largely as the result of the denigrations (including Demystification) they had experienced at the hands of the state. However, the same project of national subject-formation of which these denigrations were a part had acted on them in ways that made them identify as Guinean national citizens as well as Guinea's exemplary Others.