What’s in a Name? Notes on the Making of Seereer Identity

Chapter 3 takes on the historical limits of ethnicity, a ‘public secret’ whose avoidance does a great deal of political work in Senegal. Starting with common depictions of Seereer people as traditional peasants and of ‘Seereerness’ as a time-deep identity, the chapter draws on multiple archives to question these scenarios and the applicability of ethnicity to past settings. Specifically, it argues that, far from making up a primeval entity, the Seereer label was constructed over time in relation to other social groups and consolidated relatively recently as a primary mode of identification. If it came to condense the cultural substance of Siin residents, its authenticity also embodies a history of alterity and difference. Given the entwinement of identity and political history in precolonial and colonial Senegal, this, in turn, forces us to revisit conventional narratives of ethnogenesis and state formation in the region.

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