Interviews of the Unspoken:

Incompatible Initiations in
Senegal Fieldwork
MARIETTE VAN TILBURG
385 Mooresburg Road
Danville, PA 17821
Interpreter Mane-Rose
Dieme with Manette van
Tilburg. Photo by
Richard Kahn.

SUMMARY The main themes in this article are the practice of asking questions during
fieldwork and the confrontation with the "unspeakable" around the subject of pregnancy
and birth while doing fieldwork. As 1 entered the field, a Diola village in the rural
Casamance region of Senegal, I was aware of the existence of silence and secrecy on these
topics. Pregnant myself, I assumed that my pregnancy would aid communication and
rapport. This was not so. As my pregnancy advanced, the flow of information became
increasingly restricted and secret. Only reflexively was I able to recognize the ethnocen-
tric assumptions with which I had entered the field and to recognize the complex
dimensions of the silence and secrecy that had surrounded me.

My mother told me, "You will die if you tell the secrets." [Diola woman, October 29,1983]
Ethnography is essentially, not incidentally, communicative or dialogical; conversa-
tion, not observation, should be the key to the conceptualizing of ethnographic knowl-
edge production. [Fabian 1990:4]

In contrast to earlier times, an anthropologist entering the field today is recog-

nized as race, class, and gender specific.1 The publication of Children in the Field:
Anthropological Experiences (Cassell 1987) added to these specificities the possible
presence of the fieldworker's children and their influence on fieldwork relations
and research results. When asked to participate in a sequel to Children in the Field,
I realized that my experience would be coming from a different angle: instead of
having a child by my side during my fieldwork, I had a child growing inside me.
The situation of being pregnant in the field is not new among anthropological
fieldworkers but is rarely referred to except in medical contexts. In Diamat Diola
society pregnancy and childbirth are regarded as a rite of passage, the transfor-
mation of the social role of a girl into that of a woman. For an anthropologist,
fieldwork—the encounter with the unknown—is considered a rite of passage into
the profession. As a pregnant anthropologist in thefield,1 found myself entangled
in the Diamat Diola discourse of pregnancy and childbirth. Though initiation into
anthropology requires conversation and is supposed to require the asking of
probing questions, Diola initiation into womanhood is surrounded by silence.
In this article I discuss how my pregnancy determined my research topic and
how it affected fieldwork on both physical and intellectual levels. As a pregnant
anthropologist, that physical aspect of my sex was particularly visible and
pertinent. As my pregnancy shaped my body, it also shaped the character of my
interactions in the field and determined the channels of communication between
the women and myself. I became subject to the rules about what type of

Anthropology and HumanismlX.2);\77-\W. Copyright 1998, American Anthropological Association.

178 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

information I might receive and the appropriate channels through which I might
receive it. I found there existed knowledge that connected women and that
simultaneously set them apart from each other. My pregnancy produced knowl-
edge that, had I not been pregnant and thus subject to the rules of Diola
pregnancy, I might never have learned. By unwittingly breaking the rules, I
learned the rule that speaking makes one vulnerable and silence makes one
strong. Silence not only increases the value of the knowledge it protects; it also
protects people during periods of vulnerability.

Stories, Personal Histories, and Fieldwork Choices

It has been customary in anthropology that one is given license to write in an
autobiographical genre only after the protocol of traditional academic writing
has been followed. Until recently, the personal and subjective were mostly absent
from the official research publications of anthropologists. Only in an occasional
retrospective experiential account would an author allow reflexivity to enter the
picture. Having already written my initial study (1986), perhaps I can now record
this more autobiographical reflection and explore how the subjective situation in
which researchers find themselves is integrally connected with the choice of
research topic and with fieldwork and its findings. The boundaries between the
personal and professional become blurred in fieldwork, and the fieldwork expe-
rience is a self-transforming process. For Crapanzano, "the anthropological
enterprise rests upon dialogue—with our informants, with the texts we produce,
with ourselves" and is a "continuous movement of construction, deconstruction,
and reconstruction in the field and in the academy" (1977:3). I came to realize
that if reflexivity is so important, then the fieldwork experience starts long before
the actual research; and there is no end to the process.
One part of this article is the story of my pregnancy in the field. It is not about
sonograms and checkups (or the lack of them) but about the way I was perceived
and how I gained access to and was restricted from access to certain women and
certain information. It is not just my own story; there are others: the stories of
individual women and the story of the dialogue between the women of Youtou
and myself. And just as the subject of my fieldwork had been determined by my
pregnancy, my pregnancy in turn was affected by my fieldwork. My pregnancy
in the bush turned out to be life threatening for me and resulted in the loss of the
baby-to-be. The experience added another layer of reflexivity to the research.
Since completing this particular fieldwork in Youtou in 19831 have given birth
to two daughters. The birth of my older daughter, Hannah, actually stimulated
me to write my thesis: it got under way with the newborn on my lap and
developed as the eyes of the infant followed the motions of my fingers tapping
the keyboard. I can only wonder in what way the dissertation and this article
would have been different had she never been born. The writing of this article is
meant to connect my past fieldwork experience with my present reflection on it.
Therefore, the article is addressed to both the anthropological community and to
Hannah and Annelie, who often wonder about their "little brother" who never
lived, and is intended to tell both audiences the story of what happened so far
away, so long ago, before they had come to be.

It All Began in Africa . . .

It was not the first time I had been in Africa. During an earlier journey across
the African continent with my companion, now husband, Richard Kahn, we
traveled from east to west, from coast to coast, using any available means of
transportation, from walking with the Mbuti in the Ituri forest to paddling a
van Tilburg Interviews of the Unspoken 179

dugout canoe down the Logone River in Chad and hitching rides on top of a
cargo train in Mauritania. We had no children as yet.
People I met on that journey were as curious about me as 1 was about them.
We studied each other and asked many questions. One of the recurring questions
on that trip became the basis for my subsequent fieldwork. I remember vividly
the young mother with a child strapped to her back who pointed from her bare
breast, to her child, and then to me, raising her hand as if to ask, "And where is
your milk, where is your child?" We would explain time and again that we had
other projects before us before taking on the responsibilities of parenting. People
accepted our explanations but not without a mixture of sympathy, pity, and
perplexity at priorities so sharply contrasting with their vital social needs.
It was in Nioumoun, an island in the Casamance River in Senegal, that I met
a Diola woman who had left her own village to escape what may be termed her
"designated infertility" and its onus.3 She went to a new place, where she took
on a new name and a ritual role, hoping to become pregnant and to bring that
pregnancy and the status accorded it back to her old village. The woman and the
solution to her infertility fascinated me. As a traveler and as a woman without
children, I had started to feel an affinity with the socially infertile women I had
met during our earlier travels. As a cultural anthropologist choosing a research
topic for my fieldwork, it seemed appropriate to study something the women
and I had in common. I became interested in the ways women deal with this
question of childlessness and how they are marginalized by society. For my
research topic, I first decided to study the childless and infertile women among
the Diamat Diola of Basse Casamance in Senegal.
Three months before my fieldwork was to start, however, I found I was
pregnant. What to do? Should I refrain from going to the field and stay home?
In the Netherlands, my native country, my condition would be regarded as a
suitable reason to remain at home. Also, my family and friends expressed
concern about my going to a field site lacking standard Dutch prenatal care.
The ethical question that most concerned me in the new situation was how
could I, while pregnant, approach women stigmatized for their infertility. I knew
I could not. I had wanted the women to be able to identify with me, having our
childlessness in common. To focus on barren informants while I myself was
pregnant would be a cruel mockery. Eventually I chose to invert the topic of my
research. I would study, through pregnancy and childbirth, the Diamat Diola
initiation into womanhood. Even though I would enter as an outsider, I hoped
to become an insider; to become an "observing participant, rather than a partici-
pant-observer" (Crosby 1997:66). The shared experience of pregnancy, the expe-
rience common only to women, would become "embodied knowledge" (Crosby
1997:66).

The Netherlands: The Context of Openness

I spent the first months of my pregnancy in the Netherlands where the
discourse on sexuality and reproduction is currently quite open, operating on
the premise that openness is necessary for the promotion of health and the
dissemination of medical knowledge. Openness is regarded as essential to health;
openness itself is considered healthy.4 Pregnant women are very much a part of
this public discourse. In a country where the infant mortality rate is one of the
lowest in the world, pregnancy and childbirth are not isolated in the realm of
sickness and medicine; rather, the opposite is true: the culture-specific definition
of childbirth in the Netherlands is that birth is a healthy and natural process
(Jordan 1993:53).5 In the understanding of pregnancy and childbirth as a natural
180 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

and not a pathological event, as a joyful rather than a fearful experience, women
perceive themselves, and are perceived by others, as competent and able to
decide about their own bodies.6 Home birth in the presence of a midwife or a
midwife and the family doctor is very common.7 Having grown up amidst an
open discussion of sexuality and reproduction, childbirth was to me "normal."
I did not recognize my attitude as culture specific.
It was with this optimistic Dutch conditioning that 1 chose to journey to Senegal
and go ahead with my fieldwork—and (can I say?) "use my pregnancy" as a tool
to wedge an opening into a different culture. Just as I had previously intended
to use my outsider position to connect with infertile and marginalized women, I
would now use my pregnancy as do the Diola women: as an initiation into
womanhood, as the "birth of a woman." I hoped that my fieldwork while
pregnant would initiate me into Diola womanhood and help me acquire the
knowledge of the Diamat Diola women of Youtou, as well as initiate me into the
anthropological "trade" (Fabian 1970:392, n. 27; Hymes 1991 :ix).

The Casamance of Senegal: The Context of Silence

The field site is a village in the Basse Casamance, the southernmost part of
Senegal. The Diamat Diola, a Diola subgroup that lives in this village, are
cultivators of African indigenous rice along the tidal estuaries of the Casamance
River. The country of Gambia cuts off the Casamance province from the rest of
the country to the north, and the region, until recently, has been relatively
inaccessible to outsiders. The Casamance River further divides the province and
contributes to an even greater isolation of the southernmost section. The Diola
who live north of the river are mostly Muslim, whereas those who live south of
the river are mostly animistic. Though the southern Diola have had contact with
Catholic missionaries, with Muslim traders, and, more recently, with tourism,
they have largely responded by resisting the changes that this contact has
introduced. Thomas (1959), in his ethnography of the Diola, described their social
organization as acephalous and anarchist, with an absence of historic unity and
with great linguistic diversity. The Diola have made their living in the difficult
physical environment of saltwater marshes and mangrove-covered estuaries.
Moreover, their isolation, created by numerous waterways, has contributed to
the autonomy of the dispersed villages.
The colonial period was one of confrontation between the Diola and the French,
whose system of colonial domination was based on the assumption that they
would find primitive royal hierarchies that they could control. The mismatch
between French assumptions and the Diola decentralized political structure led
to periodic confrontations that continue today.8
The cultivation of wet rice is intimately woven into Diola identity. Life revolves
around the seasonal cycles of this agricultural crop (Linares 1981; Pelissier 1966).
Women and men collaborate on tasks, but there is a division of labor along gender
lines, each responsible for different aspects of the cultivation. Men maintain the
extensive system of dikes to keep out the saltwater from the tidal estuaries and
to catch rainfall within; they prepare and cultivate the rice paddies and are
responsible for the irrigation channels. Women are responsible for seedlings,
transplanting, and the harvesting of the crops. The women's knowledge of the
different varieties ofriceand the particular growing conditions is highly specialized,
sophisticated, and, most important in this exogamous society, portable. Rice
cultivation is central to social cohesion. During the year, young and unmarried
people may seek work in the towns and cities, but when the rice season arrives,
most will come back to help with the cultivation of the rice.
vanTilburg Interviews of the Unspoken 181

The village, during my days in the held, consisted of clusters of quarters, each
relatively independent with its own authority, ritual specialists, possessions (rice
paddies, cattle), and sacred forests with shrines for women's and men's age
groups and organizations. With the contemporary patterns of seasonal migration
from the rural Basse Casamance to urban areas, pressures for change have been
increasing, but these seem to have amplified the resistance to these changes. Since 1983
the secessionist movement (Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance) has
reportedly become violent (see Amnesty International 1998; Stavenhagen 1996).
Entering the Field
After the initial months of the pregnancy in the Netherlands, Richard and I left
for Senegal. We met up with our French-speaking friend from the village of Effoc,
where I had hoped to do my research. But I needed a translator, and although
there were many French-speaking men in the village, neither our friend's wife
nor any other woman in his village could speak French. His wife, however,
seemed interested in my research, and when I asked if I could speak with Diola
women on the subject of pregnancy and childbirth she confirmed that I could,
though not in the presence of a man.9 Definitely in need of a female translator,
we were sent on to Youtou, where we arrived on foot, just like everyone else who
goes there.
My introduction in Youtou was not without problems either, for I was intro-
duced to a delegation of women elders by a man who translated for me. I tried
to explain my project, but I was speaking in a language that the women did not
speak, and I was speaking of matters about which a man could not speak. The
women of the village received me with suspicion. I had come with my official
research permits from the Senegalese government, and, as such, I found that the
people associated me with the recent institution of modern prenatal care in the
isolated area. Already a local dispensary had been founded, run by a male
Muslim nurse to whom the women were opposed.
So there I was, pregnant and ready to do my research among the women of
Youtou, again finding no French-speaking woman who could teach and translate
the language for me. Yet the women, according to the official, were willing to let
me stay in their village. I decided to accept their decision, wondering if their
curiosity had overcome their suspicions and hoping to solve the dilemma of
translation.
We left for a time to finalize the research permits and soon returned to Youtou
on our bicycles to settle into the house of our host, the "president" of the rural
community, with his wife and their nine children. The president did not speak
French, but the village chief did. It was through an unexpected encounter with
his daughter, Marie-Rose Dieme, that my research gained focus and direction.
This young woman had a three-month-old baby and did, as it happened, speak
French. She was the only mother in either of the Diamat villages who could speak
French, and she willingly became my interpreter. She seemed the ideal inter-
preter and guide because she had already gained entrance to the secret society
of women who had been initiated through the experience of childbirth. Because
of her own initiation via childbirth, she would be able to speak with other women
and me about pregnancy and childbirth.

Words of Women: Stories of Silence and Secrets

Marie-Rose Dieme's Story of What a Diola Woman Learns
Before approaching any other woman, my interpreter Marie-Rose and I dis-
cussed pregnancy and childbirth between ourselves. From our conversations
182 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

together, and later from interviews with seven other women, a picture emerged
about the events of childbirth and menarche in this society. In the following
account Marie-Rose speaks of her knowledge and experience of childbirth:

When you go and lie down [to give birth], the women hold your legs. You're on the
ground, and the child comes out. Girls don't know about these things. Until I had my
child, I didn't know a thing—nothing, nothing. But when I was going to have a child,
the old women tell you everything, everything a woman needs to know.
When I first saw the blood [menstruation], I was very scared—scared and surprised.
I thought, "What's happened to me? Am I sick?" My mother calmed me down and told
me, "All women know this. Every month you'll see the blood, and when you see the
blood you'll be like me. Men are not to see the blood. If they get to know about these
things they'll die. Even your father doesn't know." The blood isn't good, the women
say. There's a little house where you go. When I see the blood I won't go home, but I'll
sleep in the little house for three nights. This little house is called eromun. A girl who's
seen the blood is called badjurub. Every woman goes to the eromun when she sees the
blood. You're not allowed in your father's house or your husband's; you're not allowed
to get water from the well or to cook. You're allowed to eat, but outside the house and
only with the women and children. After three days you can come home again; you can
be there and get water and cook.
When you don't see any blood for several months, you'll know that it's different. I
didn't know why the blood stopped, but I'd been with a man. You then go along with
the women who've already had children to bakin kalahaj, the sacred grove of the women,
and they'll tell you you're pregnant, hara na kum. They ask you if you know where the
child comes from and how ifll come out of you. I didn't know. Then the old women
poured bunuk [palm wine] on the bakin [altar], and I had to tell the truth about the man
I had been with. They tell you, "Don't be afraid. You'll not die if you tell the truth."
They'll tell you all the secrets, how the child will come out of you, and they ask the
bakin for a healthy child. The secrets are secret because the young girls don't know.
When you're pregnant you do everything as usual. You have to work because ifs good.
But you mustn't carry things that are too heavy. While I was pregnant I was very tired,
and my feet were all swollen. My whole body was in pain. Yes, really, I was very tired.
Everybody knows [can see] you're pregnant, but you don't talk about it.
Every woman goes to a little house called hunya in the secret woods of the women to
give birth. The old women, anahanow, those with white hair, they'll take care of you.
The hunya is the place where you give birth to children. The old women give you
medicine to help you with your tiredness. The medicines are made of leaves from the
bush. The old women wash you inside and outside, and the child is washed. The cord
of the child is cut with a knife and covered with sugar. There's another way too: you
take a pot and grind one piece of it 'til ifs like flour, and you cover the cord with this.
They shave your hair and the hair of the child. Hair is nyenye; ifs forbidden. If another
child sees the hair of your child, ifll die. The men aren't allowed to see it either. The
men know that a child is born with hair, but they're not allowed to see it. The hair and
what comes out of you are buried in the ground. For every woman a hole is dug outside
the hunya, in which the things that come out of her are buried and are covered up until
you can't see them anymore.
You stay in the hunya for three days. You're taken care of by the old women and your
child is, too. After that you go to the huromun, the house of an old woman. Here you
stay for one or two weeks until you're strong again. You'll stay in the house, and the
woman will do everything for you. She'll get leaves for the medicine you drink and
wash with. When you leave her house you're shaved again: kabohul, it means the
shaving of the hair before you see the men again. The man may only see the child when
the cord is dry; the cord that isn't yet dry is nyenye for the man. When you leave,
everything of yours is washed because you have to be clean when you come home. My
grandmother, the mother of my father, took care of me. She's a real old woman. These
are things that men and girls must never hear: these things are nubanol. People say such
persons will die if they hear.10
vanTilburg Interviews of the Unspoken 183

My Story: What I Heard and What I Learned

Marie-Rose's story turns out to be her own personal experience combined with
an account of an idealized birth, the way to become the ideal Diamat Diola
woman. The hardships and dangers of pregnancy prepare the woman for child-
birth and shape her for her life as a mature adult. According to the ideal, she must
display courage and hard work to earn entrance into the society of women
through the initiation of giving birth. Birth in Youtou occurs in the birthing hut
in the secret grove, the exclusive sphere of women. The mother and her child
remain there until both seem out of danger and can enter the quotidian world.
No one will have mentioned her pregnancy, her absence, or even the baby until
an extended period of time has elapsed after her return from the secret grove.
The existence of the new child is not acknowledged in Diola speech until the
period of perceived danger is past.
Such caution is not unusual. Not only in the Casamance but in many parts of
the world, especially those parts beyond the reach of biomedical prenatal care,
women hesitate to speak of a miscarriage and avoid in every way possible calling
a miscarriage or birth of a stillborn "the loss of a baby": "Whatever is gestating
or has recently been born is very likely not to be considered a person until it has
given substantial evidence of surviving that early critical period" (Renate Fer-
nandez, personal communications, 1997-98). The perinatal period is a dangerous
time in a woman's life; a woman never knows if she or her child will live or die.
The secrecy and the dangers of talking about such things extend beyond mother
and infant to men, uninitiated women, and children. As Marie-Rose emphatically
told me, the one who overhears what he or she should not hear will die.
What so strongly dominates Marie-Rose's story is the expression of ideas about
what one can say, to whom, and what must remain secret. Secrecy is maintained,
especially with respect to men and children. Young girls, however, are gradually
exposed to the world of women, as they become part of it during their stays in
the menstrual hut; yet they are not supposed to ask any questions until they go
through each experience themselves. This was revealed to me on one occasion
when Marie-Rose and I were talking while her younger sisters worked nearby,
pounding rice. Hearing us speak the girls shifted their work closer to us, occa-
sionally stopping to add little snippets of information to the conversation, which
made it clear that they knew more than they were supposed to. Also, from
Marie-Rose's story one can sense her willingness to talk to me, even while
acknowledging her ignorance. As time went on, I started to learn the categories
to which Diola women belonged according to their stage and success in repro-
duction. The categories formed a hierarchy. On the lowest rung were women
pregnant for the first time; next in order were the women whose babies did not
survive; then women who had given birth only to girls; mothers who had given
birth to and raised both sexes; culminating in mothers who had passed meno-
pause. Following the connections I was making in Youtou, I tried to talk to
women in each of these different categories. I focused on women who had
already gone through pregnancy and been initiated into womanhood by giving
birth. I did not include childless women in the study, feeling it unethical to
confront them with my own pregnancy. Yet I did spend time with one childless
neighbor, for I did not wish to exclude her as she had been excluded by most of
the other women.
On the other hand, the women did not know where to place me. Because of
my outsiderhood and European status I was given respect beyond my years, but
because of the transitional state of pregnancy itself, and its lowliness in the
hierarchy, I did not fit clearly into any category. My role was ambiguous. 1
184 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

sequenced my interviews to follow the social categories in the female hierarchy.

As I approached the top, however, my pregnancy became increasingly obvious,
a fact the women could no longer ignore. The unavoidable manifestation of my
pregnancy forced them to place me within their categories. But as I continued to
approach the women, their relative openness faded more and more into silence.11
Because I was an anthropologist, 1 asked questions.12 Because I was a pregnant
woman, I was asking what I was not supposed to question. "Everybody knew I
was pregnant," Marie-Rose had told me, "but I did not talk about it" (vanTilburg
1986:34). Yet, naively, insistently, and bent on my initiation into anthropology,
as I then understood it, I had continued my inquiry.
Then one morning, in the beginning of the eighth month of my pregnancy, I
found I was bleeding. When I saw the blood I was struck with panic. I reacted
not so much to my own emergency as to the fact that I had lost my blood in the
house of my host, in a place where I, as a woman, was not supposed to spill blood.
I had only recently learned what happens if a woman loses blood in a man's
house: she is held responsible for the pollution of his house. Members of the
women's society would come to the house, take everything out of it, and burn
the house down. For breaking the rule, even the rice in the storage hut would be
taken as a sacrifice to the women's shrine. The family who had taken me in would
suffer for my transgression.
By now I knew enough not to ask for the assistance of the old women who
controlled the domain of childbirth, for once in their hands and under their
control, secluded from society in the hunya, I would not be able to reach anyone
else, not even Richard.131 left the house and went to the dispensary—which was
neutral territory because it was run by the male Muslim nurse. From there Richard
and I managed to leave the village to seek medical help in the nearest city hospital.14
I had gone to the Basse Casamance in the belief that my pregnancy would help
elicit a flow of information but had gradually discovered that pregnancy was
protected by silence. Knowledge of sex and reproduction was powerful and
secret—secret from men, children, and uninitiated women and secret from me.
Because of my outsider status I was given respect, but because of the pregnancy
that marked my status among women, our conversations were severely limited.
I struggled to find women who would openly talk only to realize—well after
leaving the field—that they were not only hiding information. Rather, the women
who refused to speak with me were not just protecting their knowledge; their
knowledge required them to protect me. It was dangerous and foolish for a
pregnant woman to speak about her pregnancy. I had understood the secrecy
that separated women from men and girls, but I had not realized that a protective
silence also surrounded pregnant women. Moreover, I assumed that I myself was
exempt from the rules of Diola society. Only reflexively did I realize the double
standard I had been applying to myself; I expected both membership and special
exemption.
I had persisted and spoken of the unspeakable; and my pregnancy had turned
out to be life threatening. It was not until later that I realized how much the Diola
taboo and sense of danger surrounding pregnancy and childbirth had internal-
ized itself within me as my pregnancy among the Diola progressed. I had
appropriated their secretive mode of behavior—copied it—by fleeing the village.
My fears for my personal safety were subordinated to my social fear of commit-
ting a transgression in the house of my host. It was my fear of that moment that
finally enabled me to understand their silence.
vanTilburg Interviews of the Unspoken 185

Secrecy and Silence: A Practice of Knowing

What I learned during the interviews was what I could speak about to whom
and what had to remain secret and unspoken of to others. Men and children
seemed to know enough not to ask where a wife or mother had gone when she
spent her time in the menstrual or birthing hut. Her disappearance passed
without remark. For those who understood, silence clearly marked her absence.
As I continued my research into the knowledge of Diola women, it became
clear to me that even if one knows, one is not to divulge what one is not supposed
to know. Even if young girls were gradually exposed to women's knowledge
during their stay in the menstrual hut, they were not supposed to ask questions.
The silence surrounding childbirth was part of the seclusion of the initiation
process. As women experienced subsequent births, they added knowledge and
gained higher status in the female hierarchy. As a woman grew older and
eventually passed through menopause, attention to private family matters be-
came less important and the woman became much more focused on the collective
issues of the community. By virtue of her experience and accumulated knowl-
edge, she acquired ritual roles in the association of women, the most important
of all dealing with matters of life and its continuation, including Diamat iden-
tity.15
In the process of my fieldwork, I did not accumulate a vast quantity of
information, just enough to know when 1 was being barred from information and
from access to the old women. The teachings that were considered vital to the
process of becoming a woman were secret to outsiders and were a process
themselves. As such, the secrecy was "a matter of form rather than content" and
"consisted of restrictions on what to say, to whom, when, or for what purpose";
and "secrecy, far from being non-communication, is a cultural practice of com-
munication" (Fabian 1991:184). For me it was therefore not a question of quantity
versus quality of information but of gaining insight into the form and process of
communication.
Many have written about and interpreted secrecy (Bellman 1984; Murphy 1980;
Piot 1993; Simmel 1950). Secrecy provides borders of protection within which
dangerous but necessary things can happen: transformation and initiation, birth
and death. Secrecy not only creates borders that inhibit communication between
insiders and outsiders; it also functions as a way to communicate inclusion and
exclusion and thereby establishes power relationships. The silence that sur-
rounds secrecy increases the value of the knowledge it protects, as well as the
value of the power it thereby communicates.
When I came to Youtou, I thought that my pregnancy would let me cross the
border into both womanhood and Diola society. Yet I found that there were
different lines, those that separate women from men, those that separate women
of various statuses, and those that separate Diola from all others.
Diola secrecy seems to be widening in scope. Initially it was meant to protect
the gendered domains within the society; now perhaps it is also meant to protect
(or create) ethnic identity and maintain cohesion as Diola isolation becomes less
absolute both politically and geographically (Girard 1969; Roche 1976). Bridges
now cross over the estuaries, and a road is never more than a half-day's walk
away. Even though the Diola were never a unified ethnicity, now, confronted
with a rapidly changing world, a new identity has been created. Roche writes that
"a society worried about [its] collective survival" is more than ever determined
to guard its knowledge, and it becomes a keeper of tradition (1976:39). Diola
secrecy assumes another dimension; not only does the secrecy guard internal
structures, but it also resists assimilation. Strong emphasis on the exclusion of
186 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

outsiders makes for a strong feeling of possession of knowledge that others know
nothing about (Simmel 1950:332-333). The secrecy of the women is one instance
of a secrecy that has long existed separating women and men. It now also
establishes a barrier against the government-provided dispensary, which is run
by the non-Diola Muslim male nurse. Female secrecy might be an expression of
the fear of losing the power of knowledge and the erosion of the traditional values
of fertility.
Silence now has come to surround secrets that communicate exclusive rights
to reproductive knowledge and thereby creates a gender as well as an ethnic
identity. The Diola have sensed that their interests are not those of the Senegalese
government and now claim silence as a means of ethnic defense. Is this silence a
response to the revision of knowledge/power relations in the face of the many
changes with which the society has been confronted (e.g., the spread of Islam,
Christianity, nationalism, Senghor's pan-Africanism, globalization, and so on)?
In these critical moments of socioeconomic and political change, silence may have
become itself a form of cultural resistance (Roche 1976:42). I discovered that the
borders I thought my pregnancy would help me cross were far more complex
than I had naively anticipated. I was confronted with questions of ethnic identity
through my own race and through my association with the Muslim nurse and
Western medicine and, through my research permits, with the Senegalese gov-
ernment. These questions of ethnicity arose in sharp contrast to my universalistic
gender-identity assumptions.

Conclusion
I went to Youtou ignorant, hoping to learn how Diamat Diola women make
their way through pregnancy and childbirth. I assumed that they, like women
all around the world, would know the facts of pregnancy and childbirth but that
the basic process would be culturally elaborated in a way different than our way
at home. My ignorance lay in a different direction, however. I discovered that
their knowledge was secret, a secrecy not only coming between women and men
but maintained among women. I learned that knowledge withheld from others
is as powerful as is knowledge of the biological process. Knowledge in this
instance is not information but a practice of knowing, a practice from which I was
excluded (see Fabian 1995:45). The secrecy was expressed in silence, and I did
not know if the silence meant that the women had secret knowledge to withhold
or were defensive about their own ignorance. I did not even know whose
ignorance it was.
Yet another dimension was added by the fact that I was pregnant. I, a pregnant
woman, was bent on talking about a subject that exactly no one, least of all a
pregnant woman, should speak about. Thereby I added vulnerability to my
ignorance. To the women of Youtou, my flight from the village and the death of
the baby-to-be must have come as no surprise.16
Although an outsider, through my pregnancy I became even more an insider
than I had wished. What proved to be a barrier to me as an anthropologist was
supposed to be protective for me as a pregnant woman. I became part of the
discourse of Diamat Diola ideas about pregnancy and childbirth-—that forbidden
discourse that was trying to maintain its knowledge and power in opposition to the
encroaching, national authority from outside. In Youtou I became the protagonist
of a cautionary tale, a tale that may still serve as a finger on the lips for those who
ask to break the silence.
van Tilburg Interviews of the Unspoken 187

Notes
Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 94th annual
meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C., November
1995, in a session on anthropologists and their families in the field organized by Renate
Fernandez and David Sutton. I am especially thankful to Renate Fernandez for her
continuing inspiration and support in the writing of this article and to Tom Greaves for
his comments and encouragement. As for my family, without the literal blood transfusion
of my husband Richard Kahn I would not have written this at all. Nor could I have written
it without his invaluable support throughout fieldwork, writing, and rewriting. My
daughters Hannah and Annelie were the driving force of the project. Finally, I would not
have been able to complete the work in a timely manner without a leave of absence, which
was supported by Isabella Lack-O'Neill and granted me by the Ellen Bertrand Library of
Bucknell University.
1. "Gender and Fieldwork," a review article by Hondagneu-Sotelo (1988), and the
introduction to Gendered Fields, by Bell (1993), discuss the most important publications
dealing with the gendered perspective in fieldwork.
2. Nancy Howell records six pregnancies among the 204 primary informants in the
chapter, "Degenerative Diseases in the Field" (Howell 1990).
3. Here it might be useful to distinguish between infertility or barrenness and socially
defined infertility. The woman in Nioumoun was not infertile but bore the blame for her
barrenness and was therefore socially infertile. As results later proved, her husband was
at fault, but he bore no blame. In this case, the woman was marginalized only to be
reintegrated in her village by undergoing the ritual of kanyalen. The ritual and its roles
will be the subject of a future paper (see also Journet 1982).
4. See Gillis, Tilly, and Levine 1992 on how attitudes toward fertility in Europe changed
during the late 18th and early 19th century, partially because the political and economic
climate changed as notions of parenthood became individualized and sentimentalized
and as husbands and wives increasingly began to communicate with each other about fertility.
5. Infant mortality (death from birth through the first year of life) in 1990 in the
Netherlands was 8.9 per 1,000 live births; in Senegal it was 87 (United Nations 1994).
6. Davis-Floyd and Sargent (1996) call this "body knowing"; see also Jordan 1993:53.
7. My father, a village doctor, was frequently called out of bed in the middle of the
night to attend home births.
8. The resistance to French intervention has been well documented (Roche 1976). Since
1983, a separatist movement has been active in the Casamance. For more detailed
descriptions of colonial exploits, see Be'renger-Feraud 1879 and Hardy 1921.
9. As it turned out, our friend's wife must have just become pregnant, but at the time
neither she nor her husband revealed this information to us.
10. The excerpt is from interviews on September 29 and October 2,1983.
11. This secrecy, or rather silence, begs for explanation. Was I involved in a particular
"figure of speech" in this society? Were the women increasingly defending their auton-
omy/authority over the domain of fertility in the very face of losing it? (See also Bellman
1984; Fabian 1995; Girard 1969.)
12. Turner (1997) calls the "asking of questions" into question.
13. All too vivid in my mind was the death of the young pregnant wife of our friend
who had brought us to Youtou. When she started to feel sick her mother had taken her to
the "old women," who had secluded her even while her husband was trying to find a car
to bring her to the hospital. He was not allowed access to her. The woman died.
14. Decisions like this are not without conflict. Choosing to ignore the traditions of the
society one is in produces either a personal conflict or a conflict within the existing power
structures of the fieldwork (Wolf 1992:135).
15. As Bledsoe has pointed out, some associations or secret societies function less as a
source of female solidarity than as a vehicle for older women's political ambitions (1980:173).
16. Patricia Hitchcock remarks in the chapter "Our Ulleri Child" that "Nepalese parents
expect their children to die" (1987:177). The death of her own child in the field created an
understanding between her and the Nepalese mothers. Dettwyler has similarly remarked
that early death in West Africa is too commonplace to be considered a tragedy (1994:24).
An opposite view is offered by Linda Layne in her study of pregnancy loss in our own
188 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

society, where such loss is regarded as a deviation from the expected course of pregnancy.
In our society silence surrounds the woman who has miscarried because we do not have
the proper rites to mourn such a loss (Layne 1994, 1997). My own experience confirms
these observations. In Casamance the women in the hospital encouraged me with excla-
mations such as, "He will come back!" However, on our return home, our friends
stumbled into silence, unsure of what to say.

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