Laura Cochrane | Central Michigan University (original) (raw)

Books by Laura Cochrane

John W. Bennett (1918-2005) is best known for his work with Margaret Mead, his participation in t... more John W. Bennett (1918-2005) is best known for his work with Margaret Mead, his participation in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, and his ecological anthropology research in Saskatchewan. His education took place during the 1930s and 40s: a formative time in anthropology and global history. In the last years of his life, Bennett narrated these early experiences in a series of life history interviews with Laura Cochrane. Stories in his words illuminate the era, while Cochrane reviews the debates among, collaborations with, and intertwined social lives of the people he referenced. Several voices contribute to this story alongside Bennett and Cochrane, including Bennett’s sons John M. Bennett and James P. Bennett, Bennett’s colleague Robert Canfield, and Bennett’s former student William Cole.

The book’s larger context is the era’s conversation between the social sciences and U.S. political and social life. Along with economic depression and World War II, Bennett’s story tells of field work adventures, racial and gender inequalities in academia, and the ways social scientists participated in the war. His personal interactions with well-known scholars and cultural luminaries, and his insider accounts of war, ethics, and research, add to our historical lens into the history of anthropology and the United States.

Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal explores faith via personal accounts of family life, politics, tra... more Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal explores faith via personal accounts of family life, politics, travel adventures, and daily prayer. These narratives are framed in discussions of Senegalese cultural ideals and Sufi religious teachings. Sufism is significant within Muslim communities worldwide, creating social, political, and religious networks of believers. This book turns the focus on individuals within these networks, drawing on ethnographic research in both rural and urban towns, and life history interviews with men and women spanning seven years. The author argues that their experiences and beliefs strengthen commitments to faith, provide opportunities for everyday creativity within shared belief systems, and help create Senegal’s cultural ethos that includes ideals of mutual respect and tolerance across religious diversity, and an integration of religious and cultural practices. To what extent can religious practices be individual creative expressions? How do people create personal and shared identities through practices of faith? The common themes throughout the book are religious diversity, varying ways people practice common religious teachings, and a balance between an interior spiritual life and everyday economic and social challenges that people face.

Weaving through Islam in Senegal explores how artists practice their craft work in the contexts o... more Weaving through Islam in Senegal explores how artists practice their craft work in the contexts of Sufism and daily life in central Senegal. Drawing from 17 months of ethnographic study, this volume is a close look at everyday practices of religious beliefs and arts practices in two weaving communities. Placed in context of this region’s religious history, this book describes a contemporary religious diversity that includes Sufism, indigenous religions, and an environment rich in artistic expressions of belief. By focusing on weavers’ perspectives on Islam in daily life, illuminated through personal interviews, this book explores the relationships between artists and their beliefs. Religious beliefs are not their only motivation for weaving, though. Weavers integrate their religious affiliations with their familial, ethnic and regional heritages, creating a set of beliefs that inspires their art work.

Weaving through Islam in Senegal is written for a wide interdisciplinary audience in the arts, social sciences and humanities, in its combination of historical and ethnographic approaches to art and belief. The discussion of local arts-based development projects will resonate with those involved in economic development. Artists and those interested in expressive cultures of West Africa will find descriptions of artists’ workshops and weaving techniques.

By exploring the diversity of personal responses to religious beliefs, this book will give greater attention to the practical importance of Islam in everyday life, and also the significance beliefs have in creative expression.

Papers by Laura Cochrane

Religion and Society, 2021

Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, 2021

Economic Anthropology, 2021

Senegalese religious groups historically have relied on their own networks to manage external cha... more Senegalese religious groups historically have relied on their own networks to manage external challenges, such as colonialism, drought, and economic difficulties. Present-day religious networks often use small businesses to economically support themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research in central Senegal, this article argues that strong religious networks, and practicing Islamic teachings of social welfare, are both the means of creating and the goal of economic stability. Economic gain is a tool with which business owners can support their families and local economies, enabling people to live a religious life within a supportive community.

Africa, 2020

Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture a... more Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture and rural village economies. Rural communities, while small in scale, are creating new ways to transform their degraded environment. Their small size allows them to develop location-specific strategies to manage and improve water, soil and agriculture. This article focuses on two Sufi communities (daaras) in Senegal that integrate environmental work and spirituality. Religious organizations are influential in Senegal, as is the idea that labour is a part of both personal spirituality and shared religious teachings. As agriculture continues to be disrupted because of climate fluctuations, creating a habitable environment relies on applying region-specific agricultural science, and working through local structures. These conceptions of labour, along with the religious structures that support their work, make environmental projects spiritually significant, and also transformative for agriculture in a challenging environment.

Oppression and Resistance: Structure, Agency, Transformation (Book Ed. Gil Musolf, Emerald Publishing), 2017

Senegal’s history since the nineteenth century has favored collective ownership and work, whether... more Senegal’s history since the nineteenth century has favored collective ownership and work, whether state-run cooperatives or community-based organizations (CBOs). This essay first examines the history of resistance to cooperatives imposed by the French colonial administration and Senegal’s independent state until 1980. The primary separate community organizations then were within daaras: communities based on Islamic spiritual principles. The essay then explores today’s CBOs, many of which are faith-based, that resist neoliberal approaches to development, again, through community-based principles. CBOs have grown within the space that state control once occupied, and have as much do with indigenous structures and faith-based principles as they do with globally-recognized models of development. These foundational philosophies shape the ways people organize themselves, choose their shared goals, and elect their leaders. To discuss contemporary trends in community organization, the essay uses ethnographic examples from two present-day communities, one a faith-based daara (Ndem) and the other a five-village CBO (Lac Rose). This history and contemporary examples show that locally-grown organizations resist the easy definitions of colonial, state, or neoliberal development, and take control over the ways they organize their communities.

Central Senegal was once a thriving agricultural area, but over the past century, it has struggle... more Central Senegal was once a thriving agricultural area, but over the past century, it has struggled with repeated droughts, rising temperatures, and land mismanagement. In addition, global inequalities, including colonialism, unequal energy use, and international trade inequities, have escalated both climate change and economic insecurities worldwide. These inequalities in turn have affected local environments and economies. Throughout these long-term crises, in central Senegal, communities have relied on religious networks. Leaders of local economic development projects also work through these networks to rebuild their communities. This article focuses on the extent to which residents of two towns have used these participatory networks to address environmental and economic challenges. Their varied experiences show the importance of using a region’s social foundations in communities’ work toward financial viability. This article argues that local development projects that use these existing strengths as organizing principles are able to adapt to persistent challenges more successfully than those that do not. Existing networks that strengthen communities also strengthen their efforts to become sustainable.

In the summer of 2013, ‘Bamba Merci’ became an omnipresent slogan on public walls throughout Sene... more In the summer of 2013, ‘Bamba Merci’ became an omnipresent slogan on public walls throughout Senegal; it was a social movement started by a prominent leader of the Murid Sufi order. With both political and religious meanings, the graffiti pointed to the intertwined relationships between political and religious life. Senegal’s secular postcolonial state policies allow and encourage open religious dialogue. A state-maintained open public sphere created the possibility for this religious and social movement; a society supportive of social movements, religious expression, and public art created the welcoming forum for the expression. By placing the Bamba Merci graffiti in the context of the secular state and also recent popular social movements in Senegal, this article shows how public expression can illuminate the intersections between political and religious life. The essay concludes by questioning whether this recent graffiti is a contrast to other ethnographic examples of graffiti.

Over the past one hundred years, Senegal has experienced repeated droughts and shifting economic ... more Over the past one hundred years, Senegal has experienced repeated droughts and shifting economic and agricultural policies that have contributed to long-term land degradation in a once-productive agricultural region. Faith-based organizations have become prominent in community-level projects that are working to rebuild Senegal's rural agriculture and work toward environmental sustainability. Through ethnographic interviews with religious leaders and project managers, this article highlights Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant organizations that are involved in environmental and economic development efforts across central Senegal. Local faith-based organizations are effective in this work because they are integral parts of communities, they share communities' faith-based motivations for development work, and they have long-term strategies for sustainability that involve individuals, communities, and their natural environment.

Environmental and economic crises, including land degradation from drought and increased global f... more Environmental and economic crises, including land degradation from drought and increased global food prices, have become localized challenges for communities across the Sahel. Towns throughout central Senegal have struggled to maintain the agricultural and business enterprises on which they once relied. Ndem, a village within this region, has addressed these challenges through their artisanal cooperative, now incorporated into non-governmental organization. While Ndem’s leaders have sound business plans, this essay argues that the continued viability of both the village and cooperative is the result of a community-shared spiritual motivation for the work. Islam, the Murid Sufi order, and the Baay Fall suborder of the Muridiyya provide teachings that directly influence Ndem’s spiritual life, and also its business practices.

In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise natio... more In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise nationalism through their work, particularly in the weaving craft, and enforced this definition through selective state patronage. This ideological and stylistic control echoed state control over economic markets. As subsequent administrations have restructured the economy, leading to a powerful informal business sector, so have independent contemporary weavers redefined artistic nationalism. Using ethnographic and archival interviews, this article examines nationalism in Senegalese weaving, placing the perspectives of contemporary weavers alongside those of two arts administrators who helped to develop state-sponsored programmes in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that contemporary weavers find inspiration from Senegalese nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, yet have modified it to encompass individual expression. Because definitions of artistic nationalism in Senegal have shifted, it remains a significant ideology within the national arts scene.

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2009

Using ethnographic interviews with weavers in Thiès, Senegal, this article argues that artists ma... more Using ethnographic interviews with weavers in Thiès, Senegal, this article argues that artists make processes of weaving practices of their faith. Weavers discursively associate their work with their personal faith and with socially-circulated tenets of Sufism and indigenous systems of belief. I focus on a tacitly expressed analogy that weavers make between their work and faith: the divinely-inspired knowledge needed for personal spiritual transformation, and the technical knowledge needed for artistic innovation. Because weavers adapt their work to new techniques and styles, the ways they express their beliefs through their work also varies and develops. I use pragmatics, or the relationship between beliefs and the ways people implement them, as a framework to explore how weavers express their faith through techniques and imagery.

Posters by Laura Cochrane

The Sahel (area included in map, south of the Sahara) has faced repeated droughts over the past c... more The Sahel (area included in map, south of the Sahara) has faced repeated droughts over the past century. Land mismanagement under colonial and then independent governance compounded the resulting land degradation. Local village development projects in Senegal have been shifting their attention to new agricultural technologies over the past few decades. Their motivation is to rebuild their local economies using agriculture, a trade that once sustained the central regions of Senegal. Through experimental technologies, village leaders are pursuing ways to regenerate and transform both the agricultural trade and their local economies. Though slow, they see these changes as a shift from a degraded economy and environment to a viable place to live in the long term. They seek transformative change through total community engagement in the process of building new skills and technologies. This poster was presented at the 2015 Society of Economic Anthropology annual conference.

John W. Bennett (1918-2005) is best known for his work with Margaret Mead, his participation in t... more John W. Bennett (1918-2005) is best known for his work with Margaret Mead, his participation in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, and his ecological anthropology research in Saskatchewan. His education took place during the 1930s and 40s: a formative time in anthropology and global history. In the last years of his life, Bennett narrated these early experiences in a series of life history interviews with Laura Cochrane. Stories in his words illuminate the era, while Cochrane reviews the debates among, collaborations with, and intertwined social lives of the people he referenced. Several voices contribute to this story alongside Bennett and Cochrane, including Bennett’s sons John M. Bennett and James P. Bennett, Bennett’s colleague Robert Canfield, and Bennett’s former student William Cole.

The book’s larger context is the era’s conversation between the social sciences and U.S. political and social life. Along with economic depression and World War II, Bennett’s story tells of field work adventures, racial and gender inequalities in academia, and the ways social scientists participated in the war. His personal interactions with well-known scholars and cultural luminaries, and his insider accounts of war, ethics, and research, add to our historical lens into the history of anthropology and the United States.

Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal explores faith via personal accounts of family life, politics, tra... more Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal explores faith via personal accounts of family life, politics, travel adventures, and daily prayer. These narratives are framed in discussions of Senegalese cultural ideals and Sufi religious teachings. Sufism is significant within Muslim communities worldwide, creating social, political, and religious networks of believers. This book turns the focus on individuals within these networks, drawing on ethnographic research in both rural and urban towns, and life history interviews with men and women spanning seven years. The author argues that their experiences and beliefs strengthen commitments to faith, provide opportunities for everyday creativity within shared belief systems, and help create Senegal’s cultural ethos that includes ideals of mutual respect and tolerance across religious diversity, and an integration of religious and cultural practices. To what extent can religious practices be individual creative expressions? How do people create personal and shared identities through practices of faith? The common themes throughout the book are religious diversity, varying ways people practice common religious teachings, and a balance between an interior spiritual life and everyday economic and social challenges that people face.

Weaving through Islam in Senegal explores how artists practice their craft work in the contexts o... more Weaving through Islam in Senegal explores how artists practice their craft work in the contexts of Sufism and daily life in central Senegal. Drawing from 17 months of ethnographic study, this volume is a close look at everyday practices of religious beliefs and arts practices in two weaving communities. Placed in context of this region’s religious history, this book describes a contemporary religious diversity that includes Sufism, indigenous religions, and an environment rich in artistic expressions of belief. By focusing on weavers’ perspectives on Islam in daily life, illuminated through personal interviews, this book explores the relationships between artists and their beliefs. Religious beliefs are not their only motivation for weaving, though. Weavers integrate their religious affiliations with their familial, ethnic and regional heritages, creating a set of beliefs that inspires their art work.

Weaving through Islam in Senegal is written for a wide interdisciplinary audience in the arts, social sciences and humanities, in its combination of historical and ethnographic approaches to art and belief. The discussion of local arts-based development projects will resonate with those involved in economic development. Artists and those interested in expressive cultures of West Africa will find descriptions of artists’ workshops and weaving techniques.

By exploring the diversity of personal responses to religious beliefs, this book will give greater attention to the practical importance of Islam in everyday life, and also the significance beliefs have in creative expression.

Religion and Society, 2021

Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, 2021

Economic Anthropology, 2021

Senegalese religious groups historically have relied on their own networks to manage external cha... more Senegalese religious groups historically have relied on their own networks to manage external challenges, such as colonialism, drought, and economic difficulties. Present-day religious networks often use small businesses to economically support themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research in central Senegal, this article argues that strong religious networks, and practicing Islamic teachings of social welfare, are both the means of creating and the goal of economic stability. Economic gain is a tool with which business owners can support their families and local economies, enabling people to live a religious life within a supportive community.

Africa, 2020

Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture a... more Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture and rural village economies. Rural communities, while small in scale, are creating new ways to transform their degraded environment. Their small size allows them to develop location-specific strategies to manage and improve water, soil and agriculture. This article focuses on two Sufi communities (daaras) in Senegal that integrate environmental work and spirituality. Religious organizations are influential in Senegal, as is the idea that labour is a part of both personal spirituality and shared religious teachings. As agriculture continues to be disrupted because of climate fluctuations, creating a habitable environment relies on applying region-specific agricultural science, and working through local structures. These conceptions of labour, along with the religious structures that support their work, make environmental projects spiritually significant, and also transformative for agriculture in a challenging environment.

Oppression and Resistance: Structure, Agency, Transformation (Book Ed. Gil Musolf, Emerald Publishing), 2017

Senegal’s history since the nineteenth century has favored collective ownership and work, whether... more Senegal’s history since the nineteenth century has favored collective ownership and work, whether state-run cooperatives or community-based organizations (CBOs). This essay first examines the history of resistance to cooperatives imposed by the French colonial administration and Senegal’s independent state until 1980. The primary separate community organizations then were within daaras: communities based on Islamic spiritual principles. The essay then explores today’s CBOs, many of which are faith-based, that resist neoliberal approaches to development, again, through community-based principles. CBOs have grown within the space that state control once occupied, and have as much do with indigenous structures and faith-based principles as they do with globally-recognized models of development. These foundational philosophies shape the ways people organize themselves, choose their shared goals, and elect their leaders. To discuss contemporary trends in community organization, the essay uses ethnographic examples from two present-day communities, one a faith-based daara (Ndem) and the other a five-village CBO (Lac Rose). This history and contemporary examples show that locally-grown organizations resist the easy definitions of colonial, state, or neoliberal development, and take control over the ways they organize their communities.

Central Senegal was once a thriving agricultural area, but over the past century, it has struggle... more Central Senegal was once a thriving agricultural area, but over the past century, it has struggled with repeated droughts, rising temperatures, and land mismanagement. In addition, global inequalities, including colonialism, unequal energy use, and international trade inequities, have escalated both climate change and economic insecurities worldwide. These inequalities in turn have affected local environments and economies. Throughout these long-term crises, in central Senegal, communities have relied on religious networks. Leaders of local economic development projects also work through these networks to rebuild their communities. This article focuses on the extent to which residents of two towns have used these participatory networks to address environmental and economic challenges. Their varied experiences show the importance of using a region’s social foundations in communities’ work toward financial viability. This article argues that local development projects that use these existing strengths as organizing principles are able to adapt to persistent challenges more successfully than those that do not. Existing networks that strengthen communities also strengthen their efforts to become sustainable.

In the summer of 2013, ‘Bamba Merci’ became an omnipresent slogan on public walls throughout Sene... more In the summer of 2013, ‘Bamba Merci’ became an omnipresent slogan on public walls throughout Senegal; it was a social movement started by a prominent leader of the Murid Sufi order. With both political and religious meanings, the graffiti pointed to the intertwined relationships between political and religious life. Senegal’s secular postcolonial state policies allow and encourage open religious dialogue. A state-maintained open public sphere created the possibility for this religious and social movement; a society supportive of social movements, religious expression, and public art created the welcoming forum for the expression. By placing the Bamba Merci graffiti in the context of the secular state and also recent popular social movements in Senegal, this article shows how public expression can illuminate the intersections between political and religious life. The essay concludes by questioning whether this recent graffiti is a contrast to other ethnographic examples of graffiti.

Over the past one hundred years, Senegal has experienced repeated droughts and shifting economic ... more Over the past one hundred years, Senegal has experienced repeated droughts and shifting economic and agricultural policies that have contributed to long-term land degradation in a once-productive agricultural region. Faith-based organizations have become prominent in community-level projects that are working to rebuild Senegal's rural agriculture and work toward environmental sustainability. Through ethnographic interviews with religious leaders and project managers, this article highlights Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant organizations that are involved in environmental and economic development efforts across central Senegal. Local faith-based organizations are effective in this work because they are integral parts of communities, they share communities' faith-based motivations for development work, and they have long-term strategies for sustainability that involve individuals, communities, and their natural environment.

Environmental and economic crises, including land degradation from drought and increased global f... more Environmental and economic crises, including land degradation from drought and increased global food prices, have become localized challenges for communities across the Sahel. Towns throughout central Senegal have struggled to maintain the agricultural and business enterprises on which they once relied. Ndem, a village within this region, has addressed these challenges through their artisanal cooperative, now incorporated into non-governmental organization. While Ndem’s leaders have sound business plans, this essay argues that the continued viability of both the village and cooperative is the result of a community-shared spiritual motivation for the work. Islam, the Murid Sufi order, and the Baay Fall suborder of the Muridiyya provide teachings that directly influence Ndem’s spiritual life, and also its business practices.

In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise natio... more In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise nationalism through their work, particularly in the weaving craft, and enforced this definition through selective state patronage. This ideological and stylistic control echoed state control over economic markets. As subsequent administrations have restructured the economy, leading to a powerful informal business sector, so have independent contemporary weavers redefined artistic nationalism. Using ethnographic and archival interviews, this article examines nationalism in Senegalese weaving, placing the perspectives of contemporary weavers alongside those of two arts administrators who helped to develop state-sponsored programmes in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that contemporary weavers find inspiration from Senegalese nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, yet have modified it to encompass individual expression. Because definitions of artistic nationalism in Senegal have shifted, it remains a significant ideology within the national arts scene.

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2009

Using ethnographic interviews with weavers in Thiès, Senegal, this article argues that artists ma... more Using ethnographic interviews with weavers in Thiès, Senegal, this article argues that artists make processes of weaving practices of their faith. Weavers discursively associate their work with their personal faith and with socially-circulated tenets of Sufism and indigenous systems of belief. I focus on a tacitly expressed analogy that weavers make between their work and faith: the divinely-inspired knowledge needed for personal spiritual transformation, and the technical knowledge needed for artistic innovation. Because weavers adapt their work to new techniques and styles, the ways they express their beliefs through their work also varies and develops. I use pragmatics, or the relationship between beliefs and the ways people implement them, as a framework to explore how weavers express their faith through techniques and imagery.

The Sahel (area included in map, south of the Sahara) has faced repeated droughts over the past c... more The Sahel (area included in map, south of the Sahara) has faced repeated droughts over the past century. Land mismanagement under colonial and then independent governance compounded the resulting land degradation. Local village development projects in Senegal have been shifting their attention to new agricultural technologies over the past few decades. Their motivation is to rebuild their local economies using agriculture, a trade that once sustained the central regions of Senegal. Through experimental technologies, village leaders are pursuing ways to regenerate and transform both the agricultural trade and their local economies. Though slow, they see these changes as a shift from a degraded economy and environment to a viable place to live in the long term. They seek transformative change through total community engagement in the process of building new skills and technologies. This poster was presented at the 2015 Society of Economic Anthropology annual conference.