Gokee/Assembling the Village, 4. Everyday Life in the Land of Gold

Drawing mostly, though not exclusively, on the ethnography of Malinke societies with direct historical ties to the land of Bambuk, this chapter paints a portrait of everyday interaction from the 18th century onwards that, when viewed against the historical backdrop of the previous two chapters, offers a means of “upstreaming” into the medieval era at the microscale of the village and the mesoscale of the regional landscape. The chapter begins by defining the key institutions of house and lineage, then moves to describe some of the subsistence regimes, craft economies, exchange networks, and religious rituals that would have recursively shaped interactions among people and things in the village of Diouboye.