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BORN IN THE USA: NAMING CEREMONIES OF INFANTS AMONG SIERRA LEONEANS LIVING IN THE AMERICAN CAPITAL 'What is your name?' I asked a seven year old girl who sat down beside me.

'Amy, my name is Amy'. She wore a blue and white polka-dot dress

with a crisp crinoline beneath it, black patent leather 'Maryjanes' and white cotton socks with frilly laced trim. Her father, sitting nearby, smiled. But her aunt Sama, magnificent in a brightly coloured dress of West African cloth, upbraided the child:

'Your name is Amie, Aminata! You are Sierra Leonean, not American!'

Amy/Aminata stared blankly, ignoring Sama. Sama stared back, then turned on the child's father:

'What are you doing? Why do you let your child take on this American name? How will she know who she is?'

For Sama, as for other Sierra Leoneans living in the diaspora, names - particularly of children born and raised in America - have come to symbolize the boundaries of a community based in an imagined homeland. To change a name to 'sound American', one parent told me, 'is to erase our existence'.

This essay is based upon two years of fieldwork in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area among an ethnically diverse community of Sierra Leonean Muslim migrants. My informants live in settings as varied as suburban Maryland/Virginia and the heart of the inner city. With no physical ethnic neighbourhood in the classic sense, they have created for themselves a sense of community rooted in their memories of an African homeland, in ethnicity, and in religion.1

Central to the lives of many parents is the notion of an 'authentic' Sierra Leonean Muslim culture. Articulated in a number of ways, this notion is centred on a powerful, romanticized, and deeply nostalgic telling of homeland - one that, for many of my informants, is entwined with Islam. Parents often lament the 'Americanization' of their children and work to offset the process. Particularly through ceremony and ritual, parents draw for their children a set of boundaries that reflect a collective identity, protect their children from outside forces, and construct for them an authoritative 'telling' of an imagined homeland. To their parents, Sierra Leonean children represent a metaphorical border zone from which parents gaze into a re-created Sierra Leone, a homeland that is imbued with their own longing for an 'uncontaminated' preimmigration past, the so-called 'pure culture' of home.

Ordered to reflect the familiar (homeland), naming ceremonies nevertheless enact the unfamiliar (America). In turn, the American

landscape, shaped and understood in terms of its juxtaposition to the Sierra Leone homeland, deepens the boundaries, making them appear impenetrable. But are they? Participants in naming ceremonies continually recast boundaries in response to a series of references embedded in the opposition of self/other. That opposition, informed by the problematic of displacement, constructs multiple frames of reference and meaning in which the deeply territorialized and imagined constructs homeland/America encounter actual lived experience, simultaneously locating seemingly separate spheres of meaning within one social space. Hence, naming ceremonies, in their capacity to imbue geographic space with the imagined boundaries of homeland, continually recast those boundaries in response to the ongoing negotiation of meaning, creating multiple domains within which participants respond to social, religious, political and economic pressures, and providing the ground on which social experience is mediated in more complex and differentiated ways.

Thanksgiving Day, 1991 My husband and I enter the living room of Abdul and Isha's suburban northern Virginia home, a modest second-floor two-bedroom garden apartment in a quiet working class neighbourhood. In the small room we encounter about twenty-five men and women who are engaged in a variety of activities. Most of the men sit on couches lining two walls of the room. Some are wearing pale blue or white embroidered African shirts, a few even wear patterned shirt-pants outfits, but most are dressed casually in American clothing. The women, virtually all wearing brightly coloured dresses tailored from African cloth, move back and forth between the bedroom (where a three-week old girl is being prepared for her ritual naming), the living room (where food is laid out), and the kitchen (where, as I would soon learn, a second table is covered with food). Abdul, his brother, and the imam who will perform the ceremony sit in folding chairs facing the row of couches. Abdul wears an African shirt, polyester pants, and a white cotton crocheted prayer cap. Abdul's brother and the imam are dressed similarly. Above the chatter of hosts and guests, Qur'anic recitation sounds from a battery-powered cassette player that sits on an end table by the sofa; concurrently a professional football game blares from the 27" colour television that dominates one corner of the living room.2

As in many Sierra Leonean homes, the walls are sparsely decorated with framed posters of Qur'anic verses, a black-framed colour picture of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and several pieces of tourist art from back home: roughly carved generic mini-masks and banana leaves with ink drawings of 'natives' in 'traditional' costume. Over the front door hangs a framed, glossy magazine photograph (Time or Newsweek most likely) of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, by now ex-president and first lady. The Reagans, smiling, wave to an audience that is unseen but undoubtedly enthralled. My husband and I both note instantly the seeming incongruity of this particular image. However, to Abdul and his wife the Reagans seem perfectly in place, simultaneously sharing the wall with both religious and homeland representations.

The juxtapositions of image and sound, particularly the Qur'anic recitation and football 'sportspeak', intrigue me even more. Early on in my fieldwork I might have presumed that the television would be shut off when the naming ceremony began. By now I am used to the swirl of sounds, sacred and profane, at such occasions playing side by side without conflict. This ceremony is one that purports to challenge such juxtapositions, to reassert an 'authentic' over the 'syncretic'. Nevertheless, as the imam recites Qur'anic verses to open the naming ceremony, the football play-by-play continues in the background, becoming part of the event. Eyes, at one moment fixed on the imam, drift to the television at any possibility of a dramatic play. Even the imam, my husband later claimed, 'had one eye on the game', while never missing a Qur'anic beat.

The layout of the food and the corresponding swirl of smells also reflects the duality of the event. For today we are celebrating both a Sierra Leonean Muslim naming and the American holiday of Thanksgiving. The table set up in the living room is covered with the usual West African-style fare for such events: plasauce (a leaf and palm oil based stew) and rice, roasted halal meat on skewers, somosas, salad, fruit and ginger beer. The aroma of onions, pepper, ginger and hot palm oil fill the apartment. Most ceremonies, whatever the occasion, are 'potluck', with all participants expected to bring a dish - a 'sacrifice'. I add my own offering, a home-baked banana bread, my usual - and very popular - contribution, and compliment the women around me for laying out such a lovely table.

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'Wait', one woman tells me with a gleam in her eyes, 'you haven't seen it all!'

Taking me firmly by the arm, she leads me into the kitchen, where a complete and very traditional American turkey dinner is laid out on a second table. Ordered from a local supermarket, cooked and ready to serve, was a fully stuffed and roasted 15-pound turkey. The aroma of the bread stuffing - the combination of rosemary, thyme, celery and onion - wafted through the room. Alongside the turkey sat the usual American trimmings: mashed potatoes, corn, green beans and cranberry sauce. If the aromas of the living room evoked memories to us all of Africa, the kitchen greeted me with all the sensory reminders of childhood holidays with family and friends.

The naming ceremony, a combination of Qur'anic recitation and a sermon during which the mother and child sit at the centre of the room with the imam, cannot commence until Isha is satisfied that she and her 3-week old daughter are properly attired. Dressed in Western clothing - a colourful skirt and top reserved for special events, and unveiled - Isha will not let the ceremony start until she has draped a large piece of patterned cloth from Sierra Leone over her head. In arranging this cloth she makes sure that her baby, also dressed in Western clothing (a two-piece white knitted outfit that I had given as a birth gift) has a bit of the cloth draped over her as well. When Isha is satisfied that she and her daughter are properly covered, the naming ceremony begins.

It was only after I had given birth to my son two years later and was given a bolt of African cloth by a Zimbabwean friend - 'so you can wrap your child in Africa' - that I understood the importance that Isha gave to wrapping her daughter and herself in a bit of cloth from Sierra Leone. Dressed in the 'Sunday best' of the American world in which her child was born, Isha's insistence upon 'wrapping herself in Africa' dramatized the importance of homeland to the participants. Using the cloth to mask the realities of their American context and connecting herself and her American-born child through that cloth to homeland, Isha blurred the boundaries of the seemingly separate worlds that were symbolized in a Sierra Leonean-born mother and father and an American-born child, and by the multiple representations of the two worlds in which they lived. The cloth linked the incongruous juxtapositions of the event, symbolizing the importance of connecting two worlds so that the newborn was not abandoned to the world of her birth.

'This child is being named properly' The ceremony begins with Qur'anic recitation. The imam, the father, and the mother, holding the infant in her arms, all sit in the centre of the room on metal folding chairs. The guests grow quiet; the tape player has been shut off, but the football

game plays on. The imam, who has arrived recently from Sierra Leone, is a follower of the Saudi-trained Imam Bashara, a religious teacher who has been gaining prominence in Freetown and whose influence was beginning to reach into the Washington, D.C. community at the beginning of my fieldwork.4 The imam begins his sermon, which he delivers in Krio, by praising 'the Arabs' for their 'proper' practice. He implores all present to follow their example:

If you practice as the Arabs do, then you will reap the same benefits. Your children will be trained properly and have the tools not to give in to the evils of America. This child is being named properly. There is no drink here. I have seen too much of that in America...

Focusing on the correct behaviour of Muslims in general, and the proper way in which to name a child in particular, he continues:

When naming a child in the U.S., many parents give big parties. They serve alcohol. This is not proper. When a child is born, after seven days you are to call the adhan (the call for prayer) in her ears and name the child. This is our obligation to the child. How will the child know who she is until we name her? How will she know she is a Muslim? This child will be brought up properly. Her parents have set her feet on the right path.

In challenging what he perceives as the syncretic, corrupted practices of some Muslim Sierra Leoneans, this imam implores his followers to search for authenticity in purity of practice. In his sermon he attempts to dismantle and, ultimately, erase elements of practice in the United States that he deems alien. His assertion that he has seen too much evil in America is ultimately directed at practices within his own community, rather than an abstract evil Other called America.

To many of the participants at this event the imam's words hit home. Turning back to perceived 'traditional' practices - in this case naming children within a traditional time frame (within the first seven days of a child's life) rather than within the prolonged time frame that has emerged in the United States (whenever enough money is saved to have a big party) - is for many a strategy whereby new parents can regain a sense of self that they feel has been lost living in a foreign context.

The sermon ended, the imam names the baby. Taking her from her mother, holding her close to him, he whispers the adhan, then her names into both her ears so that only she can hear. The infant lies quietly in his arms while all look on. The imam then turns to the parents and asks if they had reached agreement together on the child's names. They affirm this quietly and the imam announces the baby's name aloud several times. Her name, we are told, is Adana. It means 'the beginning of humanity'. It is this name, first whispered to the child and then announced publicly, that introduces the newborn to her community.

The naming ceremony complete, the food is served. Having done their best to ignore

the football game during the proceedings, the men now turn full attention to the television. The older children present, all either American-born or having lived most of their lives in the United States, also sit down to watch the game. I hear them complaining quietly to each other that they have missed important plays. The women begin to serve the men, piling Sierra Leonean food onto heavy-duty paper plates. Sitting to the side writing notes, I am ordered by the women to 'Get up and serve your husband', who has become drawn into the men's discussion of the game. The women instruct me to fill his plate with Sierra Leonean food first; the turkey will be served afterwards.5

All the trimmings This particular event was shaped in the context of a series of discourses and counter-discourses in which issues of homeland, Islamic practice, and identity intertwined to shape and inscribe the terrain on which the ceremony was taking place. It also entailed a vigorous challenge to practices common among Sierra Leoneans in this community.

Most naming ceremonies that I attended were elaborate affairs, 'big parties' held in rented halls with a hired disc jockey blasting 'party music' through over-sized speakers, and often with alcohol present for those who wished to consume it. As one informant told me, an elaborate party 'is more important now than naming your child was in the traditional time. You don't want your child to grow up thinking you didn't give them the best'. Parents often scrimp and save for a year or more to afford the event. As a result, many children are well into toddlerhood before they are officially named. Yet some Sierra Leonean Muslim parents worry that unnamed children are in danger of spiritual anonymity. One informant feared for her one year old daughter:

'What if the child dies before she is named? It would be a disaster! The child would have no identity before God!'

Increasingly, some parents have begun to contest the 'big party' naming ceremonies, Abdul and Isha among them. Their turn toward practices defined as more authentic cannot be seen as the simple erasure of elements deemed foreign. Rather, they continually recast imagined traditional forms to construct an essentialized Muslim Sierra Leonean homeland.

Community, defined by the elusive construct of homeland, built up and authenticated by the categories 'Us' and 'Them', and illustrated in the naming ceremony described above, forms the foundation on which Sierra Leonean men and women build their immigrant lives in the United States. But as Angelika Bammer (1994:xii) has pointed out, 'as we ever more obsessively attempt to specify our precise locations (the familiar "I am a [fill in the

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 14 No 1, February 1998 17

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blanks]" recitation), our sense of identity is ineluctably, it seems, marked by a peculiarly postmodern geography of identity: both here and there and neither here nor there at one and the same time.'

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the finale to Adana's naming ceremony. After sharing the Sierra Leonean food prepared specifically for this occasion, in due course we move on to the kitchen to partake of the 'American' fare. The men, who had expressed great enthusiasm for the 'African' food, eat with gusto, but are markedly less animated about the turkey dinner. After my husband and I voice our own preference for the plasauce, some confess to us that they find the turkey rather bland (they were not wrong). The children, however, are a different story. They move with greater ease from living room to kitchen tables. Piling plates high with Thanksgiving dinner, they settle back down in front of the football game. The naming ceremony over, it is time to celebrate Thanksgiving. To the kids, the turkey and trimmings are a treat, a holiday break from the African food that constitutes so important a part of their normal daily diet. Much to their parents' consternation, the

Thanksgiving dinner is familiar, delicious, theirs. E

JoAnn D'Alisera Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Creighton University, Omaha, NE 68178

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1996 African Studies Association meeting. I am deeply grateful to my husband Joel Gordon for his collaboration during my fieldwork, and in writing this paper. I would also like to thank Alma Gottlieb for reading several drafts of this paper and for her insightful comments. Thanks should also go to Rosalind Shaw for insights concerning Imam Bashara, Edward Bruner, Carole Counihan, and Susan Jelly for their critical reading of this essay.

1. For a more detailed exposition of many of the ideas presented here see D'Alisera 1997.

2. Sierra Leonean men who choose to participate in sports in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are overwhelmingly football fans, and more importantly Washington Redskins fans. Games are rarely missed, and this was the year that the Redskins would win the Superbowl. Baseball, the 'national pastime', was of no interest to these men. Women, if interested in sports, would only express that interest in terms of the men they were involved with, although many of the women who were food vendors in the District displayed Redskins paraphernalia on their food carts because they said it pleased their customers and made for better business (D'Alisera 1997).

3. In the Sierra Leonean context one scholar has written that 'sacrifice' refers to 'strategies employed...to control the outcomes of spiritual and

human action' and to 'appease angry ancestors' (Ferme 1992:27). Of the many forms such sacrifices may take, the one I refer to involved the preparation of special foods and their placement in auspicious places at ceremonies. As Ferme notes (1992:27), what makes these actions sacrifices is 'their ritual setting, with the offering of prayers and blessings' in a communal setting.

4. By 1995 I was told that a group of Imam Bashara's followers had formed in the District, where they meet monthly and hold transcontinental conference calls with their spiritual leader in Freetown.

5. Women in the community often took me to task for being a 'bad wife'. 'You are going to lose that man', they would tell me. 'You don't pay enough attention to him. He is too good for you!' When I attended community events without him, they would often send me home with food and ginger beer, trying to cover my neglect. When they thought that I was being really neglectful, they would tease me by telling my husband directly, 'Get rid of that one and we will find you a nice Sierra Leonean wife!

Bammer, Angelika. 1994. Displacement: Cultural Identities in Question. Angelika Bammer, ed. Pp. xi-xx. Bloomington: Indiana U.P.

D'Alisera, JoAnn. 1997. The Transnational Search for Muslim Identity: Sierra Leoneans in America's Capital. PhD Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Ferme, Mariane. 1992. 'Hammocks Belong to Men, Stools to Women': Constructing and Contesting Gender Domains in a Mende Village (Sierra Leone, West Africa). PhD Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

INDIGENOUS HUMAN RIGHTS Anthropologists have long been active in trying to further Indigenous Human Rights, but in recent years the lead has been taken by specialist NGOs such as Survival. A panel discussion jointly organized by the RAI and Survival, held on 12 November 1997 at the Scientific Societies Lecture Theatre in the West End of London (moved from the old Museum of Mankind's lecture theatre as it was too small). The evening was opened by Jonathan Benthall recalling a similar meeting held in 1971 at the foundation of Survival International. The panel, chaired by Olivia Harris, brought together Stephen Corry (Survival), Gordon Bennett (legal advisor to Survival), Laura Rival (University of Kent), Richard Wilson (University of Sussex), and George N. Appell (Brandeis University, founding sponsor of the Anthropologists' Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research - AFUAR) to discuss the relationship to wider questions of human rights, and the actual and potential role of anthropologists in supporting indigenous human rights. The audience comprised activists, anthropologists and lawyers (many of whom had experience or interest in combining these skills), whose number and questions made evident a will that anthropologists should return their expertise to the field as advocates of indigenous human rights.

Different suggestions of the appropriate units with which to measure indigenous human rights were discussed, and the strategy of special rights itself questioned. Each presentation addressed tensions in working the interface between social pragmatics, which are inherently dynamic, and usable units which require edification. A contrast emerged in the fields that NGOs, lawyers and anthropologists occupy; in order to gain currency, the media require a simplification for public opinion, whereas the law requires a simplification from indigenous opinion. The need for an 'increasingly simplified message' leads Survival to pragmatically portray only certain aspects of indigenous life (Corry), whilst legal discourses need codifications that appear to simplify human rights (Bennett), and simplify indigenous sociality - thus misrepresenting complex realities and power structures and impeding implementation (Rival, Wilson). The role of anthropologists in returning information represented a further position of advocacy (Appell). The value of ethnography directed at these complexities was reiterated by several speakers who pointed towards solutions through local activism.

Corry addressed the media driven changing role of Survival which remains akin to a forensic advocate, defending indigenous clients against transgressors in

the presence of the jury which is public opinion, and which revolves on the symbiotic flows of messages in the media, subscription income and pressure on powerful organizations operating in indigenous areas. A 'romanticized' portrayal, avoiding issues such as past headhunting, or present whaling and trapping, is rather Survival showing the client in good light to pre-empt media portrayals of 'savages'; there is no fixed end point in human rights, and the real gains made may yet be undone.

Bennett reviewed the changes to human rights brought into law since Survival began, and contrasted universal and specific rights. Whilst some national constitutions confer special status on various bases, regional organizations have also formed whose conventions and commissions supplement several international declarations established under the auspices of the UN. Rather than from grand legislation, the reconciliation of indigenous interests with those of the wider community will come through a case by case basis, primarily from indigenous peoples themselves - efforts which surveyors, anthropologists and lawyers should prepare to assist.

Through long involvement as anthropologist and activist with the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador, Rival presented limitations in the aims and bases

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