Cultivating Care: African Sisters at the Mission of St. Joseph (Senegal)

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Within missionization, practices of care are coded as feminine, assigned to women and often overlooked as labor. Tending to the sick, laundry, cooking, and feeding are often rendered invisible in the domestic sphere and undervalued in missionization compared to practices commonly coded as vocational (and masculine), such as recruiting converts, teaching the catechism, giving sacraments, saying Mass, and translating religious texts into local languages. Since 1863, the convent at the Mission of St. Joseph (Ngasobil, Senegal) has been home to the first order of autochthonous West African religious sisters cultivating a uniquely Senegalese Catholic community. Their everyday practices of care created community not simply by providing material support, but forging kinship between themselves, refugees, and formerly enslaved individuals who gathered at Ngasobil from afar. Archaeological, archival, and oral historical investigation point towards a community intentionally built through African women’s care for each other and their labor of cultivating community.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow