Beth A. Buggenhagen

Beth Buggenhagen writes about visual culture, value, gender, and Islam in contemporary West Africa. Her scholarly work emerges from her long-term ethnographic research in Senegal since the early 1990s. She has traced the global trade networks of Senegalese Muslims by focusing on the transmission of enduring social value through valued objects such as cloth and photographs and religious offerings to Muslim clergy.

She is the author of The Future is in Your Hands: Portrait Photography from Senegal (Indiana University Press, 2023), Muslim Families in Global Senegal, published by (Indiana University Press, 2012), an open-access edited volume with Anne Maria Makhulu and Stephen Jackson, Hard Work, Hard Times. Global Volatility and African Subjectivities, published by the University of California Press (2010), and numerous journal articles. Her work was awarded a research grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, and she has participated in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology.