The social life of things and the enchantment of the world in central Africa and the diaspora

This article is a study of the common aspects of a vision of a traditional spiritualized world, or in the words of Chakrabarty, an enchanted world, shared by people in the macro-region of central Africa as well as in the diaspora experience of Central Africans during the era of the slave trade. The objective is to observe how material culture actively participated in interpersonal relations and, as Adjurn Appadurai proposes, how it had a social life that gave significance to the lives of people. It also explores how objects participated in or expressed this vision of an enchanted world. Moreover, using diverse sources, the article will analyze data from the diaspora to elaborate a proposal which may also be applied to Central-African contexts.