ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way women use song, dance, and monetary exchange to negotiate social relations and maintain baadinyaa, understood as women-centered networks of social support. It shows that performers emphasize baadinyaa in their health-related songs as a way to maintain coherence and meaning, reinterpreting the individualist behavior-change model of health communication through the lens of indigenous systems of communication and relationality. Baadinyaa provides insight into a Mandinka moral economy that involves negotiations of ethics, obligation, and power. In women’s performances, when money dances, it challenges divisions between the social, the economic, and the aesthetic. Important concepts in the moral economy of global health development in The Gambia are reflected in the Mandinka terms yiriwaa and nyaatotaa, which are widely used in health promotion programs. Particularly challenging was the way Ebola prevention programs specifically targeted social practices of care seen as moral obligations, such as looking after the sick and washing the bodies of the deceased.
