Africa 79 (4), 2009 DOI: 10.3366/E0001972009001053 THE CONSERVATIVE ASPECTS OF A CENTRIPETAL DIASPORA: THE CASE OF THE CAPE VERDEAN TABANCAS Wilson Trajano Filho This article is about a Cape Verdean institution named tabanca – a form of religious mutual aid association. It analyses the continuous flow of resources, values and goods that takes place within this institution in a society deeply marked by migration. More specifically, it examines the effects of some practices of the so-called Cape Verdean diaspora on local forms of sociality, in order to show that, rather than catalysing or inducing local transformations, these flows have a remarkable conservative tendency and contribute to the reproduction of traditional forms of social organization. Cape Verde is composed of nine inhabited islands which are physically very different from one another. Some islands are flat and sandy, such as Maio, Boa Vista and Sal; some have rainfall patterns and soils that enable rudimentary agricultural practice, such as Santiago, Santo Antão and São Nicolau; others are rocky and arid with lunar landscapes, severely restricting possibilities for human settlement. This is the case in São Vicente and some parts of Fogo. The society that emerged in the Cape Verde Islands is the result of the historical encounter between Portuguese and Africans in which the parties involved had to reach a compromise continually negotiated to accommodate social, cultural and linguistic differences in a context in which neither party had the necessary means to impose its own way of life on the other. Creolization is the term I have been using when referring to this historical compromise, and Creole society is the locution naming the social formation that emerged from this process. 1 Since this is an extremely heterogeneous society, it is important to specify exactly what is being addressed when dealing with Cape Verde, in order to avoid meaningless generalizations. The data analysed in this article come from peasant communities in inner Santiago Island. The Cape Verde I present in this article is at variance with the standard image of the country in current anthropological literature, which approaches social life in the archipelago using analytical WILSON TRAJANO FILHO received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has done research on processes of creolization in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. He has been Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Brasilia, since 1993. Presently he is also an Associate of the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale. 1 I must emphasize that my use of the notion of creolization differs from that proposed by Hannerz (1987), which has become so popular in the social sciences. Instead of a root metaphor that depicts a world whose boundaries have become blurred, I think of creolization as a process that takes place in specific historical contexts out of which there has emerged a third entity, that is, a Creole society.