Jola rites of passage produce local subjects. However, many members of the Thionck Essyl community no longer live in the village and are dispersed across all Senegal and beyond. We therefore also need an assessment of how a diasporic community reproduces itself in the face of the long-distance migration of its members. Chapter 2 demonstrates how male initiation reproduces local society. Contrary to Appadurai's rather gloomy view of the decreased capability of local communities to produce locality (Appadurai 1996: 178–99), this chapter takes the point further and attests to the continued capacity of a translocal community to reproduce itself within overwhelming global contexts. I show that in the contemporary context of globalisation, male initiation can still be a social technique for the production of subjectivity. The initiation ritual transforms young men into adults who properly belong to a diasporic community. This is why the ritual has retained its relevance for young men born in the diaspora. My approach is to focus on the historical transformations of local society brought about by the incorporation of local society into the global. The chapter goes on to analyse the translation of these transformations into the ritual process. Like ngoma in colonial Tanganyika, the rite of passage discussed here has mediated the historical transformations of society by including these changes in the ritual (Pels 1996). The ritual practice has been transformed to produce a translocal subjectivity.