Full Description
Zanzibar, an island off the East African coast, with its Muslim and Swahili population, offers rich material for this study of identity, religion, and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the phenomenon of spirit possession in Zanzibar Town and the relationships created between humans and spirits; it provides a way to apprehend how society is constituted and conceived and, thus, discusses Zanzibari understandings of what it means to be human.
Contents
Map of the Western Indian Ocean
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction
Considering perspectives on spirit possession
The fieldwork: people, engagement and context
The fieldwork: ritual participation
Performance, meaning and reflexivity
Ritual, communication and enactment
Knowledge, experience and forms of negotiation
The book
Chapter 2. Introduction to Zanzibar: the place, its politics and organization
A view of the past and the present
Identity, social privileges and political reorganization
A plural society
Gender, distinctions and effects in everyday and ritual life
Gender, ritual participation and knowledge
Chapter 3. Spirits, possession and personhood
The position of spirits
Spirits are beings with a worldly existence
Spirit possession and practices
Personhood, notions of strength and self-control
Experiencing spirits
Chapter 4. Makabila, people and spirits
Articulation of differences and the problem of identity
Identification of a spirit
The demands of spirits belonging to different makabila
The world of spirits and human beings
Chapter 5. Human concerns, spirits and recreation of relationships
How the spirits reveal their presence in the human world
Communication between humans and spirits
The ritual group and the ritual framework
Ngoma ya sheitani: a celebration and a cure
Chapter 6. Between self and other: body and mind
Ngoma ya ruhani
States of body and states of mind
A bodily experience of spirits
Losing oneself to the spirit
Altered states of body, altered states of mind
Chapter 7. Gender: relations, markers and sexuality
Gender and complementarity
Concealment and disclosure
Acts of disclosure and moral ambiguity
Enactment and perceptions of the body
Strict categories in a flexible universe
Gender images and human practices
Chapter 8. Women, men and gendered spirits
A ngoma ya kibuki ritual
Matters of affection, pride and self-control
Presentation, representation and excess
Comedy, parody and the ways of humans and spirits
Body, aesthetics, and gender images
On reflections and acts of transgression
Chapter 9. Conclusion: social identities and dramatization of the other
An aesthetic moving together
Improvisation, play and the dramatization of a life-world
Reflections on embodiment and modes of knowing
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
