Full Description
An English translation of a French study of the rituals of the Mande people in West Africa.
Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency shows through rich ethnographic analysis how Mande people in West Africa resort to multiple ritual practices to address an "episteme of doubt." In the context of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, climate disruptions, financial crises, and illness, members of "hunter societies," experts who handle certain agentive artifacts, and adepts in a spiritual possession cult deal with a complex past and uncertain future through creative embodied engagement. Formed within and partially against a predominantly Islamic context and the spread of charismatic Christianities, such embodied ways of acting enable these religious specialists to become "virtuous subjects" to change their relations to the world and to themselves. This is an English translation of Corps rituels. La fabrique du religieux en pays mandingue (Mali, Guinée, Côte d'Ivoire).
Contents
Overture
First Movement: Donsoya. Around the hunt
Chapter 1: Donsow: hunters, "civilizing heroes", and ritual experts
Chapter 2. Hunting as a technique
Chapter 3. Animals, spirits and "their" humans
Second Movement: Basitigiya. The practice with "fetishes"
Chapter 4. "Fetishes": those "persons who are not persons"
Chapter 5. Flesh against flesh with "fetishes"
Third Movement: Jin?d?n. A spirit-possession cult
Chapter 6. "My she-devil loves a good vibe": urban spirits and their masters
Chapter 7. The technology of possession
Chapter 8. Blurred boundaries and (postmodern) construction of self
Coda
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
