Catastrophe Africa: Collective Representations of African Health 3
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Janzen / Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal Page 1 REPRESENTATIONS, RITUAL, & SOCIAL RENEWAL: ESSAYS IN AFRICANIST MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2004 - 2013 John M. Janzen Professor of Anthropology The University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66045 [email protected] Janzen / Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal Page 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction 1. Representations, Ritual, and Social Renewal (& presentation)1 II. Representations 2. Catastrophe Africa: Collective Representations of African Health 3. Central African Healing Traditions (& presentation) 4. Daybreak in the Heart of Darkness: Public Health in Early Colonial Lower Congo 5. Sheikhs, Saints, and Baraka: Sufi Healing in Central Sudan (& presentation) III. Reading the Signs 6. Understanding Misfortune and Affliction: Why Divination is so Central to African Healing (& presentation) 7. Etiological Dualism in Ebola Public Health Crises in Central Africa 8. Dumuna: The Power of the Margins and Subaltern Authority in North Kongo (or, Healing Social Contradictions) (& presentation) 9. Ngoma, a Widespread Sub-Saharan Therapeutic Institution (& presentation) 10. Trauma Healing in Breaking Cycles of Violence (& presentation) IV. The Social Reproduction of Health 11. Care-giving, Therapy Management, and Power (& presentation) 12. The Social Reproduction of Health 1 Powerpoint “Presentations” accompanied these print chapters and are accessible in pdf format. Photos or diagrams are usually referenced in the text by bold-lettered phrase or name. Janzen / Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal Page 3 I. Introduction Janzen / Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal Page 4 Chapter 1 REPRESENTATIONS, RITUAL, AND SOCIAL RENEWAL: ESSAYS IN AFRICANIST MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY The core of this collection of essays was assembled in 2004 spring sabbatical lectures at Harvard University2 and at the Medical University of Vienna.3 Since then I have added other lectures, essays, and a proposal from other projects.4 The thematic focus of these writings is on how the signs of sickness and healing shape the production of health, that is the set of cultural understandings, expressions, behaviors, and socioeconomic relations that maintain health and ill health, or restore it where it is broken. This connection between representations and lived experience in health and healing is of interest both from a theoretical perspective as found in a large body of literature in anthropology, history, performance studies, and public health, as well in the inductive portrayal and analysis of specific practices in African societies, particularly in Western Equatorial Africa where I am best acquainted. The Kongo ritual of dumuna serves as a foil to explore one such connection between a particular ritual embedded in social practices and assumptions, and the production and reproduction of health. Obviously this is but one of the many representations of how sickness is identified and health restored. A further theme that runs through these essays is that the circumstances of health in Western Equatorial and Central Africa, and the scholarship about it, are distinctive in a global perspective. Otherwise put, to what extent is the particular burden of disease and the way it is approached in these Africa societies unique among human societies and thus to scholarship in medical anthropology? Answering this question yields an Africanist medical anthropology. Dumuna A quick review of known uses of this ritual demonstrates how extensive are its networks of meaning and contexts of use, requiring well-honed analytical strategies to understand and to interpret it. In a first use, dumuna is done by some healers at the close of a successful treatment, shown in accompanying illustrations of Kongo doctor/nganga Nzoamambu. Three times he led the woman between his spread legs. Following that, three times he led her in a kind of jumping handshake. The kink in her lower back clearly loosened, she went of happily to her day in the field. Dumuna confirmed this successful treatment. In another rendering of dumuna, thrice jumping action was performed by a representative of the distressed individual’s father’s clan. The “father” held both hands under the armpits of the distressed individual. Three times he lifted her up in a jumping action, and then pronounced the blessing verbally. This was intended to neutralize any lingering antagonism or ill will, and replace it with the support of 2 At Harvard University I was invited to participate in the Working Group on Health, Healing, and Ritual Practice of the “Harvard Africa Initiative,” put in motion by Harvard College to articulate curriculum, research, and resources in African Studies. Two lectures were presented to the International Center for Population and Development, where I was a visiting scholar. 3 At the Medizinische Universitaet Wien, formerly a section of the University of Vienna, I was a visiting fellow in the Department of Ethnomedicine and Public Health within the Institute for the History of Medicine. I am grateful to Professor Dr. Armin Prinz for his generous invitation and to Lecturer Ruth Kutalek for her hospitality. 4 See first note of each chapter for background on when it was prepared, presented, and subsequently used. Janzen / Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal Page 5 the paternal kindred. Dumuna was also embodied in the rites of a North Kongo medicine, called Dumuna, as seen in a photo of the nganga leaping in the air after contacting the nkisi. A further remarkable documentation of the dumuna in Kongo rites shows as the climactic enactment of a healing-inauguration of the mpu chiefship. This case will be described and discussed in more detail in chapter 8—"Dumuna: The Power of the Margins & Subaltern Authority in North Kongo (or, Healing Social Contradictions)". In a structural relationship that is the inverse of the paternal blessing dumuna of the child, here the dumuna is enacted by the patrifilial children–the gathered children of the men of a matrilineage, the political constituency so to speak–upon their father who is being healed and lifted to a sacred position over them. The healing of the father as a prelude to his inauguration is at once also a healing of the community through a re-establishment of authority. The Church of the Holy Spirit in Africa, one of many independent Christian churches in the Lower Congo, has incorporated the dumuna rite as a climactic finale to its worship services. In addition to “the blessing,” “the healing,” and general singing-dancing and scripture reading, the jumping, dancing, hand-shaking dumuna is at the heart of the “weighing of the spirit.“ In this rite a ranking prophet stands with hands trembling in the spirit. Another adherent, whose spirit will be “weighed,” evaluated or measured, dances out before the weigher officiant. The weighee extends a hand out to the weigher. If the hand is not grasped, that is if the spirit is not adequate for them to connect, the weighee must confess before the weigher. If the weighee measures up, the hands connect, and the weigher propels the weighee into three leaping handshakes. Three times this routine is repeated, each time the jump more spectacular than the one preceding it. So prominent is this rite that the hilltop center of the Church of the Holy Spirit is called Sala Duma, there where they do dumuna. All of these instances of dumuna suggest a crossing over, a transcendent vision of the human condition. The patrifilial blessing, the patrifilial children in turn blessing their father, the weighing of the spirit, and the declaration of an affliction healed, seem to expand the social space around the formerly isolated afflicted one. Further elaboration of this ritual and significations will be offered in chapter 8. Ritual and Ritualization Close scrutiny of instances such as dumuna allow us to elaborate and theorize on the anthropology of signs in sickness, suffering, disease and healing, and the production and reproduction of health. Our common sense tells us that certain aspects of sickness and healing are ritualized, —life crises and transitions, social dimensions of concern, care and comfort. When we speak of ritualization in connection with sickness, suffering, and healing, we usually mean that special symbols and metaphors are used to mirror, clarify, and express these experiences in wider realms of personhood, society, life and thought that they are not readily dealt with in everyday, conventional terms. The early 20th century anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep gave us the vocabulary of ritual, or rites of passage. It consists of a stage of transition away from an existing social role or status, a stage of transition during which the subject is liminal, in a threshold state; and a third stage, of transition back into society in a new role or status, sometimes that of chronic disease.5 This is seen clearly in the case of a Xhosa igqira in Capetown at the moment of “entering the white” stage of apprenticeship. 5 See J.M. Janzen, The Social Fabric of Health, discussion on ritualization, in chapters 5 and 6.. Janzen / Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal Page 6 The very notion of “ritual” in anthropological usage has so many possible understandings that one must stake out a claim before using it. The Ethnomedicine Library in Vienna has over fifty books and articles catalogued around the world "ritual," and we know it is a favorite notion of anthropologists. Ethologists love the term; we see how it is defined in a recent encyclopedia.6 In ethology, [ritual is] a stereotype that occurs in certain behaviour patterns when these are incorporated into displays. For example, the exaggerated and stylized head toss of the goldeneye drake during courtship is a ritualization of the bathing movement used to wet the feathers; its duration and form have become fixed. Ritualization may make displays clearly recognizable, so ensuring that individuals mate only with members of their own species. Linguists also love the term ritual. Sherwin Wilcox, a cognitive linguist, uses the term to discuss the acquisition of language in children, and perhaps even historically in human prehistory.7 Ritualization is a process that is driven by repetition.