Notes, Sources, Index Notes Chapter 1 1. De Jonghe wrote widely on African religion and ethnology, and his views on "secret societies" and ethnological theory are found condensed in the following works: Les sociétés secrètes au Bas-Congo (Bruxelles, 1907); "Les sociétés secrètes en Afrique," Semaine d'Ethnologie Religieuse Ser. 3 ( 1923); "Formations récents de sociétés secrètes au Congo Belge," Africa 9, no. 1 (1936): 56-63. Unless otherwise indicated, the review of works is drawn from De Jonghe's 1923 article. 2. H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde (Berlin, 1902). 3. S. Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1950). See especially the introduction for explicit mention of this influence. 4. W. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 10 vols. (Leipzig, 1910-20). 5. A. Kuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922-72 (New York, 1973), p. 24. 6. J. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2 vols. (London, 1890); Totemism and Exogamy, 4 vols. (London, 1910). 7. A. Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris, 1909). 8. L. Frobenius, Die Masken und Geheimbünde (Halle, 1898). 9. K. Laman, The Kongo, III (Uppsala, 1962), p. 67. 10. F. Gräbener, "Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Ozeanien," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 37 (1905): 84-90. 11. De Jonghe, Les sociétés secrètes au Bas-Congo. 12. De Jonghe, "Les sociétés secrètes en Afrique." 13. De Jonghe, "Formations récents de sociétés secrètes." 14. J. Van Wing, Etudes BaKongo (Bruxelles, 1959), pp. 426-508. 15. L. Bittremieux, La société secrète des Bakhimba au Mayombe (Bruxelles, 1936). 16. V. Turner, Drums of Affliction (Oxford, 1968), p. 15. 17. Certainly E.E. Evans-Pritchard's classic Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937) set the tone for recognition of a system of explanation of misfortune and the means of dealing with it Recent regional studies in Bantu-speaking Africa that illuminate the general lines of this system include the following: from Tanzania, M.L. Swantz, Ritual and Symbol in Transitional Zaramo Society (Uppsala, 1970); from Uganda, J. Orley, "African Medical Taxonomy," Journal of the Anthropological Soci• ety of Oxford 1, no. 3 (1970): 137-150; from Zimbabwe, GX. Chavunduka, Interaction of Folk and Scientific Beliefs in Shona Medical Practices (London, 1972); from South Africa, H. Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (London, 1977); from Western Zambia, G. Prins, "Disease at the 331 332 NOTES Crossroads: Towards a History of Therapeutics in BuLozi since 1876," Social Science and Medicine 13B (1979): 285-315, and W.M.J. Van Binsbergen, "Regional and Non-Regional Cults of Affliction in Western Zambia," in RP. Werbner, ed., Regional Cults (London, 1977), pp. 141— 175; from Western Congo (Zaire), J.M. Janzen, The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire (Berkeley, 1978), and Janzen, "Ideologies and Institutions in the Precolonial History of Equatorial African Therapeutic Systems," Social Science and Medicine 13B (1979): 317-326. For an essay that seeks to describe the historical subcontinental system, see W. DeCraemer, J. Vansina, and R. Fox, "Religious Movements in Central Africa," Compara• tive Studies of Society and History 18 (1976): 458-475. 18. I am drawing these phrases from my own work, but they appear in most of the above-mentioned publications, frequently using the very same cognates from region to region. 19. The phrase is drawn from Y. Kusikila, Lufwa evo Kimongi e? (Kumba, 1966), published in English translation in J.M. Janzen and W. MacGaffey, eds., Anthology of Kongo Religion (Lawrence, 1974), pp. 48- 55, although the idea is widespread in Bantu Africa. 20. These terms are drawn from Kongo, although the verbal stem of n ganga appears across the entire Bantu-speaking region, as do other terms associated with the therapeutic system under consideration. M. Guthrie's Comparative Bantu, 4 vols. (Hants, 1967) is an important reference for tracing the distribution of verbal concepts connected with this system. 21. Janzen, The Quest for Therapy, 1978. 22. Prins, "Disease at the Crossroads," has demonstrated the effective­ ness of this approach in reconstructing intellectual history. Long-term sur­ viving values and categories, amidst changes, indicate for him the "core" of a culture. He has used therapeutics as such a barometer of Lozi culture in the long term in his historical study Hidden Hippopotamus (Cambridge, 1980). 23. Nsemi, "Min'kisi: Sacred Medicines" in Janzen and MacGaffey, Anthology of Kongo Religion, pp. 34-38. 24. This is especially true of the work in Werbner, Regional Cults, and is exemplified in Werbner5 s introduction, pp. ix-xxxviii. 25. Ibid. Werbner bases his analytical perspective on regional cults in large measure on V. Turner, "Pilgrimages as Social Process," Chapter 5 in his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, 1974), p. 185. 26. Turner, "Pilgrimage as Social Process," pp. 185ff. 27. Werbner, Regional Cults, p. ix. 28. VanBinsbergen,"RegionalandNon-RegionalCults,"pp. 141-175. 29. J.M. Schoffeleers, "Cult Idioms and the Dialectics of a Region" in Werbner, Regional Cults, pp.- 219-239. 30. J. Vansina, The Tio Kingdom of the Middle Congo, 1880-1892 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 221-243. 31. K. Garbett's "Disparate Regional Cults and a Unitary Ritual Field in Zimbabwe" in Werbner, Regional Cults, pp. 55-92, is an exception to Notes 333 this. Garbett, in his analysis of the Mutota cult of Zimbabwe, develops a clear picture of several cults interpenetrating in a single region. Alongside the centralized, hierarchic ancestor cults he finds other nonhierarchic and ter­ ritorially undefined cults (p. 58). 32. Werbner, Regional Cults, pp. xvii-xxii. 33. Van Binsbergen, "Regional and Non-Regional Cults," p. 144. 34. B.T. Van Velzen, "Bush Negro Regional Cults: A Materialist Explanation," in Werbner, Regional Cults, pp. 93-116. 35. Ibid., p. 94. 36. K. Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth (Toronto, 1969), says that millenarian activities provide a test case in social analysis for the joining of statements valid for both participants and investigator. "Beyond their intrin­ sic human interest.. millenarian activities constitute an acute theoretical challenge. They invite a statement through which particular actions and rationalizations may be given a more general validity" (p. 2). 37. C. Geertz, in "Religion as a Cultural System," in M. Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (New York, 1966), cites Santay ana to the effect that" any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncracy" (p. 1). 38. T.O. Ranger, "Healing and Society in Colonial Southern Africa." Unpublished MS, 1978. 39. J. Vansina has developed models of state formation specific to the Tio and Kuba kingdoms in his The Tio Kingdom, and in The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, 1978). 40. J. Goody, in his Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (London, 1971), develops an analysis of state formation for Africa. He acknowledges the importance of Southall's concept of the" segmentary state" in which central and local powers have equal weight, a condition that has often arisen as larger empires or states disintegrate (pp. 9-10). For reasons of technological small scale in food production (the use of the hoe rather than horse- or ox-drawn plow), Goody rejects a "feudal stage" in state formation for most of West and Central Africa, arguing instead for a variety of historical types: the hereditary structuring of ritual powers; the ability to attract and keep a following (privileged descent groups); conquest; diffusion of the insti­ tution and idea of a state; the emergence of a central state from a nucleus in lineages, age sets, cult associations, and other institutions in acephalous society; in opposition to slave raids; or the need to move trade goods across long distances occupied by peoples lacking chiefs (pp. 12-18). Goody would then concur, perhaps, that it is difficult, even unnecessary, to make a sharp distinction between " state" and " cult," and that either can fulfill the functions of centralized or regional institutions. 41. J. Miller, in Ms Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford, 1976), has reviewed models of state formation in Central 334 NOTES Africa, arguing that generally "state" institutions are created in response to the need and desirability of contact between unrelated lineages. Relationships created are by definition political. They may come about in one or several of the following ways: to control scarce but valuable resources such as salt, iron and copper ore, or trade advantages; military or strategic advantage; as innovations capable of attracting manpower, for example, the Mbundu and Imbangala kilombo war camp, a converted initiation camp used to overcome particularistic loyalties of descent groups; ideological innovation relating to large-scale institutional integration; the assistance of outside allies; the con­ trol of commercial monopolies such as those taken over by so-called "broker states" like Angola, between Kasanji and Portugal and Brazil; agricultural surpluses, a necessary but not sufficient factor in state formation; techno­ logical superiority; and individual genius. Most of these factors could be cited as elements in the emergence of Lemba, suggesting the pitfalls of reading into a combination of them any teleological tendency to political consolidation. 42. L. de Heusch, in "Structures de réciprocité et structures