THE LAND AS BODY Marxist or symbolist approaches to the medical domain among the Manjaks of Guinea-Bissau Wim van Binsbergen |
Abstract[i]
Although
neo-Marxism informed the authors field-work on the
therapeutic effectiveness of rituals among the Manjaks in
northwestern Guinea-Bissau, the explanatory value of materialist
models turned out to be limited. Far from collapsing under the
impact of capitalism (through migrant labour in Senegal and
France), Manjak society keeps up an intact symbolic order.
Migrants continue to interpret their physical and mental
disorders in local terms and to participate in expensive rituals
which absorb their capitalist earnings. Thus they submit to the
gerontocratic order, restoring their roots in a cosmology in
which the (orifice-less) Perfect Body ultimately consists of the
ancestral Land itself. Spatio-temporal belonging, filiation,
domestic kinship power and bodily functions thus merge,
illuminating many aspects of illness behaviour and its
expressions in ritual and everyday life. Neo-Marxism,
epistemologically linked to societies under capitalism, scarcely
explains this repertoire of symbols yet helps us to
pinpoint its unexpected vitality.
The relations between the symbolic order and the political economy of any social formation are unmistakable and often throw an interesting light upon the specific structure and dynamics of the symbolic order. But the potential of such analysis gets spent, and after initial illumination it soon turns out that some of our fundamental research questions tend to become remain unanswered (if they do not become obscured and misdirected) under a materialist approach. The reasons that made some of us adopt that approach in the first place remain valid (cf. van Binsbergen 1984a). These reasons do not primarily lie (contrary to Droogers 1985) in the academic market incentives at fashionable theoretical innovation, but in the following considerations which together somehow sum up the current neo-Marxist inspiration:
(a) A rejection of the
philosophical idealism which for almost a century (under the
impact of Durkheim and his philosophical forbears) has dominated
social anthropology in general and especially religious
anthropology, and which has claimed an independent dynamics sui
generis for cultural and symbolic phenomena.
(b) The attempt to share, albeit it
only in the vicarious form of scholarship, in significant forms
of protest and struggle (between classes, ethnic groups,
generations, sexes; against statal, colonial and/or racial
oppression) in the present or the past, and adopting there the
cause of the underlying groups. Once we have understood that
oppression always has roots in the political economy, our good
intentions might easily lead us to concentrate on such roots
alone, projecting a political economy of exploitation and
oppression onto any situation involving any of the social groups
listed here, and materialistically assuming the primacy of that
political economy over whatever symbolic or ideological
expressions that group interaction might take. Ultimately the
relative powerlessness of our own social-scientific academic
production in North Atlantic society may be a principal factor in
our desire to vicariously liberate socially and distant other
people if only on paper.
(c) Neo-Marxism has proposed new
answers in the prolonged struggle between, on the one hand,
cultural imperialism as propounded by North Atlantic society in
general as from the nineteenth century, and, on the other, the
extreme, kaleidoscopic fragmentation which cultural relativism
has propounded, as the main stock-in-trade of classical
anthropology. Neo-Marxism has helped us to understand how the
logic of capitalism (as mediated through bureaucratic formal
organizations) is one of the major structural implications, and
conditions, of such cultural imperialism albeit that we do
not yet fully understand the place of anthropological
intellectual production in this set-up.[ii]
More
importantly, the paradigm of the articulation of modes of
production one of the major contributions of neo-Marxism
has allowed us to see a limited number of broad patterns
of fundamental structural correspondences cutting across the
dazzling multiplicity of cultures, and to anchor these patterns
in a few simple basic forms of exploitative relations of
production such as have repeated themselves in time and space:
exploitation of women by men; of youth by elders; of villages by
unproductive aristocratic or royal courts; of labour by capital.
The assumption that each of these basic forms of exploitative
relationship (each of these modes of production)
represents a unique logic of its own, expressed in recognizable
and repetitive (however superficially different) economic,
social, political and ideological forms, has begun to enable us
to view the manifold contradictions such as characterize all
social formations, and particularly those of the modern world, as
the dynamic interplay between modes of production seeking to
impose their hegemony over others in the same social formation.
Here the
problem is that our understanding of the capitalist mode of
production, its logic of commoditification, and the
contradictions it generates in contact with other modes, has
reached considerable maturity (after all it is the mode of
production which has produced albeit somewhat
antithetically our own discipline, and which has largely
dictated the patterns of our personal lives inside and outside
the lecture-room and the study), whereas our appreciation of
other modes of production and their logics, as conceived in the
same materialist framework, is still very tentative, exploratory
and intuitive. What immense stores of knowledge anthropology has
built up about other modes of production is largely cast in a
non-Marxist, idealist idiom; but (despite individual attempts) we
have not yet set out to systematically decode this body of
information in neo-Marxist terms, and perhaps may never succeed
in doing so entirely because of the material and ideological
constraints to which our own production of academic knowledge is
subjected in the context of our capitalist society. As a result,
classical and neo-Marxist anthropology continue to constitute
largely separate realms of meaning and explanation, sometimes at
daggers drawn, often simply incapable of relating to each other
and of illuminating each others analyses. The awareness of
a vast, occasionally rich, profound and beautiful edifice of
classical description, analysis and theory leaves the more
sensitive neo-Marxist anthropologist uneasy about the
abstraction, generality and superficiality of his or her own
tentative materialist approach. Yet one hesitates to trade the bad
conscience this generates, for the false
consciousness an idealist classical approach would constitute.[iii]
The
heuristic potential and illuminating power of the neo-Marxist
position has been brought out time and again with regard
particularly to the analysis of such innumerable social
situations in the contemporary Third World as are characterized
by peripheral capitalism. In the specific
field of medical anthropology, the ubiquitous commoditification
of health care, along with the general commoditification of the
productive and consumptive experience of its Third World users in
social formation increasingly dominated by peripheral capitalism
(proletarianization: dependence on wage labour and on monetarized
markets for food, housing, labour, entertainment etc.); the
increasing dominance of formal bureaucratic organizations in the
medical domain partly through the impact of the colonial
and post-colonial state whose logic owes much to capitalism, and
partly because this is the organizational form in which (First
World, pharmacological) capital seeks to structure the production
and marketing of health commodities; the very emergence of the
medical domain as a separate identifiable sector in
peripherally-capitalist Third World societies; the spin-off of
these processes in the way of indigenous healers exchanging the
time-honoured local forms of their trade, for innovations
mimicking the cosmopolitan doctors office, bedside manner,
techniques, remuneration and professionalization all these
highly familiar topics in medical anthropology today bear witness
to the relevance of a neo-Marxist perspective.
Yet this
needs scarcely surprise us: of course an approach that started
out as an analysis of capitalism in the first place, should be
capable of gauging rather adequately the impact of peripheral
capitalism in selected social domains such as the medical one.
Our
analytical problems, as medical anthropologists seeking to apply
a neo-Marxist paradigm, really begin when we turn to historical
societies which pre-dated capitalism, or to contemporary
societies where, for one reason or another, the inroads of the
capitalist mode of production have been slight, ineffective,
blocked. Is a neo-Marxist approach capable of
analyzing societies without capitalism? Or is
neo-Marxism only an epistemological echo of the capitalist
ideological make-up of North Atlantic society, capable only of
discerning whatever is fundamentally, ontologically kindred to
it? Having explored elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1984 and
in press) the amazing impenetrability of Manjak society in
northwestern Guinea-Bissau for capitalist encroachment , the
Manjak case as discussed in the present paper represents a far
from promising test case for this question.
Neo-Marxist materialism came as an
afterthought to my main Zambian field-work in the 1970s, and
while it has proved incapable of catching up with my data on
Tunisian popular Islam as collected in 1968 and 1970,[iv] it formed the context of my research
in progress in Guinea-Bissau. Moreover, that countrys
liberation struggle has had great symbolic and emotional value
for radical North Atlantic academics ever since Basil Davidson
(1969, 1981) adopted it; for better or worse, it still stands as
a creation of one of Africas main radical theoreticians,
Amilcar Cabral. When the Bissau Ministry of Health needed
anthropological information on the psychiatric therapeutic
potential of local, non-cosmopolitan healers, the request
appealed to me not only because it offered the opportunity of an
inside view and a personal intellectual contribution to that
country, but also because it would force me to confront my
theoretical views with new field-work in which symbolic phenomena
and their practical effects on peoples lives would be so
central that I could not easily take refuge in some superficial
political economy generalizations, but would be forced to look
for neo-Marxist interpretations as rich and as profound as the
best classical anthropology would be capable of.
Manjak rituals[v]
The research was situated in the Manjak area in the northwestern part of the country: a region where autochthonous cults, foremost the cult of the Land (Mbos), are still immensely powerful and where the world religions (Christianity and Islam) have little penetrated. In some respects this was the most intensive and direct field-work in my career: for the first time I did not have my own household but stayed with a local family, whose head was a senior Land priest to boot, and I worked without an interpreter during most of the research. However, with all this rapport the free flow of information remained checked by the extreme secretiveness of Manjak culture: within the villages and their various constituent wards I could readily participate in the ongoing social process and in collective ancestral and other rituals as directed at the multitude of local shrines (cf. figure 1), but the Sacred Grove just outside the village (centre of the Land cult and of adult male ritual and social life in general) remained closed to me, and only sporadically could I accompany individuals when their frequent personal quests for healing and good fortune led them to the napene priests the incumbents of a cultic complex (only loosely associated with the Land cult) whose many oracular shrines (puból) were also found all over the villages. It was mainly as a client or patient myself that I managed to gain frequent access to the rituals of the pubols and of the regions most important regional cult (that of Mama Jombo in Coboiana, at a distance of c. 50 km) and in doing so I merely followed in the footsteps of the many Portuguese and Senegalese strangers these shrines have accommodated over the years.
village path | compound path | ward boundary | |||
other wards | trees | ruin | |||
well | kitchen hut | cattle pen | |||
bathroom hut | name of ward | open toilet place | |||
dwellings (rectangular: modern, iron-roofed; round: traditional, thatched) | deity's shrine | ||||
distinct compounds (compound 2 consists of the larger men's house and the smaller women's house | benii (assembly place) belonging to the Pey ward (with shrine and cemetery | ||||
a collection of ancestral shrines | oracle hut |
Figure 1. A typical Manjak ward.
The
Manjak situation was my first personal experience not only with
an African society where the flow of information was so utterly
restricted and privacy so highly valued (one can imagine both the
advantages and the disadvantages of this state of affairs from a
field-workers point of view), but also with a still viable
gerontocracy that had successfully withstood the eroding effects
of capitalism and the modern state. The latter aspect I found
difficult to appreciate. In day-to-day interaction it was brought
home to me that I did not qualify as an elder (in a society where
age, and age differences, formed a constant obsession for the
participants, and even men in their sixties still recognized
their junior status vis-à-vis the real elders, their
seniors); similarly I was constantly reminded of the fact that,
as a non-initiate, my status was much lower even than that of my
local age-mates. And beyond this personal level (which was not
untinged by personal projections referring to my own social
position as a son, a father, and a senior academician, in Dutch
society) there was the neo-Marxist paradigm,[vi] which had taught me to consider the
relation between elders and junior members of their society
(women, and young men) as essentially exploitative: was not such
exploitation the pivot on which the domestic mode of
production hinged? Instead of the post-revolutionary
society I had been prepared for and with which I might easily
have identified one where young people had come to
formulate a new and inspiring social order , I found myself
in an unexpectedly archaic social order fully dominated by
elders. The proceeds of the regions massive and
prolonged labour migration to Senegal and France mainly seemed to
be controlled and appropriated by the elders, not so much (as
commonly elsewhere in Africa) in the form of bride-wealth or
other local capital investments, but certainly in the form of
relatively very expensive ritual offerings (of rum and animal
sacrifices) imposed by cults whose leaders were elders, and
(after the Land had had its libatory share) largely consumed by
these elders. Migrants to other parts of Guinea-Bissau and to
Senegal would usually return at least once a year, with money
mainly spent on ritual offerings, and while those in France of
necessity observed longer intervals, much of their distant
experience was articulated in terms of relations with the Land
and local shrines, money for sacrifices would be transferred, and
they would make a point of attending at least the local
initiation festival that, once every twenty years, forms the
culmination of the cult of the Land. Contrary to current
insights, the migrants participation in the capitalist mode
of production did not seem to serve the reproduction of that
mode, but of the local modes of production under gerontocratic
control (van Binsbergen 1984b). Political economy yet again.
Not without ethnocentric projection,
from this tentative analysis I tried to proceed conform my
research plan to pronouncements as to the therapeutic
effectiveness of the various cults in which Manjak participants,
including migrants, were involved.
One of
the striking features of Manjak rituals (which are invariably
prompted by illness) is the lack of dramaturgic and symbolic
elaboration. The rituals have a low degree of formality. They are
poor in symbolism and expression, little elaborate, and lack a
dramaturgy of tension and relief. They are usually limited to a
few minutes of pouring, drinking, killing, a short
mumbled prayer, more drinking, after which follows a hasty
retreat to productive activities in the paddy-fields or cashew
and palm groves. This applies to most ancestral and Land ritual.
Only the principal ancestral ritual (the erection of a shrine for
a deceased kinsman, for reasons of human demography a relatively
extremely infrequent occurrence), may be more elaborate in that
it may involve the monotonous drumming of praises on talking
drums, and a collective meal or drink in which also members of
neighbouring wards and villages, and particularly age-mates, take
part along with members of the deceaseds ward. Commensality
is also an aspect of the occasional rituals staged by priestly
and other occupational guilds. Despite the very considerable
alcohol consumption, local ritual is invariably very sober,
simple, matter-of-fact, direct. Ritual concern and tension turned
out to entirely concentrate on the material requirements that had
to be met even before a ritual could be staged: people, and
especially returning migrants, rush up and down the all-weather
road to the market town of Canchungo (formerly Teixeira de Pinto)
for ever more rum and animals in order to discharge constantly
ramifying and increasing ritual obligations imposed by divining
and officiating elders against whom they have no appeal. Those
involved spend a fortune on this, yet do not seem to enjoy it in
the least, nor derive any catharsis from it, at least not such as
could transpire in my day-to-day contact with them. On the
contrary, what did come across was their mounting state of
stress, when confronted with their powerlessness in the face of
the officiants demands, with their own dwindling resources
in terms of time of money, and with the fact that the
post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau economy often made it impossible
to find a taxi or buy sacrificial items even if the money was
available.
In this
set-up, I tended to interpret these rituals as primarily the
financial and symbolic submission, on the part of women and young
men, to their elders: both directly (as officiants), and
indirectly (the supernatural agents venerated in the cults were
thought of as being just as demanding and forbidding as the human
models, the elders, after whom they would appear to be shaped). How
could such submission ever be wholesome? I was
prepared to accept that when elders were both officiants and
clients/sponsors in these rituals, the result might benefit them
emotionally and spiritually reinforcing the gerontocratic
dominance they were enjoying also outside the ritual sphere. But
I tended to deny all therapeutic effect when women and young men,
at the hands of elders that already dominated their non-ritual
life, saw this domination again reinforced in a cultic setting.
The cost of ritual participation, and the clients lack of enthusiasm
in the original, religious sense of the word (i.e.
divine rapture), all seemed to corroborate such a
conclusion.
I was
however prepared to make an exception for the napenes
cultic complex. Its loose association with the Land
cult was clear, even though no ritual activity could take place
at the pubols that was not immediately
complemented by a similar offering at the Sacred Grove. The pubols
(thick-walled, dark, secluded, with one or more
typically two conspicuous libation basins, and crammed with
paraphernalia: shells, horns, animal skulls, etc.) were of a very
different construction from the Land shrines outside and inside
the Sacred Grove: the latter were mere miniature thatched huts
without walls and virtually lacking further specific features or
paraphernalia. The pubol officiants were
specialist ritual entrepreneurs who did not have any ex
officio social or political status in their wards of
residence nor in the Land cult. And the pubol rituals
of divination and healing were intimate, full of subtle
dramaturgic and symbolic effects, and unmistakably cathartic.
Having repeatedly experienced, as a client, the liberating forces
of the napenes cultic idiom even
across cultural and linguistic boundaries, this was a conclusion
I could not very well escape. But again, the napenes
did not necessarily occupy key positions in the gerontocratic
structure of this society while the officiants of the Land
cult did.
Obviously,
however, neither a field-workers aesthetic appreciation,
nor his projection of personal or theoretical views as to what
constitutes a pleasant sort of society, nor even his personal
existential experiences with divination and healing, provide
sufficient clues to approach that crucial but ill-studied aspect
of African religion: therapeutic effectiveness. What
was needed was an assessment of occurrences of physical and
spiritual disorder, in an attempt to trace the structural
conditions under which people had fallen ill, the various local
and cosmopolitan therapies they had pursued, and their outcome in
the short and the long term. This involved a study (mainly
through general observation and participation in the host family,
in the village and at the local dispensary of cosmopolitan
medicine), of symbolism and practices towards the body, illness
and healing; and the sort of diagnostic in-depth interviews and
observations my psychiatric colleague in this project (a
Western-trained psychiatrist with several years of practical
experience in Guinea-Bissau) enabled us to conduct.
Not
surprisingly, in the West African context, the North Atlantic,
post-Freudian distinction between somatic and psychic disorder
was found to have no local equivalent. Instead, all forms of
discomfort and misfortune were interpreted on one level of
discourse, that is in terms of affliction by supernatural
agents. Every person afflicted was supposed to have intermingling
ritual obligations towards various such agents (belonging to such
various classes as diseased kinsmen, minor land spirits, the Land
itself, and the pubol healing spirits). Some
ancestral obligations were inherited by birth, while others
stemmed from any number of contracts humans (the patient himself,
or a kinsman acting on his or her behalf) had once entered into
with these agents. Humans would always be behind in fulfilling
in the way of paying for, and staging, expensive
sacrifices their parts of the bargain, and illness was a
sign of the agent becoming impatient. To virtually all serious
complaints this aetiological system was applied, usually in
peaceful co-existence with cosmopolitan medicine as administered
either at home, at the migrants distant places of work, or
in the regional and national centres of Canchungo and Bissau.
This
unspecific aetiology could initially be studied on whatever
complaint my main informants happened to suffer from. However,
the projects emphasis was on therapeutic effectiveness in
cases of mental disorder. Therefore, together with the
psychiatrist, I collected and analysed such local cases we could
find of what, by any cosmopolitan or transcultural-psychiatric
standards, would have be considered grave mental disorder.
On a
population of about 90,000 Manjaks today, severe mental cases
turned out to be rather rare (some of our best studied ones are
listed in table 1).
patients |
name |
Fernando |
Carlos |
Arguetta |
Bajudessa |
Politia |
sex |
male |
male |
female |
female |
female |
|
year of birth |
1918 |
1953 |
1942 |
1957 |
1967 |
|
year complaint became manifest |
1983 |
1972 |
1980 |
1982 |
1981 |
|
residence |
is family head |
with F |
with MZS |
with paternal kin |
with F |
|
complaint (provisional) |
psychotic |
chronic schizophrenia |
hysteria |
extreme apathy |
psychotic |
|
anamnesis (selection) |
ex-napene,
junior partner took over practice; now
involved in modern Basic Health Care project |
war time separation from Mo;
extreme mobility aspirations imposed by F; rejected by
colonial patron when schooling in capital; still sexual
assaults on FW |
when a child, placed by F in
household of Ms ideal marriage partner; forced by F
to marry a non-Manjak in distant region of Guinea Bissau;
H and D died subsequently |
improper marriage; accompanied
migrant H to France; H long imprisoned there on criminal
charges; H failed to live up to kinship obligations
vis-à-vis both consang. and affinal kin at home |
F traditional king,
demoted in Independence struggle; extreme status loss in
family of orientation; patient could not stand
humiliation by schoolmates |
|
cultic treatment |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
|
cosmopolitan psychiatric
treatment |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
Far from
corroborating my initial hypotheses as summarized above, this
material suggests that contemporary Manjak society, however much
it could be considered a backward labour reserve in the
capitalist world system, is characterized by a remarkably
wholesome balance, in its internal symbolic and authority
structure as well as in its relations with the outside world
(through migrancy combined with very strong and persisting ritual
ties with home). Gerontocratic relations appear to
prevent, rather than generate, insanity; and incipient
mental problems appear to be redressed and corrected in an early
stage, invariably by invoking a combination of local rituals
including the cult of the Land. The data indicate the therapeutic
effectiveness of this ritual complex. Severe mental
distress seems to occur or at least to persist primarily in such
cases when the subject is fundamentally incapable of
communicating effectively with the cult of the Land as mediated
by the elders.
I submit
that here we are hit upon the mainstay of Manjak medical culture.
Such blockage as appears to lead to persisting mental distress
always involves factors external to Manjak society, and in most
cases appears to consist in the disruption of the balance between
symbolic rootedness in Manjak society and (often prolonged and
distant) economic participation in the outside world
typically one characterized by bureaucratic formal organizations,
urban structures and the capitalist mode of production (cf.
Collomb & Diop 1969; Diarra 1966). Manjaks fall mentally ill
if that outside society takes excessive control at the expense of
ties with home, the Manjak culture, and the central symbolic role
of the elders therein.
The
following example therefore appears to bring out the essence of
the therapeutic role of elders in Manjak society:
In her mothers compound
Ndisia,[vii] a young woman of the Ucacenem
ward, awaited her migrant husbands annual return from
Senegal. Alarmed by a series of earlier sudden infant deaths in
the family, she panicked at the first signs of fever and apathy
in her two-year old son Antonio, whom she was still
breast-feeding. Without delay she reached for the most powerful
healing strategy that Manjak culture provides: she took Antonio
to the house of the villages most senior Land priest,
Fernando, to whom her family was not related and whose ward
(called Brissor) was in a different part of the village. She was
given a room in the priests mens house,[viii] and stayed for over a week
until the boy showed definite signs of improvement. The old man
did not have to treat the child explicitly: his personal,
invisible emanations as an elder were considered to be eminently
effective. Through this action, moreover, Antonio gained lifelong
honorary membership of the elders ward, which even involved
the (in all other situations eagerly guarded and disputed) rights
of libation on the wards ancestral shrines.
Such therapeutic adoption, which does not affect the patients rights in his own ward of origin, is the only way in which libation rights can pass on to non-kin. In the neighbouring Vilela ward two young adult women had once gained similar rights under similar circumstances, and they regularly shared in collective rituals of the Brissor ward.
Part of
the underlying model is not difficult to reconstruct: illness is
seen as uprootedness, as a disrupted relationship between the
person and Land, and when the social and genealogical aspects of
this condition are redressed through fictitious re-affiliation,
the link with the Land is restored and improved, and the
Lands life-giving force as mediated by the elder once more
flows freely to the patient.
All this
does not sound particularly original. If the Manjak socio-ritual
system had been consciously engineered by an anthropologist
familiar with the classical work of Meyer Fortes (1969a, 1969b),
the result may not have been too different from what I found
empirically. The most idealist, culture-centred symbolic analysis
might have arrived at the same sort of conclusion in terms of a
wholesome communion with the essence of a culture. Personally, I
would have distrusted this analysis for that very reason,
as the all too predictable result of a set, neo-classical
interpretational framework. However, since my neo-Marxist
approach did give me ample opportunity to arrive at a materialist
interpretation if such had done more justice to the empirical
data, my ending up, instead, with the present, main-stream
interpretation reflects not so much the automatism of
time-honoured, dominant modes of anthropological analysis, but a
genuine struggle to get the most out of a rival, material
paradigm and failing to do so.
However, trading a materialist
interpretation for a more symbolist one does not reveal to us the
underlying mechanism that in either case may be said to govern
the link between the individual on the one hand, and socio-ritual
structure on the other. The next question to be asked
is therefore: what, in the symbolic and/or material
structure of Manjak society, allows rituals controlled by senior
men to have such a strong impact on both mind and body?
I believe that the answer can be given, and that it lies not in
the sort of material structures that a political-economy approach
would reveal, but in the amazingly consistent Manjak system of
symbolism of the body, that, in a microcosm/macrocosm parallelism
reminiscent of various idealist philosophical systems in the
European tradition (Plotinus, Leibnitz), at the same time amounts
to a total conception of the world, in other words, of Land.
When I
tried to formulate, mainly on the basis of observation and
participation, Manjak notions of bodily and sensory functioning
and experience in health and disease, I was at first struck by an
extreme rigidity and reticence, which reminded me much more of
peasant culture in North Africa and civil society in Europe than
of any Black African traits such as I expected on the basis of
prolonged personal field-work in Zambia, anthropological studies,
and current North Atlantic and négritude stereotypes
concerning the exuberant, utterly corporeal, rhythmic
and sensuous African. Among the Manjaks, it was as if
everything that could be socially and physiologically functional
and stimulating about the human body had become very highly
restricted. With the exception of children (up to non-initiated
young adults), Manjak villagers would hardly touch each other,
and would perform their digestive and sexual bodily functions in
the greatest secrecy so that not even the merest suggestion of
these needs or drives would enter into public life and
conversation. With averted gaze people would engage in series of
monologues rather than in dialogues; this would be true
particularly of the interaction of members of different
generations, but even age-mates would tend to fall into this
pattern. There was a little developed cuisine
whose products were meant to fill the stomach and drive home the
gender division of labour but hardly to cultivate (in the way of
food exchanges and collective meals) socio-ritual relations
beyond the extended family except for rare occasions of
ritual commensality. The local musics simple abstract
structure was wholly subservient to the abstract Morse-like
requirements of the talking drums. Representational arts appeared
to be absent, except the extremely stylized cylindrical wooden
sculptures that, as images of the deceased, constituted the
ancestral shrines. The most beautiful items Manjak culture
produced: band-woven cloths of intricate, abstract, multicoloured
designs, were not meant to be worn but to be hoarded in chests by
the dozen until the owner, at his or her dying day, would be sown
into them and thus committed to the grave; i.e. they were
displayed for a few minutes only, at the time that marked the
culmination of a human beings life, and at the same time
his or her most intimate and consummative communion with the
Land: burial.
While
these few and disconnected impressions may suffice to indicate
the general restrained atmosphere of everyday life, in illness
behaviour a similar pattern seemed to be at work. Illness had to
be denied, dissimulated or repressed, both by the patient and by
his or her social environment. On the basis of illness, patients
could claim no dispensation from daily chores around the house
nor from the immensely heavy productive activities in the
paddy-fields. Any sick-bed was always a burden and never a
relief. As a result people were inclined to give in to their
weaknesses on this point only occasionally, with very
little social conform in the way of nursing, special privileges
etc., and then only for an amazingly short time. Being (publicly
acknowledged to be) ill was a state to be measured in hours
rather than in weeks or months.
In a
society so prone to migrancy to capitalist places of work, a
materialist anthropologist would be tempted to explore the extent
to which this rather unexpected pattern might be partly
attributed to the internalization of the ideology of capitalism.
Had not extreme commoditification, and exploitative labour
conditions under high capitalism, produced somewhat similar
notions of the human body and its uses, perhaps not
so much in the lives of suppressed workers but certainly in the
official codes of formal bureaucratic organizations within which
production was realized, in employers dreams and
aspirations, and in the standards applied by their companys
doctors?
Further
research and reflection, however, convinced me that such an
interpretation is spurious. Manjak bodily symbolism is not in any
sense a product of capitalist encroachment, but on the contrary
is another manifestation of an all-pervading, integrated
cosmological system that, at best, protects
its bearers from the alienation inherent in the
peripheral-capitalist experience.
A
projection of current, enlightened notions of North Atlantic
culture would at first make the human body in Manjak culture
appear as extremely constrained, denied and repressed. But when
we go through the psychiatric case material, we find precious few
indications of such repression in the mental symptoms of
patients.
Instead,
the fundamental underlying cultural image seems to be that of the
Perfect Body, which is whole and fertile, which is
closed onto itself to such an extent that It no longer has
orifices; that no longer has needs that necessitate the passing
of external substances from outside to inside (or even from
inside to outside); and that by virtue of this perfection places
Itself outside the chain of human and social exchange, dependence
and manipulation, and at the apex of filiation. Mental
distress means separation from that Perfect Body; mental health
means emulating that Perfect Body, and anxiously but
whole-heartedly concealing the extent to which ones own
body and social functioning emulates that ideal only imperfectly.
Among
the living, the male elder comes closest to this ideal. Although
he may not be beyond the consumption of food and drink, his
consumption is largely confined to the inner recesses of the
house and of the Sacred Grove, shielded from the common gaze. His
bodily needs are thus denied, and he cannot allow himself to be
ill. If still involved in chains of social and bodily exchange,
it is others that need to receive from him (rice, cattle, sperm,
acceptance, healing etc.), and never the other way round. His
being is whole and closed (closed also from the stream of
information and gossip Manjak secretiveness perfectly fits
this model). His body is almost lifted above its human
limitations, and therefore as long as no publicly
witnessed passage across orifices is at hand can be
allowed to be massively displayed in a mere loin-cloth.
Young
men, women and children are way beneath this ideal, and therefore
may indulge, in varying degrees, in all the imperfections of the
human and social condition: devour, defecate, mate, receive,
adorn, beg, steal, be entirely naked, disclose secrets, etc.
Again
one step above the elder is the ancestor, so close to the Ideal
Body that he or she may be represented by a mere short stick
protruding from the ground: the standard ancestral shrines as
referred to above; although locally recognized as an
anthropomorphic image, not even facial openings are cut, and only
a slight suggestion is given of a neck or a reclining
shoulder-line. Like an elder, and even more so, the ancestor is
outside a chain of exchange, can no longer ask and need not ask,
since his or her living descendants are supposed to do everything
they can to anticipate his desires and fulfil their obligations
hence their embarrassment and shame when illness (always
interpreted as sign of a breach of contractual obligations
vis-à-vis a superior being) publicly reveals that they have
failed to do so.
But the
Ultimate Body that incarnates this system of symbolism and
carries it to its final consequence is Land Itself. The universal
source of life, also in the material sense of rice and palm-wine,
it may give[ix] but it cannot be admitted to receive.
Humans may try to impose upon Land with their gifts (when pouring
alcoholic drinks and animal blood) and with their dead bodies
(which are buried in the Land), but Land has no orifices through
which to receive. Its shrines are inconspicuous, without
elaboration. They may be marked by a shrub, a piece of tree
trunk, but often are just a totally unmarked spot; and they
particularly lack formal libation basins the equivalents
of bodily orifices; at best, in the course of a ritual, shortly
before libation takes place, the officiant may with a quick
movement of his hand sweep open a very shallow hole of only one
or two centimetres deep and a few decimetres wide, discarding any
dead leaves that may have collected there. Alternatively, graves
(Lands only undeniable openings) can only be dug by senior
Land priests, who force ordinary mourners to look chastely away
when the body already rendered orifice-less in its thick,
mummy-shaped layer of cloths is lowered into the ground,
and who through secret underground extensions of the grave
attempt to conceal its exact location forever after...
To an
amazing extent and degree of detail can both the ritual and the
medical system of the Manjaks be subsumed under the formula of
the orifice-less Perfect Body, right up to
the form and content of Land ritual and the material shape of
Land shrines. Without exaggeration, the human body can
be said to be the dominant symbol in Manjak culture, and it has
been applied and transformed in such a consistent way as to
surpass and surmount everything corporeal. Of
course the relationships involved are not always those of direct
transposition. For instance, in many aspects of Manjak symbolism
the topological inverse of the human bodily shape is encountered:
a hollow, tapering cylindrical space, and
modern glass bottles, that happen to fit this description rather
well, are among the most conspicuous material items in Manjak
ritual and everyday life dominating conversations and
actions to an incredible extent.
Confronted
with such circularity between mind and body, macrocosm and
microcosms, one can only guess at the psycho-somatic implications
of a cosmology that presents the human body, with its constant
flow in and out of natural, corporeal and social matter, as the
imperfect incarnation of the perfectly closed, life-giving Land,
the principal deity of this society. One suspects possibilities
of symbolic and corporeal transfer and transposition in which
symptom and economic action, exchange and well-being merge to an
extent that may well be deemed capable of eluding anything but
the most brutal confrontation with the logic of capitalism.
Whether this symbolic system in itself has been the principal
factor in keeping capitalism out, or whether, alternatively, the
overall nature of the political economy of this part of the
African Atlantic coast has merely facilitated the emergence and
persistence of this symbolic system, remains a question for
further research.
Meanwhile, the cultic complex of the napenes,
their pubols and their rituals occupy a
curious position in this set-up. It combines selected elements of
the overall idiom but mainly transforming them into their
opposites. Here we find, in flagrant contrast with the cult of
the Land proper, elaborate, thick-walled womb-like
shrines, packed with myriad paraphernalia and including
conspicuous libation basins; the latter tend to occur in pairs
and then particularly suggest a topological inversion of human
breasts. The supernatural which, in its corporeal
sublimation, is so unapproachable, forbidding and masculine in
the other manifestations of this cosmology, here suddenly appears
as approachable, bodily, and maternal. It is
here, in the pubols divination and
ritual, that mortals can yet attempt to have direct communion
with the Land: through the sacrificial smudge
that the priest, with bare hands, smears
directly onto the clients naked skin
an almost shocking corporality, therapeutically very
effective as if to offset the detached, ascetic abstractions of
the cultic main stream. Here, in this cultic side-stream, one yet
seeks to manipulate, and to set condition to, the Lands
formidable powers. A poor mens version, one would be
inclined to say, of the exalted ideals of the dominant cult,
a distorting mirror of its aspirations and negations, and
as such the aspect of Manjak ritual that could and does lend
itself best for ritual entrepreneurship and innovation. Here
clients expenses are of a level comparable to that of the
ancestral and Land cult but they are seen not as
fulfilment of unconditional obligations but as payments, and in
addition to prestations in kind involve considerable amounts of
money. The aetiological repertoire of the pubol
attendants is no longer unspecific and general, but specifies
particular complaints and their specific, elaborate remedies,
whose forms and interpretations are subject to healers
constant innovations and re-interpretations in an attempt to
capture an uncertain and highly competitive medico-ritual local
market. The relation between healer and patient is no longer cast
in the idiom of belonging to and venerating the same local Land
(although the Land cult does claim its share from every
transaction going on in the pubols) to which
one is attached by birth without optionality or escape, but in
the idiom of contract. In other words, at the oracular shrines we
encounter a type of transformation (of the dominant Manjak
symbolic idiom) that is not only feminine, routinized and eroded
it also begins to develop the well-known traits
of commoditification, constituting the locus of capitalist
encroachment in this otherwise fairly impenetrable socio-ritual
system.
Little
wonder perhaps, that this is the aspect of the Manjak ritual
scene that accommodated me (myself steeped in an utterly
commoditified, capitalist life-world) more than any other, to
which I could relate most which even appeared to offer
partial but eminently effective answers to my own existential
needs.
But here
we are operating at the very fringe of the Manjak socio-ritual
and medical system. Reference to capitalism does not begin to
explain the patterns of symbolism, continuing gerontocracy,
migrant participation, and therapeutic effectiveness that
constitute the core of Manjak society. But why should a
Marxist-inspired approach to religion confine itself to the
capitalist mode of production? A closer look at the
non-capitalist relations of production on which Manjak village
society continues to revolve, may suggest alternative ways to yet
break away from the fixation on cosmology and ideology, and lay
bare the patterns of economic action, and exploitation, that are
really at work. Are not the youth, through their expensive ritual
participation, investing in the sort of
ideological capital that, one day, when they have become elders
themselves, they may claim to be theirs? Are not the elders
transmuting capitalist-derived capital into Manjak capital,
laundering (much like, in North Atlantic society, money
proceeding from tax evasion and crime) the proceeds from labour
migration that otherwise would remain utterly devoid of meaning
and value even for the young migrants themselves? Rather than
conceiving of the body as Land, could we not try to reverse to
equation and spell out what it means both symbolically and
economically that the human body, locus of productive
force by excellence, is symbolically externalized, slighted and
denied?
When a
non-capitalist society scarcely seems to yield to capitalist
encroachment, it is tempting to resort to a neo-classical,
idealist interpretation thus reconstructing and making
explicit what is implied in the local ideology. But in the long
run it would be more rewarding to seek and formulate a specific
political economy that is cut to the measure of that society. In
this vein Peter Worsley (1956) reinterpreted Tallensi society as
analysed by Fortes. As far as Manjak society is concerned,
however, that part of my task only begins to be discernible now.
Carriera, A.A.P.
1947a
Vida social dos Manjacos. Bissau: Centro de Estudios da Guiné.
1947b
Céu, Deus e a Terra (lenda de Manjacos). Boletim Cultural da
Guiné Portuguesa (Bissau), 2:461-463.
1961
Símbolos, ritualistas a ritualismos animo-feiticistas na Guiné
Portuguesa. Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa (Bissau) 16,
63: 505-540.
Collomb, H., & B. Diop
1969
Migration urbaine et santé mentale. Waltham (Mass.): African
Studies Association.
Davidson, B.
1981
No fist is big enough to hide the sky: The liberation of
Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, London: Zed Press; second edition
of: The liberation of Guiné, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.
de Jong, J.T.V.M.
1987
A descent into African psychiatry. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical
Institute.
Diarra, S.
1966
Problèmes dadaptation de travailleurs africains noirs en
France. Psychopathologie africaine, 2: 107-126.
Droogers, A.
1985
From waste-making to recycling: A plea for an eclectic use of
models in the study of religious change. In:
W.M.J. van Binsbergen & J.M. Schoffeleers (eds.), Theoretical
explorations in African religion, London/Boston: Kegan Paul
International, pp. 101-137.
Fortes, M.
1969a
The dynamics of clanship among the Tallensi. Oosterhout (The
Netherlands): Anthropological Publications, and London: Oxford
University Press. Reprint of the 1945 edition.
1969b
The web of kinship among the Tallensi. Oosterhout (The
Netherlands): Anthropological Publications, and London: Oxford
University Press. Reprint of the 1949 edition.
Meillassoux, C.
1975
Femmes, greniers et capitaux. Paris: Maspero.
Rey, P.-P.
1971
Colonialisme, néo-colonialisme et transition au capitalisme:
Example du Comilog au Congo-Brazzaville, Paris:
Maspero.
1973
Les alliances de classes, Paris: Maspero.
1979
Class contradiction in lineage societies. Critique of
Anthropology, 13-14: 41-60.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J.
1979
The infancy of Edward Shelonga: An extended case from the Zambian
Nkoya. In: J.D.M. van der Geest & K.W.
van der Veen (eds), In search of health: Six essays in medical
anthropology. Amsterdam: Anthropological Sociological Centre, pp.
19-90.
1981a
Religious change in Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul
International.
1981b
Theoretical and experiential dimensions in the study of the
ancestral cult among the Zambian Nkoya. Paper read at the
symposium on Plurality in Religion, International Union of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Intercongress,
Amsterdam.
1984a
Can anthropology become the theory of peripheral class struggle?:
Reflexions on the work of P.P. Rey. In:
W.M.J. van Binsbergen & G.S.C.M. Hesseling, Aspecten van
staat en maatschappij in Afrika: Recent Dutch and Belgian
research on the African state, Leiden: African Studies Centre,
pp. 163-180.
1984b
Socio-ritual structures and modern migration among the Manjak of
Guinea-Bissau: Ideological reproduction in a context of
peripheral capitalism. Antropologische Verkenningen (Utrecht), 3,
2: 11-43.
1985a
From tribe to ethnicity in western Zambia. In:
W.M.J. van Binsbergen & P.L. Geschiere (eds.), Old modes of
production and capitalist encroachment, London/ Boston: Kegan
Paul International, pp. 181-234.
1985b
The cult of saints in north-western Tunisia: An analysis of
contemporary pilgrimage structures. In E.
Gellner (ed.), Islamic dilemmas: Reformers, nationalists and
industrialization, Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton, pp.
199-239.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & P.L.
Geschiere
1985
Marxist theory and anthropological practice. In
W.M.J. van Binsbergen & P.L. Geschiere (eds.), Old modes of
production and capitalist encroachment, London/ Boston: Kegan
Paul International, pp. 235-89.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & J.M.
Schoffeleers (eds.)
1985a
Theoretical explorations in African religion. London/Boston:
Kegan Paul International.
Worsley, P.
1956
The kinship system of the Tallensi: A revaluation. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 86, I: 37-75.
[i] After preparatory trips in 1981 and 1982, field-work was conducted in 1983 in the Calequisse section of the Cacheu region, with occasional extensions to the Caió and Coboiana sections. I am indebted to the people of the Cacheu region for their hospitality and interest; to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, for financing the project and granting me leave of absence; to Joop de Jong, then Head of Psychiatry, 3 de Agosto Hospital, Bissau, for initiating the project and contributing to its more specifically psychiatric side; to the Ministry of Health, Guinea Bissau, for facilitating administrative and logistic aspects; to Patricia Saegerman and Else Broers, as wife and elder sister respectively perceptive companions in the field; and finally to Renaat Devisch, whose penetrating discussions in the stimulating environment of the Louvain Unit of Symbol and Symptom, 1984 and 1985, greatly contributed to my analysis of Manjak symbolism. The first version of this paper was read at the Second Satterthwaite Colloquium on African Religion and Ritual, Satterthwaite (Cumbria), U.K., April 1986; I am indebted to Kirsten Alnaes, Michael Bourdillon, Richard Fardon, Ronald Frankenberg, Ladislav Holy, Richard Werbner and James Woodburn for stimulating comments on that occasion. A revised version was read at the Institut für Ethnologie, Freie Universität, Berlin (West), May 1986, where I benefited from stimulating comments made by Georg Elwert, Till Förster, Georg Pfeffer and Helmut Zinser. This article was originally published in English as: The land as body: An essay on the interpretation of ritual among the Manjaks of Guinea-Bissau, in: R. Frankenberg (ed.), Gramsci, Marxism, and Phenomenology: Essays for the development of critical medical anthropology, special issue of Medical Anthropological Quarterly, new series, 2, 4, December 1988, p. 386-401.
[ii] Cf. van Binsbergen 1984a and references cited there.
[iii] I have pursued a materialist approach for a number of years (cf. van Binsbergen 1981a; van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985; more specifically in the medical anthropological field: 1979 and 1981a: ch. 5, 6 and 7). I have repeatedly confessed my guilty conscience (1981a: 10f, 73f; 1981b, 1984a, 1985a), and stressed the need for a synthesis of Marxian ideas and the sophisticated insights of main-stream symbolic anthropology (1981a: 68f; van Binsbergen & Schoffeleers 1985).
[iv] Van Binsbergen 1985b and other works cited there; however, the possibility of a materialist perspective was indicated in van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985.
[v] Cf. Carreira 1947a, 1947b, 1961. De Jong 1987 also discusses general religious and medical concepts partly derived from Manjak culture, although most of his specific descriptions derive from other parts of Guinea-Bissau.
[vi]
Meillassoux 1975; Rey 1971, 1973, 1979; cf. van Binsbergen &
Geschiere 1985.
[vii] All proper names are pseudonyms.
[viii] Visiting daughters of the house are also put up here (and not at the women's house) when the occasion arises.
[ix]
Although not through orifices: the Land gives (i.e. yields produce)
not in highly localized spots but over extensive land areas:
paddy-fields, palm and cashew groves, and gardens. Significantly,
the tapping of palm trees and the resulting palm wine (ideally
set aside for consumption by elders in a ritual context) had a
mystical significance of communicating with the essence of Land.
page last modified: 11-02-01 14:26:41 | ||||