Description
Book Synopsis 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.
Trade Review “…a fascinating account of spirit possession in Zanzibar…[that] contributes to and sheds new light on debates on ethnicity, identity, and gender… Its particular value lies in its excellent ethnographic data, which demonstrate the author’s deep knowledge of Zanzibari society and its interconnections with the wider world, both ‘East’ and ‘West’, and highlight the value of long-term ethnographic fieldwork.” · JRAI
“Kjersti Larsen’s book raises significant anthropological questions about much writing on spirit possession in Africa…Larsen’s work makes important and detailed considerations of [the] problem [of racial identity], perhaps more sensitively than many others.” · Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
“…a sensitive and rich portrayal of the phenomenon of spirit possession in Zanzibar Town.” · American Ethnologist
"[The author] provides a sensitive account of people's experiences of possession and the ways in which they relate to their spirits. It is refreshing to read an account like this in which some of the uncertainties and differences of opinion about spirit possession are highlighted." · Tanzanian Affairs
"Written as a reflexive and phenomenological account, and organized into nine short chapters, the book traverses theoretical terrain in ways that challenge theories that reduce spirit possession to an effect of social marginality." · Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
Table of 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
