THEORETICAL AND EXPERIENTIAL DIMENSIONS IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCESTRAL CULT
among the Zambian Nkoya
Wim van Binsbergen
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THEORETICAL AND EXPERIENTIAL DIMENSIONS IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCESTRAL CULT among the Zambian Nkoya Wim van Binsbergen |
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1. Introduction[1]
‘That day, when I had come to
ushwana, (the name-inheriting ritual for my
deceased mother’s brother Muchati), I had not the slightest
idea that it was me they wanted to inherit the name. So there we
were in Nyamayenda’s village, where my mother originates
from. Relatives and other people had come from all surrounding
villages in the valley, and even from other valleys. We danced to
the tune of the xylophones and drums, and drank beer. I was a
small boy of twelve years old, and helped out at one of the
xylophones, playing the bass part. All we knew was that secretly
the elders of the village had discussed the name-inheritance of
Muchati, and that in the middle of the night they would rise from
the men’s shelter where they were sitting, chatting and
drinking beer. They would come forth and catch, among the adults
and youths dancing around the orchestra, the person they had
secretly chosen to be the heir.
‘It is a great honour to
inherit a name, but it is also terrible. The shade is anxious to
return to the village, and we honour him by giving his name to a
relative who is still alive. It is very nice to inherit a name.
You receive most of the personal possessions of the deceased, his
gun if he had one, his clothes, personal things. If he had a
wife, she can be your wife if you want. Or if you are a woman and
you inherit the name of your aunt or elder sister, then her
children will be yours, and if she had a husband, he can be your
husband if you want. But the shade is formidable, and
unpredictable. If the name you have inherited does not fit you,
the shade will make you ill, he may even kill you. It is very
difficult to say why a name should not fit you. If your illness
or back luck is caused by a wrong name you have inherited, that
is something you can only find out through divination. Even if
the elders select someone who was close to the deceased before
his death, someone who in his habits and character is similar to
the deceased, then still the shade can reject the living person
who is caught to take his name. Nobody will ever take a name
voluntarily, unless it is the name of a headman. And even then
people may refuse. A few years ago they wanted my father to
inherit the name of Chief Kankulwe. But we, his sons, implored
him to refuse, since we feared that our father would be killed by
sorcery just because of that name. For if it is a big name you
inherit, if it makes you a chief or headman, or if the
possessions that come with it are plentiful, then your younger
brother or your cousin will be jealous, and may commit sorcery
against you. To inherit a name is really a very trying matter.
‘That night, when I saw my
grandfather and other relatives approaching me, I realized that
they wanted to catch me to make me Muchati. I fled. They caught
me by a slip of my shirt, but I tore loose, and ran away from the
dancing ground in the middle of the village. The elders were
after me. I never ran faster in my life. I could hear them
crying: ‘‘Muchati! Muchati! Tatiyetu
(our father)! Yaya yetu
(our elder brother)!’’
I was scared to death. Along the
village path I ran to the next village, where I hid in the house
of my grandmother. I could hear them coming nearer and nearer. I
decided to make a run for the river. For if you reach the river
and immerse yourself in the water before they can catch you, you
are free and you do not need to take the name. There is something
special between water and the shade; for instance, when you start
praying, you take some water in your mouth and blow it out. So I
sped out of my grandmother’s house again, and made for the
river. They were on my heels. There we were, running through the
night. Fortunately there were no lions or buffaloes about, then.
I had almost reached the river bank, when I tripped over some
root in the path, and fell. Immediately they were upon me, seized
me, and called me by my new name, Muchati. I kicked and screamed,
and tried to break loose again, but it was too late now. I had
become Muchati. Everyone crowded in on me, bending their knees
and clapping their hands in a reverential salute. Everyone called
me by the kinship term with which he or she had addressed my
mother’s brother when was still alive: ‘‘Welcome,
father.’’ ‘‘My elder brother, you have come
back.’’ ‘‘Mother’s brother, stay with us
now!’’
I was a twelve-year old kid, and
they addressed me as if I were an elder. My mother and her one
surviving brother came up to me, clapped their hands for me,
called me ‘‘elder brother’’, and started
crying. I gape up all resistance, and started crying too.
Muchati’s own son came up to me, then a grown-up man almost
old enough to be my father. He saluted me, calling me
‘‘father,’’ and we cried.
‘I was taken to a
semicircular windbreak of reed mats, and there they dressed me in
white short pants. Meal was put on my hair. Then I was led to a
newly-erected shrine in the shape of a forked branch. I had been
placed at some distance from the permanent village shrine, which
as you know has a similar shape. I was made to sit at the foot of
the new shrine, on a reed mat. Then my mother’s relatives
came again to formally welcome me as Muchati who had come back to
the village. The elders started lecturing me on the
responsibilities that now rested upon me, as the heir to this
great name. As dawn came, all the people who had danced and drunk
beer through the night, lined up near the shrine, and one after
the other sprinkled some meal on my head and saluted me, saying:
‘‘Welcome back home, Muchati.’’
‘My mother’s brother
had been a formidable man, and a great buffalo hunter. I had
loved him dearly when he was still alive. Now as I was sitting
there, I felt numb and tired; yet I began to feel that the name
of Muchati would fit me and would not turn against me...’
These were the words,
approximately,[2] in which Muchati, fifteen years
after the event, told me the story of how he himself had
inherited the name of his deceased kinsman — the central and
most dramatic aspect of ancestor veneration among his people, the
Nkoya of Central Western Zambia. The tale was prompted by the
occasion. Through the early night we were walking down the path
and forded the valley’s central stream, on our way to Mayobe
village, where that night (a year after the death of Kafungu, a
woman in her late twenties) an ushwana
ritual would be staged similar to the one in which Muchati had
played the principal part. As we walked along the wooded slopes,
the small forest gardens and the grass-covered riverbanks, the
serenity of the night and the vividness with which Muchati told
me about one of the most important moments in his life, put me in
a proper frame of mind to share in the intensity and drama of ushwana.
Effortlessly, or so it seemed, I crossed the stream that forms
the boundary between the secularized life-world of a European
anthropologist and renegade Christian, and the life-world of the
Nkoya, where shades are part of reality and, through ushwana,
reincarnate continually in the world of the living. Following the
path up the opposite slope, we reached Mayobe village. There, the
musicians were already tuning up their instruments, beer drinking
had started, and, no doubt, the heir of that night had already
been selected by the secret gathering of elders. I had already
reached a stage in the field-work where our arrival in the
village no longer attracted more attention than that of other
more or less prominent locals. We joined in the dancing, chatting
and drinking, and the ritual proceeded towards its dramatic
climax.
2. Two Problems
My aim in this paper is not to
present a full description of ancestor veneration among the
contemporary Nkoya. I shall concentrate on two problems which,
although pertaining to very different levels of conceptualization
and experience, complement each other.
The first
problem can be defined without challenging the habitual canons of
a scholarly, analytical approach to African religions. I concerns
the extent to which an analytical theory of African religious
change is capable of explaining contemporary plurality[3] of religious forms in selected
areas of that continent, as the synchronic outcome of the
dialectical historical processes that have shaped a social
formation. As an integrated complex of religious beliefs and
practices, in other words as a cult, ancestor veneration among
the contemporary Nkoya operates in a context of religious
plurality: it is only one of several major cultic forms found
side by side among those people today. Much of my published work
on Central African religion constitutes an effort to interpret
the contemporary plurality of religious arrangements as the
ideological component of distinct socio-politico-economic part
structures (called ‘modes of production’ for lack of a
better term) that in the course of the last few centuries have
emerged in the expanding social formation encompassing Central
Western Zambia. These part structures have become interrelated
and subordinated to each other in a fashion that could be
illuminated with the concept of the articulation of modes of
production. The outlines of the structural theory, tentatively
explaining the mechanisms that cause these phenomena, and a
discussion of the attending methodological and conceptual
difficulties, I have presented in extenso in my recent book Religious
Change in Zambia.[4] Although in the present paper I
shall apply that theory to the Nkoya ancestral cult, I cannot
here repeat the argument in all its complexity.
However,
the second problem I want to confront in this paper is of even
wider scope: it stems from dissatisfaction with the scholarly,
external approaches to African religions, including my own
approach. But before this second problem can be formulated, let
us first take a more comprehensive look at Nkoya society and its
ancestral cult, to which Muchati’s account has already
introduced us.
3. The Nkoya and Their
Ancestral Cult
The ancestral cult in Western
Zambia has been the subject of several studies.[5]Although these studies, and other
sources[6] suggest a considerable structural
homogeneity for this part of Africa — a homogeneity which is
manifest in the religious field no less than in other aspects of
society — the following description only refers to the Nkoya
people.
The Nkoya
today mainly inhabit the wooded plateaus between the Zambezi,
Kabompo and Kafue rivers. They are surrounded, and partly
interspersed, with historically and culturally more or less
related groups (including Lozi, Kwanga, Kaonde, Luvale, Mbunda,
Lamba, Ila, Tonga, Lenje), and the Nkoya language is virtually
their only truly distinctive feature.[7] About 35,000 people speak some
variant of Nkoya as their first or main language. The small
polities which in the 18th century, grew out of Nkoya clan
territories, in the 19th century were increasingly incorporated
into the Lozi state; the latter became, under the name of
Barotseland, a protectorate within Northern Rhodesia (1900), and
was fully incorporated into the Republic of Zambia in 1964. In
the area, labour migration gained momentum in the first decade of
this century, while Christian missions arrived in the 1920s.
Especially since Independence small-scale cash-crop cultivation
has been added to labour migration as a form of involvement in
capitalist production.
Nkoya
village society today displays the main features of peripheral
capitalism: domestic communities partly engaged in non-capitalist
modes of production, while reproducing, and being reproduced by,
a qualitatively different, distant, capitalist sector, with
labour migration and cash cropping as the main links between the
two. Non-capitalist modes of production are still prominent in
Nkoya life: food-crop cultivation, hunting, fishing and
collecting organized on a kinship basis form significant aspects
of the rural economy. Despite a partial reliance on money earned,
and food, clothing and utensils purchased, in the capitalist
sector, and despite the existence of all sort of transitory forms
between capitalist and non-capitalist organization of rural
production, the bilateral kinship system, and the associated
residential and marriage patterns, still form the organizing
principles underlying much of the day-to-day social and economic
process in the villages.
Nkoya
kinship organization revolves on bilaterally and affinally
recruited effective kin groups. These can best be described as
factions consisting of a more or less floating cluster of younger
men and women (who are extremely mobile, both residentially and
as regards their effective membership of kin factions), attached
to a more stable core of bilaterally related elders. The elders
are holders of prestigeous titles. The fact that each title
ideally implies village headmanship, renders a considerable
degree of residential fixation to the otherwise rapidly shifting
factions. Even so, the boundaries of kin groups are blurred and
overlapping, and their composition cannot be predicted from a
genealogy but springs from the actual social process
(particularly: patterns of mobilization and allegiance in case of
marital, political, or health crises). The organization of
non-capitalist production takes place within these kin groups.
Production is controlled by the elders, who allocate land and
women, who own guns and other implements, and to whose heriditary
titles fishing rights accrue.
Through
their titles, and the hierarchy implied in them, the elders keep
up, in an eroded form, the organizational, ideological and ritual
superstructure of a tributary system such as it existed in the
last century. However, as a structure of control, exploitation
and redistribution that tributary system ceased to exist with the
imposition of colonial rule. Contemporary Nkoya rural society
contains other superstructural remnants of earlier modes of
production whose economic infrastructure has been supplanted by
peripheral capitalism. Some kin groups are claimed to be of slave
origin, other to be royals: a vestige of the tributary mode of
production. Another mode of production which penetrated in the
last century, in close association with the tributary mode, was
that of mercantile capitalism, locally represented by Swahili and
Ovimbundu traders. This mode of production was likewise wiped out
with the advent of the colonial state. but traces of it can still
be found in a prominent class of cults of affliction: notably
those which, in cultic congregations cutting across existing
residential groups and kin groups, venerate alien spirits that
allegedly cause misfortune by chance, without human infringement
of moral codes being involved. In ways which I have described and
explained elsewhere,[8] these cults of affliction were
transformations of the ancestral cult (along with cults of the
wilds, of the deep forest); in their turn these non-ancestral
cults of affliction became transformed again into the prophetic,
theistic, regionally-organized cults that appeared in Central
Western Zambia shortly before World War II. These
transformations, just like the waxing and waning of Christian
congregations including Watchtower, can be explained, to a
considerable extent, by reference to the changing political and
economic structures in which the Nkoya were involved in the
course of this century and the last. Thus the ancestral cult
among the Nkoya today exists in a context of religious plurality,
which comprises, in addition to the ancestral cult: chiefly
cults; non-ancestral, non-prophetic cults of affliction;
non-ancestral prophetic cults of affliction; and finally,
Christian cults.
The main
manifestation of the ancestral cult itself can be summed up as
below. All these manifestations can be interpreted as ideological
means ensuring the temporary viability of kin groups and
residential groups, counteracting their highly unstable and
shifting nature.
a. Erection of a village shrine
(made out of a forked branch) at the creation of a new village;
the ancestral cult thus underpins the distinct existence of the
village (constituting the visible core of the effective kin
group) as a viable unit of production and reproduction.
b. Enthronement of the successor
to the village headmanship takes places at this shrine; the
ancestral cult thus legitimates the patterns of authority that
govern the social and economic processes within the village and
kin group.
c. Among several rival
explanations of misfortune (including sorcery, and intervention
of the High God), misfortune is often attributed to ancestral
wrath at the bread of moral obligations between living close
kinsmen. Such misfortune takes the form of mental disturbance,
women’s reproductive troubles, general debility, or lack of
success in hunting. Two particularly prominent alleged causes of
misfortune in this respect are: failure to keep the peace within
the kin group (thus threatening its viability as a unit of
production and reproduction); and a hunter’s failure to
distribute his bag among his relatives (thus threatening the kin
group’s viability as a unit of internal distribution and
consumption). Collective prayer to the ancestors, and offering of
meal, beer and meat stock at the shrine are major steps in the
redress of internal relations.
d. The living not only have
obligations to meet vis-à-vis each other, but also vis-à-vis
the dead. These obligations include: observing the rules
concerning burial and inheritance, as well as special
instructions such as the deceased may have given before his
death; and having a living member of the kin group inherit
(kuswanisha) the name of the deceased, so that his name and
social person is not lost for the kin group. The institution of ushwana
thus is a major mechanism in the reproduction of the kin group as
a vital unit in the social and economic process. The enthronement
of the village headman or chief is merely a more exalted case of ushwana,
and designated by the same term. Many cases of misfortune are
attributed, through divination, to defective observance of the
living’s obligations vis-à-vis the dead, or to the choice
of an unsuitable heir. In these cases the ancestors are not
conceived as a nameless collectivity, but the identity of a
specific irate ancestor is found out through divination, in the
course of which lists of deceased kinsmen are recited.
e. While success or failure in
agriculture (mainly due to meteorological conditions and crop
pests) is the province of the cults of more exalted supernatural
agents (chiefly cults, and, more recently, cults of the High God
including Christian cults), success in hunting is primarily
associated with the ancestral cult. A hunter (and a sizeable
proportion of the male population are hunters) will store his
hunting medicine in his ancestral shrine, and will present his
gun there, sprinkling it with white meal and offering prayers and
libations to his ancestors. Many shrines are adorned with hunting
trophies. Moreover the ancestors are considered to speak through
the hunting oracle: success or failure in the hunt, the gender of
an animal killed, can be interpreted as the sign of a specific
opinion of the ancestors on important matters at hand.
f. The village shrine is the place
where members of the kin group are acknowledged as such at birth
and after a long absence, or where they offer prayer before
setting out on a long journey, especially as labour migrants.
Thus the ancestral cult marks crucial stages in an
individual’s career. The shrine is however never a place of
burial: burial takes place away from human habitation, in the
forest.
g. In a more diffuse way, without
formal ritual elaboration, the ancestors are considered to take
an active interest in the day-to-day lives of their living
kinsmen, and frequent reference is made to them, sometimes in a
relaxed, jocular manner. They frequently appear in dreams, where
they admonish the living or reveal unexpected resources, e.g.
hitherto unknown medicinal properties of forest plants.
As
indicated, this ancestral cult exists in a context of religious
plurality. In the other cultic complexes found today among the
Nkoya, different supernatural agents are venerated than
ancestors; different explanations of misfortune and of evil are
propounded; different (and typically: much less) emphasis is laid
on the relation between man and nature, on primary economic
appropriation of nature for the sake of human production;
different moral implications are encountered (from the a-moral
orientation of the non-ancestral cults of affliction, to the
emphatically moral overtones of Christian cults); and ritual
congregations are differently structured: from the territorial
unit (from a valley, or a group of valleys administering a
chiefly cult, to the individualized recruitment patterns of cults
of affliction and Christian cults, that cut across existing
residential groups and kin groups and, that no longer can be said
to underpin viable socio-economic units of production and
reproduction).
The
overall idiom of these various coexisting cults is irreducibly
different. Yet all these cultic forms, with the exception of
mission Christianity, can be considered as radical
transformations and permutations of religious themes already
available in the ancestral cult.[9] This process of transformation
can be traced, not only on the basis of a formal analysis of
contemporary forms, but also on the basis of historical analysis,
data for which can be gleaned from oral, archival, and published
secondary sources as well as from a comparison of distribution
patterns of ethnographic traits. This enables us to fix a time
scale to each of the major cultic forms. The emergence of each of
these forms appears to coincide with the emergence of major modes
of production in the social formation of the region; e.g. the
emergence of chiefly cults along with the emergence of the
tributary mode of production; the emergence of prophetic,
theistic cults of affliction, and of mission Christianity, with
the emergence of industrial capitalism as a dominant mode
production. Therefore it seems reasonable to try and explain the
emergence of these various cultic forms as religious aspects of
these new modes of production, which in the course of the last
few centuries have imposed themselves upon the more ancient
domestic mode of production. The ideological component of the
latter was and is the ancestral cult in, supposedly, more or less
its present-day form.
I cannot
here enter into a discussion of the dialectics of articulation,
of consciousness, and of the relative autonomy of the symbolic
and ritual order vis-à-vis the material processes of production
and reproduction. Yet these dialectics are crucial, if we are to
understand how cultic forms to not automatically constitute an
epiphenomenal superstructure (as they do under capitalism in its
purest form), but instead (as under peripheral capitalism, or
under non-capitalist modes of production) form an integral,
essential part of the very relations of production that govern
economic and social life. Neither is it possible to explain in
the context of this paper how ideological components of modes of
production which have ceased to govern production and
reproduction (e.g. the tributary or mercantile-capitalist mode),
still, as chiefly cults and non-ancestral cults of affliction,
live on as a form of religious expression in a context of
religious plurality. The theory advanced in Religious
Change in Zambia touches on all this, and
particularly throws light upon the persistence of the ancestral
cult. The latter’s remarkable vitality is explained, not on
the basis of some postulated self-propelling property of
so-called traditional culture, but on the basis of the continuing
viability of the domestic mode of production in contemporary
Nkoya society — a viability which is crucial to the
political economy of peripheral capitalism.
4. Beyond Theory:
Experience
The structural theory of African
religion outlined above, just like the others that have been
formulated,[10] operate at a level of great
analytical abstraction. These approaches apply an idiom that is
totally, and deliberately, alien to African religions forms and
modes of conceptualization. While they may constitute a step
forward with regard to questions and debates as formulated within
scholarly disciplines dealing with African religions, they do not
seem to bring us any nearer to the experiential, or existential,
aspect of these religions. The very concepts we are applying
(such as religion, cult, structure, mode of production, social
formation) are imposed from without. It would appear as if these
concepts could be applied, with equal success, or lack of
success, by armchair scholars without first-hand knowledge of
African religious life, and by researchers, including Africans,
who have intimately observed, and lived through, the subtle
personal and collective dramas staged by these religions as
aspects of a total social process. By sleight-of-hand we, as
theorists of African religion, produce statements about these
religions which, if the Africans we write about were to read
these statements, would be totally irrelevant and alien to them.
Okot p’Bitek’s African Religions in
Western Scholarship [11] has been an outcry to that
effect; and while p’Bitek’s argument has created
considerable embarrassment I am not aware of any attempts by
analysts of African religion to really take up the tremendous
challenge which that small book represents. In a related fashion,
and with less of a personal stake in the African-ness of African
religion, James Fernandez[12] has chided researchers working on
African religion, such as Robin Horton and myself, for imposing
‘imageless’ models upon the full, living imagery that
for him constitutes an essential dimension of African religion.
In
partial defense against these serious allegations one could say
three things.[13]First, the imposition of alien
analytical categories, of etic models upon an emic reality, is an
essential task of scholarship, and something we should be proud
of. Secondly, in addition to symbolic and internal analyses of
African religions, there is room for contextual approaches that
locate these religions within their social, political, economic
and historical framework; and from these external, contextual
approaches one cannot demand that they illuminate the more
internal aspects at the same time. As Geertz[14] put it:
‘The anthropological
study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation: first, an
analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which
make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating of these
systems to social-structural and psychological processes. My
dissatisfaction with so much of contemporary social
anthropological work in religion is not that it concerns itself
with the second stage, but that it neglects the first, and in so
doing takes for granted what most needs to be elucidated.’
Thirdly, the etic models we impose
may not be so totally alien, since they sometimes represent more
or less simplified translations, to the etic (attic...) level, of
African emic categories which researchers like Horton and myself
have mastered in the course of prolonged, participatory
field-work on African religions.
Having
made these points, I am still dissatisfied, for a number of
reasons. The scholarship that claims the imposition of alien
analytical categories as its major task, may be legitimate,
respectable, and worthy of research funds; but its results may
have meaning only within the context of such scholarship (or, by
extension, within the context of the North Atlantic secularized,
industrial, urban society producing and reproducing such
scholarship). What relevance does such scholarship have for
members of the Third-World societies treated in it? Also, while
it may be true that some etic models in fact adequately restate
emic ones (e.g. for Central Western Zambia, an etic model of
sorcery as a levelling mechanism counteracting inequality and
upward mobility can be shown to have parallels in people’s
own conceptualization of sorcery in their society),[15] this is certainly not the case
for the main concept featuring in e.g. Horton’s approach, or
in my own. Such distinctions as between microcosm and macrocosm,
infrastructure and superstructure, domestic and capitalist modes
of production, primarily reflect the contradictions inherent in
North Atlantic society today; and the theoretical problems they
solve there (if any) are not shared by the African subjects in
whose lives these distinctions are alleged to play a dominant
role. These people would hardly be able to recognize their own
life-world as rendered by such theoretical models. And what is
more, I for one fail to recognize, in these approaches, not only
what I take to be the experiences of my African friends and
informants, but also my own experiences as a field-worker.
5. Experiencing African
Religion in Field-work
There is a marked tendency, among
anthropologists today, to interpret Pope’s maxim[16]
‘The proper study of
Mankind is Man’
as meaning
‘The proper subject
matter of anthropology is the anthropologist.’
After the illusory positivist
objectivism of classic anthropology, this swing of the pendulum
is most timely. We need not be alarmed by the narcissist elements
it undoubtedly contains: hopefully after spending its momentum,
the pendulum will swing back, leaving us, with an anthropology
that knows approximately as much about its main measuring
instrument (the field-worker) as astronomy, electro-physiology or
psychoanalysis know that theirs (telescopes, micro-electrodes,
and the psychoanalyst’s mind, in that order).
Anthropologists
in the field tend to be much more than mere spectators. Often
they are major protagonists in the social processes they
describe.[17] Because of the personal, social
and financial resources he controls a field-worker may
unwittingly cause or trigger the quarrels he describes as in
vitro;[18] may partially sponsor rituals
that occupy key positions in his academic arguments; may solicit
verbal and gesticulatory responses relating to courtship and
love-making by actively creating the appropriate setting for
those; or may stimulate[19] a surge of ethnic awareness when
his own presence among an ethnic minority offers unique
opportunities of ethnic self-advertisement
But it is
a poor field-worker who always knows himself in control of the
field, or who desperately strives for such control.[20] It is virtually impossible that a
field-worker penetrates, with his observations and participation,
the more intimate dimensions of people’s lives, without
getting entangled, if only briefly, in the same web of
perceptions, conceptualizations, aspirations and anxieties,
within which the so-called informants are caught. this is what
makes anthropological field-work a devastating, but profoundly
human experience, whose justification lies largely outside
the field of academic production as measurable in terms of books
and articles written and lectures given.
For the
study of African religion through anthropological field-work,
this view of field-work has several implications which will be
totally unacceptable to the majority of my colleagues.
If
participation observation creates some degree of osmosis (between
the religious beliefs and actions of the subjects, and the
researcher who studies them), then the researcher has, through
introspection, some immediate access to these beliefs, actions,
and the attending emotions and aspirations. The field-worker will
be able (to a limited extent) to make meaningful and essentially
correct statements about the experiential dimensions of the alien
religion he studies, precisely because the participation he
engages in temporarily make him a non-alien. Upon the social
field and the social process which already existed before his
arrival, the field-worker through his research imposes a
research-centred process and field, which confusingly blend with
the original ones. In the course of his field-work, in an
increasing number of practical situations, the researcher becomes
a participant. His peculiarities (often including foreign origin,
unusual skin colour, academic background, deficient language
mastery, secularized world-view, or a combination of those items)
are fairly irrelevant in many settings. A white European renegade
— Christian field-worker dancing around the orchestra on the
night of ushwana, or
lining up with the others (exhausted and intoxicated, like them)
in order to sprinkle meal on the head of the chosen heir, is
‘venerating an ancestor’ (according to the codes of the
local community) just as he is ‘collecting data’
(according to the code of a distant academic community).
Does that
field-worker believe in
this ancestor’s post-mortal reality, in the reincarnation
that is alleged to take place? That question is less legitimate
and meaningful than one would be inclined to think, and can only
be answered along with two related questions: Does
that researcher believe in data? And do his fellow-participants
in the ushwana ritual
believe in the ancestor and in the reincarnation that is alleged
to take place?
Frankly,
my intuitive answer to all three questions would be that most
unscientific of all gestures, a shrug of the shoulders. A the
theoretical level I will (like I would then, eight years ago)
passionately defend the view that data are mere artifacts of the
selective theoretical perception with which one enters the field,
in combination with the vicissitudes and chance occurrences of
the field-work situation. At the practical level however, I have
engaged in a passionate quest for data, sacrificing sleep and
leisure time, spending a fortune, wrecking my car, and risking my
own health as well as that of the members of my family in the
process. At the theoretical level of explicit intellectual
reflection, the local participants in the ushwana
ritual, when prompted in a formal interview situation or when
overheard in spontaneous conversation at a beer-drink, could be
shown to display a considerable variety among themselves, as well
as a considerable variability as individuals. All would be
inclined to attribute some
degree of reality to the shade. However, many of the peasants
involved would have been labour migrants to distant urban areas,
would occasionally listen to radio broadcast, would have attended
several years of primary school, and would for some years have
been active members of Christian churches. Through all these
influences they would have been exposed to a mechanicist,
secularized view of the factors that control the functions of the
human body, and of the ecological processes governing wildlife.
As a result they would have acquired more relative views of the
shade’s power to control illness and success in hunting.
Others among the Nkoya would belong to the Watchtower sect, and
would entirely reject the notions of the shade and ushwana;
refusing to stage ushwana
in their own Watchtowerized villages, they would participate in ushwana
elsewhere only for the sake of social obligation. In other words,
it would be hard to tell whether or not the local participants
involved in ushwana do
‘believe’. But in the ritual context, it would be an
irrelevant question to ask. For at the practical level this
variation and variability in the cognitive patterns attending ushwana
is not reflected in people’s ritual actions once ushwana
is being staged (i.e. outside the Watchtower villages). Everyone
‘believes’ with his body, his voice, his clapping, his
tears — no matter what goes on, then or at other moments, in
his mind.
The
essential point is that in this type of local, folk religions
which, people themselves perceive as a collective tradition and
whose congregations are not purposely and recently established
but, on the contrary, are conterminous with existing residential
groups and kin groups, the cognitive aspects of the religious
system are not
dramatically embraced, accepted, by an act of conversion at a
specific time and place — by an act of will which could also
have led to rejection and negation. Instead, these cognitive
elements are unobtrusively instilled in the course of life, and
are gradually adopted, along with the cognitive elements
pertaining to other cultic subsystems within the social
formation. They are taken for granted.
Their truth value lies at a practical level, and has nothing to
do with the theodicies and apologetics of the North Atlantic
Aristotelian tradition. This tradition has come to dominate
religious anthropology, e.g. in the form of logically integrated
treatises claiming to describe local African religious systems,
and (as regards the definitional problem) in the form of an
obsession with the non-empirical
status of the supernatural agents venerated in ritual.
From this
point of view it is totally immaterial what the field-worker
‘believes’ to be the theoretical objective reality of
the shade venerated in a ritual like ushwana.
Like the others, he may come to a point where he takes
that reality for granted; at least for as
long as the ritual lasts. And the proof of this is that, like the
others, he shows his belief at the practical level, with... his
body, his voice, his clapping, his tears.
African
folk systems of religion can be temporarily adopted, absorbed,
because they are not surrounded by conspicuous insurmountable
cognitive or actional boundaries. They invite us to join in.
I see
very little reason why, among the participants, the
anthropological field-worker studying religion should be treated
as a total alien, or, worse still, as a virtually invisible,
non-human measuring instrument, supposedly registering
‘data’ which no non-human instrument could ever
register. I suspect that there is something in the nature of
ritual which renders this form of human activity particularly
suitable for the practical crossing of cognitive and cultural
boundaries. Emile Durkheim called this element
‘effervescence’, while Victor Turner more recently
attempted to penetrate it with the notion of
‘communitas’.[21] What ritual participation
certainly creates is a reversion of the habitual
field-worker’s attitude of incessant, conscious
participation reversion observation and interpretation; thus the
practical merging of outsider and participant, while too
subjective to pay off in the way of data collection, in the field
situation represents a caesura long enough to remind us of the
fact that we are just as human as the people we study. And to
remind them of that fact.
This does
not mean that the anthropologist, in some mysterious or mystical
way, becomes one (let alone: remains one) with the local people
— that his identity merges with theirs in a lasting sense
that can be transferred to the non-ritual aspects of the field
situation. He remains more of a stranger to them, than they tend
to be vis-à-vis each other; but the difference is quantitative,
not qualitative.
Thus,
‘religious plurality begins at home’; the stranger
doing field-work on African religion constitutes a boundary
condition, a limiting case, of religious plurality even in those
rare African settings that in other respects would seem to lack
such plurality. A theory of religious plurality would enable us
to understand the religious anthropologist at the same time; just
as a theory of field-work would take us a long way towards a
theory of religious plurality. Or, like Richard Werbner[22] stated in one of the most
profound, or simply cryptic, opening sentences in recent
anthropology:
‘Religion and
strangerhood transform together.’
6. Conclusion
The aim of the previous section of
this paper was not to present a theory of field-work in religious
anthropology, but to formulate a problem that such a theory might
attempt to solve in future. Yet I am not at all sure that a
solution in terms of a detached, analytical theory would be in
the spirit of this paper:
...The light of the
rising sun skirts the conical grass roofs of the houses of
Mayobe’s village. Shikanda, the young girl who was seized,
last night, to inherit the name of her deceased aunt Kafungu,
sits on a reed mat in the middle of the village. She faces the ushwana
shrine and the rising sun. She is now wearing a white dress;
albeit that the only white dress her relatives could afford to
buy turns out to have black-and-white checkered sleeves. Shikanda
holds Kafungu’s last-born child in her lap. The child has
become Shikanda’s, now that Shikanda has become Kafungu. On
Shikanda’s face the terror of last night has given way to a
serious, only slightly anguished expression. On another reed mat
to the right of Shikanda sits Ntaniela, Kafungu’s widower,
holding in his lap his first-born son from the marriage that
ended in Kafungu’s death. Ntaniela is likewise dressed in
white. For the duration of the ritual, he is considered
Shikanda’s husband, although his marriage will never be
consummated, and each will go his own way after the ritual is
over.’
‘Exhausted, dazed
in the morning light, and all more or less drunk, the remaining
participants in the ritual line up in order to salute Shikanda
under her new name, and to sprinkle meal on her head. Our number
has dwindled to about forty. Some of us are crying. In my ears
still reverberates Shikanda’s screaming when, in the middle
of the night, the elders caught her: ‘Nakana,
nakana, natina shikuma, nakana (I refuse, I
refuse, I am so afraid, no!).’ I intercept the resigned,
puzzling smile with which Ntaniela looks at Shikanda holding his
child. The people keep shouting ‘Kafungu! Kafungu!’ and
call Shikanda by the kinship terms they would each use vis-à-vis
Kafungu when still alive. Unable to fight back my tears any
longer, I am overwhelmed by the thought that Kafungu has actually
returned in the shape and person of Shikanda; that the shade is
eminently real; that here, among the downtrodden ethnic minority
of the Nkoya, in a Central African backwater, death has been
overcome.’
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mammals and a brave people, Seattle &
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Africa, London: Cass.
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among the central Bantu’, Africa,
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n.d. ‘Play and time:
A philosophical analysis of development’ [check title],
doctoral thesis, Department of Philosopy, University of Leiden,
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n.d. African
religions in western scholarship, Kampala
etc.: East African Publishing House (1971).
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1977 ‘Law in the
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[1] Field-work among the Nkoya was conducted in 1972-74, 1977, and 1978. For full acknowledgements and a list of my related papers till 1980, see: van Binsbergen 1981a. For the present paper I am especially indebted to discussions with Johnny Nchabeleng; and to Adrienne van Wijngaarden for typing successive drafts. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the I.U.A.E.S. (International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences) Intercongress, Amsterdam, April 22-25, 1981 — Symposium on: Plurality in Religion.
[2] Of course the conditions under which Muchati told his story rendered a verbatim record impossible. His text was reproduced from memory within days after the occasion; it appears here in an edited form, to which for clarity’s sake a few lined from Muchati’s statements at other occasions during the same period (1973) have been added. Names of persons and localities have been altered.
[3] Although some contributors to this symposium have opted for the term ‘religious pluralism’, rather than ‘plurality’, I would strongly prefer the latter term — which is also the one propounded by the conveners. Pluralism, like any -ism, emerges as the result of actor’s deliberate choices within an explicit ideological context — and as such it might apply, e.g., to phenomena like denominational ‘pillarization’ in Dutch society. However, such a state of affairs is not encountered in situations like that of the Nkoya today. Moreover, the term pluralism is unfortunate since it is often employed as a respectable euphemism for ethnic and racial segregation, apartheid. Plurality of religion is a much more primary, analytical term, which simply poses the coexistence of distinct, mutually more or less irreducible religious forms — while the causes the conditions of such plurality remain a topic for further empirical investigation.
[4] Van
Binsbergen 1981a.
[5] Cf. Colson 1962; Lancaster 1977; Marks 1976; Melland 1923; Munday 1948; Stefaniszyn 1954; Turner 1968; for the Nkoya: van Binsbergen 1977: passim, 1979a: passim, 1981a: especially ch. 1, 3 and 4.
[6] Cf. van Binsbergen 1981a: footnotes to ch. 3 and 4.
[7] Cf.
van Binsbergen 1981b.
[8] Cf.
van Binsbergen 1981a: ch. 1, 4-7.
[9] This is even the case with the non-ancestral cults of affliction, which, although venerating alien spirits in non-communal congregations, can be shown to be fairly straightforward transformations of the ancestral cults in more or less distant areas, where a ritual and symbolic culture, and a production system, prevailed that was historically and substantively closely related to that of the Nkoya . And, as I have shown elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1981a: ch. 4), even mission Christianity in Western Zambia fits to a considerable extent into this pattern of symbolic transformation, despite its distant, alien origin.
[10] Cf. Horton 1971, 1975; Wilson 1971
[11] p’Bitek
n.d.
[12] Fernandez 1978a, 1978b.
[13] Van
Binsbergen 1981a: 28-38.
[14] Geertz 1966:
42.
[15] Van
Binsbergen 1981a: ch. 4.
[16] Pope, Epistle II, line 2, in: De Fontanes 1821.
[17] Cf. van
Binsbergen 1978a: 55f.
[18] Cf. van Binsbergen 1979a: 43. Only in order to avoid awkwardly complicated phrases, I describe the field-worker as male; however, gender does not seem to constitute an important factor in the aspects of field-work discussed here.
[19] Cf. van
Binsbergen 1981b.
[20] For a general discussion of related problems in field-work, cf. Bleek 1979 and van Binsbergen 1979b; Nchabeleng n.d. provides a philosophical analysis of this problematic, in terms of the process of ‘going native’.
[21] Durkheim 1912; Turner 1974.
[22] Werbner
1979: 663.
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