Sónia Silva

Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets

Introduction Chapter 1. Birth Chapter 2. Initiation Chapter 3. Adulthood Conclusion: A Way of Living Glossary Works Cited Index Acknowledgments

Reification and Fetishism: Processes of Transformation

Reification, fetishism, alienation, mastery, and control – these are some of the key concepts of modernity that have been battered and beaten by postmoderns and nonmoderns alike, with Bruno Latour, a nonmodern, discarding them most recently. Critical of this approach, which creates a rift between moderns and nonmoderns, the author engages in dialogue with modern thinkers – particularly Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Stanley Pullberg – with a view to recycling and redefining the concept of reification from a nonmodern perspective. Marxian scholars associate reification with an attitude of detachment and passivity. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Luvale-speaking region of northwest Zambia, Africa, the author seeks to convert the negative and asymmetrical Marxian reading of reification, which places subjects above objects, to a positive symmetry. Marx explained the capitalist economy through the lens of religion. Reversing the direction of symmetrical comparison, the author considers the northwestern Zambian universe of ancestors and their different mahamba manifestations in the form of spiritual beings, diseased bodies and material objects through the lens of Marxian concepts, mainly reification and fetishism. Three aspects of reification understood as a human universal come to light: first, reification and animation entail each other both in the realms of materiality (human bodies and material objects) and immateriality (concepts and spirits), being best perceived as a form of fetishism. Reifacts are fetishes and fetishes are reifacts. Second, because fetishes are animated and do things, reification is a form of engagement with the world, a means to action and a tool for transformation. Third and last, and without contradiction, reification entails engagement and detachment, action and withdrawal, control and surrender. There is much to gain from recycling the old concept of reification. In a non-partisan symmetrical perspective, the redefinition of reification as fetishism yields a new, positive understanding of the place of material and immaterial things in social life and the ways in which we humans apprehend the world and implicate those things in our projects and struggles. Reification is not an impediment to action but a condition for action.

Remarks on Similarity in Ritual Classification: Affliction, Divination, and Object Animation

In Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, when comparing the variety of fire festivals in Europe to many different human faces, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “one would like to draw lines joining the parts that various faces have in common.” In Philosophical Investigations, speaking now of games—card games, board games, ball games, and so on—Wittgenstein says, “if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all” but “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” In the similarities among different games he sees “family resemblances.” In the act of tracing similarities he defines his method. I propose to employ Wittgenstein’s method in the study of three rituals from northwest Zambia, where I have conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork since the mid-1990s. Because the Luvale, Chokwe, Mbunda, Luchazi, and Lunda who live in the region are culturally and historically related to the Ndembu, the ethnic group whose social and ritual life Victor Turner studied in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in the 1950s, readers will be rather familiar with those three rituals as well as the concepts that I employ

Witchcraft and the Gift: Killing and Healing in Northwest Zambia

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In becoming a witch, that woman kills one of her relatives, whose flesh is consumed by the cowitch. The cowitch, in turn, becomes indebted to her and must provide more human flesh. This cycle of death may be broken when a healer offers a gift of sacrificial blood to the accused witch in exchange for the victim’s life. Drawing on David Graeber’s concept of human economies as well as Peter Geschiere’s treatment of intimacy and trust in witchcraft discourse, this chapter shows that requests and gifts may constitute leaps of faith that are dangerous but also necessary to undertake.

Art and Fetish in the Anthropology Museum

Abstract Between the 1920s and early 1980s an increasing number of African art exhibitions opened to the public in Western Europe and North America. In these exhibitions African religious objects such as masks and wooden figurines were reframed as modernist art. Focusing on the illustrative case of the National Ethnology Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, this article shows that these African art exhibitions offered a powerful alternative to the colonial, religious concept of the fetish. Early scholars of comparative religion claimed that the primitive fetish worshippers were unable to grasp the idea of transcendence. By elevating African religious objects (the so-called fetishes) to the transcendental realm of modernist art, curators of African art helped dispel the colonial concept of the fetish, and change mindsets and worldviews. In their struggle against the notion of the fetish, these curators also engaged with the concepts of art, culture and religion. Mounted on pedestals and bathed by light, the African religious objects became modernist cult objects: cultural artifacts elevated to a higher plane of religious and aesthetic spirituality.

The expert interpreter

Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination’s grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mobility and Immobility in the Life of an Amputee

S lived through colonialism in Angola, the liberation war, the civil war that followed independence, forced displacement to Zambia, and a landmine accident resulting in amputation. At diff erent points in his life, Samuzala was a trader, a migrant, a refugee, and an amputee. In engaging with Samuzala’s life story, a narrative of movement, we learn that mobility and immobility are relative to one another; mobility and immobility are not absolute conditions, with complete immobility being the fl ip side of pure, unimpeded mobility. In everyday existence, mobile individuals experience stillness, and physically immobilized individuals experience movement. As humans, we exist in a universe created by the possibilities of stasis and mobility, a universe that sets limits to our existence but also opens up new horizons. By adopting an existential stance we are more likely to avoid stereotyping and reifi cation. We are also more likely to privilege the lifeworld over concepts such as migration and forced displacement, and more open to giving voice to new understandings of collective phenomena from the perspective of those individuals whose lives and movements generate them.