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agent. As in many African cultures, the attribution of misfortune to a human or spirit agent was a statement about the victim's social and ritual relationships, and therefore about social identity. |
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Three categories of misfortune agents emphasized the moral universe of kinship. Senior relatives (both matrilateral and patrilateral) were thought able to curse (ohulama, ohung'waba) if their rights were not honored, if bridewealth was not paid and redistributed properly, if they were not treated respectfully. Ancestral ghosts (emigu j'abafu) were said to send misfortune to remind their descendants of their obligations to commemorate them through sacrifice and ceremonies. Similarly, clan spirits (ekuni) could make demands upon members of the clans with which they were associated (see Whyte and Whyte 1987). Attributing misfortune to these agents emphasized one's identity as a junior kinsman (related to a curser), as a member of a local descent group (descended from a particular forefather), or as a member of a patrilineal clan (associated with a specific clan spirit). The rituals prescribed to address these causes dramatized kinship identity by bringing kinsmen together for the common expression of moral ideals. |
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Opposed to these categories of moral, kin-related agents was the sorcerer (omulogi), who sent misfortune not as a punishment for failed obligations but out of such immoral motives as envy, jealousy, hatred, and vengefulness. Sorcery was the most dangerous cause of misfortune, and it was the cause to which death was most commonly attributed. (In illustration, one Nyole diviner remarked that even Jesus died by the malicious act of Judas, another human being.) Nyole suspected personal enemies of sorcerynot people who were irredeemably and totally evil and harmful toward everyone but persons who had specific motives for striking at the victim. Here too social relationships (albeit negative ones) were the mode of interpreting misfortune. |
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A final category of little spirits (obusambwa) and foreign spirits (emisambwa miganda, miswahili, etc.) were thought to have no preexisting relationships to their victims. These spirits were said to attack women and children primarily, with the significant exception of some foreign spirits which possessed both men and women in connection with divination. Elsewhere I have suggested that this aspect of the Nyole view of misfortune is a logical opposition to the emphasis on social relationship and serves as a counterpart to the dominant, male-oriented model of misfortune (Whyte 1981). |
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The Nyole view of misfortune is based on a relational concept of the person. To a large extent, a person is defined in terms of relations to external agents rather than in terms of internal psychological or biological states and processes. The difference between the Nyole concept and our own is very clear in the diagnosis of sickness. Western medicine subjects disease to what Foucault (1975) called "the medical gaze"; sick bodies are examined and compared in the clinic in order to identify pathological processes. Nyole were not unaware of pathological symptoms, but the diagnosis of serious sickness, the identification of what it really was, did not involve the clinical examination of the ailing individual. Diagnosis had to do primarily with social and ritual relations rather than the symptoms of the individual body and mind. Thus the diviner as diagnostician did not need |
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