Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult Among the Yaka

Capa
University of Chicago Press, 1993 - 334 páginas
For the Yaka of Southwestern Zaire, infertility is a tear in the fabric of life, and the Khita fertility ritual is a trusted way of reweaving the damaged strands. In Weaving the Threads of Life Rene Devisch offers an extended analysis of the Khita cult, which leads to an original account of the workings of ritual healing.

Drawing on many years among urban and rural Yaka, Devisch analyzes their understanding of existence as a fabric of firmly but delicately interwoven threads of nature, body, and society. The fertility healing ritual calls forth forces, feelings, and meanings that allow women to rejoin themselves to the complex pattern of social and cosmic life. These elaborate rites—whether simulating mortal agony and rebirth, gestation and delivery, or flowering and decay; using music and dance, steambath or massage, dream messages or scarification—are not based on symbols of traditional beliefs. Rather, Devisch shows, the rites themselves generate forces and meaning, creating and shaping the cosmic, physical, and social world of their participants.

In contrast to current theoretical methods such as postmodern or symbolical interpretation, Devisch's praxiological approach is unique in also using phenomenological insights into the intent and results of anthropological fieldwork. This innovative work will have ramifications beyond African studies, reaching into the anthropology of medicine and the body, comparative religious history, and women's studies.

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Índice

Field and Method
11
12 Field work
20
13 Bantu Cults of Affliction
23
14 Healers in the Town
25
A Critique
33
A SemanticPraxilogical Approach
37
The Cosmology of Gender Arrangements and Life Transmission
53
21 Horizontal and Vertical Space
54
52 Divinatory Etiology and the Work of Cults
169
53 Etiology as an Indication of Therapy
173
The Khita Fertility Cult Reversing the Evil
179
61 Khita and Similar Cults
180
Reversing the Persecution into Uterine Bonds of Life Transmission
183
The Decay and Cooking of Generative Forces
196
The Khita Fertility Cult Reorigination of the Fabric of Body Kin and Lifeworld
213
Seclusion in the Uterus of the World
214

22 Cosmological Portrayal of Gender
60
23 Animals and Plants
74
24 Capturing and Cooking Untamed Forces
86
The Social Formation of Life Transmission
92
31 Lifebearing and Nurturing in the Homestead
93
32 Marriage as a Transfer Along the Path to the Village
101
33 The Reproductive Cell
106
34 The Twoforked Tree of Agnatic Descent and Uterine Filiation
115
35 Hunting versus Sorcery and the Fabric of Kin
122
Body Group and Lifeworld Between Maze and Weave
132
41 Physical and Sensory Modes of Contact
134
42 The Relational Body
139
43 The Body and Its Afflictions
146
44 Cults of Affliction and Communal Sodalities
147
Impediments to Life Transmission
161
51 Masculinist Views on Human Agencies in Infertility
164
Emancipating Forest Forces into Social Fecundity
224
73 Relapse of Illness
244
A Look at Victor Turner
245
The Body as the Weaving Loom of Healing and Life
255
81 The Role of Music and Dance in Healing
259
82 The Source of Healing
264
83 Paradox Transgression and Homeopathic Healing
267
84 A Ternary Logic of Mediation and Effusion in Selfhealing
276
Epilogue
282
A Case of Infertility
285
Herbarium
293
Notes
299
References
315
Index
325
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