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women threaten the social order, which has to bereconfirmed by ritual healing.

B i b l i o g r a p h y

J. Boddy, Wombs and alien spirits. Women, men and theZr cult in northern Sudan, Madison, Wis. 1989.

P. N. Boratav, 100 soruda Trk folkloru. Inanlar. Treve trenler. Oyunlar, Istanbul 1984.

C. Delaney, The seed and the soil. Gender and cosmologyin Turkish village society, Berkeley 1991.

. Z. Eyubolu, Cinci byleri ve yldzname, Istanbul1978.

B. J. Good and M. DelVecchio Good, In the subjunctivemode. Epilepsy narratives in Turkey, in Social Scienceand Medicine 38:6 (1994), 83542.

K. Hentschel, Ginn-Glaube, Zauber- und Heilwesen imheutigen Kairo, Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna 1987.

O. ztrk, Folk treatment of mental illness, in A. Kiev(ed.), Magic, faith, and healing. Studies in primitive

psychiatry today, New York 1974, 34363.S. Strasser, Die Unreinheit ist fruchtbar! Grenz-

berschreitungen in einem trkischen Dorf amSchwarzen Meer, Vienna 1995., Impurity as criticism. Reports from a Black Sea vil-

lage in Turkey, in International Institute for the Studyof Islam in the Modern World Newsletter 5 (2000), 13.

Sabine Strasser

KEY WORDS: female body; impurity; social order;fainting spells; counterhegemonic potential; ritual heal-ing; cin/peri.

West Africa

Although the literature regarding female spiritpossession in Muslim West Africa is strikingly poor,in most of these Islamized societies where cult pos-sessions take place it has been noted that womenconstitute the majority of the possessed. Among theSonghay of Niger, Stoller (1989) relates the factthat, during the holle hori (better known as theholey possession ceremony), the possessed medi-ums (called bari, horses of the spirits) are predomi-nantly female, while male mediums participateoccasionally in the possession troupes. Women canalso become zima, priestesses of the possessiontroupe. To become a part of the possession group

means that a woman has been sick, diagnosed asbeing invaded by a particular spirit, and initiated tothe cult as a healing process. Once initiated, medi-ums devote a large part of their lives to their spirits;they wear clothes associated with them, make sac-rifices to them, and attend possession ceremonies.A similar cult is found among the closely culturallyrelated Zarma (Diarra 1971), and among the Fulbeof the Niamey area (Niger) where, in some villages,more than 70 percent of the horses of the spiritsare women (Vidal 1990).

Nonetheless, studies of spirit possession in West

30 spirit possession

Africa have mainly focused on the well-known boricult, which has become the paragon of womensspirit possession in Muslim West Africa. Bori is avery complex religious institution started before the

arrival of Islam from the Hausa people, located onthe border of Niger and Nigeria, and it is highlyaccommodating of Islamic practices. In some areas,such as the Maradi valley in Niger, bori is a prima-rily female domain, where membership and posses-sion are exclusively for women (Monfouga-Nicolas1972). In others, such as Dogonoutchi in Niger, it isdivided between men and women, and both menand women hold positions of leadership within thecult (Masquelier 2001). Similarly, OBrien (1999)emphasizes that while its clientele is disproportion-ately female, bori is not central to the lives of mostHausa women of northern Nigeria. Yet scholars

converge to assert that female mediums largely pre-dominate in bori. Most of these women come fromthe fringes of the Hausa society, be they prostitutes,runaway girls, or women who have divorced multi-ple times. It has been shown, however, that whilebori mostly recruits its adepts among marginalizedwomen, male mediums are more frequently pos-sessed by important spirits and recent spirits andthey are more likely to become chief ofbori (Echard1995).

The pantheon of the bori is composed of a greatnumber of spirits (both male and female, callediskooki), mainly of three types defined by their

color (white, black, and red), and inclined toinclude new spirit characters like female warriors,French soldiers, noble Tuareg, seductive prosti-tutes, Zarma blacksmiths, doctors and lorry driv-ers, Muslim clerks and bank thieves (Masquelier2001, 292). As among the holey Songhay, spiritpossession, sickness and healing are intimatelylinked in the bori. The bori is first and foremosta therapeutic cult which recruits its followersamong unfortunate people (who have experi-enced, for example, disease, sterility, or successivechild deaths), and an initiation into bori is alwaysseen as a form of treatment. Once the entity respon-

sible for the sickness is identified by a ritual expertas being a bori spirit, the patient will be initiated toits cult for seven days. While treated with ritualherbs known only to bori specialists, she will learnthe particular history of her spirit, its gestures,songs, and the dances that accompany it. At the endof the initiation, a possession ceremony takes placewhere the newly initiated is publicly possessed byher spirit. It is worth noticing that possession inbori is often described as a sexual act wherein thepossessed woman is mounted by the spirit who pen-etrates her (Masquelier 2001, 87).

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Although literature is scarce, it is agreed thathealing is also crucial to female cult possessions inthe western part of Muslim West Africa. Among theLebou of Senegal, where the men are in charge of

the Muslim-inspired religious life and the womenthe guardians of the traditional religion, the cere-mony known as ndep (ndoep or ndop) is a curingritual headed by female religious specialists (thendopkat). The rite aims to extract the rab (ancestralspirit) from the body of a patient. First, the ndop-katwill diagnose the sickness by naming the spir-itual agency responsible for it. She will then providea ritual treatment and organize an initiation forthe patient lasting three to seven days. In the courseof this initiation, sacrifices and divination tech-niques are practiced, while public sessions of pos-session take place where women are seized by their

designated spirit. Once the rab is expelled from herbody, the patient becomes an adept of the society,and therefore a privileged intermediary betweenthe human and the spirits (Zemplni 1966).

Similarly, among the Bulongic (a people belong-ing to the cultural mosaic of Baga groups, locatedalong the coast of Guinea-Conakry), the recentintroduction of Islam (ca. 1950) and the abandon-ment of male pre-Islamic practices have heightenedthe social relevance of female pre-Islamic rituals,based on cult-possession (Berliner 2005). Bulongicwomen have their own secret ritual organizationnamed kk. As is the case in numerous female

associations of the subregion, kk women are par-ticularly focused on illnesses linked to witchcraft.Indeed, anyone attacked by a witch no longerhas control over herself: without knowing it, he/she is attached to a witch. Being attached mani-fests itself in physical or mental troubles, a series ofdeaths, accidents, bad harvests, and social con-flicts. It is through dance ceremonies during whichcertain women become possessed that they will beable to see things and to use their ritual poweragainst witches. It is said that some women of theassociation are gifted with extraordinary powerssuch as the night eye, which enables them to see

entities from the invisible world.Whilst the old men who are today the primary

guardians of Islam no longer practice the sacrifices(otonion) destined to honor their spirits, thewomen of kk continue to gather together twice ayear to hold theirs, regardless of the contention ofthe men who are fiercely opposed to these fetishis-tic practices. These ritual events take place at thebeginning of the rainy season and at the end of theharvest, in consideration of the coming of the rainand the success of work in the fields. They aremainly aimed to pray to their protective spirit,

west africa 31

known as mama. The entity is described as a fatwoman with black skin. It is she alone who, duringthe otonion, takes the women (called the chil-dren of mama) during the ritual dance. The

moment that they are taken bymama, some womenbecome able to predict the future, literally to seethe thing that is coming. They are also capable oflocating ailments in a person (Such-and-such aman suffers from a swollen stomach, Such-and-such a woman lost a child in that family). Thespirit speaks through the mouth of the possessedwhile one of the oldest women asks it questions.Once mama delivers its message, the kk womencan then intervene in a therapeutic way and pro-pose sacrifices and medicines. During the posses-sion ceremony, the ritual work of the kk seersconsists mainly in checking the village, finding

people attached by witches and talismans thatcould have been buried in the village. In the courseof these otonion, the women stop frequently toengage in recitations from the Qurn. They viewtheir possession ceremonies as both positive andnecessary to social harmony without being incom-patible with Islam in any way.

Outside these public rituals (kk women alsodance at the funerals of old adepts and duringfemale excision ceremonies), the expertise of thekk women is famous within the region andattracts people with various ailments. Manywomen, young adult men, as well as the Bulongic

elites living in the city and foreigners to the village,come to consult the kk seers to diagnose an ail-ment, to be cleansed, or made strong againstpotential attacks of witchcraft. The women ofkkare reputed to possess powerful medicines that cancure many illnesses. In the past, for women whohad already given birth, kk was especially knownfor treating problems connected to sterility, preg-nancy, and childbirth, including stillbirths, nursing,and menstrual complications.

While in many cases men have abandoned theirown ritual practices in the name of Islam, womenin many West African societies continue their

involvement in pre-Islamic practices and use inno-vative means to contribute to maintaining religiousbeliefs and performances, perhaps in order to chal-lenge their exclusion from Islam. Bori, kk, ndep,and holey are only a few examples of possessioncults whose roots lie in the pre-Islamic era, andwhose transmission to this day operates mostlythrough women. Even though these cults have beenstrongly influenced by Islam, they constitute arepository of pre-Islamic ritual knowledge ofsongs, dances, and healing techniques in contem-porary Muslim societies. Thus, it is through the

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deeper phenomenological realms of female spiritpossession such as the physiological and healingqualities of trance, expressions of personhoodthrough the body, and the range of religious mem-

ories that spirit possession brings into play thatwomen reveal their own ritual and therapeuticexpertise which can coexist with Muslim rites.

B i b l i o g r a p h y

D. Berliner, La fminisation de la coutume. Femmes pos-sdes et transmission religieuse en pays bulongic(Guine, Conakry), in Cahiers dtudes africaines45:177 (2005), 1538.

J. Boddy, Spirit possession revisited. Beyond instrumen-tality, in Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994),40737.

F. Diarra, Femmes africaines en devenir. Les femmeszarma du Niger, Paris 1971.

N. Echard, Gender relationships and religion. Women inthe Hausa Bori of Ader, Niger, in C. Coles and B. Mack

(eds.), Hausa women in the twentieth century, Londonand Madison 1995, 20720.

32 spirit possession

I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic religion. An anthropological study ofspirit possession and shamanism, Harmondsworth,England 1971.

A. Masquelier, Prayer has spoiled everything. Possession,power, and identity in an Islamic town of Niger,Durham, N.C. 2001.

J. Monfouga-Nicolas,Ambivalence et culte de possession.Contribution ltude du Bori hausa, Paris 1972.

S. OBrien, Pilgrimage, power, and identity. The role of theHajj in the lives of Nigerian Hausa Bori adepts, inAfrica Today 46 (1999), 1040.

P. Stoller, Fusion of the worlds. An ethnography of pos-session among the Songhay of Niger, Chicago andLondon 1989.

L. Vidal, Rituels de possession dans le Sahel. Exemplespeul et zarma du Niger, Paris 1990.

A. Zemplni, La dimension thrapeutique du culte desRab. Ndop, Tuuru et Samp. Rites de possession chez lesWolof et les Lbou, in Psychopathologie africaine 2(1966), 295439.

David Berliner

KEY WORDS: possession, pre-Islamic, healing, bori,kk, ndep, holey, Guinea-Conakry, Niger, Nigeria,Senegal, spirit mediums, syncretism

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