Examining the varied reactions of people to the blood-stained wrapper of a spirit devotee during a bori possession ceremony in Niger, I explore how dirt and disgust are more complex than neat structuralist models of purity and pollution often used to explain them. Understanding menstrual blood in situational terms, and looking at the reactions as shaped more about complex dimensions of agency...
The river Niger, a source of life and danger for the people in impoverished eastern Mali, is also the origin of elaborate mythology. From his travels through Mali and down the in a dugout canoe, Jean-Marie Gibbal has created a personal documentary of the cultures of the region. The result is at once an ethnography of cultures in crisis and a evocation of the environment and people he...
In this article I explore the semantics of sweetness among the Hausaphone Mawri of Niger. I show how the various configurations of sweetness meaningfully unify the contexts of prostitution, spirit possession, and obstetrics for some Mawri struggling to make sense of changing social realities. These interrelated experiences of production and reproduction in turn provide an idiom for expressing...
This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit...