Four.docx
Four
PERSONS Engendering Subjects, Spectacular Rituals I suggested in chapter 3 that a structure of reciprocal desire drives the Kabre economy. The same is true of houses ( ʠ εs ɩ ), sites par excellence of Kabre material and social reproduction. Here it is male and female persons, defined through their differences—and thus through their reciprocal gendered persons are produced. Since Kabre do not conceive of gender as given in nature, and since they see children as gender undifferentiated, they must work to achieve the differences that constitute gendered subjects. This task is accomplished largely through ritual—through the initiation ceremonies children undergo during the course of their maturation. The work of these ceremonies is not confined to the household alone, however. They also play a salient role within the diaspora, annually drawing tens of thousands of people back to the north and thus providing an important point of articulation in relations between those who have left the north and those who remain behind. On a larger scale yet, Kabre initiation ceremonies have recently come to play a role in national politics. Each year the president brings government business to a halt for two weeks while he returns to the north to attend the wrestling matches of southern massif male initiates ( afalaa ), an event that is broadcast on state TV. Here the cultural apparatus of the postcolonial state—a state that constitutes itself through spectacle (Toulabour 1986; Mbembe 1992)—and a local commitment to the power and efficacy of public ritual converge. Ritual is necessary, Kabre claim, because it is through ritual that identities and relationships are made known, “visible,” and thus real, to others. “Without funeral rituals,” I was told, “how would others know that a person is dead? And words would we trust to make these things known to us?” The president is similarly attempting to draw power from public images. He is not only making himself and the state “visible,” and visibly concerned with the local; he is also attempting to center Kabre within the representational space of the nation-state. The Histories of Children At birth, and when speaking of the newborn, Kabre say that a “stranger” ( ɩ k ɔ m/ak ɔ maa , literally “who has come?”) has arrived. The baby is a “stranger” because its prior history (in the unseen world) is unknown, as are its motives for coming into this world: Did it come in search of its twin? Is it an ancestor who has come to plague someone? Is it a mother’s daughter returned—the one who died suddenly and who people later discovered was a spirit that had come back to afflict her? Or are its motives more benign? Only time will tell. The newborn is also a stranger—and here Kabre manifest a certain anthropological sensibility—in the sense that coming from a place where social practices and conventions are different, it will have to learn the habits of its parents (and vice versa) and to develop the everyday understandings that constitute a relationship of familiarity. Far from a tabula rasa , the Kabre newborn is thought of as already having a history, a personality, desires, relationships, and so on; further, it is up to 1998). Indeed, Kabre adults feel they must adapt to their children, rather than the other way around. Much attention is thus devoted to attempting to discover the hidden histories and ulterior motives of newborns. A week after birth, elders from the father’s and the mother’s brother’s houses come to inspect the infant to see, as they put it, “what it was that the mother gave birth to”—a child, an animal from the bush, or a nefarious spirit. During the early months, diviners are consulted to interpret various signs—a baby’s prolonged crying, the call of a certain bird at night—that might indicate something about its relationships with those in the unseen world, and therefore something about its present desires: is its twin calling it to return to the other world? Does it want to go or stay? Is it the reincarnation of a dead ancestor? Such divining is complemented by the placing of small charms on children—a wooden flute around the neck of boys, a bracelet on the right arm of girls—to deflect the interest and attention of spirits. A full-blown hermeneutics is thus brought to bear on a child’s prebirth history: it is read, pondered, discussed. The hope is that with time and through careful coddling—appeasing those forces that would pull the child back to the other world (cf. Gottlieb 1998) while simultaneously whetting the child’s appetite for the things of this world—this “stranger” will begin to forget about its previous ties and its powers of clairvoyance ( k ɩ na Ʊ )—an ability many children to that world—will become attenuated. The Sex of Children Kabre parents must also attend to another type of separation. As already mentioned, children are not yet gender differentiated, and indeed are considered androgynous. 1 As they mature, however, and in order to get married, they must become sexually single, for households are composed of the labors of two opposite, gendered single-sex beings. Children must therefore be separated from androgyny and “divided” from one another. To say that they consider children androgynous is not to imply that Kabre see little boys and girls as totally indistinguishable. Their sex is taken notice of—symbolically marked—from the beginning: the day after birth, for instance, a young child is sent to the house of the newborn’s mother’s brother carrying a bow on its head if the child was a boy and a sorghum stalk if it was a girl (symbols that refer to the work of each gender—hunting and cooking). As they grow up, little girls spend more time doing “female” work—taking care of their younger siblings, helping their mothers with cooking and marketing—while little boys do more “male” work—accompanying their fathers to the fields and, eventually (around puberty), beginning to cultivate in small work groups of their own. Still, much of children’s behavior blurs the boundaries between the sexes: little boys fetch water their fathers; and, more generally, both eat without regard to the sexualized taboos normally associated with adult consumption. The sexual ambiguity of children also derives from their proximity to the spirit world—where gender identities are more fluid and ambiguous—and from the fact that children are identified with, and considered the reincarnations of, their deceased grandparents. The association with the latter collapses many of the distinctions between the two sexes, for old people generally are considered bisexual—old people cook and cultivate, need not follow gendered eating and dancing taboos, and so on. Finally, the androgyny of children resides in the fact that they are seen as embodying and conjoining that which produced them: male and female bloods (at conception), male and female labors and foods (after birth), and, more generally, the productive energies of the two (“male” and “female”) families that nurtured and produced the child’s parents and, by extension, the child. We get a very clear image of the androgynous self in the meat divisions after Kabre sacrifices conducted during life cycle ceremonies. As is true elsewhere in Africa (see for example Evans-Pritchard 1956; Heusch 1985), the animal sacrificed represents, and stands in for, the person. After the blood of this surrogate has been spilled on the ground, the animal is dismembered and distributed the mother’s brother; father and mother’s brother, in turn, send parts of their legs to their fathers and mother’s brothers. Other, lesser shares are given to more distant relatives and friends. The most important shares, the front and back legs, are gendered—female and male, respectively. These belong to those “female” (mother’s brother’s) and “male” (father’s) families that are seen as having produced the child. The animal thus embodies the dual nature of the productions that went into creating the child and symbolizes the fact that children are conceptualized as the product of the difference between their parents. 2 If Kabre children are sexually ambiguous and, as it were, symbolically complete, they must nevertheless become sexually single and “incomplete” as they mature. The task of creating incomplete, gendered persons—of deconstituting androgynous persons—is the aim of a child’s initiation ceremonies. 3 Dividing Persons While my focus will be on the role initiation ceremonies play in the differentiation of male and female gender, the ceremonies accomplish much else as well. Indeed, to say that their content is overdetermined would understate the case. In addition to addressing issues of gender identity, the initiations also vitally influence household and community-wide productive activities, establish of community diviners, and activate relations between homesteads, clans, and communities. As indicated above, they also engender a type of north-south reunification, for those Kabre who have migrated into the diaspora return to the north at the time of these ceremonies to initiate their children. And, over the last two decades, the ceremonies have come to play a role in national politics. Thus, in focusing on a single theme for analysis, we must nevertheless be wary of looking for the essence of these ceremonies in that theme alone. 4 I should also note that the ceremonies of the two sexes are not simply analogues of one another. For one thing, boys have more ceremonies than girls; for another, while the ceremonies of both are concerned with “extracting” (Strathern 1988) them from androgyny, those of girls are also concerned with achieving a different sort of separation—dividing a girl from her parents and resituating her productive energies in the homestead of her husband. Male Separations When a boy begins to develop the muscled physique of a man and to hold his own in cultivating, his father will start him on his round of initiations. The first occurs around age fifteen, and the fifth (and last) almost ten years later. Each initiation ushers a boy into a new grade— ɩ fal Ʊ , s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ , ɩ s ɔ k Ʊ , kεŋt Ʊ , ɩ k Ʊ l Ʊ —and confers on him a new status. Differences in dress, personality and temperament, productive The changing identifications these differences engender are instrumental in effecting an initiate’s gradual separation from the world of his mother and from his androgynous self, and his increasing identification with the world of males: as he identifies with male domains, foods, animals, and so on, he “becomes” male and is thus divided from the world of females. Simultaneously, his “need” and “desire” for a female other are created. Space . The space in and around Kabre homesteads is gendered in a very specific way. The interior of the homestead—the central courtyard—is “female,” for this is where women do much of their work—preparing and cooking food, and birthing children. That which lies outside the homestead—both the shady lounging/meeting area immediately outside the entrance and the fields beyond where men work—is “male.” There is also a third, symbolically significant, space—a courtyard that extends out from the side of the homestead where grain is dried after the harvest. This courtyard is associated with various transitions, both material and ritual: In addition to being the place where crops rest as they undergo the journey from field to fire, it is also that ritual space where a deceased person’s “double” ( war ɩ t Ʊ ) is brought and resides between the burial of the body in the fields (where the tombs are located) and the fixing of the ancestor stone at the center of the homestead’s courtyard. and appropriate its symbolism in achieving their ends. Thus, the first ceremony for afalaa , conducted when a boy is around fifteen years old, begins with him seated on his mother’s cooking stool—in the heart of the homestead’s female space. Then, after a series of sacrifices, a period of confinement in his mother’s hut, and a ritual refusal of beer offered him by a woman of the house, he exits the homestead—running—through the grain-drying area and disappears into the fields. This flight from female space is witnessed by community elders who gather to watch the initiate’s coming out. When he becomes a s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ , three and a half years later, the initiate appears with his cohort at night, singing and playing his flute in the male space outside the entrance of homesteads throughout the community. Were a s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ to try to enter the homestead to play his flute, he would be barred. When he joins the next grade and becomes an ɩ s ɔ k Ʊ , he is symbolically pushed even farther from the homestead—into the fields—where he makes his only ritual appearances and where he is expected to show his prowess as a cultivator. 5 Three years later, he becomes a kεŋt Ʊ and is formally “shown,” and thus associated with, another male space: the sacred groves where all the major sacrifices to the spirits of the community are carried out. At this point in his initiations, after years of symbolic exile from the homestead, the initiate begins his return. Invited by relatives from crops and ancestral spirits—through the graindrying area where, at the time of the spectacular quinquennial ceremony called waa ɣ a , he and his cohort dance as antelopes. Having been associated exclusively with male spaces over the previous seven years, and having thus “become” male, the initiate now reenters the female domain of the homestead as a different being, as someone transformed. His metamorphosis is reflected in comments I heard over and over again at the time of waa ɣ a . When watching the initiates dance, people would say: “We don’t know who they are,” “Where is my child? I don’t see him,” “The kεŋnaa [those who dance waa ɣ a ] are unrecognizable.” Finally, two and a half years later, when he becomes an ɩ k Ʊ l Ʊ and goes through his last rite of passage, the initiate is again invited to dance at the homesteads of family members, but this time in the central courtyard. This ritual return to the space where he began ten years previously stands in stark contrast to that earlier occasion, however: then he was a timid child identified with his mother, sitting on her cooking stool; now he stands tall and confident, draws attention to himself with his song and dance, and is in possession of those abilities—cultivation, strength, self-control—he will need to feed and care for a family. Blood . If one of the modes through which a male initiate is divided from androgyny and the world of women is by identification with male spaces external and the changes those foods effect within his body. The sacrifices that occur throughout a boy’s initiations are typically of “male” animals—rams, cocks, and dogs. While he himself does not consume all of each animal (much of which is divided and distributed to relatives), the initiate is expected to eat those body parts that are coded “male.” Thus, he should eat the testicles of the ram and the head of the cock that is sacrificed when he becomes an ɩ fal Ʊ and s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ . He is also expected to eat the meat of those dogs sacrificed at each of his initiations and to consume the gravy made from the dog’s blood. The significance and symbolic role of dogs in the initiations is noteworthy. For Kabre, dogs are the most “male” of all domestic animals: they are forbidden as food to women between puberty and menopause (indeed, they are the only domestic animal women may not eat); they are cooked only by men, and in pots that are never used to cook food eaten by women; they are sold in markets that are set apart from the main marketplace (a female domain); and so on. Thus, in consuming dog, an initiate consumes the ultimate symbol of the nonfemale. Even more than the meat, however, it is the dog’s blood—which is cooked into a thick red-brown gravy—that carries special symbolic currency. In consuming this substance (as well as its symbolic equivalent— s ɩ l ɩ m , the reddish sorghum beer that is a ubiquitous part of the initiation ceremonies), Kabre cultivate, and thus the ability to feed a family, but also produces his semen, 6 and thus enables him to have children. Through a type of symbolic blood transfusion, then, the ceremonies aim to fashion a certain embodied male potency. The Head . While the entire outer body of the initiate becomes the focus or site of various markings, inscriptions, and identifications, it is his head in particular that receives the most attention. Among Kabre, the head is considered the seat of mystical power and knowledge, and therefore is the most important part of the body (cf. Swanson 1985: 214–16; Karp 1990: 86; Matory 1994: 130–38). It is also, of course, the highest part of the body, and is used metaphorically, as in English, to designate those at the top of hierarchies: the “head of the house” ( ʠ ε ɣ a ny Ʊ ɣ Ʊ t Ʊ ), “the head of the initiation class” ( kεŋnaa ny Ʊ ɣ Ʊ t Ʊ ), and so on. Thus, too, when sacrificing animals to spirits, it is the skull that is left behind at the spirit’s shrine to show that a sacrifice has taken place there. Trading on this symbolism, the ceremonies pay special attention to the heads of initiates, which become metonyms of their changing identities. The first grade ( ɩ fal Ʊ ) is marked by the absence of anything on the head. Indeed, on the day of his initiation, an ɩ fal Ʊ ’s head is shaved clean. When he enters the second grade ( s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ ), however, his head is adorned with a striking headpiece: a helmet of thick purple thread woven tightly into the hair, top. Attached perpendicularly to the cyclinder is a red wheel-like structure about eight inches in diameter. This headpiece, minus the wheel, is identical to the one the initiate will wear five years (and two initiations) later when, as a kεŋt Ʊ , he will attach to it the horns of the antelope. The hornless headpiece of the s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ , then, symbolizes that he is halfway along the journey to manhood: while potentially a man, he is not there yet. Or, as it was once described to me, a s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ at once “looks back to the time when he was female and forward to when he will be fully male.” 7 When he becomes an ɩ s ɔ k Ʊ , the initiate places the foot-long quills of the porcupine in his hair, and thus associates himself with an animal that is symbolically “male”—because, it is said, porcupines keep their distance from homesteads (a female domain) and promenade at night—as men (but not women) sometimes do. When, three years later, the initiate becomes a kεŋt Ʊ , he dons the enormous phallic horns of the antelope. These he wears for waa Ɣ a , the ten-day dance that initiates see as the high point of their ten-year ritual passage into manhood. The antelope is regarded as the most male of all wild animals, known for its strength and for its ability to gore other animals with its horns (as men do with their arrows when hunting and with their knives when sacrificing domestic animals). 8 One of the striking things about the dress of initiates is its deployment of symbols of the “outside.” This is true not only of the horns and furs of animals that are the centerpieces of an initiate’s outfit, but also of the cowrie shells and iron implements (bangles, anklets, gongs) that adorn his arms and legs and dangle from his waist. (Cowries and iron, of course, are replete with associations of distant markets and the time of slaving, and, more generally, with Kabre connections to outside and distant others.) It is the outside’s association with “power” and things powerful, and the Kabre desire to appropriate those powers (cf. Jackson 1982; Beidelman [1986] 1993; Werbner 1989; Jackson and Karp 1990; Karp 1990), that makes cowries, iron, and the horns of wild animals particularly apt symbols for these maturing males. Such appropriations also demonstrate the way the local is always also global, or, to use a different idiom, the way the inside is constituted through its outside. the mid-1970s, a kεŋt Ʊ from the south purchased a plastic, eighteen-inch doll of a baby and attached it to his horns when he returned to the north to dance waa Ɣ a . The doll was widely admired, and by the mid-1980s plastic dolls on the horns had become all the rage, with dozens of initiates in each northern community imitating this southern innovator. (This, I was told, followed an earlier fad of tying plastic horses to the horns that was introduced by a Kuwdé initiate in 1970.) Thus, shortly before I returned to Kuwdé in 1985 to see waa Ɣ a —and, I should add, much to my chagrin, for I was at that time under the grip of a romantic urge to experience the purity of a dance that many had told me would reveal the essence of Kabre culture—I received letters from Kouwènam and Nnamnawé, who were then dancing waa Ɣ a , asking whether I would buy them each a doll. I did, of course, and they proudly attached these bright plastic babies to their horns for the duration of the ten-day ceremony. Kuwdé keŋnaa , dolls on horns, returning home after a visit to a sacred forest in Faren; Boua, June 1985 My own sensibilities notwithstanding, the symbolism of these dolls is entirely consistent with that of other items κεŋnaa place on their horns for the dance, as well as with Kabre appropriations of an outside domain associated with power. Thus, the dolls are attached to the horns next to just-harvested ears of corn and millet, small bottles of milk, and other symbols of fertility. Referred to as “white child” or “colonial child” ( anasara pε Ɣ a ), however, and thus unlike the other items, these dolls are coded European/colonial. Just as the dress of initiates draws from the outside, then, and just as certain of the ceremonies attempt to appropriate the outside powers of the bush, so too does this recent innovation appear to be an attempt to appropriate and subvert the fertility and “power” of the colonial/postcolonial other. I should add, however, that those initiates with whom I spoke about the dolls said simply that they were “just for beauty” and “nothing more than fun.” A case, then, in which either the anthropologist’s desire to impose meaning has over-leapt its bounds or those I spoke to had their own sound reasons for remaining mute when questioned by the white outsider! Comportment . The ceremonies also devote much attention to an initiate’s inner bearing and attitude. As he approaches manhood, it is said that a boy must learn discipline and self-control: he must measure his speech and not speak or eat indiscriminately in public, like women and children his heart.” He must also learn how to treat people of rank—elders—and his in-laws with respect. Afalaa are timid, quiet and reserved; s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ŋ )—true to their sexually ambiguous, trickster-like nature—are loud and bawdy; as ɔ kaa , again, are quiet and reserved; kεŋnaa , similarly, are very controlled, but they also—and this is even more true of ak Ʊ laa —walk and speak with a measured confidence they lacked as afalaa and as ɔ kaa . When I first arrived in Kuwdé and was just getting to know Nnamnawé—who was then a s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ —one of the things that attracted me to him was his fun-loving, mischievous nature. In public, he was often loud and bawdy, constantly flirting with the line between propriety and impropriety. It was all in good nature, however, and others, like myself, seemed to find him a pleasure to be around. I was surprised, then, six months later, when his personality seemed to undergo a dramatic shift. In public, he became sober, quiet, and withdrawn. The prankster in him was entirely gone. Not yet aware of how heavy was the imprint of the initiation system on the identities and personalities of initiates, I imagined the worst: that he had family problems or had discovered a blight in one of his fields. When I asked someone one day what had happened to him, however, they simply said that he was now an ɩ s ɔ k Ʊ and that if he were to behave as he had when he was a s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ɣ Ʊ , he would be severely chastised. “Being the head of a family is a heavy their emotions and words in public. If they do not learn restraint, they will get into trouble with others and then later when they need help, they will find themselves all alone.” (In poaching on these ceremonies to recruit initiates into the military [see below], Eyadéma has also appropriated the ethos of discipline and self-control associated with as ɔ kaa in particular and male initiates in general. Thus, I frequently heard Kabre compare the military to an initiation grade, and soldiers—and the discipline they must exercise—to as ɔ kaa .) Work . As an initiate moves from female to male spaces, attire, foods, and comportment, so too does he move from female to male productive activities (and from productive dependence on his father to relative autonomy). As a child, and as befits his androgynous nature, a little boy engages in the work of both sexes—going to the fields with his father, while also helping his mother with chores around the homestead (cooking, fetching water from the spring, and so on). When he becomes an ɩ fal Ʊ all this changes. He stops doing women’s work and joins an adult male work group ( ɩ kpar ɩ ) for the first time. This is an important step, for these four- to six-person work groups are the mainstay of the Kabre agricultural system, convening each morning throughout the crop cycle and mobilizing more labor than any other type of work group. Having established his place in the small work group as an ɩ fal Ʊ , he then comes to assume a prominent place in the large (20–30 person) community-wide work group ( ha ʠ aa ) as an ɩ s ɔ k Ʊ . These groups convene in the afternoons at bottleneck periods during the crop cycle—especially during the second sorghum weeding in June, and at the time when yam mounds are made in August. Indeed, as ɔ kaa are expected to lead the ha ʠ aa —not only finishing first but also doing more of the work. Thus, if you are in attendance at one of these sessions, you will see a line of quilled heads, bobbing up and down, at the front of all the other cultivators. An ɩ s ɔ k Ʊ must show, Kabre say, that he is ready to feed a family with his hoe. 9 A kεŋt Ʊ continues to demonstrate his prowess as a cultivator in special work sessions. As well, his work habits are subjected to public scrutiny and discussion. If he is a slackard—or otherwise not focused on cultivating—he will be openly criticized by others. When Kouwènam was in this grade, he spent some (and clearly in the eyes of others, too much) of the money I paid him drinking beer and fraternizing with friends in the market. After several months, people began to gossip about him—criticizing him for spending his energy on drink and talk, rather than conserving it and channelling it into cultivation. It is often at this point in his development, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, that a young man gets married and begins to acquire some independence from his father. To this point all of his work has been carried out on his father’s fields, and all of the food he has produced has gone into his father’s granary. When he becomes a kεŋt Ʊ , however, he is given fields and allowed to build a but from now on his energies will be more focused on feeding his own nascent family. Two and a half years later, when he goes through his last ceremony—called “finishing” ( nt ɩ s ɩ r ɩ )—and becomes an ɩ k Ʊ l Ʊ , his independence becomes even more complete. At that time, he may build his own homestead in one of his father’s outlying fields. When he does this, and begins to feed his family on his own, Kabre say the initiate has “arrived.” 10 . . . If this is the symbolic template that guides male initiates through their passage to adulthood, it is nevertheless amazingly malleable. Indeed, much of the strength of this set of ceremonies lies in its plasticity, in its ability to adapt to changing historical circumstances and to accommodate varying individual histories. The French anthropologist Raymond Verdier (1982) has suggested, and he is doubtless correct, that this system of initiation had its origins in the time of the slave trade (and thus, I might add, within modernity—Gilroy 1993a) and served to recruit young men to the defense of the communities of the massifs. (The aggressive, warlike symbolism of some of the ceremonies today would tend to support such a claim. 11 ) Whether or not it also served to organize Kabre resistance during the colonial era I was unable to determine. Kuwdé elders I spoke to said initiation classes were not sites were quick to point out, however, that Mahate, the Kuwdé man who shot and killed the first German invader, was a kεŋt Ʊ , and thus a member of the initiation class that is also thought of as a “warrior” class. Certain of the ceremonies did engage colonialism in a different way, however. The French missionary Jacques Delord, for instance, was present at initiation rituals during the 1950s that mimetically incorporated colonial-era work projects: In one village, Kiriwude, a new and unexpected rite has been added [to the initiation of kεŋnaa ]: as the mound [the initiates were building] requires several rocks to strengthen it, the sponsors take the initiates to a place about a half hour away, near a stream, and taking advantage of the fact that the elders did not follow, they imitate for the initiates the famous construction of the road from Sokodé to Lama-Kara, including the installation of the telephone lines, the building of the bridges, and those who deliver messages attached at the end of their sticks, as well as the gardeners who water the flowers of Madame, the wife of the administrator! (Delord 1961: 135, my translation) Was this parody? Symbolic subversion? Mimetic appropriation? “Initiation” into colonial road work? Unfortunately, I was unable to find anyone who had been present on such occasions. Nevertheless, if such symbolic action is at all consistent with the logic and symbolism of the ceremonies generally, my guess would be that it was an attempt both to empower initiates faced with the privations of the colonial labor system and to magically appropriate and subvert the technology and power of the the ceremonies of the initiation system were harnessed to the dynamics of the emerging Kabre diaspora. Thus, the return of southern initiates, especially afalaa and kεŋnaa , to the north to undergo initiation came to be used, as it still is today, as an index of the nature of north-south relations. The expectation is that those who have departed for the south will return again and again—“that they will not forget those they have left behind”—and these ceremonies have come to assume much of the weight of that obligation. Thus, at the time of the initiations of afalaa every July and of kεŋnaa in June of every fifth year, the roads are jammed with thousands of southerners returning to the north to initiate their children (“to show them their houses of origin”), and homesteads and communities in the north swell to many times their normal size. Those southerners who fail to return inevitably arouse the wrath of house ancestors and spirits who, like the rain spirit, will almost certainly repay their neglect with hardship. Another way the spread of Kabre into the diaspora has affected the initiation system has been to skew it toward those ceremonies for which southerners choose to return. Thus, even for those who permanently reside in the northern communities, the ceremonies of afalaa and kεŋnaa are today considered the most “necessary” to perform, while many of the others have become dispensable. When I asked Kuwdé elders about this change, and the similar to those Karabu offered when discussing ɩ kpant Ʊ rε exchange: “It is not the quantity or size of the ceremonies that matters, so much as the intent of those engaging in them. Thus, if southerners can only make it back for afalaa and waa ɣ a , it is because they are unable to return more often, and if northerners can only find the means to do those two ceremonies, it is because of hardship rather than unwillingness.” Finally, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the last two decades have seen the dramatic intervention of the national government into the ceremonies. Thus, the July wrestling matches of southern massif afalaa 13 have become state spectacles, annually attended by Eyadéma and his cabinet, and broadcast on state television. Although the ostensible focus of the event is the wrestling—the initiates appearing two at a time, stripped to the waist, muscles abulge and glistening, to duel before the president—the occasion is striking for the way Eyadéma’s presence displaces that focus. Arriving by helicopter, like a giant bird out of the sky, moving briskly in suit and tie alongside a phalanx of soldiers to a reception line to greet visiting dignitaries and local chiefs, seating himself front and center before the wrestlers, Eyadéma clearly becomes the event. Indeed, when I attended in 1996 in the village of Lassa, the wrestling came to an abrupt end, even though many wrestlers had not yet fought, when Eyadéma decided after an hour that it was time to move on to the next village. Needless to say, Eyadéma’s participation in this single ceremony has affected the entire initiation complex. Today, for many Kabre, and especially those from the south, afalaa has become the ceremony of choice, and wrestling, an otherwise relatively minor part of the initiation of afalaa , its central focus. So, too, for non-Kabre, the wrestling matches have come to stand not only for afalaa but also for Kabre initiation as a whole—and indeed, through the martial image they project, for Kabre and northerners generally. But what is the state’s interest in such rituals? Eyadéma himself claims a charmingly personal reason. He is reputed to have been a great wrestler during his youth and says that it is his nostalgia for their continued survival. But clearly there are more instrumental reasons as well. Eyadéma uses the occasion to recruit new soldiers into the army, hand-picking those wrestlers he deems most able at a closed gathering at his house in his natal village on the day after the last matches. 14 Eyadéma also uses the event to show members of his home region that he, like other Kabre who have departed into the diaspora, has not forgotten his ties to the north. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he aims to project a Mobutuist image to the entire country of state support for local culture and also, by identifying himself with wrestling, to further enhance the martial image that lies at the base of his power. This latter is not without risk, however: his identification with wrestling has been appropriated by his adversaries in the south, who use such representations as evidence of the “savage,” “uncivilized” nature of the north, and therefore of Eyadéma’s/the Kabre’s unfitness to rule the country. . . . This ceremonial system’s adaptability in the face of historical change is matched by its ability to accommodate divergent personal histories (Jackson and Karp 1990). As Nnamnawé put it when I asked him to describe how different initiates went through the system, The ceremonies stay more or less the same but no two people go through the same way. Each has his own way. I south making money so that I could buy the animals I needed to sacrifice for waa ɣ a . And Kouwènam didn’t do any of the ceremonies before konkoriŋ and waa ɣ a because his father was old and had nothing. In such a case, instead of doing the whole ceremony, you just kill a dog and distribute the meat. I think that’s what Kouwènam did. But if you can’t even do that—like Awurakum whose lazy father was never able to find the money to purchase the animals at the time of his initiations—you can kill a dog for each of the ceremonies you missed at the time of waa ɣ a . And, in Awurakum’s case, since his father died before he danced waa ɣ a , he had to do this on his own. Another path is to do a ceremony for someone who isn’t here—an initiate who couldn’t make it back from the south. If he sends money to buy the animals, members from his house here in the north will do the sacrifices and tell the ancestors that it’s for him. . . . Initiates also show their differences when they are dancing. Each has his own song, his own way of fluting, his own style of dancing. And these distinctions are highly valued. It is the differences between initiates which are remembered when the old people talk about their initiations. “Atakpai won all the cultivations.” “Tcheki came out with a flute melody that no one had ever heard before.” “The words that Kundoukou sang were so beautiful because their meanings were hidden but very intelligent.” You should have seen the pride on my father’s face when I won the big race at waa ɣ a —when I showed that I was the best of my class. . . . Another, and for many the most important, way [male] initiates divide themselves is by whether or not they have hama (power). As you know, someone who has hama —someone who can do extraordinary things like jump over buildings or, like the president, survive a plane crash—doesn’t come out and admit that he has it. Hama is not something you talk about. It remains hidden. But at the wear around your neck. A red skin [from a fox or a goat] indicates that you have hama . Another way is by attaching a second, smaller set of horns between the large horns on your head. . . . Finally, each initiate has his own history—my mother’s brother is different from Kouwènam’s, I have ɩ kpant Ʊ na that he doesn’t have, I am in a different work group. All of these differences come out in the sacrifices because I send meat to my relatives and friends, and he sends to his . The personal histories we tell through these sacrifices are in each case different. Nnamnawé’s commentary here indicates the general value Kabre place on a certain type of personal distinctiveness. The initiate who distinguishes him/herself, the dancer who improvises, the diviner with special powers, the person who makes others laugh, someone who is good at playing with words or who is quick with the biting insult, the best (male) cultivator or (female) sauce maker or marketeer—all these are personal traits that are highly valued (and it is these attributes of the person, among others, that are celebrated when someone dies). It should be noted, however, that such forms of self-realization are not opposed to the types of relational personhood to which Kabre are also committed. Always mindful of a set of relational commitments and constraints, they seek to author a self that is at once distinctive and relational. Thus, in the world of exchange, the most individual of Kabre—and the most esteemed—is also the one who is the most relational: and dance, the highest praise is reserved for the drummer or dancer who improvises—but within parameters set by, and in relationship to, the other drummers or dancers (cf. Chernoff 1979). . . . If one of the aims of Kabre ritual is to make identities known to a public, and thus more real to those (initiates) undergoing the ritual, another is to cater to various desires in that public. One such desire is strictly aesthetic—the longing, expressed by many with whom I spoke, to experience the beauty of the ritual, the grace of the dance, the elegance of a dancer who has mastered proper form and is willing to innovate upon that form. In Kuwdé, this aesthetic sensibility is steeped in a highly developed culture of criticism: a dancer’s movements, an initiate’s dress, the improvised words of a song are all subjected to ongoing critical evaluation and commentary. Such scrutiny, of course, not only deepens the experience for the aesthete but also spurs the competitive and creative juices of the performers themselves. Another desire elicited by the ceremonies is more gendered. It consists in the longing of female spectators to witness and evaluate the maturation of their male counterparts, and vice versa. Thus, as kεŋnaa move majestically beneath their horns in the homesteads and sacred forests, clusters of young women stand and watch attentively, gazing upon the dancers, judging their performances and their their market appearances, young men gather to watch the female dancers and similarly discuss their strengths and weaknesses, their readiness for marriage, their appearance, their character. Here public spectacle situates a gendered gaze that fixes the other as object of desire—and thus powerfully furthers the process of division that is a central aim of these ceremonies. Female Separations As mentioned above, the ceremonies a girl undergoes are fewer in number than those of boys—there are only two, and they take place in the course of a single year. And while one of the aims of these ceremonies is to make a girl into a woman (to make her unambiguously female), an even greater concern is to separate her from her parents and relocate her at the homestead of—and in a complementary productive relationship with—her future partner. As with boys, the timing of a girl’s initiation—somewhere between the ages of fifteen and eighteen—depends upon her physical maturity and her productive development. “When a girl is small,” a mother told me, “she learns how to work—she carries compost to the fields, she finds leaves for the animals, she gets water at the spring, and she helps her mother with cooking. Then one day, when we see that she is strong and has learned to work well, we know it is time for her to be over much of her mother’s workload: she goes to market in her mother’s place, does most of the household chores, and routinely cooks the evening meal. While the work a daughter performs considerably lightens the mother’s workload, and therefore is a special—and eagerly anticipated—moment in the life cycle of every woman, its overt purpose is to give a girl practice in developing the work skills she will need when she marries. The rituals associated with a girl’s initiation repeatedly inscribe and articulate this theme of household work. Thus, at the beginning of her dry season ceremonies, the initiate makes a special trip one evening to her fiancé’s homestead, where she grinds flour, fetches water from the spring, and cooks the evening meal for her future in-laws. In performing these acts, Kabre say, the initiate shows her in-laws that she can do women’s work. Later, during the wet season, the initiate makes beer for her future spouse—again, to show that she will be able to do so when he needs beer for a ceremony or work group. On the same occasion, she is expected to collect firewood for her mother-in-law. In addition to demonstrating that she can perform domestic chores, she must also show that she can successfully engage in market commerce. Thus, at various times during the wet season, she makes “market beer” (under the supervision of her mother) and takes it to sell in the local markets. and women. “Men should drink a lot of s ɩ l ɩ m (beer) and eat only a little m Ʊ t Ʊ (sorghum porridge),” they would say, “while women should eat a lot of m Ʊ t Ʊ and drink only a little s ɩ l ɩ m .” While this expression confers on men the undeniable privilege of consuming more beer, it also points to a contrast Kabre see between consumption practices and differently gendered bodies. Thus, if boys’ bodies, and their blood/semen, is produced by consuming beer (and dog blood), girls’ bodies, and their wombs, are produced by consuming sorghum porridge, for eating a lot of porridge, Kabre say, enlargens the stomach/womb ( lotu ) and prepares it for giving birth to a child. Filling a girl up with food is thus a major preoccupation of the time leading up to her initiation, and both the girl’s fiancé and her parents devote their energies to ensuring that she eats well. The fiancé does his part with the harvest prestations he makes—initially small, then gradually increasing quantities of sorghum, yams, and corn, each year for ten years leading up to the marriage. He also works the fields of his father-in-law two to three times a year over the same ten-year period. These gifts of food and labor are thought of not so much as an exchange between houses of property for a woman (as in certain bridewealth systems) as a direct gift of food to the woman herself. Their purpose, Kabre say, is to “feed” the man’s future spouse so that the noun used to refer to these gifts, kusu ɣ u , means “filling up,” and its verb form, masuu-i —used by a fiancé when referring to the gifts he makes—translates “I fill her up.” Thus, in making prestations to the girl’s family, a fiancé is thought to be “feeding” and “filling” his future wife with food—and thus helping to produce her body/womb. This practice, of course, is the complement to her role in making his blood—through the beer gifts she gives him at the time of the harvest. The image of the full/fat wife, and of the role of the groom in the womb-making process, is strikingly represented on the occasion when a female initiate goes to her in-laws’ to work and cook dinner for them. When she arrives, she is presented with a very large hen, which should have the appearance that “it is about to lay eggs.” If she accepts it (if it is not big enough, she may ask for a larger one), it is killed, cooked whole, and then stuffed with salt. Later, when it is time for her to return to her parents’ homestead, this stuffed hen is placed in a bowl filled with red palm oil for her to take back to her parents—so that they can see that “she has been well fed.” A girl’s parents, too, contribute to the feeding/fattening process. Especially during the year of her initiation, they make sure that she eats a lot so that when she “comes out” in the market—on a special day in September when her period of initiation is nearing its completion—people will remark of her that she is ready for marriage. Separation . If ensuring that a female initiate is prepared to do women’s work and to bear children are two of the major aims of her initiation, another is relocating her from her parents’ homestead to her husband’s. This task is not easy, however, for it involves separating her from a situation that is known—from the family with which she has grown up—and assimilating her into a situation and a homestead that is unknown and about which most girls have enormous ambivalence: will she and her husband get along? Will he give her enough food? Will he buy her cloth to wear? How will he treat her if he takes a mother-in-law—for whom she must work during the early years of the marriage—make out? All of these questions in a girl’s mind are informed by the knowledge that these relationships—husband/wife, co-wife/co-wife, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law—are among the most difficult and conflict-ridden in Kabre society. The girl’s parents, too, have their reasons for hesitating to let her go. Not only are they concerned with how she will be treated; they are also loath to lose her labors and her children. 16 In order to win over his in-laws—and thus to “extract” his future spouse from her homestead—a young man must convince her and her family that she will be treated well. Indeed, many of the activities of the initiation period have this sort of subtle persuasion as their aim. For instance, Kabre say that the purpose of the marriage gifts a boy makes—the ten years of harvest gifts and field labor he gives his parents-in-law—is not only to “fill” his future wife with food but also to show what type of character he has and what type of worker he is. Thus, much attention is paid to whether he works hard in his father-in-law’s fields, whether the food gifts are on time, whether he merely gives the minimum required or more, and so on. By being successful, a young man hopes to slowly build his future wife’s desire for him, and thus to prod her into eventually leaving her parents to live with him. Seeing marriage gifts in such terms, of course, is consistent with that which Kabre deem important in much as their actions. As well, to the extent that these gifts represent a type of “request”—a manifestation of a groom’s “need/desire”—they create a hierarchical relationship between the groom and his in-laws and, it is hoped, initiate a process that will eventually lead to a return marriage between the families—and a reversal of the hierarchy. Recall that for Karabu, such a marriage (FZD) was the desired outcome of ɩ kpant Ʊ rε . The submissiveness of a boy toward his future in-laws is vividly illustrated in the following ritual scene. The occasion is the first day of his future wife’s initiation ceremonies in February. At this time, the community’s elders are “called” to her homestead to drink beer and witness the opening sacrifices. At one point during the festivities, a surrogate for the girl’s fiancé (his family’s ritual helper, ceu / ɩ kpant Ʊ ) enters the courtyard crouching and clutching a chicken in his hand—a gift for the initiate’s parents. When the fiancé gets to the middle of the courtyard, he lies face down next to the pot of beer. He is then asked by one of the elders to explain the purpose of his visit. “I’m looking for a s Ʊ n Ʊ ɣ Ʊ (a small gourd used in cooking),” he says. “There aren’t any here,” the elder replies. As the disappointed fiancé turns to leave, the elder hedges and asks him whether, if they can find such an implement, the fiancé would be willing to bring his hoe and replace the soiled dirt behind the homestead, where the bath water and urine drain out, with clean dirt. The a chicken and offer him beer. On the one hand, this ritual moment is about work and the complementarity of labors that constitutes a marriage: a husband-to-be, someone who works with his hoe, is in search of a cook, someone who works with a s Ʊ n Ʊ ɣ Ʊ . In this sense, the ritual reiterates one of the central themes of the initiation process. On the other hand, however, this spectacle is also about hierarchy and submissiveness: the initiate enters the compound low to the ground, in a position of submission, and, when addressing the elders, lowers himself even more by actually lying on the ground. He also agrees to replace the soiled dirt behind the homestead’s bathing area. Needless to say, there are few more unenviable tasks than this, and a fiance’s willingness to do it is a sign of his accepting his in-laws as his superiors. But it is precisely by thus submitting himself—and this moment can stand as representative of the larger relationship between a boy and his parents-in-law—that he furthers the process of coaxing his future wife away from her parents. By “giving them respect” ( Ʊ ha - wa nyamt Ʊ ), he hopes to win them over, and hopes that they will eventually allow him to marry their daughter. However, the success of these various seductions—timely and generous gifts, acts of submission 17 —is never total. The doubts and the ambivalence remain. Indeed, they are often his father-in-law, and so on, the girl’s concerns linger on. (Understanding the manner in which a groom’s behavior is surveilled helps make sense of a fact that puzzled me when I first heard it: that Kabre girls, but not boys, can refuse their future spouses (either at the time their marriages are first arranged by their parents, or later). This asymmetrical prerogative is consistent with the fact that it is the premarital behavior of boys, more than that of girls, that is subject to scrutiny and, indeed, may be found wanting.) As if in recognition of the possibility that the marriage might never be consummated, a girl’s initiation period ends—in a scene that graphically images what, following Strathern (1988), I have been referring to as a process of “extraction”—with her ritual abduction from her parents’ homestead. On a Monday in October, she makes beer and invites her fiancé and his age-mates to her homestead. After several hours of talk, flirtation, and drink, they get up to leave and she accompanies them to the pathway outside the homestead to say goodbye. Suddenly, the boys seize her and forcibly take her to the fiance’s homestead. Once there, she accepts and spends the night. The next day she moves her belongings and cooking pots into her husband’s homestead. From this day forward, they are considered married. Thus it is that the initiation ceremonies of Kabre boys and girls fashion complementary single-sex to recombine them in new households. In chapter 5 I examine these processes of recombination; before proceeding to that analysis, however, I wish briefly to consider certain theoretical issues that are raised by these ceremonies. The Power of Spectacle, Spectacles of Power One question that has dogged theorists of ritual, and one which came back to me again and again as I viewed these ceremonies, is why they seem to do little more than the obvious. That is, why do Kabre initiation ceremonies spend so much time mimetically walking boys and girls through the paces of what they apparently already know—“teaching” them how to cook, cultivate, and so on? What is achieved with this type of redundancy? There are, I think, several answers to this question. First, while certain actions may seem redundant, attitudes are not, and these ceremonies are as much about the display of an initiate’s attitude as about his/her actions. This is true both of boys when they are working for, and making gifts to, their in-laws and of girls when they go to their in-laws’ to cook the evening meal. Indeed, many a sour postmarital relationship has found its start in what were perceived as bad faith efforts at the time of initiation. There is, then, always uncertainty as to whether the ceremonies will succeed or not, with as well. Each initiate comes to the ceremonies with a different history, or rather, different histories—those from before birth, those of childhood, and so on. These histories and the relationships they embody (with both humans and nonhumans) all affect the timing (the age at which one starts, how quickly one proceeds through the various stages) and the outcome of each initiate’s ceremonial journey. As mentioned above, the ceremonies can be delayed, or even skipped altogether, for any number of reasons—a father’s inability to purchase the animals to be sacrificed, an ancestor’s reluctance to give the go-ahead, and so on. Alternatively, an initiate’s performance might be enhanced through the mystical power he has acquired from a bush spirit or a wild animal. Thus, the ceremonies become a template for the expression—the externalization—of an initiate’s personal history. The point here is not just that someone’s history has an effect on the rituals but also that the rituals are crucial to making known that history. But there is another, equally important reason why the ceremonies achieve more than just the obvious. Much of the ceremonial action has to do with making visible actions and statuses that are not considered achieved until they are “seen” by others. Throughout their initiations—and especially so for boys, for among Kabre boys more than girls are objects of the gaze—there is an emphasis on display enter each new stage, the initiates are expected to go into the markets, so that others will “see that their time has arrived.” The sacrifices that accompany each initiation are similarly concerned with making actions visible: after slitting the animal’s throat, the sacrificer rubs the victim’s blood (and, in the case of a chicken, its feathers) all over the sacrificial site (the ancestral stones, the shrine of a spirit) so that others may see what actions took place there. What we have here is an everyday epistemology that relies on making things known by making them visible. 18 In this way, too, the ceremonies’ performance is far from redundant. Moreover, what is true at the local level is also true of the state. The reason Eyadéma attends so assiduously to ritual is that he understands the power and importance of spectacle—that his power will not be “real” to his subjects until it is made manifest and visible (in ritual). When he attends the ceremonies of afalaa (or insists that localities perform “animation” for visiting state functionaries), he centers himself and the state in a representational nexus that constructs the nation as his and himself as the nation, while also positioning spectators as witnesses to—and, of course, potential critics of—such representations. But consider here the traffic in meanings between local and state: is this not an example of the reverse colonization alluded to by Bassari when he commented that the nation is the village writ large? Has not Eyadéma the process also transforming the power of spectacle into a spectacle of power? Theories of Initiation Finally, a point about anthropological theory and initiation. This ritual system “divides” boys from girls, creating each as the object of “desire” for the other. As such it fashions gendered subjects who are partial/incomplete, configured through difference, saturated with hierarchy, and forever connected to others through embodied webs of affiliation. This is not the autonomous, self-authoring, propertied individual of the Western liberal tradition; so, accounts of this person, and/or of Kabre gender, that are derived from the individualistic assumptions of this tradition have difficulty engaging those processes at work here. Consider two such theories. In examining ritual complexes such as this, descent theorists have focused on the ties initiation grades create between individuals and groups—in other words, on the problem of social cohesion (Fortes 1958; Gluckman 1962; La Fontaine 1985). Initiation ceremonies are said, on the one hand, to socialize individuals into groups, and on the other, to create ties of solidarity between members of different lineages (through the bonding initiates experience as they undergo their ceremonies together). Such an explanation not only assumes that “individuals” as such exist and that solidarity might be a problem for them, 19 but also rituals and the amount of energy Kabre commit to them. If the system of initiation were about cohesion, that could be achieved in a much simpler way—through, say, an annual barbecue or some such event. Another theoretical approach, also rooted in the liberal tradition, is to see such ritual complexes as produced by, and serving the interests of, male power. It is argued that since they have more power than do women, men reserve the most spectacular and the largest number of ceremonies for their male children, and in so doing reproduce the greater prestige of men in everyday life (Nadelson 1981; Herdt 1981; La Fontaine 1985). (Here “power” has replaced “cohesion” as the functional explanation of social practice, and “groups” appear as “individuals.” 20 ) It is not necessary to rehearse once again the numerous analytical problems to which such a theory opens itself (see chapter 1; see also Strathern 1988: 43–97). Assuming, nevertheless, that men do have more power (and this is a complex issue I take up in detail in chapter 5 ), such a fact could hardly serve as an “explanation” of why Kabre expend such enormous amounts of wealth in this manner, on a series of such intricately detailed ceremonies, extending over so many years. I asked many men and women in Kuwdé about this point, and invariably received answers such as the following from Atcham, an assertive, articulate middle-aged woman who has raised and initiated three boys and three girls. Yes, men are superior to women, but that is not why they than girls. Girls are close to their mothers from the beginning, while boys don’t take up the hoe until many years later. As well, a boy must become head of a house and is responsible for feeding his family, and sacrificing to the spirits and ancestors. Being able to do all this depends not only on his skill with the hoe but also on his ability to save money, to drink in moderation, and to temper his words in public. Also, to find a wife, a boy must spend many years showing respect to his in-laws to show that he is worthy. For a girl, it is much easier. She learns her work from an earlier age by following her mother around the homestead. By the time she is ten, she already knows how to cook and care for children. Marketing will come later but the essentials are not difficult to learn. And, while her in-laws are certainly interested in whether she is a good worker or not, and whether or not she will bring trouble to the house, her behavior is not watched and judged in the way that a boy’s is. It is her family that has the upper hand in this one. I do not mean to say here that these spectacles do not also exhibit and even enhance male power, much as state spectacles enhance the power of Eyadéma. But that is not their aim, nor is it why Kabre expend enormous amounts of energy in this system. Another problem with both theories—and with the type of anthropology that generated such theoretical problematics—is that they assume a bounded totality. Thus, they assume that there is a society (“Kabre”) that has a set of cultural practices (initiation ceremonies) that can be accounted for through social dynamics (cohesion, power) internal to that society. But Kabre are not now, nor have they ever been, bounded in this sense. The gendered and complementarities, both regional and national, thus complicating any simple reduction of the ceremonies to a function of locally systemic dynamics. There is a Strathernian point here as well. Kabre person/gendermaking is informed by a qualitative logic—by operations through which persons are differentiated from more encompassing states. Such a logic contrasts with the quantitative, “augmentative” (and indeed commodity) logic of liberal theory that searches for comparisons within and between genders. The assumption of such theory is that one can have, or be, more or less of one’s gender, and thus that one gender can be compared to—and can be found to be more or less than—the other (Strathern 1995). Kabre seem to be engaged in processes that are at odds with such assumptions. The cultural aim here is precisely to make qualitatively different types of persons that are incommensurable—and thus, through their incommensurability, their difference, to bring into being certain relational possibilities.
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