Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession [paperback ed.] 0802077838, 9780802077837

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL

HORIZONS

Michael Lambek

—

Knowledge and P*ractice in Mayotte

Local Discourses of Islam, Borcery,and Spirit Possession

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession In a major ethnography of the religious and ethnomedical practices of Malagasy speakers in Mayotte, an island off the coast of East Africa near Madagascar, Michael Lambek formulates an anthropology of knowledge. Based on lengthy participant-observation fieldwork, and making extensive use of case histories, Lambek's work provides a rich account of the disciplines of Islam, cosmology (astrology), and spirit possession as they emerge in the practice of local experts and ordinary villagers. Lambek views local culture neither as system nor as structure, but as a conjunction of discourses with no common measure. He describes the way in which the knowledge comprising each discourse is circulated and reproduced, and how each permeates social practices. He com¬ pares the objectified textual knowledge characteristic of Islam and of cosmology with the embodied knowledge of spirit possession. The author emphasizes the power and the authority constituted by each discipline, the scope for action each provides, and the limitations placed upon action. The account links power and meaning, analysis and interpretation, while also demonstrating the diversity of ways in which people exper¬ ience the world and take action within it. Careful attention is given to the ideas and practices of specific individuals - Islamic experts, wellinformed citizens, cosmologers, sorcery extractors, clients, and spirit mediums. The book argues for the ethical nature of their activity and shows how their knowledge emerges in practice. is a member of the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. He is the author of Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte, and the editor of From Method to Modesty. Michael Lambek is the general editor of Anthropological Horizons. MICHAEL LAMBEK

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MICHAEL LAMBEK

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1993 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-2960-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-7783-8 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Lambek, Michael Joshua Knowledge and practice in Mayotte (Anthropological horizons) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-2960-4 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7783-8 (pbk.) I. Islam - Mayotte. 2. Mayotte - Social life and customs. 3. Spirit possession - Mayotte. 4. Knowledge, Theory of (Islam). I. Title II. Series BP64.M3L3 1993

297'.09694

C93-093702-3

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

For Jackie

The ... character of knowledge [is] intersubjective not only because it refers to the one real world common to all of us and because it is subject to confirmation and refutation by others, but also because the personal knowledge of each of us refers to the knowledge acquired by others - our teachers and predecessors - and handed down to us as a preorganized stock of problems, with the means for their solution, procedural rules, and the like. All these manifold problems belong to a theoretical science dealing with the social distribution of knowledge. The present inquiry is just one modest step in this direction. Its purpose is to investigate what motives prompt... [people] living their everyday life ... to accept unquestioningly some parts of the relatively natural concept of the world handed down to them and to subject other parts to question. Alfred Schutz, 'The Well Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge'

Contents

Tables and Figures xi Preface xiii Stylistic Conventions and Conundrums xvii Dramatis Personae xxi PARTI INTRODUCTIONS

1 Knowledge and Hubris 3 Knowledge, Power, and Morality 3 Towards an Anthropology of Knowledge 8 Transcending Subdisciplinary Boundaries 15 Ethnography as Hermeneutic Practice 19

2 Locating Knowledge in Mayotte: Structure, History, and Practice 31 Cultural Diversity in Mayotte 32 Historical Overview 40 The Three Traditions 48 Historical Practice 53 Islam 'Versus' Possession? 62 From the Sweep of Traditions to Local Views 66

3 Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge 68 The Social Distribution of Knowledge 68 Portrait of the Villages 71 The Social Organization of the Village from the Perspective of Knowledge 84

Vlll

Contents

The Village Fundis 90 The Economic Basis of the Experts 95

PART II THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF TEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE 4 Islam: The Perspective from the Path 103 Prayer and the Projection of Moral Imperatives 104 The Social Production of Prayer 112 Prayer and Reciprocity 116 The Politics of Prayer 121 The Economy of Justice 127 5 Educating Citizens: The Reproduction of Textual Knowledge 134 The Three 'R's': Reading, Writing, and Recitation 137 The Transmission of Knowledge and Authority 144 Learning as the Embodiment of Knowledge 149 Individuation through Learning: An Example of an Educated Citizen 156 The Value of Learning 159 6 Islamic Experts: Practice and Power 162 The Vulnerability of Authority 163 Islam and Politics: Two Public Figures 168 Styles of Practice: Two Village Fundis 170 Moral Intervention and Understanding 175 Friday Prostrations: A Conflict of Interpretations and Modes of Legitimation 179 The Articulation of Heterogenous Knowledge in Practice 185 Certain Knowledge, Contestable Authority 189

PART III COUNTERPRACTICES: COSMOLOGY AND THE INS AND OUTS OF SORCERY 7 Knowledge with Power: The Discipline of Cosmology 195 Relations of (Re)production 196 Divination as Calculation 209

Contents World and Body 212 Indispensable Knowledge, Amoral Authority 219 Interdisciplinary Challenges 227 A Cut in Time 233 8 Knowledge and Antipractice: Committing Sorcery 237 The Dark Side of Knowledge 237 The Imagination of Evil 245 A Dead End 249 Sorcery in Practice 254 Postscript: Unleashed Accusations 262 9 Removing Sorcery: Committing (to) the Cure 266 Extractor and Client 267 Extraction in Theory 270 Tumbu in Practice 274 Scepticism and the Conversation between the Disciplines 280 The Extraction Itself: Experience and Sincerity 287 Extraction as Performance 290 Conviction and Good Faith 295

PART IV EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE AND THE PRACTICE OF SPIRIT MEDIUMS 10 The Reproduction of Possession: Gaining a Voice 305 Spirit Possession as Embodied Knowledge 305 Gaining a Spirit as Moral Agency 320 Public and Personal Aspects of Succession 332 Emerging Voice 335 11 Tumbu and Mohedja: Excerpts from the Healers' Practice 338 Sources of Knowledge and Agency 339 Ethics 347 Multiple Voices and Gender Politics 354 Intimacy and Solidarity: Curing Halima 361 Embodied Knowing, Polyvocality, and the Therapeutic Alliance 371 Knowledge as Relationship 374

IX

X

CONCLUSION 12 Granaries, Turtles, and the Whole Damn Thing 379 Collapsing Granaries, Emerging Stories 380 Culture: Concurrent Perspectives 392 Culture, Incommensurability, and Conversation 396

Epilogue, 1992 407 Notes 409 Glossary 437 Bibliography 441 Index 453

Contents

Tables and Figures

Tables 3.1 3.2

Fundis Resident in 1985 96 Sex of Fundis 96

Figures 2.1 4.1 4.2 10.1 10.2 10.3

The Western Indian Ocean 35 Hierarchical Model of Supplication 111 Egalitarian Model of Supplication 118 Multiple Possession in the Family 326 Spirits in Vola's Family 328 The Generational Cycle 331

Preface

Writing about the social organization and reproduction of knowledge elsewhere, it behoves me to reflect briefly on the circumstances that enabled this book to be written. Knowledge and Practice has its germ in the first draft chapter of my doctoral dissertation, a chapter written and discarded in 1976. The dissertation expanded out of one small section of that chapter and, in a later transformation, became Human Spirits. At the time I did not have the theoretical means to link possession, Islam, and curing. In the 1970s a competent anthropological study of religion ap¬ peared to require the sort of depth and holistic cultural analysis epito¬ mized (in varying ways) in the works of Levi-Strauss, David Schneider, and their followers. By the early 1980s I had a sense of direction and even a title, 'Knowl¬ edge and Power,' which had to be discarded in the flurry of Foucaultian works that began to appear. But despite the emergence of new ways to legitimate the organization of the ethnographic material, I have remained aware of the examples set by the great Africanist ethnographers of the 'classical' period of British social anthropology. This book elaborates themes developed by Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, and Turner: the logic of beliefs from Evans-Pritchard, the exploration of personhood from Fortes, and the descriptive procedures and development of the case study from Turner. I have also been heavily influenced by the work of Geertz and Rappaport. In his ovular essay on religion Geertz presents an ideal model of - or perhaps for - religion; this is religion in the abstract. Rappaport's key essay is also highly abstract. I have analysed aspects of a specific religious repertoire in its concrete historicity. Like any living religion, it fails to solve completely the problems set for it by Geertz or resolved for it by Rappaport. It is full of fissures. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, it is perfectly sensible that systematizing intel-

XIV

Preface

lectuals try to tidy the world and occasionally, like Geertz and Rappaport, do so brilliantly, but the world is not a tidy place. 1 have tried in this book to describe one untidy corner of it. Since 19781 have been associated with another untidy but lively comer, the University of Toronto. My endeavours have been both encouraged and influenced by colleagues and students in the Anthopology group at the Division of Social Sciences at the Scarborough Campus and in the Department of Anthropology on the St George Campus. My work has also been generously supported by various granting agencies. Fieldwork over fourteen months in 1975-6 was supported by a Canada Council doctoral fellowship and by the NSF research grant awarded to Conrad Kottak and Henry Wright. 1 returned to Mayotte for the summer of 1980 with a faculty award administered by the University of Toronto and have also recieved funding to attend some of the conferences listed below. In 1985-6 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided a leave fellowship, as well as a research grant to Jackie Solway and me. Our four months of fieldwork in Mayotte were also supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society. During that sabbatical the first drafts of a number of chapters were written in Gaborone, Botswana, in a government guest flat generously provided Jackie by the Department of Rural Sociology in the Ministry of Agricul¬ ture, and in the home of David Khudu in the Kalahari. The bulk of the manuscript was written during 1990-1 while 1 was the beneficiary of an SSHRCC research time stipend and a visiting fellow in the warm com¬ pany and stimulating environment of the Department of Anthropology at Yale. An SSHRCC research grant assisted a brief visit to Mayotte in June 1992 and continues to support me as 1 write these words of thanks. Portions of the manuscript have been published or given as papers elsewhere and have been improved through the advice of editors, ref¬ erees, discussants, and audiences. Versions of Chapter 1 were presented at the Department of Humanities and Social Studies in Medicine at McGill University and the departments of anthropology at the University of Toronto, University of Connecticut, and University of Massachusetts Amherst. Versions of Chapter 2 were given at an African Studies work¬ shop at Harvard in June 1991 organized by Ronald Niezen and Leroy Vail and in April, 1992 to the Madagascar seminar at the London School of Economics. Portions of chapters 5 and 6 were given in a panel orga¬ nized by Sudeshna Baksi-Lahiri at the 1988 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Phoenix and subsequently appeared as 'Certain Knowledge, Contestable Authority: Power and Practice on the Islamic Periphery' in the American Ethnologist 17(1): 23-

Preface

XV

40 (February 1990). The remarks on Islamic musical performance are drawn from a paper presented to Cinquieme colloque international d'Histoire Malgache in Antsiranana, July 1987, and published as The Ludic Side of Islam, and Its Possible Fate in Mayotte' in Omaly Sy Anio (Hier et Aujourd'hui), the excellent history journal of the Universite d'Antananarivo 25-6: 99-122. Other portions of Chapter 6 were pre¬ sented to the Satterthwaite Colloquium on African Religion and Ritual in April 1989, organized by Richard Werbner and Karin Barber, and published as 'The Practice of Islamic Experts in a Village on Mayotte' in the Journal of Religion in Africa XX(1): 20-40 (1990). A version of Chapter 8 was presented at the Satterthwaite Colloquium in April 1992. A small portion of Chapter 10 is taken from a paper presented at the 1990, Atlanta meeting of the American Ethnological Society at the invitation of Katherine Verdery, and at the Department of Anthropology, Univer¬ sity of Chicago, and subsequently published as 'Taboo as Cultural Prac¬ tice among Malagasy Speakers' in Man 27(2): 245-66 (June 1992). A few other portions of Chapter 10 appeared in 'Spirit Possession/Spirit Suc¬ cession: Aspects of Social Continuity among Malagasy Speakers in Mayotte' in American Ethnologist 15(4): 710-31 (November 1988). Chap¬ ter 12 was presented at the University of Toronto; excerpts from it were included in a panel on narrative and experience, organized by Ellen Corin and Mariella Pandolfi at the annual meeting of the Canadian Anthropological Society, May 1992 in Montreal. Previously published materials appear here with the permissions of the JRA, the Anthropo¬ logical Association, and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. They are not for sale or further reproduction. None of the chapters are identical to the journal articles. I am indebted to the three reviewers who ploughed heroically through the first draft of the manuscript. All of them recommended that I shorten it, and I have done so substantially, removing, in particular, episodes concerning the onset of possession careers, sorcery, and the healing practices of the spirit mediums. The process was made much easier by the discretion and encouragement of my editor, Suzanne Rancourt. Many people have offered various kinds of support, encouragement, advice, corrections, criticism, or debate over the years. These include: Neville Alexander, Pauline Aucoin, Sam Bamford, Ted Banning, Wanda Barrett, Gilles Bibeau, Sophie Blanchy, Maurice Bloch, Jon Breslar, Frances Burton, Peter Carstens, Annette Chan, Ellen Corin, Rory Crath, Isabelita De Ramos, Mickey Deitler, Bob Dewar, Susan Drucker-Brown, Dale Eickelman, Joe Errington, Patrick Gaffney, Michelle Gilbert, Audrey Glasbergen, Noel Gueunier, Depankar Gupta, Angelique Haugerud,

XVI

Preface

Wendy James, John Janzen, Art Keene, Ray Kelly, Conrad Kottak, Jack Kugelmass, Susan Kus, Richard Lee, Tom McFeat, Gerlie Mendoza, Bill Merrill, John Middleton, John Miron, Sally Falk Moore, Shuichi Nagata, Howard Norman, Sherry Ortner, Paul Ottino, Michael Peletz, Kim Raharijaona, Jean-Aime Rakotoarisoa, Terry Ranger, Skip Rappaport, Ted Relph, Martine Remondin, Alison Richard, Malcolm Ruel, Larry Sawchuk, Hal Scheffler, Lesley Sharp, Bob Shirley, Mala Singh, Paul Stoller, Prudence Tracy, Carole Tuck, David Turner, Sheila Van Wyck, Pierre Verin, Jean-Michel Vidal, Andrew Walsh, Dick Werbner, Pnina Werbner, Henry Wright, Diana Wylie, and many other friends and colleagues. I thank especially Aram Yengoyan for his intellectual example and for his friendship, and Paul Antze, Janice Boddy, and Jackie Solway for being the long-standing conversation partners who have enabled many of the ideas presented here to take on a social reality. No one but me bears responsibility for the faults in the manuscript. Jackie Solway accompanied me to the field in 1985, confirmed and challenged my observations and ideas, and broadened my intellectual outlook. She has also given me tremendous emotional and practical support throughout the writing. Nadia and Simon Lambek have inspired me to do my best, while urging me to keep the whole thing in perspec¬ tive. The rest of my family have always shown support and interest. Robert Murphy once said that the best ethnography is written a long time after fieldwork when the details have begun to fade and the struc¬ ture gets correspondingly clearer. I have tried to write about the general organization of knowledge, but I always seem to end up with the prac¬ tice of particular people. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. In any case, it reminds me how much I am indebted to the people of Lombeni Kely and Lombeni Be for their generosity and their example. I thank the experts, the well-informed citizens, and the people on the path in Mayotte, especially those referred to in this book by means of pseudo¬ nyms, a decision about which I remain uncertain. Mohedja Salim and Tumbu Vita continue to fill me with admiration. Saidu Bwana, Yusufi Bwana, Safy Bourahim, Vola Mze, Dauda Swadiki, Zafy Bakar, and many others are my good friends. They have conversed openly with me and treated me with warmth and respect. I only hope this book shows that I have done the same with them. Julian Lake and Toronto August-December 1992

Stylistic Conventions and Conundrums

One of the most difficult decisions I have had to face in writing this book concerns the tense in which I put things. Perhaps this is a problem for all writers of English, but it is certainly something that has been problematized for ethnography. The choice between the ahistorical, visualist present and the autobiographical past is not a happy one (Fabian 1983). The criticisms of writing in the ethnographic present are well known, but I found myself continually reverting to the present tense. Is this resistance to the past tense just a vestige of older bad habits, an aesthetic preference developed by previous reading? I think there is also something more positive to be said about the present; unlike the past tense, it does not impose finality on events. Things reported in the past tense are over and done with. The people I report on are obviously as much in history as the rest of us and their lives have been changing very rapidly since 1975, especially after the period of fieldwork reported on here. Yet to write off the practices I observed as completed is to furnish a verdict that is not mine to make. It is unfortunate that we cannot write more comfortably in the imperfect tense in English, the tense of the past continuous. This is the tense of the Australian 'dreamtime' (Yengoyan, personal communication), a locus of reference with which ethnography may share a good deal, for anthropologists and their subjects alike. Anthropologists have dealt with the problem in one of two ways. Some have abandoned the moral ambiguities of writing the history of the present for the ethnography of the more distant past. Where all the players are deceased, the past tense is unproblematic. Other ethnographers have turned to more vivid ways to evoke the presence of the past, notably by situating themselves firmly in their narrative and

xviii

Stylistic Conventions and Conundrums

adopting the conventions of novelistic dialogue; tense can be determined by the frame of the quotation marks. 1 have been unhappy with these solutions; in choosing to rely more on reported speech than on (ostensibly) direct quotation, I have made the issue of tense much trickier for myself. As Volosinov remarks: [W]hat is expressed in the forms employed for reporting speech is an active re¬ lation of one message to another ... We are dealing here with words reacting on words. However, this phenomenon is distinctly and fundamentally different from dialogue. In dialogue the lines of the individual participants are grammatically disconnected; they are not integrated into one unified context. Indeed, how could they be? There are no syntactic forms with which to build a unity of dialogue (1978: 150).

One of the ways I have dealt with the problem, as well as with the question of gender-neutral language, is to refuse the tendency to be absolutely systematic. There is no good reason to succumb to the tyranny of editorial consistency. The main point, of course, is not to read as though the meaning of tense (or gender) were transparent. Part of the work of the reader of any ethnography (as of the writer) is to problematize time, to keep it continuously at the forefront of consciousness, to give in to the myths of neither the timeless present nor the safely distant past. In the dilemma of transcription can be found a microcosm of the issue addressed by the whole book. Words have entered Kibushy from a variety of languages: standard Malagasy (with Austronesian roots), Comorian and Swahili (Bantu languages), Arabic, and French. Each written language has its own orthographic conventions and these are not all commensurable. In one sense Kibushy is certainly a 'single' language, yet in another it is a jumble of conventions juxtaposed from various traditions. They have not been completely fixed, bounded, rationalized, and objectified in a single consistent form, and I do not see this as my task to perform. To create a unified system would be untrue to the context. Rather than be overly systematic, I have decided to transcribe words in ways that connect them to their sources, but also in ways that enhance readability for an anglophone reader who is not necessarily a specialist in one of the local systems as opposed to another. Thus I have departed from authorized Malagasy orthography where the latter is unhelpful in distinguishing phonemes present in the northern dialects. In particular.

Stylistic Conventions and Conundrums

XIX

I distinguish o from u as standard Malagasy orthography does not. I have not stuck to Comorian transcription either, especially where the latter has been geared to francophones. Thus 1 write the word 'y^ar,' which comes from Swahili, as mwaka rather than moika. Following the urging of Noel Gueunier, 1 have departed from my previous Tndonesianist' habits. The velar nasal 77 is now indicated as n rather than ng, except in final position (as in the English 'sing'). The ng is now in-dicated by ng rather than by ngg. 1 have also followed Gueunier's advice in replacing the hilim of my former publications with 'Him. Final e is pronounced like e in French. Words in Kibushy are italicized whenever they appear. Kibushy does not normally distinguish the plural in nouns. Where the context calls for it, I have added the appropriate English morpheme but without italicizing it, thus one mwaka, two mwakas.

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Dramatis Personae

Many of the people whose pseudonyms follow appear in more than one section of the book; they are listed here under the discipline with which they are most closely associated or the section in which they are most extensively discussed. Not all names found in the body of the text appear here. Islamic knowledge {'Him fakihi) Saidu Bwana Yusufi Bwana Hamisy Shehu Ahmad Ali Addinan Sheikh Ibrahim Fatima Halidi Bakar Diva Zafy Bakar Darwesh Zaina Madi

An Islamic fundi An Islamic fundi, Saidu's brother An elderly man and Maulida fundi Senior Islamic fundi of Mayotte A senior fundi of the island A senior fundi of the island A devout woman Fatima's husband Fatima's daughter Zafy's husband A young woman with troubling dreams Zaina's husband

Cosmology {'Him dunia) Juma Abudu Abudu Rubia Mussa Malidi Izudin Amana

A senior expert Juma's father, deceased A young cosmologer A cosmologer from a neighbouring village and an apprentice sorcery extractor of Tumbu's

Dramatis Personae

XXll

Spirit Possession i'iUtn ny lulu) Tumbu Vita Mohedja Salim Safy Bourahim Hasan Mena Kasimu Juma Dady Accua Musy Matwar Dady Zalia Halima Ali Vola Mze

A senior possession fundi and sorcery extractor Tumbu's wife and colleague; a trumba fundi A young male possession fundi and extractor A sorcery extractor; former apprentice of Tumbu Tumbu and Mohedja's patros fundi, deceased An elderly possession curer for patros spirits The senior curer for trumba spirits An elderly possession curer for trumba spirits A middle-aged woman holding her trumba ceremony Halima's classificatory younger sister; also holding a trumba ceremony

Clients and Others Zainaba Salima Sandia Malidi Aesha Zara

A young woman possessed after giving birth A middle-aged client of Tumbu's A sophisticated young woman, client of Tumbu's A wealthy man of Lombeni Malidi's wife A young woman who died quite suddenly

Islam and Possession: a villager dressed for the mosque consults a trumba spirit, Nramanavakarivu, 1985.

OPPOSITE

top

A village street, 1975. Left of centre is a raised granary.

bottom

The same portion of the village, viewed from the hillside, 1992.

A village mosque, 1975. To the right is the unfinished women's section. Pieces of metal roofing on the verandah await use for the upgrading of the mosque that has since taken place.

OPPOSITE

top

A festive way to thresh rice, 1985. Part of the ceremonial exchange that took place at the preparation for a shungu feast, to be held here by one of the village women on the occasion of the circumcision of her sons. Photo by ].S. Solway.

bottom

Qur'anic lessons, 1975.

A village fundi studying an Islamic text, 1985.

OPPOSITE

top

Performers at a mulidi hosted by a large village, 1975. The dance is

performed kneeling with movements in unison of the upper torso and hands. The men in the foreground are singing and playing small drums.

bottom

Guests who have come to dance at a maulida shengy, 1985. Teams

from each village choose their own matching style of dress, including gold combs and earrings crafted in Mayotte. Photo by J.S. Solway.

Dancers at a maulida shengy hosted by Lombeni, 1985. Photo by J.S. Solway.

Intimate communication among the senior spirits prior to the rombu being held for the veiled spirit, 1985. Note the traditional bed and embroidered sheet.

A morning scene near the end of a rombu, 1985, Halima, possessed by her male spirit and holding a trumba wand, sits next to the drinks table. Carouser spirits dance around the musicians (who are not visible in the photo). Among the onlookers are the author and daughter Nadia. Photo by J.S. Solway.

PART I Introductions

Tsy tany mandeha, fo ulun belu. It is not land that moves, but people. - Kinyume, proverb Les explications unilaterales ne peuvent jamais rien valoir, en sociologie, car les groupes humains que celle-ci etudie ont derriere eux de longues evolutions dont les elements sont imbriques comme les tuiles des toits. Aussi ne faut-il pas s'etonner de trouver chez ... les Malgaches non pas un systeme mais plusieurs systemes religieux qui s'entremelent. - van Gennep, Tabou et Totemisme d Madagascar

1

Knowledge and Hubris

Knowledge, Power, and Morality The angel Gabriel, travelling in human form, once chanced upon an old fundi (master, scholar, expert) living in a house built on a dry river bed. Curious, Gabriel stopped and asked the man what he was doing there. Wasn't he afraid of being flooded out? The fundi answered confidently that it wasn't going to rain for seven years. Gabriel went and asked God about this. God replied that indeed it wasn't going to rain for seven years, but that first it would pour that very day. Gabriel returned to the fundi and, finding him in the process of re¬ moving his house from the river bed, again inquired concerning his motives. The fundi said that although it wasn't going to rain for seven years, it would first pour that very day. Much astonished at the extent of the man's knowledge, Gabriel again reported the conversation to God. God told the angel to ask the

fundi one more question: whether he knew where Gabriel was. Disguised once more as a man, Gabriel returned and asked the fundi, 'Where is the angel Gabriel?' The fundi checked the time by the stars and then pored over his books at some length. Finally he said, 'I've looked everywhere, north and south, and Gabriel is not there. Therefore, if he's not me, he must be you.' At this Gabriel snatched away all the fundi's books, leaving him with only a single page.

I heard this story one night in Mayotte as we sat late over dinner. Mayotte is an island of the Comoros archipelago in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar where I have carried out fieldwork since 1975. The story was recited informally among a group of neighbours relaxing after a meal. Although the story obviously was not created in tropical Mayotte, where it rains almost daily for about half the year, it exempli¬ fies certain Islamic conceptions of knowledge and attitudes towards

4

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

learning and the learned that are prevalent there. The first part of this book elaborates these conceptions and the practices associated with them, while the latter portion describes alternate conceptions and prac¬ tices juxtaposed with the first. Conceptions of knowledge lie at the heart of any system of thought. The Navajo first man learns the names of things, interpreting reality by means of previously existing symbols (Witherspoon 1977). In the Book of Genesis practical secular knowledge is a human product; it is Adam who names the creatures of his world. On the other hand, by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve's eyes are opened to the world existing beyond their immediate experience. Islam, like the prophetic streams of Judaism and Christianity, accords with the second account in its emphasis on revelation. Knowledge exists prior to indi¬ vidual human consciousness; humans gain greater or lesser access to it in the historical periods after the original revelations through the study and recitation of the texts in which the revelations have been inscribed or interpreted. In Islam, even more than the other two religions, the core texts are identified in a very profound sense with the revelations themselves. Thus 'knowledge,' rather than 'belief,' becomes the critical expression of the relationship of the adherent to the faith. 'Belief has its roots in a relationship of trust in another person (Ruel 1982), whereas the key phrase of commitment to Islam, the shahada, refers to 'testifying.' Where Christians 'believe' in Christ, Muslims 'know' or affirm their Qur'an. Indeed, in the words of the Islamicist Franz Rosenthal, the Qur'an itself expresses the 'equation of religious faith [imdn] with knowledge ['Urn]' (1970: 29, 97). At first reading, the story suggests that truth is single, that it is re¬ corded, and that it is accessible to humans. Knowledge exists in a real sense, independent of the experience of the knowers. All 'natural' and human events, however singular they may appear, are apprehensible. This is a text-based view of knowledge, though it is not insignificant that it is presented here as an oral tale. Knowledge has external, objective substance; it can be looked up, grasped, accumulated, manipulated, and made practical use of by the individual. In the story, knowledge is essentially additive, information. At one level, the story demonstrates that what is critical for humans is not establishing the existence of knowledge per se, but gaining and maintaining access to it. Objective knowledge is, in theory, available to everyone, but (with the exception of divine revelation) acquisition de-

Knowledge and Hubris

5

pends on access to the books in which it is recorded. In fact, independent men of great learning like the fundi in the story are rare and impressive. In the normal course of events, access to knowledge entails engagement in a demanding relationship with a more advanced fundi who has mas¬ tery of the texts containing what one seeks. This state of affairs is rooted in conceptions of knowledge basic to Islam,’ but it is also not unrelated to the means of reproduction of knowledge and the nature of literacy prevalent in Mayotte during the 1970s. All children attended Qur'anic school at which they were taught the alphabet and the major prayers. But there was much to distract or deter a child, and it required a good deal of motivation to master these skills thoroughly and move beyond them to longer and more demanding texts. Moreover, since what was taught at the village level was essentially recitation rather than reading, and since the texts were written in a foreign language (Arabic), study proceeded slowly, on a text by text basis, through the mediation of a tutor. For all but the most advanced students then, Islamic learning progressed at an arithmetic rather than a geometric rate. The stage at which familiarity with the Arabic of the texts exists independently of the recitation of specific texts was rarely reached by people in Mayotte, especially those living in the smaller and more isolated villages, such as the ones in which I worked. Thus the learned remained dependent on those with greater learning, ultimately on scholars and sources far beyond the shores of Mayotte. Indeed, despite the long history of Islam in the western Indian Ocean, the people of Mayotte perceived themselves to be at a great distance from the most learned authorities. Nevertheless, the acquisition and application of knowledge formed central concerns of life in Mayotte, situating people vis-a-vis one another and to the world beyond. As we will see shortly, they also formed a bridge for the anthropologist, arriv¬ ing from and returning to a foreign society and, in the interim, seeking, like the Navajo first man, to learn the names of things in a world not of his own making. There is a second conception of knowledge audible in the story, the suggestion of an identity between God and the totality of knowledge. God is omniscient. The more he knows, the closer the scholar approaches God, to the point where the identities of the scholar and the angel, God's close associate, threaten momentarily to merge. The pursuit of knowledge is thus a valued activity, even a deeply religious one, but it is not unambiguous.^ Here is a sense in which knowledge is not merely an objective sub-

6

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

stance to be manipulated, but something that comes to be embodied, an intrinsic part of the self. This has implications for human practice. If the story displays certain fundamental assumptions about knowledge, it also contains divergent and discordant views of practice. Internal to the text is a critical view of the practice of one discipline, 'Him dunia (cos¬ mology or astrology, worldly knowledge), from the perspective of an¬ other discipline, 'ilim fakihi (sacred knowledge).^ Although it is not stated explicitly, the fundi in the story is a cosmologer, pursuing objec¬ tive knowledge for its own sake and not worrying where it will lead him. The fundi does not spend his time reflecting, generalizing, criticiz¬ ing, or constructing new theories, nor does he read in order to be in¬ structed or edified. Rather, he pores over his books, searching for a specific instance until he exhausts the possibilities. Learning of a differ¬ ent order might have brought wisdom. A person with great knowledge will not necessarily use it well; a wiser man than the fundi might have stopped learning before he knew so much, kept his mouth shut about what he knew, or pursued the sacred rather than the practical branch of learning. Nor would he have presumed that his knowledge could ever come close to equalling that of God. The final action of Gabriel in snatching away the fundi's books suggests that the latter was guilty of sacrilege. Cosmology relies on a more objectified conception of knowledge even than Islam and this is the force of the Islamic critique. Knowledge has an indexical, personal function; what one knows is not fully distin¬ guishable from what one does or who one is. At the limits, the omniscient fundi is the embodiment of knowledge, yet it turns against him. Even as he approaches God in his knowledge, his practice renders him more distant. Likewise, the story transcends the unproblematic identification between knowledge and its object characteristic of the cosmological view of the universe by picturing God as an agent, free to alter the design of things. God disrupts the static knowledge of cosmology by choosing to make it rain. An additional interpretation appears when we move beyond the text to the context in which it was told. On the occasion on which I heard the story, the old man who recounted it with a chuckle did not distin¬ guish between the two disciplines of cosmology and sacred knowledge, but was making a point about the purveyors of all textual knowledge as a general type from the stance of the ordinary 'man on the street.' On the one hand, learning is both the path along which humans can ap¬ proach the sacred and a means to the successful handling of such prac-

Knowledge and Hubris

7

tical problems of life as avoiding gullies in a rainstorm. Because knowl¬ edge is valued and valuable to the community, learning implies authority and social responsibility and is to be treated with respect. But on the other hand, it is bad to know too much. Both the man who recited the story and his audience, a small informal group of neighbours, claimed this to be its moral. They said that the fundi had learned so much that people might have started listening to him instead of placing their faith in God. In other words, knowledge is recognized as a source of power. Excessive power in the hands of one's fellows is felt to be both wrong and dangerous. Power and responsibility are thus the socially significant aspects of the possession of knowledge. People with knowledge are both respected and suspected. That the fundi lives in a river bed, in the wild (anala) rather than within the moral order of the bounded village community (antanana), emphasizes his essential independence from social control. His exces¬ sive learning confers social distance and moral marginality. Knowledge taps power and confers power on those with learning. Power, in turn, raises questions of action and accountability; there has to be a means beyond the measure of the sheer quantity of knowledge itself to evalu¬ ate the conduct of those who possess it. If knowledge provides a means to the acquisition of power, morality speaks to its use. Morality has to do with evaluating and directing the uses to which knowledge is put, attempting to constrain the power of those who have it and rendering them accountable for their actions. Knowledge thus faces the moral order, to which it is both indissolubly linked, since morality is itself a part of knowledge (of 'Him fakihi) and since study is a moral activity,^ and to which it is opposed. More gener¬ ally, applications of knowledge are construed as moral (or immoral) acts. The moral ambiguity of knowledge (found also, of course, in the Garden of Eden story where the knowledge of good and evil not only does not preclude evil acts but stems from one) is a central feature of thought in Mayotte. The tension between morality and apparently selfserving power underlies social life. It is an issue both internal to the various disciplines of knowledge and a central part of the ongoing conversation of the different kinds of practitioners with themselves, with one another, and with the general public. For example, it forms a major theme of the rituals and representations of spirit possession (Lambek 1981). It appears in any situation where people are dependent on those with greater knowledge, in the practice of religious scholars, cosmologers, spirit mediums, and curers of all kinds.

8

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Towards an Anthropology of Knowledge A focus on conceptions of knowledge in another society must render our own assumptions more visible. Hence, a major aim of this work is to problematize 'knowledge.' A reading of this book will not necessar¬ ily provide a sense of certainty, produce a finite increase in the reader's general knowledge, but it will, if it is successful, provoke reflection on the cultural and social dimensions of epistemology and on the complex¬ ity of 'local knowledge,' wherever it is found. The book also - necessarily - begins with certain assumptions about knowledge. These are the assumptions of a sceptical Western social scientist of the late twentieth century (though they have doubtless been shared by others), although they cannot, at this point, be assumptions that fully precede my encounter with Mayotte. They are a blend of Western theory and common sense, tempered by what it is I desire to understand. I treat knowledge not in a fully objectivist sense as the truth about the world waiting to be discovered (a dominant Western view that shares a certain affinity to our cosmologer in the gully). Instead 1 take a social constructionist view, following the classic account of Berger and Luckmann of knowledge as 'the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics' (1966: 1). In focusing on the certainty rather than the reality of the phenomena, my account is social and cultural. Knowing has no essence to be described but is 'a right, by current standards, to believe' (Rorty 1980: 389), hence contestable. Although the subject of this book is knowledge, the perspective is not that of 'cognitive science'; it is not concerned with analysing the universal mental (cognitive or neurological) properties by which all humans pro¬ cess experience. I do not wish to suggest that people in Mayotte go about solving ordinary problems - how to predict the weather, shop for a bargain, or judge the intentions of a potential adversary - any differ¬ ently or less successfully than people in Canada, but I think that the inquiry into such matters is incommensurable with what is attempted here.® I say this not only to preclude possible misunderstanding of my intentions or claims, but also because it is a major argument of this work that the knowledge of any given society (or person) cannot be fully linked within a single system - that incommensurability is a criti¬ cal feature of most forms of knowledge (including science). In other words, the range of knowledge found or used anywhere will always include components that are not 'able to be brought under a set of rules

Knowledge and Hubris

9

which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached' between them (Rorty 1980: 316). In any cultural or personal repertoire there will be concepts and paradigms that cannot be related logically to one an¬ other, hence organic and mechanical metaphors - knowledge as a fully integrated body or system - are inappropriate. This is not to say that knowledge need contain outright contradiction, only that the components do not always precisely match up. The relationships of parts of the repertoire to one another can better be understood hermeneutically, set in conversation or argument. The respective proponents attempt to mutually interpret each other until one is able to bring premature closure through the exertion, not necessarily of greater knowledge, but of power or moral claims. Together with persons and material resources, knowledge forms a substantive part of the means and ends of life in any society, although, due in large part to its relegation to the realm of the ideal, it has been little investigated as such in smaller-scale societies.^ Obviously, one cannot hope to examine or reproduce the totality of a society's knowl¬ edge. A study in the anthropology of knowledge must therefore make certain theoretically informed strategic decisions about what to consider. In contrast with the shift in the rich field of the sociology of knowledge from a concern with ideology towards common sense (Berger and Luckmann 1966), my focus here is on what the people of Mayotte themselves single out as knowledge; that is, precisely with what they do not take for granted as common sense.^ This does not mean that I am not interested in discovering underlying conceptual and symbolic structures or assumptions that people do not make explicit -1 am - but rather that I begin with what people themselves identify as important knowledge. I argue that indigenous conceptions of knowledge and the means by which salient categories of knowledge are objectified and handled provide a key to the investigation of social life in Mayotte. The pursuit of knowledge and its application in ethnomedicine or 'practical religion' (Leach 1968) form central concerns in Mayotte, playing a sig¬ nificant part in processes of individuation, social organization, moral evaluation, and the general quests for meaning and value. The questions that arise include how such knowledge is defined and discriminated; through what mediums and mechanisms it is justified, stored, communicated, acquired, withheld, and reproduced; and how its presence (or absence) is recognized. That is, I seek the cultural as¬ sumptions and structural constraints in terms of which reference to explicit knowledge makes sense in Mayotte and the principles according

10

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

to which it is ordered, as well as the effects it can have. The study is less concerned with the content of knowledge per se than with the ways in which its presence is socially attested, and concerned not only with who knows what but with who claims to know what, how such claims are evaluated, legitimated, and accepted, and their consequences for social relations, especially for power, morality, and what Douglas (1980) has called social accountability. In a currently fashionable phrase, the concern is with the discourse or discourses of knowledge. As an analytic tool, the concept of knowledge thus enables us to bridge distinctions between ideal and material, subjective and objective approaches. Knowledge is material in that it has existence and effects in the world; access to it may be a matter of life and death, its unequal distribution a major source of social inequality. At the same time, it is a social phenomenon, collectively defined and constituted, made manifest in written texts, recitations, ritual acts, and other cultural practices.® Through these means it can be acknowledged, acquired, accumulated, given, or withheld. Its force depends on its social acceptance and legitimation (its authority). Finally, knowledge must be meaningful. It is both externalized and internalized by individuals and provides reasonably coherent and satisfying models of and for social action and the world in which action is situated (cf. Geertz 1973, 1983; Obeyesekere 1981). Thus I view knowledge as social fact, examining how it is produced or reproduced, distributed, and consumed (that is, applied or internal¬ ized), and, conversely, how social limitations are placed upon its growth, transformation, circulation, and application. I also consider the implica¬ tions of the acquisition, use, and control of knowledge or the means to knowledge for the exercise of power, for gender discriminations, for moral accountability, and for self-identity in Mayotte. This kind of approach may not be equally appropriate for every soci¬ ety, but it is specifically suited to Mayotte. Knowledge is both sacralized, the grand design of the universe, and the stuff of daily social life. We have seen that there is a clear conception of knowledge that is reasonably independent of the knower. Such objectified knowledge may be of par¬ ticular significance for social articulation in nonunilineal, nonsegmental societies such as Mayotte where status is largely achieved. As LeviStrauss puts it, in such systems 'real statuses because they are territorial rather than personal are external to the individuals who can ... define their own status with a certain margin of freedom' (1969: 105). The acquisition and display of objectified knowledge provides an important

Knowledge and Hubris

11

means for self-definition and the construction of social relationships. A broad spectrum of various kinds of knowledge is used to discover and legitimate personhood - individual destiny, social character, moral transcendence, and particular restrictions and constraints (taboos), reso¬ lutions to specific social and personal crises, lines of articulation with predecessors, consociates, and successors. Objectified knowledge is also seen to be a major currency of social life in Islamic societies. Thus, according to Rosen (1984: 58), the people of Sefrou, Morocco, assume 'that it is knowledge that distinguishes men from one another and sets one person's social stature above that of another.' Likewise, Mitchell writes that 'For the life of ordinary Egyp¬ tians [prior to the late ninteenth century], the correct written or articu¬ lated word (the word of the Qur'an, in most cases) was a critical resource' (1988: 86). In any Islamic society everyone is engaged to some degree in the never-ending tasks of learning, reproducing, and passing on the sacred texts. The management of sacred knowledge plays a significant role in the development of the social persona, male and female, and the construction of a Mushm self-identity. Indeed, Islam has often been considered an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy. Authors such as Antoun (1989), Eickelman (1978, 1985), Fischer (1980), Gilsenan (1982), and Mitchell (1988) have begun to pay systematic attention to Islamic systems of education and the relations of knowledge to the practice they entail, while Bourdieu (1977) and Rosen (1984) have noted the negotiated quality of life in certain Muslim societies and the role of 'symbolic capital' in this process. This study shares many of the concerns of these authors and, like them, attempts to add to our understanding of Islam in local contexts (Eickelman 1982). But the case of Mayotte is somewhat different from the common portrait of the North African and Middle Eastern situations. As in Java (Geertz 1960), and possibly throughout the Islamic world, Islam must be situated alongside what can still be distinguished as alternate disciplines. Culture in Mayotte is a dynamic amalgam of many traditions: Malagasy and Southeast Asian, Islamic and SwahiU, Bantu, and Eranco-European. All of these have contributed to the forms and techniques of knowledge found in Mayotte, as well as to its actual content. It may be that this heterogeneity itself implies an objectification of knowledge and the concern with its circulation. Thus, the traffic in symbols must be viewed not only as an Islamic phenomenon but as the product and condition of much broader and more complex historical processes, including, of course, colonialism.

12

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Although the focus of this work is on a small island that is currently far from the centres of world political and economic interest, off the wellbeaten tracks of even tourism and anthropology, it points to questions that may be of general relevance in an increasingly plural world where objectified written knowledge penetrates ever more deeply, but is met by increasing resistance on all fronts, not least in the centres. If the postmodern attempts to challenge holistic models of cultures as clearly bounded and internally consistent units are valid, life in Mayotte may provide a glimpse of a kind of Durkheimian 'elementary forms.' If Mayotte does not form a unitary and fully coherent system, we can examine the historical, collective, and individual forces that generate attempts at systematization, as well as the forces that render these at¬ tempts fragmentary. This book thus begins to elaborate a more general view of cultures as particular conjunctions of incommensurable discourses. An argument that emerges much more slowly and circumspectly throughout the course of the work than the bald form in which it is asserted here, is that culture is better viewed not as a 'thing' but as action.^ Culture is found in the acts of ongoing conversation we have with each other (and within ourselves), conversations in which some partners have or think they have a relatively good understanding of what others are saying, but in which the topics or the language into which the topics are put inevitably are not always commensurable with one another and hence in which we talk past one another, unhappily into mutual miscomprehension, but happily into new fields of creativity. These are conversations, too, in which some parties demand or are granted greater authority or greater access to the means of authority than others. To attempt to define culture is an act of hubris for any anthropologist, but my depiction should be understood modestly, in its own light, as but one moment in my con¬ versation with you. The most salient discourses or disciplines of knowledge in Mayotte, which are relatively bounded and internally coherent, can be very roughly glossed as the sacred {'Hint fakihi), based on Islamic texts; the cosmological {'Him dunia), based on other Arabic texts; and that con¬ cerned with spirit possession {'Him ny lulu), which is transmitted orally and is derived from both coastal East African and Malagasy sources, as well as from references in the cosmological texts (cf. Lewis 1986). I will be concerned with how these disciplines are socially constituted, how their respective practitioners formulate and carry out their tasks, and how they articulate with, challenge, or resist one another. I attempt to

Knowledge and Hubris

13

delineate the nature, scope, internal diversity, use, and mode of repro¬ duction of salient knowledge forms and the ways in which people con¬ struct and negotiate meanings whose sources lie in the various and sometimes incommensurable forms of knowledge that are socially available. Two kinds of challenges have been raised to this focus on explicit forms of knowledge. Reader A says that such an approach misleads because it does not take into account ordinary everyday forms of cogni¬ tion and gives to relatively esoteric forms of knowledge a central place that they do not merit. In this argument, a study of religion or ethnomedicine ought to begin by showing how formal, ritual knowledge draws upon yet is qualitatively distinct from everyday knowledge. Reader B suggests that it is misleading - and even mystifying - pre¬ cisely to attempt to distinguish special forms of knowledge, that what Westerners single out as 'religion,' 'witchcraft,' etc., are in African soci¬ eties merely parts of the natural attitude, indistinguishable from every¬ day cognition. In the penetrating critique of Olivier de Sardan (1992) the exoticizing of non-Western magic is an unreflexive product or pro¬ jection of its separation from Western common sense. Hence, if the former complaint concerns the apparent rendering of exotic phenomena into the ordinary, the latter worries about occultism and the exoticizing of the ordinary. Both criticisms point to significant dangers - overgeneralizing about cognition on the basis of a limited and biased source of data and pre¬ senting an exaggerated and stereotyped picture of the ethnographic 'Other,' whether as credulous fool or fount of mystical wisdom. A related and simplified set of criticisms complain either that the anthropologist is too generous in his ethnographic portrait, glossing over discrimination and the victimization inherent in a given set of practices, i.e., that the anthropologist contributes to mystification, or that the sceptical anthropologist's analysis of how mystification is supposedly accom¬ plished is no less than his own mystification, his inability to experience 'authentic' spirituality or to perceive the true religious communion be¬ neath the superficial politics that form the grist for his mill. I hope that I have been able to avoid the worst excesses on both sides. My main strategies for charting these treacherous waters are twofold. First, a disclaimer towards special insight into either general mental processes or unique religious experiences; my interest lies resolutely with knowledge as a social phenomenon, albeit at the expense of the thrills and chills of ostensibly 'deeper' discoveries. Second and more

14

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

significant, I attempt to demonstrate and contextualize the diversity of local approaches to explicit knowledge. Local knowledge is by no means the sort of monolithic (or dualistic) entity that could be depicted in terms of such bold oppositions as 'ordinary' versus 'ritual' knowledge or a 'natural attitude' versus a 'mystical' or a 'religious' one. An exami¬ nation of knowledge in Mayotte shows diversity along many dimensions and gradations, some of which are elaborated in this book. First, the different traditions present in Mayotte offer varying views of the world, even different senses of what knowledge is. These can be held concur¬ rently by people without necessarily a good deal of self-consciousness. Second, people's attitudes to any given kind of knowledge change over both the short and the long term, according to their needs, goals, and interests. Someone may take a cultural practice for granted one minute and subject it to intellectual scrutiny the next. The same holds for the experiences people draw from their knowledge; the presence of spirits may be quietly accepted for days on end, yet provoke terror on a dark night in the forest. People's attitudes to knowledge are multilayered, ambiguous, subtle, and complex; they cannot be reduced to the ideo¬ logical formulae wielded in the anthropologist's intellectual battles. Third, some people in Mayotte make greater commitments to some parts of the repertoire than do others. What is taken for granted or laden with import for one person may be treated with scorn or earnestly contested by another. Adherents of Islam problematize spirit possession in quite specific ways, and vice versa. We can no longer generalize about a whole society or community's beliefs as though only we were sophisticated or jaded enough to tolerate a clash of opinions. How I address local knowledge is also an ethical and a complex issue, not only with regard to my audience at home, but also with regard to the people who have shared their knowledge with me. Hence, while Olivier de Sardan claims that 'exoticizing magic' contributes to negative stereotypes of African societies, this must be balanced with the concerns of both the local sceptics and the curers, who consider the drama of their practice a major component of its therapeutic value and who would not wish me to cast too pragmatic a light on their activities. Put another way, knowledge can only be understood in the context of practice (and vice versa). A person can hold different kinds of relations to the same knowledge. Depending on its immediate interest, a given piece of knowledge can be more or less taken for granted, more or less profound, critical, or troubling. Similarly, at the same moment two members of the same society can hold quite different attitudes towards

Knowledge and Hubris

15

the same piece of knowledge. This mutability and multiplicity of relations to knowledge is well articulated in the terminology of Alfred Schutz, which I introduce in Chapter 3. Transcending Subdisciplinary Boundaries: From 'Medical Anthropology' to 'Knowledge and Practice' The salient forms of knowledge described in the book are applied most frequently and with greatest intensity in situations of misfortune, of personal and bodily distress. Since many of the practitioners can (with some reservations) be labeled 'curers' and their activities therapeutic, I began by thinking of this book as a project in 'medical anthropology,' an account of alternate therapies and their respective practitioners. The triad of concepts that emerge from our opening story - knowl¬ edge, power, and morality - form a useful starting point for any specific or comparative ethnomedical account. Obviously, they will not have precisely the same internal relationship elsewhere as they do in Mayotte; for example, knowledge is unlikely to have the same objectified quality in societies that traditionally do not have writing or that have less social differentiation,^” but their intersection forms the locus at which the in¬ vestigation of ethnomedicine is properly found.” And yet if my study is not defined with reference to such extrasocial phenomena as diseases or micro-organisms, nor with an interest in therapeutic intervention, it comes closer to what has been described from another direction as 'practical religion' (Leach 1968). Perhaps any attempt to force the mate¬ rial into an institutional framework is misleading. As Dumont remarked (1975: 337) with regard to politics, 'there is no guarantee that just because modern societies clearly distinguish the political dimension it makes a good comparative dimension.' In other words, to isolate a 'medical' or 'ethnomedical subsystem' from the total 'system' is to project onto other societies the image of the contemporary West. As a brief example of the kind of situation that could be found in any African ethnography, take the case of a woman in Mayotte who in 1975 went to a diviner because she was suffering from a number of vague complaints ranging from aches and pains to a poor harvest. Part of her treatment was the extraction of sorcery planted in her field, which had had the effect both of making her ill and of attracting rats and birds to eat her crops. The perpetrators were intimated to be neighbours with whom the client had been engaged in a boundary dispute. The treatment also entailed the recitation of a lengthy liturgical text by a Muslim

16

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

specialist and the consumption of a sacrificial meal, which had among its aims the welfare of the entire family, especially the woman's children, and the divine protection of the field from future interlopers. The fundi of 'Him fakihi who performed this ritual was scornful of the following divination on the part of another specialist who also left food offerings in the fields to placate the pests. Declining harvests, land shortages, and the very question of private ownership of land are here intimately linked to personal and family health. As in many societies, so-called medical practice in Mayotte is virtually indistinguishable from matters of religion, economy, social structure, social control, conflict resolution, intellectual debate, prestige systems, and other more basic forms of social activity such as the business of daily living and the construction of coherent individual and collective identities. A concern with knowledge and practice provides a way of transcend¬ ing the artificial boundaries between 'medicine', 'religion', 'education', and the like which, because they merely reproduce Western institutional categories (and reflect disciplinary and intradisciplinary specializations that are a product of our system of knowledge production), distort the societies we are attempting to understand. To call this study 'ethnomedicine' would be, on the one hand, something of a distortion of its contents, a misleading translation, and, on the other, something of an artificial rearrangement of social life in Mayotte to suit a category that will fit comfortably between the covers of a Western book. It is precisely to lessen these consequences^^ that I focus on concepts such as knowledge, power, and morality, which are at once more abstract than institutions when it comes to comparison and more precise when we speak in terms particular to Mayotte. Such taxonomic problems are partly resolved through the focus on practice.^^ Medicine is, above all, knowledge put into and emerging from practice. I consider how people with knowledge ('experts') work, not simply listing their recipes, but discussing how they go about their activities and how they make sense of what they do: what to study, whether or not to accept a particular client, how to understand a complex case, what sort of distance to keep from clients. Because the study is social rather than clinical, my concern is more with how the curers work than with how the cures do. To a lesser extent (for reasons of space) I am concerned with the practice of clients: how they decide upon particular experts, what they choose to reveal to them, how they go about evaluating the outcome.^^ Local theories of causation and therapy are important here, but explicit

Knowledge and Hubris

17

theories, as in any therapeutic practice, are either put aside when nec¬ essary or reformulated in the Hght of practical experience. Notions of causality are locally more important for the choice of expertise than for classifying a fixed set of illnesses. There is a difference, too, between the model the expert presents to or explicitly shares with the client and the expert's personal or professional models. The principles that guide the practitioner's action and thought are not always on the surface of what is negotiated with either the client or the student (such as the anthro¬ pologist). As Evans-Pritchard (1937) demonstrated in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, ethnomedical theory is mainly constituted in practice, and can only be reconstituted by the ethnographer through an examination of practice. Since the Zandes' interests are primarily practical rather than theoretical, the logic of their beliefs can only be made apparent in the context of their application; 'they only appear inconsistent when ranged like lifeless museum objects' (1937: 540-1).’^ This assumption seems to underline the way the people of Mayotte talk about their experts as well. What we learn from the account about the fundi in the river bed is phrased not as a set of abstract moral pre¬ cepts, the elaboration of a theoretical system, but in the personalized and immediate form of a story that illustrates the fundi's practice. In¬ deed, the best form in which to represent practice and reveal its workings is narrative. In other words, if we want to discover what an expert knows, it is insufficient to simply ask her; instead, we have to observe, recount, and talk with her about what she does.’^ Despite the recognition that practi¬ cal concerns predominate over purely theoretical ones in many reli¬ gions, especially those found in small-scale societies (Douglas 1966; Kopytoff 1980; Levi-Strauss 1966), rarely have we seen ongoing practice investigated.^^ Close fieldwork with a number of experts is necessary to determine their relations to the knowledge they claim to control. We will examine how specific fundis conceptualize and meet problems and how they put solutions into practice in the course of their work. In the study of practice we can see the emergence and transformation of par¬ ticular formulations and theoretical explanations in the hght of immediate contexts, actions, and their consequences. To give but a single illustration of the sort of situation that can be analysed: what does the sorcery curer do with a client who believes he is suffering from a sorcery attack when the curer himself believes that the source of the trouble lies elsewhere? The curer's initial view of the case, his actions, and subsequent inter¬ pretations will tell us a good deal more about both implicit cultural

18

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

notions and the logic of practice than would the elicitation of abstract theoretical knowledge in a series of interviews. Such a strategy raises new issues of theoretical interest. In the case I observed the sorcery curer took the client's view seriously; that is, took it into account in planning to bring about a cure. The curer pretended to extract the sorcery, claiming that a client cannot become well until he believes himself to be cured. Yet, 'pretending' to extract sorcery looked exactly like extracting sorcery to me and the difference needs to be investigated. This case also raises the question of the good faith of the curer. LeviStrauss's well-known discussion of the scepticism and faith of a shaman (1963) is rare in the literature and was based on secondary sources. I will consider how curers rationalize their practice and how they deal with failure and with the scepticism present in their community (cf. Feierman 1981). A study of practice entails consideration of will, means, and imagination as well as of knowledge. Curing will be examined as both a social and a personal enterprise. Outline of the Book

The first part of the book provides a kind of political economy of textual knowledge. In Chapter 2 I attempt to characterize culture and society in Mayotte as a conjunction of parts and I place the articulation of the three traditions that concern us here, namely Islam, cosmology, and spirit possession in historical perspective. Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the distribution of knowledge at the community level. I introduce the ideal types from Schutz (1964), namely the man on the street (revised as the person on the path), the well-informed citizen, and the expert, that are critical to the remainder of the discussion, and I provide a brief portrait of the villages in which I worked. In Part II, I describe the practice of Islam from the respective Schutzian perspectives in three successive chapters, relating Islamic knowledge to issues of power and morality, and showing practitioners' relationships to the other disciplines. Part III presents an alternative textual model found in the discipline of cosmology, as well as popular ideas about it found in the discourse of sorcery. The organization and social reproduction of Islamic knowl¬ edge are contrasted with that of cosmology in Chapter 7. The following two chapters on sorcery and its removal provide the fulcrum of the book. Sorcery is conceptualized in Mayotte as an illegitimate yet essen-

Knowledge and Hubris

19

tially text-driven practice, whereas its extraction depends on access to knowledge by explicitly nontextual means. If textual practices are dominant in Mayotte, sorcery and its removal might be analysed, in part, as counterhegemonic forms of in/subordinate discourse, resisting textual knowledge and technical control at the level of bodily practice (cf. Boddy 1989). Chapter 9 also offers a detailed account of the rela¬ tionship between theory and practice in sorcery removal. In Part IV 1 attempt to reformulate the conceptual apparatus to make it relevant for nontextual knowledge as exemplified by spirit posses¬ sion. Knowledge here is less objectified and more embodied than in Islam. 1 discuss the reproduction, in large part a self-production, of mediums and provide an account of certain aspects of their practice. My previous work on spirit possession presented an essentially synchronic, structural analysis, elucidating the rules and conventions by which meaningful trance performances are constructed and under¬ stood (Lambek 1981). Now 1 turn to the internalization of power and knowledge in curers who develop relationships with possessing spirits who are conceptualized as teaching, protecting, and collaborating with them. The management of relationships with clients, apprentices, and fellow curers (cf. Ngubane 1981) is considered, as are gender questions, ethical principles, and other general issues the curers themselves raised concerning the nature of their work. I had hoped also to discuss the psychological dimensions of possession, the growth of the self in mature mediums, the motivational underpinnings, and the role of possession in maintaining personal identities and relations, but considerations of length have rendered this impracticable here. In sum, this is a hermeneutic study, the focus of which is on knowledge and practice: how various kinds of knowledge are formulated, put into use, and articulated with one another, how people attribute the use of knowledge to themselves and to others, and how they evaluate that use. Rather than attempting to reconstruct local theory in the abstract, 1 encounter it as it reveals itself in practice. The conclusion brings together local assertions and arguments concerned with death with my arguments and assertions about culture. The conjunction is fortuitous.

Ethnography as Hermeneutic Practice The story of the fundi in the river bed has a further dimension that it behoves us as fellow scholars to consider carefully. The fundi is guilty of hubris - aspiring to the cognitive power of the gods. Anthropologists,

20

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

too, have had the tendency to assume that what they discover in other peoples' river beds is full, objective, and disinterested understanding. But, complete knowledge of the other, says the story, is identity - the encompassment or annihilation of the other in the self. This is one of the dubious aspirations we sometimes bring to our work. Happily, out¬ side of apocryphal stories, it is a vain ambition and a misleading claim. Gabriel lives, as the story suggests, because Others are not merely the object of our knowledge but the agents of their own; because, despite what we imply in their absence, when we return home to lecture and publish among ourselves, fieldwork is always a process of dialogue. I inquire and someone - actually, many people - respond. And the re¬ spondents hold their own epistemological positions. I inquire from a world in which there is a question for every answer, man is God, and hubris is rewarded with promotion. My respondents' answers were forged in Mayotte, where truth is destiny, knowledge is subsumed in God, and man is the hesitant first-grade pupil in the vast universe-ity. Moreover, my respondents have legitimate intentions too, and construct their own interpretations of mine. They too interrogate me; we con¬ verse. They remain at least one step beyond my reach. As we inquire and respond, each of us shifts our position in response to the other so that neither of us ends where we started, yet each of us argues from and remains within our respective, possibly now enlarged, traditions. Although written ethnographies have ways of concealing the fact, and perhaps inevitably subverting it, and although the political circumstances of (post)colonial domination and inequality distort it, the dialogue of fieldwork is a joint construction and one that does not subsume either party in the other. Ideally it produces, in Gadamer's famous expression, a 'fusion of horizons,' not a substitution of perspectives.^® The use of such hermeneutic language is not meant to offer ethno¬ graphic practice - my practice - a new mystique. One of the implica¬ tions of my account is that the ethnographer's conversation with the 'native' is not really all that different from the conversations of any two natives with each other, or indeed from the way any one native - you, me, a fundi in Mayotte - juggles incommensurable concepts in our daily practice. In my case it was the ways in which the people I met in Mayotte conceived of my task and attempted to assist me in it that have led to this book. Their initial interventions and subsequent actions, as well as the ways they conversed with each other, forced me to realize the sig¬ nificance of local forms of knowledge as a subject of study. Local epis-

Knowledge and Hubris

21

temologies and locally acceptable means of transmitting knowledge shaped my fieldwork, directing and constraining what and how 1 learned and eventually, partially encapsulated by my epistemology, have become one of the subjects of that learning. I first arrived in the community of Lombeni in early June 1975, asking, like the proverbial Martian, to be taken to the chief and expressing the rather vague request to learn from the inhabitants. I was brought to a man who, far from being the leader of the community ('chief being a category by which the village was then able to confuse the French ad¬ ministration), was, among other things and together with his wife, the fundi of a small group of children studying the basic elements of Islamic knowledge deemed necessary for social life. I had said I had come to learn and I was evidently ignorant of even the basics; well then, they would put me to learn. And so, one morning of my third week, just after sunrise, I found myself the last arrival among a ragged group of pupils perched on little blocks of wood or hunched in the red dust, moving grimy fingers along the first pages of our Qur'aiuc primers and muttering the aliphu be. My fellow travellers were somewhat younger than I, aged between about four and eleven, a motley crew, male and female, each reciting aloud from his or her own place, at their own pace. Their mixed chorus was loud and raucous so early in the morning. Their voices rose and swept in collective protection around the unlucky member whose momentary drift into space had caught the eye of the fundi, who sat nearby with her cooking, and her switch. 'Allez, cochonsV shouted the fundi's husband, juxtaposing an equally foreign language of profanity to the language of sanctity, which the recalcitrant child took up with a shrill and nervous vengeance. The relatively detached, objective tone of my early field-notes cannot conceal the fact that I was not in control of my education. Here are some tidied excerpts. Small children spend their mornings from sunrise (6 AM) to 9 AM studying, and often again a couple of hours in the late afternoon, thus a good part of their lives. They sit together in a tight little group and recite. Whenever their voices fall too low and relative peace descends on the compound, the fundi begins to shout and raises her bundle of straws until the volume increases again. Some¬ times the teacher leans over a student and helps; often she keeps an ear open for mistakes. The younger children and I use the Kurassa, the local primer. Those aged over eight or so use a larger book, the Msahafu (Qur'an), carefully cradled in their laps since it is not allowed to touch the ground. The teacher seems to

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

22

know this by heart as well. Sometimes one of the children chants alone, the others adding to the refrain. At other times they write on their tall wooden boards with a sharply pointed stick dipped repeatedly in a washable black ink made from scraping the soot off the bottom of cooking pots. I haven't observed the teacher giving too much direction, but maybe that is because she is largely concerned with me. The group of children appears to be relatively constant, about seven or eight in number. Smaller children of the compound are also present since they are being minded at the same time. They must absorb a lot by the time they first start formal lessons (at about the age of five or when they can count to ten), much as one absorbs a mother tongue. The teacher also busies herself with household tasks and prepares a late breakfast for her family or directs a couple of girls in the task. When breakfast is ready, the smaller children are fed. The pupils are expected to continue concentrating while their younger cousins sit and eat right next to them. Finally, when lessons are over, they return to their own compounds for breakfast. The education consists largely in learning sequences of Arabic sounds, words, and prayers in a completely standardized manner by following a series of writ¬ ten texts. The first of these texts, the Kurassa, presents the alphabet, simple se¬ quences of letters, and basic prayers. All the pupils of my class seem to have progressed to the stage where they are able to recite whole passages. I don't know to what degree they can really read or whether they just recite from memory, using the signs on the page to mark their place. It is true that most of the adults are literate; they use the Arabic script to write Kibushy (Malagasy) and to painstakingly record the English vocabulary they ask me for. But whether they can read the Arabic or not, I don't think they understand it, nor is this method of teaching expected to lead to the ability to translate. I have asked the

fundi about this, but he doesn't seem to understand my question or, if he does, to be at all disturbed by its implications. His half-brother, who has received a special education in a larger village, really can understand some Arabic and knows the meaning of some of the prayers. My own education has been proceeding as follows. When I arrived I already knew some of the alphabet, picked up hastily during my stay in town. No one has asked me to write out the letters. Mostly I am expected to recite them aloud and in order. If I can't enunciate a text, it is recited for me, word by word, with me repeating after each word. Great attention is placed on correct pronuncia¬ tion of each syllable, but there is no concern at all in giving me time to try and associate sound with symbol. Every time I try to snatch a momentary pause to think out a cormection, the person guiding me rapidly fills in the next syllable. We progress to passages where I have greater and greater difficulty until I

Knowledge and Hubris

23

forcefully turn back to an earlier page and the process begins again. There is no end to it, the guide always filling in my silences. Without the guide I am lost. The fundi occasionally modifies the procedure, making me go over and over a passage until I can utter it perfectly. If I really insist on going more slowly and point to each letter, she will tell me which letters are present in each word. No explanation for letter changes or sequences is provided; one is expected to absorb the logic by the continual, rapid rereading. This is probably easier for visually-oriented people. It would be absolutely impossible for those learners in our society who insist on elaborate explanations of each step before moving on to the next. Very occasionally people point at random to a place to begin, but mostly it is the sequence I am expected to know. The sequential aspect is em¬ phasized by the fact that the texts are normally chanted or sung; this aids in memorization, Fm sure. At the end of each passage is written Wasalaam and this indicates the breaks in sequence.

After a very few days I became restless and frustrated. I had come to study a community and suddenly, by what was apparently a matter of miscommunication, I found myself compelled to spend a fixed period of time each day uncomfortably hunched over a block of wood that served as my seat, in the compound of a single family, repeating end¬ lessly what appeared to be nonsense syllables with a group of small and noisy children. My fellow students nudged one another a lot and glanced over at me instead of at their books, and I felt partially respon¬ sible for the angry scoldings and occasional flash of the switch they received as a result. I also feared the same punishment, or at least the disapproval from which it stemmed, directed at me. I explained to the fundi that I had not come to memorize passages for which no one could supply the translation but to understand why this learning was important, to learn those things that everyone took for granted. I said that I wanted to learn from not just a single fundi but from everyone in the community. The villagers had not run across a student like me before and they felt that such aims were unlikely and such methods surely unsound. Although they were too polite or frightened to tell me so at the time, some of them suspected me of being a profes¬ sional heart-and-liver thief who stole body parts in order to make Eu¬ ropean medicine. As a murder was committed in town shortly before my arrival, others thought I was a fugitive from French justice. Since there were no further deaths ensuing, people then decided to accept my next compromise - that I was among them to learn their language, a northern dialect of Malagasy, which it was all too clear I did not know.

24

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

They likened me to the Comorian speakers who sometimes moved into the village upon marrying local girls. These men often had communica¬ tion problems for the first few months of their stay, and sometimes for much longer if, as was often the case, they insisted on speaking only Comorian. Perhaps, indeed, I had come not out of any serious desire to study but because 1 wished to find a wife. Despite its abrupt and ignominious conclusion, my brief career as a Qur'anic student had a profoundly positive effect on my broader con¬ cerns. One particularly tortuous but ultimately illuminating aspect of this process concerned the fact that it was not only the fundi who saw fit to teach me. Anyone, whether adult or child, who chanced to be in the neighbourhood of the compound during the lesson hours would stop in and delight in having me repeat passages for them, leaning over my shoulder and guiding me along. Even outside of school hours and after 1 had stopped attending, as 1 walked through the village or when people came to visit me they would ask me to recite for them. They appeared to be more impressed by the Qur'anic primer than by any of my other possessions. Inevitably, they would spot it on my table, ask to look at it, finger it, and smile. I wrote: 'It seems somewhat surprising, considering how painful the educational process must be, yet they handle the primer with a kind of love.' Islam and the texts through which it is enunciated are central to social life, substantiating identity, informing experience, and rendering the world in meaningful and moral terms. Although I felt I was wasting my time attempting to learn the Kurassa when I might have been out meeting people or practising my Kibushy vocabulary, I could not have been more mistaken. Taking up the primer expressed, as nothing else could have, the sincerity of my interest in their way of life and the progress of my socialization into it. By the simple act of handling the Kurassa and hesitantly reciting a few lines, I became accepted in a man¬ ner and to a degree that I could not have anticipated. People say that the reason they learn to recite is in order to be able to enact the rituals that require such recitation, but in fact the recitation itself is the core of the ritual. From the first day I was enacting some of the most important ritual behaviour of the culture, with all the implications that such per¬ formance implied. As each person asked me to recite, I substantiated my position for him. Once I started going to the mosque the remark was everywhere: 'Michely is not a vazaha [European, white person], he's a Silamu [Muslim, one of us].' I was proud but also uncomfortable about this, felt myself a

Knowledge and Hubris

25

hypocrite, and worried that they might not want an unbeliever in their mosque, miming the prayers. But for them my entry into the mosque transformed me into a Muslim and the concept of mimicking prayer was unthinkable. Their understanding of ritual was virtually entirely in terms of performance. They assured me that it did not matter if 1 really did not know the prayer by heart, nor its entire meaning; the main thing was that I went to the mosque. 1 could then recite personal prayers to myself or repeat 'Allahu akhhar' ('God is great') as 1 went through the movements of prayer. Many people who had never really learned the words properly apparently did likewise. When people challenged or questioned me, it was less about whether 1 was coming to believe in Islam or to agree with them than to verify the degree to which 1 knew the ritual phrases. During prayer they also glanced sideways in order to observe whether I put my forehead directly on the floor and they teased me about whether 1 was developing the blackish mark on the centre of the forehead said to appear on those who pray regularly and prostrate themselves fully. Knowledge here is linked to doing and its embodied signs; objectified knowledge is dis¬ played and legitimated in practice. When Jon Breslar, an American anthropologist, moved into a neighbouring village of Comorian speakers, he had similar experiences. Long after we had both made our respective escapes from Qur'anic school, our relative competence at doing our jobs (which was a matter of some competition between the two villages) was measured largely according to how much recitation each of us knew and how well each of us followed the ritual precepts of Islam. My presence and activities in the village generated an additional kind of response. During the first few weeks a number of people came to me for lessons in English, a language for which in 1975 in this Frenchdominated part of the world they had virtually no external opportunity or economic incentive to speak at the time. Each of us scribbled translit¬ erations in our respective notebooks, they in the local version of the Arabic script, and attempted to recite back what we had written. Even¬ tually they gave up on English as I gave up on the Qur'an, but they saved their word lists, they said, as knowledge to pass on to their children. People were interested in how I could afford my occupation and many suggested that if they were given the money, they would like to come and do anthropology in my country, in order to return home and tell people what they had learned of customs there. These remarks, like

26

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

the English word lists, were assertions of reciprocal equality, but based on local conceptions of knowledge and its value. One man likened my activity to his desire to study Islam intensively on the Grande Comore. He envied my opportunity to be absent from my family and regular social and economic responsibilities so that I could concentrate on my studies without distraction. Other people assumed that I was practising anthropology for the money I could make dispensing the new knowledge upon my arrival home. They argued that this knowledge would bring me a certain amount of prestige as well. Should a Kibushy speaker ever wash up accidentally on Canadian shores, the government would call upon me to do the translating. Thus, not only did people treat me as they felt a student should be treated, but they also evaluated me by these standards and ascribed to me the various motives of local students: the love of learning for its own sake, prestige at having esoteric knowl¬ edge, indispensability to the community, economic benefit, the desire to help others, the desire not to have to depend on other fundis, the ability to harm others, the achievement of religious insight, and religious merit. Those people who appointed themselves my instructors did so with very specific ideas about what teaching, learning, and knowledge meant. The acquisition of knowledge was an open, explicit, daily, almost takenfor-granted activity in Mayotte, not, for the most part, an esoteric or mysterious pastime. The most important knowledge was not the secret of secrets concealed in a Chinese box-like series of initiations or para¬ doxical encounters.’^ On the other hand, the transfer of valued, explicit knowledge was very definitely conducted by means of a standardized social relationship in which the teacher was the dominant party. As the questioner, the student, I was the junior member of the dyad. When someone sat down with the express purpose of imparting a piece of information, it was selected, delimited, and presented in ways that were appropriate to the teacher. As the book will show, each disciphne viewed me differently, according to its own conceptions of knowledge and learning. Whereas everyone tried to teach me Islamic texts and the only stumbling blocks were produced by my own resistance, members of the more exclusive discipline of cosmology fobbed me off with semitruths. I learned about the curing practices of the spirit mediums only by the good fortune of living adjacent to them and becoming good friends. They never gave me strong invitations, but they were willing to teach me when they judged my questions correct. I was neither encouraged nor discouraged from entering trance and never felt the urge to do so. This situation constrained my work. It required patience^® and it made

Knowledge and Hubris

27

it impossible to become the student of many people, especially those in some competition with one another. But I was not passive either, having arrived with my own agenda, anxieties, and notions about what consti¬ tuted adequate fieldwork. Moreover, my presence often encouraged people to come up with creative responses and new interpretations of what was passing between us, a process that was presumably of interest to both of us. There were also ways around the constraints, specifically by questioning fundis engaged in practice or immediately after the fact rather than in scheduled formal interviews. The main constraint was not knowing what to ask, and this too made the observation of practice always enlightening. Systematizing has been our concern, grounded in our epistemology and social order, not theirs. Throughout my fieldwork I gained my best information by observing or hearing about specific cures or practices and asking questions about them. The questions emerged from the gaps in the model that I was constructing; the answers sometimes broke the model apart, sometimes added new pieces to it, but the people around me, while often extremely subtle and reflective, were mostly not con¬ cerned with explicit model building at all. Of course, this varied some¬ what by individual and, as for any anthropologist, a 'good' informant was someone who could elaborate a conscious model of some sort or produce information that at least appeared internally consistent.^’ But it is an open question to what degree these 'good' informants, having begun to learn my model of knowledge transmission, produced the kinds of responses I wanted more for my benefit than for theirs. Often, I think, their models were tacit or unconscious; they knew what they were doing and, when asked, could readily explain themselves, but they rarely stopped to consider how all their actions fit together. Fieldwork is an encounter, a hesitant grappling of epistemological horns. If I were much the stronger, the Other would hold no interest for me; if the Other were much the stronger, I would have no independent perspective from which to report. What we create if we are both success^l and interested is a mutually comprehensible dialogue, a fusion of horizons, the ground for further conversation, not a unified theory. The potential for self-deception is of course very high here. This is the reality of fieldwork. I could attempt to avoid it by staying in the field at an entirely superficial level of discourse; or, like Boas, by attempting to remain the silent partner; like Levi-Strauss, retreating to the laboratoire; or like some Marxists, working harder at my models than with my informants. I could deny it, by asserting that what I bring

28

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

home is not a facsimile but the real thing, pressed flat between the pages of my notebook, now too easily caught and objectified on audio cassette or video. Many fieldworkers have seen the native's point of view simply as an obstacle, something that must be got around if decent information is to be collected. Informants, in this view, must be trained. Evans-Pritchard (1940) speaks of the frustrations of working with the undomesticated informant as 'Nuerosis.' In the view taken here these 'obstacles' become part of the very subject matter of inquiry, thus, with a little distance, are not obstacles at all, but rich sources of information on precisely such topics as epistemology and the political economy of knowledge. This is a similar tactic to the psychoanalyst's focus upon resistance. I have tried to be a good listener and present what I heard with a minimum of distortion. This means that I have not tried to distill an essence or reduce the speakers and their arguments to some kind of external explanatory system. The noise enters through the imperfection of the recording device. Most of what I have reported as my own or someone else's speech we did not literally say in identical words. I never taped our conversations. That would have distracted me from listening and them from speaking, as well as removing the transcriptions from the context in which the words were uttered. Nor did the most interesting conversations take place at predictable intervals, according to a schedule established by me. Although I sometimes settled down for interviews, I learned most things improvisationally, in informal set¬ tings and chance occurrences, on walks, at meals, along the path, in whispered colloquy. Sometimes I wrote notes while we spoke or while I observed. At other times I waited until the conversation had ended or, if things were very busy, until evening. My note-taking habits varied both over time and according to subject matter and conversation partner. So, my resistances and my misunderstandings also play a role in shaping the narratives. They are imperfect, but then again, in an enterprise of this kind excessive precision produces its own forms of distortion. After all, my informants never said quite the same thing twice - and might never have said it once if I hadn't waited for them or asked them how and when I did. Portions of my field-notes, at times lightly edited, are used throughout the book. Most of the time they are in the form of reported rather than direct speech. Much of my understanding was shaped in the initial fieldwork period of 1975-6. When I use the ethnographic present it refers primarily to that period, although I also make extensive use of material collected in

Knowledge and Hubris

29

1980 and 1985. Life was changing during the decade between my first and last visits and its pace has accelerated since. While my focus is not on the process of change, the book is about the entire decade and 1 like to think of my method, in the term of my colleague, Peter Carstens, as diasynchronic. I hope to portray a dynamic picture, not a static one. Much of the ethnographic material is presented in a form I refer to as 'stories.' These are generally composed of information collected from multiple observations and conversations as well as subsequent reflection. They are not usually stories in the literal sense, neither heard out of context and reported verbatim, nor the product of my artifice. Rather, they represent the first stage of making sense of the material. They are followed by interpretation or analysis, the second stage of making sense and one that draws upon my growing understanding of the whole in order to illuminate the part. 1 prefer to call these excerpts stories rather than case-studies to indicate their dialogical and often narrative origins, as well as the fact that my perspective has not been overly clinical. Also, I want to emphasize that the most interesting 'dialogues' are the con¬ versations local people hold with each other, the ways in which ideas from different traditions were articulated in the practices of distinct individuals and brought into play among them (rather than simply with or for me). My style also shifts along with the topic and my prox¬ imity to it. Thus some of the discussion of the political economy of textual knowledge retains a more formal, distant tone than the accounts of practice. I do not apologize for this. A shifting between experience near and experience distant perspectives is one of the primary tools at our disposal and there is no reason to disguise it for the sake of some artificial stylistic consistency. I refrain from writing in a purely dialogical style because I believe it is deceptive. Not only did 1 rarely have the time or means to inscribe my informants' thoughts in precisely their own words, or to catch accu¬ rately the informal conversations and off-the-cuff remarks that give a dialogical account its essential flavour, but I recognize that the act of writing, as opposed to fieldwork, is grounded in authorial control. The effective dialogue in writing occurs with editors and readers, friendly and anonymous (for example, the previous paragraph responds to Reader B). Nevertheless, I have tried to preserve something of the dia¬ logical quality of fieldwork in my account for two reasons. First, it is in itself a good place to see local theory in practice. As someone asking questions of knowledgeable individuals in Mayotte, I had the role of student thrust upon me, although no one ever viewed me as a typical

30

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

student. How could they, since I manifestly maintained elements of my previous identity? Second, it gives a more accurate picture of the status of what I report - that my generalizations and conclusions are largely the products of a series of conversations. For interpretive anthropology the dialogues replace statistics, footnotes, polysyllabic abstractions, and citations, favourable or unfavourable, of intellectual father figures as a means of providing the text's authority. I have tried not to usurp the identities of those from whom I learned (though I have also attempted to maintain their privacy). I do not claim to have replaced Gabriel, to have become, myself, the ideal, omniscient, abstract informant. The conclusions are at once validated by the dialogue and left in question by it. The next word must always rest with them.

2

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte: Structure, History, and Practice

There is still overmuch concern with the quasi-metaphysical problem of wholes and parts. For Redfield peasant societies are part societies. But in Islamic ... societies, what is the 'whole'? - Jack Goody, Introduction in Literacy and Traditional Societies

As we examined the story of Gabriel and the scholar in the river bed in the last chapter, we saw three distinct local perspectives begin to emerge - those of sacred Islam, cosmology, and the lay teller and his audience. One of the main points this book makes is that culture in Mayotte is not a seamless whole but consists of diverse and sometimes discordant strands. Ultimately, these are united, not through some underlying structure or axiomatic order, but in social practice. Although most people in Mayotte would claim that truth is single, there are many different kinds of knowledge and hence several recog¬ nized paths towards it. There are two dimensions along which to begin to make descriptive sense of this diversity, the first to distinguish distinct traditions of knowledge and the second to distinguish people and groups according to their degree of knowledge of, or interest in, the respective traditions. As much of this book will show, in practice these dimensions can not be fully separated from one another. However, for the purposes of introduction, a division of analytic labour seems useful. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to identify three kinds of knowledge salient in Mayotte and to place their relations to one another in historical per¬ spective. The following chapter will begin to describe the differentiation of people according to their degree of specialized knowledge and will move from the broad historical picture to the social organization of a specific community. Hence, while in this chapter I speak of distinct

32

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

'traditions/ in subsequent chapters that examine the transmission, re¬ tention, and reproduction of knowledge in terms of the specific social forms characteristic of each, I will change the analytical category to 'disciplines.' The goal is not to reify idealized traditions, but to see in concrete terms how disciplines are practised, reproduced, and possibly transformed. What are critical are not only differences in the cultural content of the various traditions but the specific manner in which knowledge of each is acquired and reproduced. Villagers in Mayotte identify three main traditions (or disciplines) of non-tacit knowledge that together are concerned with matters we might, with the cautions expressed in the previous chapter, call 'religion' and 'medicine' and for each of which there are publicly recognized practi¬ tioners. These three traditions are 'Him fakihi, concerned with the study, transmission, and interpretation of sacred Islamic texts and commentaries upon them; 'Him dunia, concerned with cosmological and related medical texts and their implications for individual and collective affairs; and 'Him ny lulu, concerned both with treating people troubled by spirits and with utilizing the knowledge and power that spirits provide. These are the main fields with which we shall be concerned, though in addition, we will take account of the fact that there are various other kinds of medico-religious knowledge, either highly particular or so diffuse that they do not fall into a clearly marked discipline, but that might be referred to more broadly as audi silamu (Islamic - read indigenous - as opposed to Western medicine). Much of this knowledge is of the kind that is sometimes placed under rather ambiguous terms like 'herbalism' and 'magic.' Finally, there is Western knowledge. In 1975 it was not yet fully integrated into the structure of social life and not usually mentioned in the same context as the other three traditions. In this chapter the relationship among the three traditions is addressed from broad structural and historical perspectives. Although nothing might appear simpler than putting a local study in context, I want to problematize questions of scale as well as the nature of culture itself. Hence the unit of analysis slips between the region, the island, the community, and the individual. If culture is received as tradition, it is also created by local communities and used as a resource by individuals in the course of constructing their own lives. Thus the chapter concludes with a turn towards practice theory. Cultural Diversity in Mayotte A major issue that this book addresses is the question of internal cultural

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

33

diversity. How is the 'culture' of Mayotte to be characterized and how are we to view the processes that have led it to become what it is and that are changing it towards what it will be? When I first began thinking about writing up my ethnographic material in 1976,1 was hampered by the concept of culture prevalent at the time and I couldn't seem to find the underlying structure or set of cultural assumptions, root metaphors, or even structural contradictions that made sense of the whole and that were necessary then for producing an authoritative cultural analysis. I was not even clear what the identity or boundaries of the whole were. Since then the field of medical anthropology has dealt more systemati¬ cally with medical pluralism, but more important have been the general changes in regard to our thinking about culture associated with the label 'postmodernism.' Without embracing all referents of this complex word, two of the messages of postmodernism for anthropology have been that we have overly demarcated cultural boundaries even as we have effaced the differences within cultures (Coombe 1991, citing Rosaldo 1989: 27-30). Postmodernism expects difference and calls for attention to the play and movement of diverse cultural forms, as well, in its more political variants, to the loci of cultural production in struggle. The best anthropological work on culture has until recently been conducted from the 'lost island' perspective: each society viewed as reasonably discretely bounded and internally consistent. Whatever its value for the study of the Trobrianders, the Hopi, or the Nuer, the postmodernist critique of such an approach is appropriate for Mayotte.^ Despite its appearance in 1975 as a set of sleepy communities of pre¬ dominantly subsistence cultivators, Mayotte shared a number of the characteristics (obviously not all of them) attributed to postmodern so¬ ciety: discontinuity, diversity, and transnationalism. My first landlady in Mamoudzou was married at the time to a man living on a different island, speaking a different local dialect, but also a Muslim, who flew in to visit her once every couple of months. The cosmopolitan flavour of Mayotte in 1975 was not much different from earlier periods of its history. Mayotte is, in fact, an island, some 375 square kilometres, lying just above the thirteenth degree latitude south of the equator in the Mozambique Channel of the western Indian Ocean, between Madagas¬ car and the Tanzanian coast. Mayotte is well watered, with a rugged terrain and peaks rising to 500-700 metres. The climate and vegetation are tropical with a rainy summer and dry winter. The island is encircled by a coral reef, providing excellent fishing. Mayotte, or Tany Maore, as it is known in Kibushy, is the southeastemmost island of the Comoros

34

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

archipelago, which also includes Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Anjouan (Ndzuani), and Moheli (Mwali). Since mid-1975 when the other three islands declared their independence from France as a unified republic, Mayotte has been administered separately, maintaining instead a rather anomalous position as a collectivite territoriale within the French (neo) colonial system.^ This direction was the outcome of a hotly contested political campaign and series of referenda in which the people of Mayotte expressed their demands for development and their fear of political domination and economic exploitation by their neighbours. Despite the latter sentiment, Mayotte is insular in physical terms only. People have come and gone and mixed with each other for centuries. The plurality of knowledge found there is a product of the variety of sources and traditions from which it stems: Swahili, Middle Eastern, Malagasy (and hence, ultimately, partially Southeast Asian), African, European, South Asian, not to speak about what has been created in the Comoros and in Mayotte itself. The significance of these traditions and the relative prestige accorded them varies across various levels and sectors of the society and over time. The Comoros form the bridge between the coastal East African and the Malagasy worlds. Unlike the Seychelles, Reunion, or Mauritius, they were inhabited long before the advent of Europeans in the Indian Ocean; the vast majority of the contemporary population have long-standing cultural and historical ties to the region. Since I began fieldwork in 1975 at a time when Mayotte was still administered as part of the preindepen¬ dent Comores, this population has grown enormously. The census fig¬ ure for 1974 was 40,000; by 1984 it was approximately 59,000 (DASS 1984). Part of the increase can be attributed to immigration from Anjouan and the Grande Comore as well as to the return of numerous former residents of Mayotte from Madagascar. From a contemporary global perspective, the Comoros appears to be a relatively isolated corner of the world, but this is far from always having been the case. The Comoros may have been a crossroads for proto-Malagasy speakers arriving by sailing canoe from Southeast Asia in the first centuries AD and Bantu-speaking Africans. In any case, the coastal peoples - African, Comoran, and Malagasy - are, in part, a product of such a meeting. In the Middle Ages maritime trading net¬ works were established throughout the region, bringing settlers from the Middle East as well as vessels from China and India. Comoran traders often made the trip to South Asia and back. From the period when the Portuguese first rounded the Cape of Good Hope until the

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

35

Figure 2.1 The Western Indian Ocean

COMOROS ISLANDS 0 „ MAYOTTE ^ / J^ntsiranana Majunga

ananVO

MAURITIUS o REUNION

MADAGASCAR

36

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

advent of steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal, the Comoros, especially Anjouan, formed a major staging post on European trade routes to the East, while their own long-distance trading activities were eclipsed. Martin cites a description of the population of Anjouan at this period as 'un veritable cocktail de races' (1983a: 28). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the region was a hunting ground for European and American pirates, and later for Malagasy ones. The advent of guns and the slave trade created conditions of local conflict and instability, exac¬ erbated by the intervention and competition of the British and French. Population movement and cultural diffusion among the various is¬ lands in the region have continued to occur to the present. Mayotte, like most of the world today, is ethnically heterogenous and, moreover, has been that way for some time. The contemporary linguistic diversity indicates some dimensions of this heterogeneity while concealing others. The population is divided today primarily between the speakers of Shimaore (a Bantu language closely related to Swahili) and Kibushy (with various subdialects), a northern dialect of Malagasy, which is an Austronesian language. In addition there are numerous speakers of the languages of the Grande Comore and Anjouan, each quite closely related to Shimaore, and speakers of Antalaotra, a dialect of Malagasy very close to Kibushy. There are also a few small mercantile groups of South Asians (themselves differentiated from one another), some highland Malagasy, a handful of descendants of French settlers, and the French Foreign Legionaires and ever-increasing numbers of administrators.^ What is primarily concealed is that the grandparents or great-grand¬ parents of many of the islanders were Africans whose Bantu languages, indicative of former low status, have virtually disappeared on Mayotte. Although Mayotte has been under French control since 1841, until the present decade the transmission of the French language and Western knowledge among other than urban dwellers and a small elite has been sporadic and relatively slight. In 1975, in the two villages in which I worked only a single adult - and a part-time resident at that - was fluent and literate in French,^ and only a handful of children attended school in French outside the villages. Since then there has been an enor¬ mous change; in 1985 all the village children attended the local French elementary school and a few had reached secondary school. Between 1977 and 1984 the island as a whole saw a growth in the number of students from 'several hundred to fifteen thousand, of whom one thou¬ sand five hundred attend the new lycee-college of Mamoudzou' (Michalon 1984:10).

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

37

The internal diversity of the villages of Kibushy speakers that I stud¬ ied is by no means of the magnitude characteristic of the island as a whole. Pluralism describes neither the internal world of the villages, nor the villagers' views of themselves. Nevertheless, the origins of the villagers are by no means uniform; contemporary Kibushy-speaking residents include among their ancestors people from northwestern and northeastern Madagascar, as well as a few Antandroy from the far south; Shimaore speakers of Mayotte and people from each of the other islands in the archipelago; people from East Africa (Mrima) referred to collec¬ tively as Makua and perhaps coming predominantly from that northern Mozambican group. It is important not to reify these categories. Mayotte did not develop objectified ethnic groups and were it not for the physical boundaries among the islands, it would be hard to make a clear distinction between the residents of each. In the precolonial period classical Arabic provided a common writing system that did not encourage the objectification of vernaculars (cf. Anderson 1983). Similarly, in the colonial period the presence of Islam discouraged missionary activity so there was less of the objectification of languages and language boundaries (and 'tribes' and 'tribal' boundaries) that was the product of missionary transcription and publishing activities elsewhere in Africa (Ranger 1991).^ As Gueunier (1990) notes, there are no real ethnic divisions between Shimaore and Kibushy speakers; speakers of both languages identify themselves first and foremost as Muslims and as Mahorais, that is, residents of Mayotte. The society is an incorporative one (Turner 1979), encouraging marriage with outsiders and absorbing immigrants who marry into it and who gradually shift to local dialects.

Perspectives on Internal Diversity The emphases on internal difference and transnationalism for which contemporary anthropology prides itself are not completely new but have been characteristic of a number of earlier paradigms. The approach developed here builds on past work, learning from past debates with¬ out claiming to have definitively transcended them. Studying alternate claims to knowledge in Mayotte, it would not behove me to stake ex¬ clusive theoretical claims of my own. Diffusionism was once a mainstream theoretical alternative and has continued to be significant in some European circles and indeed in some of the work pursued on the Comoros and Madagascar. But

38

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

diffusionism has never been very good at seeing the logic of the system of which the movement of culture is a part. Innocent of any sociology, it has remained purely descriptive and never come to grips with the me¬ chanics of change, the ways in which export, migration, synthesis, incor¬ poration, selection, transformation, rejection, resistance, marginalization, etc., really work. And it presupposes the very concept of discrete, essentialized cultures that is precisely in question. In the diffusionist histories of the region the aim is to identify and trace waves of peoples arriving from elsewhere; diversity is never a product of local social processes. An alternate perspective has been the Redfieldian one, distinguishing the 'big tradition' of the urban centres from the 'little tradition' charac¬ teristic of peasant villages and focusing upon the 'cultural brokers' or 'intelligentsia' who mediate between them, especially as urban culture becomes 'parochialized' in the countryside (Antoun 1989). This approach has much to recommend it as long as the superiority expressed by the adherents of the urban tradition is not accepted at face value. In the hands of a sophisticated analyst such as Antoun, it becomes a study of the 'accommodation of traditions' (1989: 15) concerned with both the cultural products of the various traditions and the individuals who, from their respective positions in various hierarchies, take an active role in linking them. Yet Antoun himself points to the weakness of the Redfieldian approach. In its conceptualization of global traditions and processes, it 'leaves much of the complexity ... uncomprehended and uncontextualized' (1989: 32). In fact, as Antoun says, neither the 'Great' nor the 'Little Traditions' are as internally undifferentiated as the Redfieldians make out. Political and religious hierarchies may at any given point in history be clearly distinct from one another and in conflict over values while competing for the abiUty to carry out certain functions, such as legal arbitration, in the local communities. Within local communities people cannot simply be categorized as for or against ideas or practices emanating from the outside, but take nuanced, individualized, and highly contextualized positions on specific issues, attempting to arrive at coherent views while susceptible as well to the forces that maintain or enhance prestige and susceptible also to the opinion of the majority. The importance of consensus, the basis for consensus, and the means by which consensus is reached will vary from one place to another.* Moreover, the approach is not well suited to contemporary Mayotte since the traditions I am discussing cannot be distinguished from one

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

39

another according to their respective locations along some hypothetical folk-urban tradition. Viewed historically, the various traditions do not emanate from a single centre. The centres were of different orders from one another, none of them were in continuous, direct communication with Mayotte, and, in the case of spirit possession and to a large degree of cosmology, the connections have disappeared. The specialists in these traditions are not cultural brokers, mediating the views of the centre, but representatives and articulators of what have long since become dispersed and local views. The one area in which the Redfieldian approach might hold is that of Islam since villagers in Mayotte definitely think of themselves as the 'folk' in this regard. On the one hand, they view what they consider their backwardness with some displeasure, but on the other, as we shall see in Chapter 6, they meet the attempts of the Islamic reformers with a good deal of resistance. However, we must not accept any of this at face value. The views of the reformists may not be any closer to a central or great tradition - if such a thing exists at all - than those of the average villager. El-Zein (1974, 1977), Gilsenan (1982), and Lewis (1986) have each pointed out that there may be several versions of Islam operating within a single society, that we must not grant lesser value to the Islam of villagers than to the Islam of an elite, and that we should not reify the distinctions between them. Even in Morocco, where, unlike Mayotte, the local Qur'anic teachers tend to come from outside the village, the continuities are impressive (Eickelman 1985). Einally, Islam in Mayotte has never been static or tradition bound as the folk/urban distinction implies. In sum, it is not clear who or what constitutes the centre; moreover my main concern is less with the vertical accommodation of traditions between the village and the wider world than with their horizontal articulation within the village. Antoun concludes that 'when we speak about the social organization of tradition we must speak about many different versions of tradition with a small t on both sides of the part-society, part-culture divide, and perhaps not about a divide at all, but rather about a culture and power gap of greater or lesser degree that can be accommodated more or less easily in the same or different spaces over a short or long period of time' (1989: 39^0). In the last twenty years it has been Marxist anthro¬ pology, concerned with modelling the relationship between social sys¬ tems characterized by the unequal distribution of power (whether this is phrased in economic terms as the relationship between centre and periphery or in political terms as domination and resistance, and whether

40

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

it is viewed in the end as one system or two) that has faced these problems head on and has provided a theoretical apparatus for ad¬ dressing them. Indeed, it is largely due to Marxist (and feminist) an¬ thropology that the older conception of cultures as discretely bounded and internally coherent monolithic units has been called into question. This book could not easily be called Marxist since I am dealing with medico-religious ideas, knowledge, and practices rather than with food production, land, explicitly political ideas, and the like. But I try to bridge the gap between material and ideational and try to see whether some of the concepts Marxism has developed for understanding food, land, etc., cannot also be usefully applied to knowledge, books, and spirits. Like some Marxist work I will avoid reifying idealized traditions and instead examine in concrete terms how knowledge of various kinds is reproduced and employed in practice at a specific historical moment. In subsequent chapters I will speak about the means of production of knowledge and, in a way, my problem of internal diversity might be phrased as one of the articulation of modes of knowledge production. This is a different tack from those Marxists who treat medico-religious practice as purely superstructural, rendering it relevant, if they do so at all, by decoding it as a political critique of capitalism or a discourse of resistance to colonialism. In fact, I am less concerned with the contem¬ porary relations of local traditions to forces impinging upon them from the outside than to the way the traditions impinged internally upon one another. One of the major lessons of Marxist work is the need to situate eth¬ nographic accounts historically. Although the analysis presented in this book is primarily synchronic rather than diachronic, and hence will not meet the strictest criticisms of ethnographicism, it recognizes that what the ethnographer sees during his or her stay is but a moment in the life of a community and must be situated with respect to what has gone on before. The first avenue for understanding the diversity of knowledge forms locates them within the traditions from which they come and it necessitates a historical argument. After a brief review of the history of Mayotte, we will return to the question of how to model the relationships of the diverse forms of knowledge. Historical Overview It is difficult at present to reconstruct the history of Mayotte. Martin (1983a, 1983b) provides an excellent account of the political and eco-

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

41

nomic history of the Comoros immediately prior to and during the French colonial period based on an exhaustive study of the European sources, and I draw extensively on his work in this section. However, Martin's sources provide little insight into the perspectives of the indig¬ enous peoples; local people appear when they are viewed as significant obstacles to European aims, but otherwise their voices remain silent. Moreover, there is little interest in the nature of their societies. Work on the earlier periods rehes on a far more haphazard collection of documents as well as some archaeology (Allibert 1984; Kus and Wright 1976; Wright 1986) and its conclusions are still preliminary. However, it is clear that whatever their previous histories of mixing and conjunction, there has been a reasonably sharp cultural and political gap between the Islamic Comorans organized into sultanates since at least the sixteenth century and involved in regional commerce, and the Sakalava and other Malagasy. These categories were mediated by the Antalaotra, Muslim Malagasy speakers who maintained trading settlements along the west coast of Madagascar from the fifteenth century (Verin 1986: 75).^ Prior to the nineteenth century people in Mayotte engaged in some overseas trade and piracy, but their general stance was a defensive one and most international trade passed the island by. It was visited by the Dutch as early as 1607 and some British pirates spent six months there in 1702-3. Mayotte was reputed to have lots of food for sale at good prices. The records speak of successive elite groups who claimed do¬ minion over Mayotte. These people were closely linked to the leaders of the other mercantile polities in the region, and were broadly Swahili in culture. Although accounts sometimes speak of Arabs, and one dynasty claimed origins in Shiraz, those who had been long in Mayotte presum¬ ably spoke Shimaore, whereas newcomers spoke other Comorian or Swahili dialects. They were, of course, Muslim; the mosque at Tsingoni dates from 1441 (844).® But records are far less clear about the people over whom they held dominion, the conditions of the ordinary villagers in Mayotte, and the terms and degree of their subjection to the elite. Whether we can talk of slavery or feudalism, as on the more stratified neighbouring island of Anjouan,^ whether there were already Africans or continuously settled communities of Malagasy in Mayotte prior to the nineteenth century, whether these people were all Muslims, or whether some communities remained autonomous, are unclear. The nineteenth century was a period of turmoil in the region and the population of Mayotte was fluctuating and low. At the beginning of the century Mayotte had a relatively small population of Comorian speakers.

42

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

nominally vassals of neighbouring Anjouan led by a commercial family claiming origins in Oman, but in practise at the mercy of annual incur¬ sions of Malagasy pillagers, to whom much of the island appears to have been abandoned. Hence the population was divided between Comorans loyal to the local sultan and Malagasy who were not under his authority. The countryside was underpopulated and subject to ex¬ traction from both sides. Struggles over succession led Sultan Maouana Madi in about 1807 to form an alliance with a Sakalava leader who became known as Andriantsuly and who thenceforward played a sig¬ nificant role in the affairs of Mayotte. Andriantsuly became king of a large polity in western Madagascar and converted to Islam, an act that improved his commercial and political relations in the Mozambique Channel. Andriantsuly turned to these overseas relations in part because of his fear of the expanding Merina kingdom. The victories of the latter forced him, together with several hundred of his Antalaora and Sakalava followers, to flee to Mayotte in 1832. There followed several years of fighting for control of Mayotte in which a number of powerful leaders from the region played a part and in which the British and French began to meddle. Eventually the French were able to take advantage of the situation, signing an agreement in 1841 with Andriantsuly, the be¬ leaguered contender whom the French chose to recognize as legitimate, in which he 'sold' Mayotte to France for an annual pension of 5,000 francs and the education of two of his sons. When the French emissary (and later commandant supmeur) Passot took up residence in 1843 he was struck by the low population of Mayotte, about 3,000 people, of whom some 1,750 were clustered about Andriantsul/s residence on the rock of Dzaoudzi. The remainder of the population were said to be 'slaves' set out on the Grande Terre (main island) to cultivate it. The population was quite heterogeneous, including Comorans, Sakalava, and perhaps some Africans. There was a Shafeite cadi (Islamic judge) and seven subchiefs. Andriantsuly is painted in the French sources as obese and unintelligent, a tyrant, usurper, and drunkard, an image far different from that portrayed today in spirit possession. He died in 1845 and the French did not permit any further succession to the sultanate.’” From that point forth Mayotte became, in Martin's words, 'une mediocre colonie sucriere' (1983a: 181). Planters came from Nantes and La Reunion, and French policy was concerned with supplying them with land and labour. Any land that appeared to be uncultivated or lacking known owners, i.e., virtually the entire island, was declared

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

43

state property (1983a: 194). Pieces of land were apportioned to colonists as concessions, and could only be fully purchased in 1865. By 1864 there were thirty-eight concessions, covering one-third of the island, including the most fertile land, though only about 1,324 ha of this were under cultivation (1983a: 196). With regard to labour, the policy was twofold: abolishing indigenous slavery and importing manpower. French labour policy was fraught with contradictions: slaves were 'liberated' from their indigenous masters, only to be forced to work under more severe conditions for the government or the planters; and while slavery was officially abolished, most of the imported labourers, known as engages, were actually a product of the East African slave trade (Shepherd 1980). While the abolition of slavery had the aim of freeing up local labour, it also had the effect of undercutting the power of the indigenous elite, some of whom left the island. Martin argues that 'by comparison to the neighbouring islands, the aristocracy in Mayotte appeared fewer in number and without great influence' (1983a: 211, my translation), and this situation has continued to the present. The 1846 census listed 2,733 slaves.” A large native owner is said to have had some twenty-three slaves (1983a: 222). Owners included Antalaotes, Sakalavas, and Mahorais. The freed slaves were to work for the government or be loaned out by the owners for five years to pay for their freedom. How¬ ever, many of them seem to have preferred their previous condition and in the end were able to work off their time under their original owners. Some of them 'founded small hamlets where they subsisted on the products of gardening and fishing' (1983a: 224). There was plenty of land available for subsistence cultivation and people could graze animals and gather foods on unworked concession land (1983a: 209). The government kept trying to cluster the hamlets in larger villages where the population could be kept under better surveillance and be more readily subject to labour demands, but there was nevertheless a good deal of autonomy. Although in 1846, in an excess of fear and repressionary zeal, one official had the idea of making everyone in Mayotte wear a pass (Martin 1983a: 243-4), large parts of the island evaded all surveillance (1983a: 227) and white planters were often afraid to live on the Grande Terre. In any case, the number of whites was few; in 1868 there were only 137, some sixty of whom were functionaries or military personnel stationed on Dzaoudzi (1983a: 204). As it proved extremely difficult to convince local labourers to stay on the plantations, importation became the most significant form of re-

44

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

cruitment. The imported labourers were called engages libres and the process was rationalized as a system to end slavery, although, as Mar¬ tin well argues, it actually encouraged the trade (1983a: 255). Mozambican slaves were 'laundered' in the Comoros where the French paid the local rulers a sort of tax for each five-year contract signed. In an attempt to hide their East African origins, all workers brought to Mayotte after 1855 were supposed to have been resident in the Comoros for at least a year, but even this condition was often violated. The indigenous leaders on the Grande Comore and Anjouan, the boat owners and sailors, the French authorities, and the planters in Mayotte were all complicit (1983a: 260). It must be added, however, that the distinction between engages libres, who worked for Europeans, and 'slaves,' who worked for indig¬ enous people, is salient for the descendants of the engages in their claims of equality for people of African descent.'^ During the 1860s and 1870s there were over 200 arrivals per year, reaching 368 in 1883 (1983a: 255). According to Martin, the trade lasted, though in much more modest proportions, up until the first years of the twentieth century (1983a: 261). Conditions on the plantations were very bad and not effectively under administrative control. The work day was set at ten hours, though it frequently lasted thirteen. Planters often did not pay their workers even the meagre salary that was their due, kept them on a ration of nothing but rice, and physically abused them. In Martin's words, 'Mayotte etait le Par West des Reunionnais declasses qui y faisait regner 1'esprit de la Frontiere ...' (1983a: 242; cf. Shepherd 1980). Since the number of plantation workers reached its height of 4,200 in 1870 (1983a: 237) even though importation of slaves continued and the population by the latter half of the century reached 6,000 to 12,000 people (1983a: 186), one can assume that that there was a regular movement of workers off the plantations towards subsistence cultivation in autonomous communities, whether this occurred at the end of the contract period or through flight. The process was speeded up in the latter part of the century as the sugar economy collapsed and most of the plantations closed. Former plantation workers either joined together to purchase plots of land from the government or settled in existing villages. In doing so, their lives became not dissimilar to those of the indigenous cultivators. Largely ignored by or out of reach of the French government isolated on the rock of Dzaoudzi,’^ and also for the most part independent of the older elite, the villages developed a reasonably con¬ sistent set of social and cultural patterns in this vacuum of power. Martin refers to Mayotte as 'une colonie ou il n'existait plus de chefferie

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

45

traditionnelle et oil aucune organisation administrative autochtone n'avait ete mise en place' (1983a: 209) and suggests that the islanders appreciated the relative peace this afforded. What occurred, then, during the latter part of the nineteenth century was a process of gradual assimilation or even, if we are to speak more generally, of ethnogenesis (cf. Shepherd 1980). The Malagasy speakers were critical in this process. On the one hand, they became more like the Comorian speakers, as they adopted Islam, lessened their social links with Madagascar, and began to think of Mayotte as home. On the other hand, they were relatively open in absorbing the former plantation workers, many of whom took up Kibushy rather than Shimaore as their language. Martin notes an alliance between the Africans and the Sakalava as early as the insurrection of 1856, in which several hundred workers fled into the hills until they were defeated a month later by a massive show of arms on the part of the French and their ostensive leader, Bakari Koussou, a Muslim Sakalava, was put to death in a public ex¬ ecution. The Sakalava had lost privileges as a result of the French land and labour policies and because the French favoured the interests of the 'bourgeoisie arabe' (1983a: 235). Martin views the rebellion as 'proletarian' rather than simply anticolonial (1983a: 237). However, the Africans did not remain proletarian; as they shifted to freehold cultivation they be¬ came far more equal, more integrated with, and culturally much more like the other islanders of similar class position. Some sectors of the Malagasy population seem to have intermarried quite freely with the former plantation workers while others maintained a sense of superior¬ ity. Today, although some prejudice lingers, it is not expressed openly. The African languages have died out and the descendants of Africans are no longer considered a distinct ethnic or social group. Virtually everyone has a heterogenous biological, social, and cultural ancestry.

The Twentieth Century The French takeover created a period of reasonable political security after several decades of inter-island wars, raids by Malagasy pirates, and the like, matched by extreme economic domination. However, by the turn of the century most of the French plantations failed and the exploitation of indigenous labour eased considerably. Sugar exports rose from 537 tonnes in 1857 to 3,400 in 1869 until the bottom fell out of the market ... (Martin 1983a: 200-1). The fifteen factories founded in 1885 were reduced to three by 1902 (1983b: 53^). Nevertheless, a con-

46

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

tinning labour shortage raised wages to twice that on the other islands. As the French dreams of economic prosperity and political glory rap¬ idly dwindled or were transferred to other parts of the world, the is¬ landers settled down to cultivation on freehold settlements. The mi¬ grants, former slaves, and indentured labourers absorbed one another, took up local patterns of life, and became converted to Islam if they were not already Muslims. The relative prosperity of Mayotte from the local view was enhanced by the presence of the administrative capital of the Comoros with its opportunities for domestic servants, concubines, and petty commerce (Martin 1983b: 55) until in 1962 the capital was moved to Moroni on the Grande Comore. Political and economic penetration progressed very slowly and there was little infrastructural change for decades. French schooling was extremely limited and highly localized, there was no conversion to Catholicism, and no class without access to subsistence land. The villagers followed mixed production strategies based primarily on subsistence farming and fishing, com¬ bined with cash cropping and irregular periods of local or migrant wage labour. By the 1960s events and expectations began to speed up a little; a small class of indigenous civil servants had crystallized and villagers could make relatively good money from vanilla and ylang-ylang.’^ The more successful ones began to buy up land. As the Comoros moved towards independence, a lively debate about the outcome began in Mayotte; people looked uneasily towards the highly exploitative elites and the landless and land-hungry peasants found on the other islands of the archipelago, and wondered whether union in an independent republic was in their best interests. When I arrived in 1975 Mayotte was just reaching a major crossroad. It was the end of a long era, one that had been characterized by an imposed but in the end relatively uninterested colonial power. Hence, it is fair to speak about a power vacuum at the village level, about the egalitarianism characteristic of the village life of Kibushy speakers,’® and perhaps about Islamic hegemony. There was also tremendous dis¬ satisfaction about the economic stagnation. The Mouvement Mahorais, a Creole-led popular movement that construed this largely as the prod¬ uct of a struggle between the interests of the other islands and Mayotte, campaigned against the provisional Comoran government in Moroni and agitated for closer ties between Mayotte and France. The movement owed its origins and success largely to the dedication and organizational abilities of local women:

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

47

23 January 1976. Shamsia reminisces on the origins of the resistance movement. The revolt has been going on for nine years [at least]. In the beginning it was composed only of women. They would be called up for specific confrontations - and they had to show up, unlike today when attending political meetings is optional. She says the women really suffered back then while the men were not ready to take part. Her husband interjects that it was a good thing the men abstained; if they hadn't, the government would have really clamped down, there would have been a lot more violence, and separation would never have been achieved. Shamsia remembers one demonstration [in 1968] - all the women, except the very old, the sick, and those with nursing babies, loaded food on their heads and marched to the spot where they had been called. They found many women from across Mayotte there already. They were protecting a piece of road-building equipment that the Comorans were trying to send to Ngazidja. [The issue had to do with resentment that Mayotte was underdeveloped by comparison to the other islands.] They guarded it for a period of five days, through pouring rain. At night they sat up and sang the Maulida.'^ The men worked the fields. The women from Lombeni were very angry because their husbands did not bring them rice as the men from other villages did. Eventually they sent a message home and a contingent of three men arrived with a little rice. Finally, the ship that was waiting to load the bulldozer backed off. A week later the women were called up for something else. It was not entirely fortuitous that I arrived when I did. Pierre Verin, a scholar of long standing in the region, urged me to, insisting that this was the last opportunity to record Mayotte in this phase. What followed was, as they say, history: political conflict, referenda, some beatings and expulsions, popular affirmation of the decision to remain linked with France rather than to join the emerging nation state of the Comoros, and, most decisively, the response of France. Suddenly, in the late 1970s the French began to devote a lot of attention to Mayotte. There was political reorganization, a huge infusion of French personnel, and tre¬ mendous infrastructural and economic change. The budget rose from 49 million francs in 1977 to 144 million in 1983 (Michalon 1984:10). Clinics, roads, and schools were built. A radio station was set up in 1977 and a newspaper established. Virtually overnight everyone began participating in the wage economy, and all the children were going to school. Economic stagnation gave way with a vengeance to capital ac¬ cumulation and impoverishment, entrepreneurship and dependency, wage labour and the transformation of reasonably autonomous villages

48

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

into virtual bedroom suburbs easily penetrated by the state. While it is questionable whether the boom can last, the changes have been profound and far-reaching. What French schooling will do to Islam or what will be the reaction when risen expectations are not met, remain to be seen, but, since the referendum was won in 1975, the struggle for hegemony has not, so far, appeared to be much of a struggle. French culture has rushed in to fill the ever-widening gap created over a century earlier when the French first took power. The situation for Islam has been complex. Structurally, Islam shrinks to mere religion, that is, one compartmentalized institution among many in a capitalist state society. On another level, it becomes one of the few bases left for the assertion of cultural identity and pride in the face of the onslaught. Resources are put into building new mosques even while fewer congregants find the time to attend services. This is a kind of para-political and relatively nondeliberate reaction on the part of vil¬ lagers. But there has also been the development of a high degree of selfconsciousness on the part of urban Muslim leaders, many of whom are descendants of the old Comoran elite with ties in the other islands and have not been in favour of maintaining the link with France. They now raise the call more loudly for explicit adherence to some form of orthopraxy as they see it. Paradoxically, as French or capitalist ideology gains hegemony, so too does the Islam advocated by an elite status group heighten its attack on traditional village forms of practice.^^ But my story is not mainly this. My story is the view in and from the village and especially the village as it appeared in 1975, though supported by field research pursued in 1980 and 1985. My story is about the orga¬ nization of cultural traditions in the lives of villagers who live off the main stage and less about how this organization changed than how it worked at a given time. The account is located at a particular historical period and recognizes that what it describes is the product of a particu¬ lar historical conjuncture. My theme is the relationship of the non-Eu¬ ropean traditions with one another rather than specifically with the European system; this is much less studied and complex enough in itself.^® The Three Traditions Islam has been present in Mayotte since at least the eleventh century, the first evidence for Muslim burials (H.T. Wright, personal communi¬ cation, 1 December 1990). Islam was the religion of the elite and was

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

49

used to legitimate leadership; thus the Friday sermon was pronounced in the name of the current ruler. Tsingoni was once a capital, and in 1975 it remained a centre of Islamic authority as well as a repository of tradition for the Shimaore-speaking elite. Islam also placed Mayotte firmly within the East African mercantile sphere and connected it to political and intellectual currents that stretched from the Arabian pen¬ insula down the Swahili coast. Nevertheless, the strength, form, and degree of penetration of Islam have not been constant. At the time of the French takeover, the population of Mayotte is described as 'en partie islamisee, du moins superficiellement' (Martin 1983a: 160). A large proportion of the contemporary Muslim inhabitants of Mayotte, includ¬ ing the villagers among whom I studied, count among their ascendants non-Muslim immigrants from both Madagascar and East Africa. Thus there are families who only became practising Muslims in the latter portion of the nineteenth century and their knowledge of the religion has been steadily increasing since then. Some elderly people remembered a time when almost no member of the village could recite a text; when they held a ritual they would call in an Islamic expert from a large neighbouring village of Shimaore speakers. In 1975 virtually all adults knew the most important texts. A few individuals and incidents are singled out as significant in the process of conversion and education or in legitimating Mayotte as Is¬ lamic. On the beach near Lombeni lies a tomb said to be inhabited by a Sharif (descendant of the Prophet) who came from somewhere near the centre of the Muslim world (Arabie). Although he is believed to have lived near Lombeni before the ancestors of any of the present villagers, and hence to have no direct connection with any of them, the spot was considered sacred and potent (masing) and until the mid-1980s the vil¬ lage held a communal sacrifice there every three years. It fits with the egalitarian ideology prevalent in the village that the Sharif is not sup¬ posed to have left any descendants. The same is held for Andriantsuly and other former rulers; the occasional claims by some groups in the village to privileged descent are scoffed at by others.^® Several villages maintain shrines dedicated to former religious leaders renowned for their teaching. Some of these are associated with the Sufi orders. Sufi dances are extremely popular in Mayotte (Lambek 1987) and, as de¬ scribed for northern Madagascar (Eanony et Gueunier 1980), the orders have formed a major means of incorporating adherents in the faith. However, they may not be of any great antiquity in the region. At least one of the major shrines is dedicated to a man who was alive during the

50

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

first part of the century. Adults of Lombeni remember another fundi coming to pledge community members to one of the orders around the time of World War II. Islam has been enormously appealing to the islanders and has been a necessary means of integration for all non-European rural settlers. As Gevrey ([1870] 1980) predicted, all African and Sakalava inhabitants of Mayotte converted to Islam. By contrast, conversion to Christianity during the long period of French occupation since 1841 has been virtually nil. In the Sunni Shafeite form, Islam is currently the religion of the vast majority of the population, everyone except the small pockets of South Asians, highland Malagasy, and French found almost exclusively in the towns.^° Nevertheless, we must be wary of essentialist and reified depictions of Islam. Like any other religion, Islam is characterized by internal di¬ versity, mechanisms, and processes that enable a number of diverging views and practices to emerge at any time. As I.M. Lewis says (1986: 107), 'Elements in literate mainstream Islam ... introduce and perpetuate alternative renderings of the Prophet's message. Islam is thus not the "religion of the book" but, rather, the "religion of the books," a package of written compendia that in their catholic [sic] profusion facilitate the diffusion and rediffusion of so-called pre-Islamic survivals.' The study of Islam must give attention to these processes through which ideas and practices emerge and are regulated. The manifestation of Islam at any 'local' time or place is a complex articulation of ritual forms and core modes of representation with the cultural, social, and historical contexts. This is especially true in a premodern or non-Western society in which religion has not yet sedimented out as a discrete institution, but is part and parcel of daily practice in all its forms - kinship and marriage, politics, law, art, and medicine. If we can date Islam by the presence of mosques and the memory of conversions, it is much more difficult to locate cosmology historically. My sense is that it has been present in the region as long as Islam, included in the 'package' referred to in the quotation from Lewis. ‘Him dunia is transmitted in Arabic texts, many of which in content appear to be very old.^’ This content is likely to have changed less than the inter¬ pretations of Qur'anic Islam {'Him fakihi), which has been open to waves of reformist ideas emanating from the Swahili coast, Anjouan, and the Grande Comore. The relative inflexibiUty of 'Him dunia by comparison to 'Him fakihi is due not to lack of contact with the coast, which, to the contrary, was an indispensable source of books, but to the respective

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

51

means by which the two traditions are reproduced, to be discussed in chapters 5 to 7. The practice of 'Him dunia was probably more central in previous centuries than in 1975. People attribute to the first inhabitants of the island, spoken of as fani, great knowledge of cosmology combined with the magical powers it brings, and in general associate astrological learning with the past. Bonfils, the rare colonial administrator who took the time to make some acquaintance with the inhabitants, remarked on the 'paganism' of the interior villages in 1852 and, according to Martin, 'fought against the influence of the feticheurs (moalimou), confiscating their amulets' (Martin 1983a: 208). Both Islam and cosmology require literacy, a skill that, at least during the past century, spread through conversion to Islam. The rate of literacy among non-Muslims may be gauged by the signatories to a deed for land purchased in 1872 by the founders of what is now a large village of Kibushy speakers. Of the twenty-two purchasers, only four of them signed their names; the remainder are marked by crosses. Today every adult in the village could write a good deal more than his or her name in Arabic script. It is not possible to date the origins of spirit possession, although it is clear that there have been shifts in the form this has taken, several varieties having disappeared or emerged during the lifetimes of my older informants. Gevrey ([1870] 1980: 96) presents a brief description of spirit possession without mentioning the variety; it is interesting that this appears in his account of the 'Arab' sector of the population rather than the Malagasy or African. Of the two kinds of possession most prevalent during the 1970s and 1980s in the villages in which I worked, the patros spirits are said to be indigenous to the island and live in underwater villages along the coasts, in places often linked to early settlements, yet they are not necessarily older than the textual traditions (cf. Lewis 1986). The patros spirits draw their personal names from the books of 'Him dunia and, in addition, they have close parallels on the Swahih coast and throughout much of Islamic Africa (Giles 1987; Lambek 1981: 194 n. 3, 195 n. 5). The trumba spirits, representing deceased Sakalava monarchs and their entourages and originally part of the royal Sakalava cult, can be dated at least to the arrival in the first half of the nineteenth century of the Sakalava king, Andriantsuly. Andriantsuly's spirit, known as 'Ndramanavakarivu, is the leader of the trumbas in Mayotte and his tomb is the central locus of the practice. Trumba pos¬ session was a key mechanism of political legitimation in the Sakalava

52

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

polities of northwest Madagascar (Bare 1977,1980; Feeley-Harnik 1978, 1982,1991), but has continued to be significant in Mayotte in the absence of any institutionalized political base. Still other forms of possession are associated with other places, for example, the rewa with Zanzibar (Ngudja). The similarities between the patros and trumba and between each of them and other forms of spirit possession found in the region as well as in Africa more widely suggest that they are transformations of an underlying structure of long duration.^^ In general, possession is the most open of the three disciplines, and the curers associated with pos¬ session are probably the most eclectic in the kinds of knowledge they draw upon. The 'culture' of Mayotte has thus been composed by a continual cross¬ fertilization and gradual accretion of disparate elements among groups of people whose class and relative status have shifted significantly over time. Although my aim is not to trace their sources or assign provenience to various cultural traits, it is clear that the medico-religious repertoire contains ideas and practices emanating from a wide range of sources, including African ones, which are least acknowledged. The three kinds of knowledge we are most concerned with have associations with par¬ ticular social loci: Islam with the Arab and Swahili worlds and with the Comorian-speaking elite; cosmology with the 'original' inhabitants of Mayotte; and the various types of spirit possession with various ethnic origins, most notably the trumba spirits with the Sakalava. Each of these traditions is composed of a systematic body of knowledge over which specialized practitioners exert varying degrees of control, and each tra¬ dition thereby maintains a degree of historical identity and continuity. Nevertheless, the traditions are permeable. Contemporary practitioners of the disciplines are not necessarily associated with particular social origins. Moreover, many pieces of cultural knowledge are readily decontextualized or objectifiable and circulate more freely, becoming components of the inventories of individual practitioners of any disci¬ pline or elements in new constructions of cultural bricolage. Thus the diversity of knowledge characteristic of the village is not a matter of rigid, discrete blocks of knowledge, nor is it currently distributed pri¬ marily along 'ethnic' lines. This account does not yet describe the relations of the three traditions to one another at a given point in time. One of the questions that must be addressed is whether Islam can be said to dominate the others and, if so, how to conceptualize this. If we look at the region historically, we can see the expansion of Islamic mercantile communities whose political

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

53

and economic domination were legitimated by the Islamicization of the local populations. Islam provided a coherent world view and a means of organizing social institutions that claimed to represent the interests of the entire society and that were embraced, more or less closely, by all strata. In the nineteenth century the liberated African slaves, inden¬ tured labourers, and the settling Sakalava warriors, beginning with Andriantsuly himself, rapidly adopted Islam. Like the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Islam 'organizes action through the way it is embodied in social relations, institutions and practices, and informs all individual and collective activities' (Bottomore 1983; 202). With the French conquest there arose a situation of European power opposed to Muslim cultural hegemony. In the contemporary period this structural 'anomaly' is being reduced as Islamic hegemony gives way to a European bourgeois form. (But while French culture is in the ascendancy, it has not led to conver¬ sion to Christianity; it merely constricts the domain and relevance of Islam without causing Muslims to challenge its central postulates.) What I encountered in the field was the convergence of formerly independent hegemonic conceptual systems (spirit possession in the Sakalava mon¬ archies, Islam in the mercantile sultanates) in a village characterized by an egalitarian ideology in a colonial setting that likewise did not permit the emergence of a local political elite. If class has to do with differential access to the means of production, it is culture that defines what those means are. Is knowledge objectified such that it can be said to be produced and circulated or restricted and, if so, are there various means of access to it? Islam, cosmology, and spirit possession create different means of access to knowledge, hence, if knowledge be linked to power, alternate forms of the distribution of power. In this model culture and power are dialectically related. Power may determine which cultural definitions prevail, but equally it is culture that constitutes some of the conditions for the existence of power. In subsequent chapters I will attempt to show how the various traditions each create their own constellations of power, forces, and counterforces that exert constraints upon its application. Historical Practice The relationship of Islam to the other traditions cannot be resolved in purely structural terms. In discussing the three main traditions, two of them text-based and requiring reading in Arabic, and the third orally transmitted and dealing largely, but by no means exclusively, with trance

54

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

phenomena, it is all too easy to reify and separate them. Although their original sources may be historically and geographically distinct and their epistemological assumptions at variance, they operate in the same social arena and in the context of one another. Their boundaries are by no means impermeable, especially once we move from the perspective of their respective theories or from what people say about them to a consideration of practice, not only the practice of those 'lay' people who use them interchangeably on a pragmatic basis, but even that of the specialists. In practice, the three traditions provide complementary but also overlapping services, interpenetrating with one another such that there is no sense of exclusivity, final separation, or firm closure. In fact, it will do little good as an outsider to attempt to distinguish or adjudicate which local ideas and practices are or are not Islamic. It is far more useful to start with indigenous models, and these vary according to the sector of the community. But the villagers, at least in the popular view, take for granted that all local practice is to one degree or another Islamic. Distinctions are made, and they form much of the framework of the ensuing discussion, but they are made from the perspective of insiders viewing their way of life holistically and labelling that way of life, in contrast to that of Europeans, as Islamic. In 1975, when I asked people in Mayotte who they were, in the hopes of discovering an ethnic or tribal label, I would get the reply ‘Zahay Silamu' ('We are Muslims'). To be sure, Silamu has been used as a kind of ethnic demarcator on the Malagasy coast for some time (Verin 1986), but when spoken by the villagers it encompassed an evident array of cultural, social, and linguistic diversity.^ By 1985, the reply was often different: people would say 'Zahay fa vazaha' ('We have become, are now, or are already. Westerners'). Together, the three traditions formed the basis of a local, unified repertoire, kisilamu (Muslim, ours), as opposed to kivazaha (Western, European, French, yours). This is a repertoire, not a system. As the meeting ground of essentially incommensurable concepts, it is virtually impossible for an anthropologist to discover an underlying structure that makes sense of the whole in Mayotte or for members of the society to construct their own fully rationalized intellectual accounts of the whole. Thus, for example, there are a number of words, derived from each tradition and several languages, for beings that I translate as 'spir¬ its,' but there is no universally accepted or even dominant model for clarifying the distinctions among these entities or for dictating which word should be used and when (Lambek 1981: 27). In daily life experi¬ ence is formed and interpreted through idioms borrowed from all three

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

55

traditions and such contradictions as arise are largely situational and, for most people, easily transcended with little sense of paradox. The incommensurability of paradigms experienced by some of the experts is resolved through a local hermeneutics in which people are engaged in interrogating their traditions and conversing about problems of meaning. Practice is not merely relevant for synchronic analysis, but is also the medium of historical change (cf. Comaroff 1985; Ortner 1989). Each of the traditions has been shaped by the way its adherents have responded to the intellectual and practical challenges set by each of the other tra¬ ditions, as well as by the exigencies of other forces. Two stories, emerg¬ ing from the same event in 1985, will illustrate the interplay of traditions in the historical construction of daily life and attitudes, and hence the practical construction of history. One night, during which a large spirit possession ceremony and dance happened to be in progress in Lombeni Kely, a young woman named Zainaba gave birth to her second child. She had a short labour and the baby was delivered by the time the clinic's pickup truck arrived. Fol¬ lowing regulations, the driver insisted on taking Zainaba and the new¬ born infant for a postnatal inspection. Zainaba's father, father's sister, and mother-in-law accompanied them. When the father returned home, he described to us how, upon their arrival at the clinic, a trumba spirit had suddenly risen in Zainaba (i.e., she had entered trance). Complaining about the antiseptic smells of the clinic, the spirit demanded loudly and forcefully that Zainaba be removed from the spot at once. Her kin re¬ monstrated with the spirit, explained that Zainaba was in the clinic for medicine, and managed to coax it to leave her body of its own accord. According to Zainaba's father, all this took place without the personnel of the clinic being aware of what was happening. In order to understand Zainaba's actions, we need to examine the context of childbirth. Until very recently, birth took place at home. In the 1980s the French authorities began to insist that women give birth in the hospital or clinic. The question of medical benefits aside, the main reason for the ruling is evident in the punishment for its infringe¬ ment: babies not born in clinics were threatened with having birth cer¬ tificates withheld; such documentation has suddenly become necessary for a myriad of other entitlements, beginning with the rights to attend school and receive medical attention. Giving birth in the clinics was greeted ambivalently by individual women for all the reasons that we might imagine. But aside from ques¬ tions of health, privacy, social support, and autonomy in the birthing

56

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

process itself, the shift to the clinic threatened an essential aspect of personhood as it was ritually constructed and understood in Mayotte. Immediately after birth, an infant ought to remain indoors. This is justi¬ fied by reference to increased health risks outdoors, but it speaks also to the fact that the infant has not yet become a public person. If personhood is regulated by the French state according to whether the infant is iden¬ tified, enumerated, and evaluated in a bureaucratic system, it has been legitimated locally by the controlled emergence of the infant from the house. The inside/outside code and the crossing of thresholds link to¬ gether a number of transitions in the life cycle. Being taken outside for the first time (bok' antany) was the first significant event in a person's life. Regulating the infant's exit from the house was a form of social birth and an assertion of order. The event is constructed along several dimensions. The Islamic element is the most overt, but it makes use, in a typically Malagasy way, of space as an idiom of social relations. The infant is carried from the house by a fundi to the mosque porch where it is whispered the call to prayer and 'shown where to pray.' Then the infant is picked up by a senior relative, such as a grandmother, and returned home, 'so that it won't wander as a child but will stay close to home.' After this, a blessing (shijabu) is performed over the mother and infant, and a small ritual meal is eaten by the household members and the fundi or men who recited the Muslim prayers. The ritual thus introduces the child to Islam and establishes its public, Muslim identity, while also publicly declaring its kinship affiliation. However, although the practice is extremely common in Mayotte, it is not carried out by all of the most knowledgeable Muslims. The custom appears to be a local creation, an Islamic overlay of other notions. Saidu Bwana, a fundi of 'Him fakihi in Lombeni, told me that carrying the infant to the mosque is merely something extra one can do to please God. He laughed and said that maybe his own neglect to do so explained his children's failure to listen to their parents. On another occasion he recounted the correct way to take out a child, ac¬ cording to his books. The infant should be removed from the house on the seventh day and have its hair cut. The parents should give a gift to the poor of the weight of the infant's hair in gold, slaughter a goat without breaking any of its bones, and serve cakes, honey, and other good food. However, he said, neither he nor other villagers could afford such a ritual. Further significance of the first exit custom can be found by examining the period of transition whose end it marks. Traditions of humoral

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

57

medicine say infants and new mothers should be kept inside to protect them from cold and wind, creating, in effect, a kind of extension of pregnancy. Mothers should stay inside for the first forty days after giving birth. Fires are lit under their beds and they eat food that is both hot in temperature and spicy. However, according to a Malagasy taboo known as ranginalu, some new mothers and infants cannot tolerate heat at this time; they can only eat cold and bland foods and must bathe in cold water. Which practice, hot or cold, the new mother follows should depend on the taboo inherited from either parent by the genitor of the new infant. On the twentieth and fortieth days the mother goes to bathe in the salt water of the ocean, carrying a lighted taper in order to keep away harmful spirits who might be attracted by the smell of childbirth. The period of seclusion establishes a healthy and protected environment for mother and child and its proper conclusion legitimates the child's parentage. The most critical aspect of the infant's first exit lies in its scheduling, which is generally determined by a cosmologer. The event takes place several weeks or even months after biological birth and is different for each individual. The precise time of exit determines the infant's destiny (nyora), hence his or her future well-being, whether he or she will have a soft (malemy) or a tough (mahery) life and character. The mwalim dunia (cosmologer) establishes the most auspicious date of exit and whether or not the nyora requires a sacrifice (swadaka) and of what kind. If you don't fulfil the swadaka, which may range anywhere from a single coco¬ nut to ten small chickens, a knife, and a litre of milk, the child will be unable to fulfil the potential of his or her destiny. Once established, the nyora is virtually unchangeable. If the liminal period is rationalized through a combination of humoral and Malagasy ideas concerning taboo, the first exit ritual brings into play both 'Him fakihi, since it is the occasion for the infant's first religious instruction, and 'Him dunia. The event may be presided upon by a rep¬ resentative from either tradition and it also involves various close family members celebrating successful reproduction and asserting their deter¬ mination that the life of the new infant will continue to be successful. The ritual juxtaposes the not entirely commensurable realms of Islam and cosmology, yet it has a coherence stemming from the symbolic resonance of the contrasts between indoors and outdoors, house and village, physical body and social body, and so on, and from its structural links to other rites of passage.^^ However, despite the ritual's signifi¬ cance, by 1985 the imposition of state surveillance had rendered it ob-

58

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

solete. Birth in the clinic subverts the entire process, evacuating meaning, relocating control, and enhancing risk. Although Zainaba had shown signs of incipient possession prior to the birth, this was the first time she had ever gone into a trance and a spirit fully manifested itself. This kind of incident was not an uncommon one, 1 was assured; spirits dislike the smell of antiseptic and often rise in protest when their hosts enter hospital. Such an act is critical of the hospital; the danger of the smell of the woman's own blood attracting harmful spirits is replaced by the offence taken by a potentially protective spirit at the smell emanating from the clinic. It is also a clear assertion of autonomy, of access to an alternate source of power and knowledge thrown up in the face of French medicine. The fact is that the Europeantrained personnel were not even aware of the disruption in their midst. The disdain of the spirit for French medicine, its offence at the antiseptic smell, is matched by the very ignorance on the part of the French system that a legitimate challenge to it might exist. Powerful as it is, French medicine has limits to its knowledge. Moreover, the conversation of the woman's kin with her spirit is critical. In convincing the spirit to leave and to allow Zainaba to submit to clinic procedure, they may be ac¬ knowledging the necessity of compromise, their powerlessness to do otherwise. But more important, they are redefining the situation, ac¬ cepting it in their own terms, and, in effect, taking charge, if only to a degree. Perhaps most important, in Zainaba's case there is an implicit under¬ standing that the spirit will return and that she herself will eventually undergo a possession ceremony in which the bond between host and spirit will be confirmed. Established spirits sometimes replace cosmologers in scheduling significant events and there is a strong im¬ plication here that the spirit will serve as a protector, providing an ostensibly external source of support where such support has been re¬ moved. What is clear, then, is the link among the traditions that is evident in practice, both in the 'traditional' performance of the life cycle ritual and in Zainaba's innovative resistance to its obstruction by alternate and imposed French practices. Spirit possession is brought in to counter the weakening of a ritual composed of Islamic and cosmological elements. In many contexts these three traditions are viewed as being at odds. Yet, despite the fact that the presence of the spirit might be frowned upon by experts in Islam or cosmology concerned with rationalizing the distinction between their fields and possession, the arrival of the

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

59

powerful spirit is meant precisely to form a complementary means of guarding the fate of the new infant. Moreover, none of the Islamic fundis or senior cosmologers had the means or occasion to express the resistance that this young woman did. As an aside, it is useful to point out that the resistance expressed by women is not to French medical knowledge per se but to its mode of application. Mohedja Salim illustrates well the positive scepticism of a locally well-informed woman towards both Western and local knowl¬ edge. Mohedja has explained to me that while she knows midwifery, she does not like to practise it. It is too hard on one; as someone with young children and grandchildren of her own, she is not able to be on call night and day. However, she felt capable of testing the French doctor's knowledge and concluded that he was highly competent. While in the seventh month of her most recent pregnancy, she deliberately misinformed the doctor that it was her sixth month and he corrected her. Likewise, when one of her nieces was off by a month in her own count, the doctor knew. In an observation that places her firmly in line with many Western women, Mohedja remarked that the main problem with the French system was that the doctors seemed too quick to perform surgery (manan operation). She thinks this is very serious; too many operations can destroy a person. On the other hand, she has observed that women who give birth in the clinic tend to heal much faster than those who give birth in the village, because of the greater access to medicine. The clinic does permit women observing the ranginalu taboo to avoid heat. In any event, Mohedja has experimented and discovered that ranginalu doesn't work in her case. On return from the clinic, she argues, one should continue to follow the local customs (fomba)-, a new mother cannot cook food for others to eat, must stay in the house for at least twenty days, and then bathe in the sea. Women should observe the practices even if they find them uncomfortable and would prefer to be up and about, cooking and farming. If Zainaba's actions demonstrate the practice that constructs the histori¬ cal present, the next story directs us to the past. Zainaba's possession may have been stimulated by the large trumba ceremony that took place in the village on the night she gave birth. An account of the spirit that emerged in that ceremony provides an illustration of the complex link between possession and Islam as it emerges in the representation and practical formulation of local history. Halima Ali (no relation to Zainaba) was a woman in her fifties who had been troubled by a trumba spirit for

60

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

a number of years. In 1985 Halima finally amassed the resources and reached the determination to hold the major ceremony (rombu) in which the identity of the spirit could emerge and be publicly legitimated. For the first time the trumba dressed in the appropriate clothes. The cos¬ tume was a striking one; the head gear included a white cloth with a red fez perched atop it, quite unlike any spirit I had seen before. When the trumba announced its name, Madi bun Sultwan, it proved to be equally unusual. Many of the younger onlookers, confused by the Ara¬ bic rather than Malagasy form of the name and clothing, thought that a mistake had been made and that the ceremony had failed In fact, the annunciation represented the reappearance of the trumba spirit that had possessed Halima's deceased grandmother. This woman was the sister of one of the leading fundis (shehu) of 'Him fakihi (Islam) on Mayotte at the time. The sister's trumba was an embarrassment to the shehu and his followers and they did everything they could to make it go away, including making a large amulet for the host to wear around her neck. But when the shehu saw that none of this was doing any good, he advised his sister to go elsewhere for her cure. So sometime around the turn of the century, she came to Lombeni Kely to have her spirit called up and to conduct her ceremony (rombu). She married a man of Lombeni and, contrary to common uxorilocal practice, stayed there. She became a well known trumba fundi and managed the cure of Musy Matwar, the Lombeni woman who eventually became her successor when she grew too old to practise and who was subsequently responsible for curing and training a number of younger women in Lombeni, including, in part, Halima (see Chapter 11). To this day, possession ceremonies are forbidden in the grandmother's home village of Tsaratany, which remains a place of pilgrimage to the shehu's tomb. Contemporary residents of Tsaratany who need to hold a spirit cure must go elsewhere. They used to travel as far as Lombeni until they were no longer welcome there. Once, at a large Islamic festival held in a third village, members of Lombeni were mortified to hear people from Tsaratany saying that the people of Lombeni had no religion (dini) except spirits. The people of Lombeni thereupon forbade the people of Tsaratany from holding spirit cures in Lombeni. Resident spirit curers were told that while they had a right to earn their living, they would have to pursue the cures of Tsaratany clients elsewhere. The subsequent ceremony for a Tsaratany chent was held by the Lombeni/undi in a third village, while the following client from Tsaratany was chased away by Lombeni villagers.

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

61

In extreme old age the grandmother was called back to Tsaratany by her daughter who had remained there in order to die in her home village. But her nephew, one of the shehu's sons, moved temporarily to Lombeni Kely in order to teach people some of the basic Islamic texts. He lived with one of his kinswomen; the villagers all worked his rice plot and studied with him. Several of the men who know how to read the Friday sermon today learned it during his stay. The division of religious labour between the two villages indicates the uneasy relation between the traditions - the public dominance and prestige of Islam and the underlying persistence, and, in effect, complementarity, of possession. Claims of mutual exclusion are tran¬ scended in the practice of ordinary people. In addition, it is striking that the conflict between the traditions that was made manifest in the life of the shehu's sister was also mediated by the identity of her spirit, at once both a trumba and a Muslim. In fact, the spirit corresponds to a historical personage whose own life mediated the traditions. Madi bun Sultwan, also known in Malagasy as 'Ndramihutsy, was a member of the Sakalava royal dynasty, a son of Andriantsuly, the monarch who fled Madagascar for Mayotte and who eventually converted to Islam. The spirit's name translates as Madi, son of the Sultan, indicating Andriantsuly's claim to that title. Andriantsuly's own conversion to Islam is not represented directly in his trumba spirit 'Ndramanavakarivu;^^ the life of his son in local memory represents the incorporation of Sakalava elements in a Muslim society and the subordination of the former by the latter, yet its very representation in the figure of a trumba also subverts this process. The historical relationship between the trumba spirits and Islam has con¬ tinued to be enacted annually at a ceremony at Andriantsuly's tomb, which parallels the commemoration of deceased Islamic scholars mentioned above. Every year in the Islamic month of Maulida, 'Ndramanavakarivu calls people from across the island to a maulida shengy, a religious dance and song performed by women in honour of the Prophet. Many spirits rise; the senior trumba spirits sit and watch the performance, while another kind of spirits, known as lulu ny maulida or lulu kimaore, join in the dancing. The latter spirits represent Shimaore-speaking Muslims from the history of Mayotte. The performance is properly Islamic - except that its sponsors and some of its participants and audience are spirits. The link between the two kinds of spirits present replays the com¬ plex power relations of the previous century and indicates that the balance between Islam and Sakalava spirit possession remains a delicate one.

62

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

The reappearance of Madi bun Sultwan in Halima brings an old sign to contemporary consciousness in the village. It also articulates HaUma's link to her grandmother, the connections of this family to the village of Tsaratany, and the genealogy of trumba possession curers within Lombeni. Halima's activity is thus, in its public dimensions, an assertion of the continued power and significance of possession in general and of the value of possession healing as a form of labour for Lombeni in particular, as well as, through the image of the trumba spirit himself, a reminder - and a reproduction - of the interconnectedness of posses¬ sion and Islam. The story demonstrates that Islam has the power to limit the bound¬ aries of spirit possession but not to quell its source. If spirit possession cannot do the same, it is not passive either. Spirit possession is not simply a tradition that was conquered, a faith from which its adherents were forced to convert, but a supple means to enact and represent the historical process itself. Possession is not a past that can be easily dis¬ carded, but a continuous working through of the past and recon¬ textualizing it into the present. Thus the articulation of traditions is not something that is captured in an abstract, objectified, and rationalized formulation. Rather, it is in the practice of Zainaba, of Halima, of Halima's courageous grandmother, of the shehu, of the villagers of Tsaratany and Lombeni, of the people from the entire island gathered at Andriantsuly's tomb, that the ongoing process is to be discovered. Islam 'Versus' Possession? The people of Mayotte are Mushms and they all interact with spirits, either directly or with spirits that rise in the bodies of others. But nei¬ ther possession nor Islam are unified phenomena nor is peoples' com¬ mitment to each of them all of a piece, not even when experts are distinguished from nonexperts, nor over time for any given individual. The critical time dimension for the individual is not necessarily one of major biographical shifts, of conversion, as it were, but rather of a more subtle shifting of perspective on a daily basis. Phenomenological per¬ spective is deeply embedded in practice. To receive a diagnosis of pos¬ session is to shift perspective and interest just as the annual passage through Ramadan shifts the intensity of Islamic interest. From the stories recounted, clearly one form of interrogation would be to examine whether the alternate histories are gendered. To a degree, this is so; Islam is embodied and reproduced largely and most saliently

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

63

by men, possession by women. But there are several important reserva¬ tions. First, neither Islam or possession is entirely exclusionary here; women do figure in Islam (I wouldn't be surprised if Halima's grand¬ mother had not been very pious and learned, though admittedly this is not a fact about her that is passed down) and men do figure in spirit possession and did so even more in the past. Indeed, a generation ago in the neighbouring village, the mediums contemporary with Halima's grandmother and possessed by 'Ndramanavakarivu were men. It was they who organized collections for the annual ritual at Andriantsuly's tomb. Second, the larger proportion of the spirits whom women embody are male ones. Hence if possession is a 'women's history,' it is a history about or through male figures, or rather it is a curious conflation of past male subjects with present female ones. Third, even though the spirits mostly rise in the bodies of women, once they are present in the com¬ munity, they interact a good deal with men and most men take them very seriously. So the gender division is more a division of labour in historical production than it is an ideological division between two competing and opposed gendered paradigms, ideologies, or the parallel existence of closed gendered worlds. Another point worthy of note is that although I tend to speak of spirit possession in the abstract as a unified category, and local people some¬ times do so as well, in fact this does not express how possession is experienced and practised. There is no possession in the abstract, but only possession by members of one particular kind of spirit or another. In the story of Halima and her grandmother, it is a central fact that the spirits are trumba spirits. The senior trumba spirits are members of the royal descent group of the Sakalava; for the most part they are deceased monarchs - kings and queens who once reigned over the Sakalava and who correspond to genealogies still remembered in northwestern Mada¬ gascar. In their ceremonies at Mahabu, the location of Andriantsuly's tomb on Mayotte and the generic term for Sakalava royal burial grounds, the trumbas enact the history of the last independent monarch of their line, Andriantsuly, and his tenuous absorption into the Muslim society of Mayotte. They also stake a claim to their own respectability, if not as Muslims, at least by means of sponsoring an Islamic ceremony, all the while distinguishing themselves from Muslim society by such traits as dress, comportment, language, and drinking habits, as well as by their own remembered history. The opposition between trumba spirits and Islam is portrayed by the spirits and the audience at the Islamic Maulida as a matter of historical contingency, one that could, in

64

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

a sense, be transcended by appropriate forms of alliance and mutual respect. The relation between the patros spirits and Islam is quite different. On the one hand, the patros are elements of the Islamic cosmos, identified with shetwan and named in the Arabic cosmological books that accom¬ pany the spread of Islam. But on the other hand, within the world conceived by Islamic culture, the spirits are in some sense the antithesis of piety and Muslim comportment; as the quintessential nonhumans, they are also the quintessential non-Muslims and they are constructed in part by the simple inversion of Muslim norms. Thus a favourite food of the patros spirits is blood, a substance that is not only strictly forbidden and polluting for Muslims but considered highly dangerous to all hu¬ mans. Both patros and trumba spirits are powerful, but the power of the patros is more the power of nature and the wild; that of the trumba of an alternate and formerly threatening human polity and religion. At the same time, this meaning of the trumba is in decHne. As the once autonomous Sakalava polities have been conquered by the French and then absorbed into the nation of Madagascar, and as people in Mayotte are faced with more pressing experiences and concerns, the trumba come to take on more of the generic quality of spirits as simply nonhuman. To be reproduced, possession must draw on a past that remains or can be made relevant to the present. Above all, in the village context, pos¬ session creates new social persons; as these persons are reproduced, history is made, both in the sense of bringing the past to the present and in the sense of the ongoing progression of the present. Halima brings her grandmother and her grandmother's spirit back into public space from the past. We have here both a repetition of the past, the past in the present, and also an active present in the sense that doing this was Halima's choice (even if her agency is mystified). It was she, with the support and acquiescence of the other trumba adepts, who deter¬ mined that the spirit was still relevant. It is interesting that the spirit draws its relevance now more from the reproduction of the grandmother and perhaps of what the grandmother stood for, than from Andriantsuly's son himself. The latter is no longer fully signified, but only signifier; this process of transformation is itself a historical one, the leaching out of signification from one source into another. In a similar vein, once Halima and her peers die, if the same spirit is reproduced again, it will only be because of memory of Halima, not of her grand¬ mother; the chain of intergenerational continuity is far longer than any salient link of it.

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

65

It is of interest that the inscription of Islamic traces in the trumba spir¬ its overlies that of earlier historical experiences. One of the striking things about the trumba spirits is that they drink European liquor and smoke European tobacco, while rejecting locally-produced intoxicants. This was a puzzle to me as in other respects the trumbas seemed antiEuropean. For example, during certain parts of the trumba rituals, it is forbidden to wear tailored garments. People remove their shirts and blouses and sit wrapped in cloths. Before I became well known in the community some trumba adepts told me the trumbas would have noth¬ ing to do with me because I was 'European.' So how to explain the whiskey and cigarettes? If one turns to the history of the Sakalava poli¬ ties and the source of their political and military success in Madagascar, indeed their remarkable expansion up the long west coast over a fairly short period of time, it is apparent that they owed this in part to the trading relations established with the European vessels that visited the coast (Verin 1986). In return for slaves and food items, one of the objects of exchange was undoubtedly liquor. The royal trumba spirits did not identify with the Europeans or try to imitate them in dress or manner, but access to European consumption goods marked the leaders off from the common people, the militarized clans from the objects of their ag¬ gression. European items were thus a sign of local power and indeed encode part of the story of how that power was achieved. This fits well with the prevailing attitude towards the trumba spirits. Trumba spirits are not idealized and revered. The relationships humans have with them are, for the most part, uneasy ones, acceptance of their superior powers combined with an attempt to bend them to human needs and interests. No less than the patros spirits, the trumbas are por¬ trayed first of all as preying upon humans. Indeed they are considered more vicious, tougher to handle, and more expensive to buy off than the patros spirits. Although their royal status is recognized, and even constructed and reproduced during the curing rituals, their presence is viewed with a good deal of anxiety and ambivalence. This anxiety and ambivalence is partly due to the incongruity with Islam, the embarrassment for a good Muslim at entering trance. But that is a superficial concern by comparison to what is really at issue: the unpredictability and ultimately exploitative nature of the trumbas. This is history of a non-nationalist order; one that does not attempt to glorify the past, even the precolonial past, but that, at least according to its most explicit statements, feels condemned to relive it. This is one reason that spirit possession and Islam are not as opposed as they might be.

66

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Islam is viewed by everyone as a superior moral order. While women may chafe at the restriction of their Islamic practice relative to men, they do not deny its truths. They too claim to view possession as first an imposition on them, a cause of sickness. And if they also view it as something more than this, as a source of knowledge, of pleasure, and of support, they never mistake the unpredictable, quirky, and frequently ill-tempered, all too personal spirits they call upon for the impersonal, omnipotent, omniscient, and supremely moral God of Islam. From the Sweep of Traditions to Local Views Two serious limitations of the community-based study must be ac¬ knowledged. I am not able to devote serious attention to knowledge and practice in sectors of society to which the community has little access, even when the decisions made in those sectors have significant repercussions in the community, for example, whether to institute French schools or dispensaries at the local level. This means that I will not be able to account for all the wider forces that affect the shape, content, and distribution of knowledge in the community except insofar as they have meaning there. Nor am I concerned with each of the sources and traditions of knowledge in their own terms, for example, with the subject of Muslim cosmology per se, but only insofar as they have a recognized expression and value at the local level. Despite the fact that much of the knowledge available in the community is derived from various, essentially foreign, texts and contexts, local experts and their clients creatively combine, synthesize, and reconstruct them in their practise on the basis of local interests and in local idioms. The meaning of the texts that concern us lies not in what was written into them but in what the villagers of Mayotte read out of them and what they do with them. The indigenous models that attempt to encompass the whole are not themselves uniform and their application is in part political. For some, the practices of spirit possession are part of the same reality as the textbased precepts of Islam; for others, they are to be excluded. While all villagers agree on the existence of the three traditions, various attitudes towards them exist - at the most basic level, those that distinguish the 'insider' practitioners or specialists from the 'outsider' lay public. Sum¬ ming up the most commonly expressed views of the 'person on the path,' I might speak of the positive model of Islam, the ambiguous model of cosmology, and the countermodel of spirit possession, but this

Locating Knowledge in Mayotte

67

does not account for the often tacit perspectives people hold as they make use of, study, or practise one of the latter and integrate them in various ways with Islam. It is clear that from the broader perspective Islam - as represented by 'Him fakihi - was dominant in 1975,^^ though subtly undermined by the others. But the characterization of culture in Mayotte, whether as uni¬ form, coherent, pluralistic, fragmentary, or hegemonic and resistant, is neither self-evident nor simple. The levels, areas, and dimensions at which it can be described by these sorts of terms is a central problematic of this work, which may be seen in part as an exploration of just how to pursue cultural analysis in a 'peripheral' and 'intermediate' society such as Mayotte.

3

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

Knowledge is the stuff of social life in Mayotte. The objective character of much knowledge enables it to be actively pursued and its embodied qualities and consequences enable its presence to be evaluated. Every¬ one in Mayotte is a student or apprentice at something; virtually every¬ one is recognized as the master of at least some bit of knowledge. As a result, people are engaged in an ongoing, complex, multidimensional process of exchange and reproduction. This chapter introduces the vil¬ lages in which I worked and attempts to describe the distribution of knowledge within them. At the same time, 1 try to see this diversity of knowledge as an intrinsic part of the wider social organization, to begin to show how explicit, formally constituted knowledge, like kinship or citizenship, helps constitute and define persons and social relationships. The Social Distribution of Knowledge

Knowledge is not distributed equally, nor is it pursued with equal in¬ terest by all. There are two complementary and interdependent ways to look at this. The first is a kind of political economy of knowledge, examining the unequal distribution of knowledge as a function of the constraints on its production and dissemination. From this point of view it is useful to shift our vocabulary from the previous chapter. Instead of distinguishing among cultural 'traditions,' we will speak of 'disciplines.' It is these disciplines that constitute 'structure,' the dialec¬ tical partner of 'practice' in my analysis. Each discipline produces its own specialists, entails its own constraints on reproduction, dissemina¬ tion, and practical use, and has its own forms of legitimation and pat¬ tern of distribution within the community. The acquisition of serious

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

69

knowledge in any given discipline, while in theory available to everyone, is a lengthy, arduous, and frequently painful task. Hence the distribution and circulation of knowledge are in part products of the way in which learning is socially organized. The second perspective begins with practice. In a classic formulation of the sociology of knowledge, Schutz (1964) distinguishes the 'man on the street' from the 'well-informed citizen' and the 'expert.' As I will be using these terms extensively, I will quote Schutz's definitions here. 'The expert's knowledge is restricted to a limited field but therein it is clear and distinct. His opinions are based upon warranted assertions ...' (1964: 122). By contrast, 'the man on the street has a working knowl¬ edge of many fields which are not necessarily coherent with one another. His is a knowledge of recipes indicating how to bring forth in typical situations typical results by typical means ... In all matters not connected with such practical purposes of immediate concern the man on the street accepts his sentiments and passions as guides' (1964: 122). The 'well-informed citizen,' says Schutz, is short for 'the citizen who aims at being well informed ... To be well informed means to him to arrive at reasonably founded opinions ...' (1964:122). WeU-informed citizens are thus somewhere between the expert and the man on the street in the amount of knowledge they have and also in their concern with its legitimation. However, if we take experts to be caught up in their particular para¬ digms and specialized corners, it may be the well-informed citizen who has the greatest opportunity for thinking critically. There is an interesting ambiguity in the Schutzian terms. On the surface they appear to describe positions within a relatively fixed structure, in this case, within the disciplines. The word 'expert' certainly conveys this, and Schutz's definition seems to support it when he says the expert's opinions are 'warranted.' But the Schutzian terminology is less one of roles in a structure than one of shifting phenomenological perspectives: a man is a 'client' not only because he is defined that way by others, but because this describes his immediate interests in a particular situation, his attitude to a particular piece of knowledge at a particular time. Hence the categories direct us not only to the relative quantity of people's knowledge, but to the reasons they are acquiring it and to their rela¬ tionship to it. Experts are people with an active mastery of knowledge; they hold it as a resource and make use of it to address problems. The 'man on the street,' whom I transform here to 'people on the path,' views knowledge from the perspective of a relatively 'passive' consumer. People on the path seek knowledge when necessary, but are content to

70

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

apply it second hand, that is, by means of the expert. 'For the man on the street it is sufficient to know that there are experts available for consultation ... His recipes tell him when to see a doctor ...' (Schutz 1964: 123). Persons on the path may call in experts to schedule a ritual, perform a prayer, diagnose or heal an illness. They contract for the knowledge and gain specific answers or solutions but not a direct un¬ derstanding of the means by which the answers were arrived at. This distinction between active and passive, agent and patient, is, of course, situational, and for many situations it is far too extreme. Schutz's category of the well-informed citizen nicely mediates the distinction, indicating a person who 'considers himself perfectly qualified to decide who is a competent expert and even to make up his mind after having listened to opposing expert opinions' (1964:123). Schutz's categories are, of course, abstract ideal types and, as he points out, 'each of us in daily life is at any moment simultaneously expert, well-informed citizen, and man on the street, but in each case with respect to different provinces of knowledge' (1964:123). We can imagine also that the substantive social forms of the ideal types will vary some¬ what according to the kind of knowledge at issue. The nature of the expert and the distance between expert, well-informed citizen, and per¬ son on the path are distinct in each discipline. People who are experts in one field may be clients or consumers in another (or even in their own). Likewise, their perspective on the degree and manner of integration of the various traditions shifts according to their social position within their respective disciplines, that is, according to the distribution of knowledge and interest. Thus it is only among a few experts in Mayotte, and these generally of a higher standing than are found in the village, that a permanent sense of contradiction and competition among the disciplines occurs. Well-informed citizens are, by definition, more open-minded, while persons on the path are prag¬ matic. Ordinary people do not express loyalty to a single discipline to the exclusion of the others, and even the experts often try to learn from one another. Nevertheless, people are opinionated and make various kinds of choices. In sum, I am beginning to lay the stage for a kind of local social organization of knowledge. This does not depend upon any sort of objective or 'etic' quantification. What matters is less how much knowl¬ edge given individuals control (i.e., know, have access to), even assum¬ ing that it could be quantified, than what they are socially recognized (by themselves no less than by others) as controlling and the implications

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

71

of this for their practice. What individuals are recognized as knowing may be both more and less than what they actually know. We are concerned not only with how one becomes an expert or how experts attempt to retain exclusive control over their resources, but with how the problems of legitimation are different when seen from different points within the disciplines, with the limitations to experts' power imposed by the critical evaluation of well-informed citizens and the changing interests of the people on the path. The analysis is cultural, conducted largely in terms that are meaningful and publicly available in Mayotte. I agree strongly with those who argue that practice is incomplete without structure (Ortner 1989), that the two are constituted, both theo¬ retically and in the real world, in dialectical relation to each other. The structure is provided in my analysis precisely by refusing to see actors as anonymous, abstract individuals, but instead locating them within and towards specific disciplines of knowledge. Thus, for example, while I attempted to take the stance of 'the citizen who aims at being wellinformed' towards all three disciplines, my interests were encouraged or thwarted in part according to the tolerance of each discipline for such a person and according to the means of inclusion and exclusion at each discipline's disposal. In much recent literature the concept of prac¬ tice is invoked without specifying the kinds of agents involved, expected, or tolerated, whereas I argue that the appHcation of Schutz's types (or comparable concepts), with reference to specific cultural domains and dis¬ ciplinary organizations, can aid us considerably in refining our analyses.’ An ethnography of knowledge in Mayotte must move between both distinguish and relate - these two dimensions: the contrasting disciplines of knowledge and the relative degrees of knowledge and competence (as these are socially defined and accepted) and practical interest found among their adherents. Taken together, these two di¬ mensions will reveal the social organization of knowledge. The prelimi¬ nary description of a community and of the distribution of knowledge within it is the object of this chapter; in successive chapters we will deepen the analysis by examining the factors that affect the reproduction and application of knowledge, and hence the relationship of knowledge to power and of structure to practice. Portrait of the Villages^ There is a good deal of variation among the villages in Mayotte, each

72

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

community being the product of a particular ethnic mix and history, and some villages maintaining specialities in particular bodies of knowledge. Thus one village, the ancient capital, is recognized as the centre of Muslim learning on the island; another, whose population is largely of Malagasy origin, for its highly skilled bone setters. If the pair of villages of Kibushy speakers in which 1 focused my work, Lombeni Be and Lombeni Kely (Greater and Lesser Lombeni, sometimes just referred to jointly as Lombeni - they are pseudonyms) have a particular reputation for anything, it would certainly not be for their theological expertise (and still less for their bone setting), but rather for their knowledge of herbalism, the removal of sorcery, and, as we saw in the last chapter, the treatment and practice of spirit possession.^ However, because of the low esteem in which these activities are supposed to be held, this is a description that would be emphatically rejected or resented by the majority of people who live there and 1 do not want to overem¬ phasize its importance. The people of Lombeni are as good Muslims as those anywhere on the island. The villages in which 1 studied replicate internally some of the diver¬ sity characteristic of the island as a whole. Formed in the latter half of the nineteenth century by varying combinations of Malagasy immigrants and former plantation workers, they have continued to absorb outsiders. Certainly, as I argued in my previous book, what goes on there is intel¬ ligible to people on the rest of the island, even if it is not always identical. In other words, within the same broad realm of shared discourse, there are particular emphases and formulations found in various communities. However, by focusing on these two communities, a sense of Mayotte as a whole - the full pattern of intervillage variation and exchange - is unfortunately partly elided. Why focus on the village as the unit of study? Recently Clifford (n.d.), and others have urged ethnographers to investigate displacement rather than locality (cf. Eickelman and Piscatori 1990), and to shift our views of ourselves from dwellers to travellers. But in Mayotte, where people travel a good deal, the village has been the key locus of social construc¬ tion, of placement as opposed to displacement. People say, Tsy tany mandeha fo ulun'belu’ (Tt is not land that moves, but people'). People on the move are not asked, 'Who are you?' but 'Where do you come from?' {‘Anao bok' ayyaT) and 'Where are you going?' ('Anao mande' ayyaT) Much attention within the village has likewise been given to constructing grounded local orders. Hence, methodological excuses aside, the village (tanana) has been a critical subject of thought and locus of action in

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

73

Mayotte. Conversely, villages are highly permeable and to study in a village did not limit me to a fixed set of ideas or fixed population. As we have already seen, the three disciplines that I focus on spread far beyond the shores of Mayotte. Villagers too, many women as well as men, have travelled widely, though the ease of regional movement has become increasingly constrained with the growth of national borders and of state control within them. Many residents of Lombeni have spent time in other places; a good number of them have been to Madagascar or the other islands in the Comoros archipelago or have kin there. A few have been to Mecca and, since I began my fieldwork, to France. Some former migrants to Madagascar returned to Lombeni after the ethnic violence in Majunga in December 1976; others remained in Diego (Antsiranana), which boasted an active organization of Mahorais. Lombeni Be sits on the shore of the lagoon; Lombeni Kely is a tenminute walk from it over the first ridge inland. I selected these villages for study in 1975 for practical reasons. They were off the single paved road that crossed the island, yet not too far from it; relatively enclosed without being isolated. With a combined population around 650 (rising to 868 in 1985), they seemed a manageable size for an intensive study, neither so big that I would not be able to know every adult personally, nor so small that I might get bored. A preliminary inspection revealed non-Western housing and a clean water supply. At the time I began the study I did not realize that what appeared to be closely related hamlets on the map and a single village in the eyes of the French administration viewed themselves as two separate communities. Nor did I learn for several weeks that while everyone spoke Kibushy, the majority of the inhabitants of one of the communities had been Malagasy-speaking for only a few generations. In 1975 Lombeni Be had about 115 houses, densely packed along the piece of flat land that lies just behind the sandy beach and straggling up the hillside beyond. On the beach sat a row of some ten to fifteen unpainted two- and four-person canoes, as well as two or three much larger ones painted in bright colors. Each canoe had a single outrigger; the larger ones boasted a mast to which a sail could be attached. In 1980 the masts and sails had been replaced with outboard motors. The canoes ventured into the lagoon mostly at night, with kerosene lamps to attract fish caught with hook and line. The canoes rarely set out on nights with a full moon, during bad weather, and for the entire dry season when the wind blows away from the island. During the agricultural season they were also used to transport people and crops

74

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

along the coast. Many of the inhabitants of Lombeni Be own their most productive fields at some distance from the village and some spent several months of the year living at their fields. People also travelled by canoe to villages across the bay, in order to attend religious festivities, visit relatives, or seek out particular experts. The lagoon provided the most direct route to the terminal of the paved road that leads across the island to town and to its commercial, administrative, and medical fa¬ cilities. Many sick people began their trip to hospital by canoe and many of the terminally ill returned home this way to die. In 1980 a dirt road passable by car in the dry season connected the main road to Lombeni and replaced the lagoon as the thoroughfare. The road brought in the occasional French tourists seeking the beach beyond the next promontory and encouraged some day labourers to purchase motor bikes. During the day children play in the shallow water. At low tide women go on noisy expeditions to trap fish in the deeper pools along the beach. Women also collect edible shellfish along the rocks and men may search for octopus, which, because of their strong grip, are handled with long poles. (Otherwise, it may not be clear who has caught whom.) At the centre of the beach is a large shade tree under which small groups of men gather to chat and take advantage of the sea breeze. Some of them repair their canoes or bring along another chore - a rope to make or roof mats to weave. One expert may be constructing a canoe on com¬ mission, while another builds a granary he hopes to sell. When a canoe comes in, everyone goes down to help pull it up the sand. A couple may be returning from a trip to town to sell a cash crop or buy stock for the little shop they own in the village. Women pass by the men and exchange a few words, perhaps a joke or two, but they do not stop to sit among them. Canoes are privately owned, but they should be available for public use in case of an emergency or a communal event. In the days before the radio station was estabhshed in Mamoudzou and began to broadcast announcements of deaths, the canoes would be used by young men sent by the village to call distant kin to a funeral. One day a wealthy man from a neighbouring village, who had long spent alternate months here with his Lombeni wife, got angry with some boys for taking out his large canoe without permission. He purchased a chain and locked the canoe to a tree. The village was outraged, and after a large meeting, the man was expelled. It was felt that he had violated the norms of collective reciprocity by his action.

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

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At night the shade tree forms the spot behind which men come to urinate. The women use a place further down the beach near the rocky promontory. Next to the shade tree and closer to the village is an un¬ cleared hummocky area. This is the burial ground for small children. The main cemetery lies among a thick growth of trees a few hundred yards down the beach, away from the settled area. Further along the coast, on the steeper ridges and in the deeper valleys lie bigger patches of forest. Many people are frightened of the creatures reputed to live there, but the spirit curers, male and female, venture into the bush to seek the plants that form the basis of their pharmacopoeia. The fishing canoes return at dawn and are greeted by a crowd of men and older boys waiting to acquire whatever the fishermen do not choose to keep for themselves and their close kin. All the boat owners live in the village; they do not always participate in the fishing, but are always entitled to a share of the catch. The fishermen are generally their younger kinsmen - sons, sons-in-law, brothers, and nephews. Although the ca¬ noes are made from local materials, many men claim to lack the resources to construct or purchase one for themselves. Most men in Lombeni Kely know nothing at all about boats or fishing and are afraid of the water. Often there is not enough fish to satisfy all the would-be purchasers. During periods when there has been little fishing activity or when the catch has been slight, the fishermen may wish to increase their profits by carrying the fish for sale to inland villages. Prices for fish within the village do not change on a daily basis and a man would be ashamed to charge a kinsman or neighbour more than the established rate. A man who does not fish and cannot lay direct claim to a portion of the catch must rise early, be patient if the boats are late returning, and be quick with his tongue and hands. A woman who wants to purchase fish must have access to a man or boy she can send to the beach on her behalf. The wives of fishermen sometimes sell the fish fried, increasing its value and its cost to their neighbours. In 1985 there was a fishing cooperative with a kerosene-powered freezer that was supposed to assist the fishermen and also grant steadier access to fish within the community. While it helped the fishermen, it also raised the price of fish for villagers and encouraged wealthy traders to drive in from town and buy up the entire stock at what for them were bargain prices. The amount of fish available in the village declined. Inland from the beach are the houses, arranged roughly in rows along the contours. Houses are rectangular, about half as wide as they are long. In 1975 most were built of either wattle and daub or raffia palm.

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

The latter had prefabricated walls, constructed and raised onto a framework of hand-hewn wooden beams by an expert. Wattle-anddaub houses can be constructed by anyone, although even here the assistance of a carpentry expert would be useful to set up the main support structure. A few houses were more solidly constructed with cement facing over the mud or with a filling of stones inside a lattice of posts and bamboo. A number were built on cement platforms or had tin roofs. Some were constructed in other styles or made of temporary palm-leaf matting. The vast majority were roofed with coconut palm leaves. Houses are divided into two rooms of about equal size. One room, the 'men's side' {tapa lalahy) opens to the street and the other, the 'women's side' {tapa viavy) to a fenced or partially fenced courtyard. Most houses have their own courtyards, while others open onto a com¬ mon area shared by a small number of closely related households. Inside the courtyard, each household has its own hearth, kitchen shelter for cooking in the rainy season, raised granary, fenced bathing enclosure, and perhaps a chicken coop. Goats are tethered under the granary at night to nibble on bunches of fresh vegetation hung there for them. Some households own a few cattle, which are always kept outside the village. The bathing area contains two large clay water jars made by a woman potter. One of the jars is placed so that a fire can be lit under¬ neath. Adjacent is a platform of flat rocks on which the bather can stand out of the mud. At sundown the village fills with the pleasant smell of wood smoke as the bath fires are lit. People of both sexes bring firewood back from the fields, while girls and women have the responsibility for keeping the household supplied with water. In 1975 Lombeni Kely had a cement reservoir filled by a spring and Lombeni Be had a number of wells. By 1985 women were able to collect water from standpipes dis¬ tributed throughout the village. In 1975 no one in the village was yet able to afford a house of stone or cement block, although such houses were not uncommon in wealthier villages, but by 1985 the village had changed in appearance. The French administration encouraged the switch to cement houses with tin roofs. Many villagers purchased the kit of materials made available by the administration and hired one of a number of locally emerging expert builders to assist them in setting up the house. Old and new style houses pushed up the steep hillside towards the public land where the new road began. In 1975 this land was partially forested and some people were afraid to walk there at night. Now it is a centre of sorts.

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with great gashes of red earth, a cluster of primary school buildings, and an open space where the bush taxis deposit their goods and pas¬ sengers. Across the way still stands a large old mango tree where an expert carpenter carried out his business of hewing planks. People stop to chat here in the heat of the day; from this spot one can look down towards Lombeni Be and the ocean, or, turning the other way, towards the shallow basin where Lombeni Kely sits nestled in a ring of coconut palms and kapok trees. When I moved into Lombeni Kely in 1975, it had about forty houses. I was given a place in which my landlords stored their vanilla harvest and into which they planned to move after the marriage of their daughter, in order to leave their bigger house to the new couple. Every married or previously married woman should have her own house and it is rare to find a house that includes more adults than the married couple. Widowed elderly women and unmarried men live in smaller structures on their own, as I did, while boys often share bachelor quarters with one or two friends. Boys' houses, smaller than those of adults and located on the fringes of the village, often have whimsical touches splashes of bright paint, interior walls pasted with magazine pictures, and ornamental shrubbery. My own hut was situated at the uppermost end of the village, along one of the paths that led to the fields. Each morning 1 greeted a procession of children herding goats and men and women off to cultivate their dry rice fields. In the late afternoon they would return, laden with firewood, large bunches of green bananas, baskets of manioc roots, manioc leaves, or other fruit and vegetables destined for household consumption. People would stop to offer a friendly word or, at the beginning, just to stare, and the mosquitoes would transfer themselves from the goats to my house for the night. Like most adults in the community, I had a high box-like structure covered with mosquito netting over my bed. The bed was locally constructed by a carpenter, a solid wood frame set with tightly woven cross-cutting strands of rope. On top of this was a mat covered with a kapok-stuffed mattress and pillows, the covers of which, like the mosquito net, were made from purchased bolts of cloth by a seamstress using an old foot-pedalled sewing machine. The bed was very comfortable and the only drawback was the occasional residence in the house of wood rats who have a fondness for kapok seeds and who would leave neat little holes in the pillow. I hired a carpenter to construct a wooden cupboard for my supplies, and I had a chair and table borrowed, like the bed, from villagers. To cheer up the place a

78

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

little, I purchased limewash from the coral burner. The white also had the advantage over the plain mud walls of showing up the poisonous centipedes that would sometimes wake me at night with their rattle. Prior to the whitewash I would find myself swinging my locally con¬ structed machete at some harmless piece of straw that, in the light of the flickering little home-made kerosene lantern, had taken on ominous proportions. If I was a little nervous early in my stay, so were the villagers. While I was berating myself for getting to know only my immediate neighbours in Lombeni Kely, unbeknownst to me, many members of Lombeni Be, who were rightfully suspicious of white foreigners but also playing out the drama of local factionalism, were wondering whether I was not a fugitive or a witch and warning my sponsors not to bring me down there. After a few weeks had past, Mohedjam Salim, at whose house I was by now regularly eating my meals, judged the time right to begin introductions. Dady (Grandmother) Nabuko, an old and very frail woman in the lower village had fallen on the way to the mosque and broken her hip. Mohedja wished to pay a visit of condolence and invited me to come with her. Following Mohedja along her particular itinerary through the larger lower village, stopping briefly at one house to greet her brother and his wife, crossing a gully to meet her husband's cousin, and twisting along a hillside path to her sister-in-law's, we eventually found ourselves at a small and badly eroded hut near the ocean. Inside, a very thin wrinkled old woman lay on a bed surrounded by her daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I knew no one and could barely speak a few sentences in Kibushy. As all eyes turned towards me, I felt like an intruder on a deathbed scene and tried bashfully to stay in the background. I was pushed up front. Dady Nabuko looked up at me. Feebly, she raised her scrawny arms, the silver bangles slipping down to her bony elbows. She pointed at me, at herself, and then, in an unmistakable gesture, she put one thumb and forefinger together to form a ring and vigorously jabbed the other fore¬ finger back and forth through it. The entire group broke into uproarious laughter. This was my first practical introduction to the well-worn anthropological topic of the jok¬ ing relationship; it took me a long time to recover my composure, and months longer to understand all the ramifications. The best jokes may be those that take their victims totally by surprise, but in retrospect it is likely that the woman was almost as surprised by my reaction as I was by hers. In any society jokes are expected between certain categories of

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

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people and unexpected between others. In a society with standardized joking patterns, the jokes condense a great deal of information, both long-standing assumptions about social conduct and messages to the respondent and audience concerning the immediate context. Unpacking the joke provides an entry into these local understandings, much as experiencing the joke provided me with an entry into the community. First of all, as Mary Douglas tells us (1975), the joke supposes a system of classification. It directs us to the fact that this is a kin-based society and that kinship is based primarily on the dimensions of gender, gen¬ eration, and affinity (the latter contrasted to siblingship, which is silent in this case and precisely not a subject or context for joking). Villagers are embedded in a system that defines their relations to each other, and hence who they are, according to these dimensions. Alternate genera¬ tions - grandparents with grandchildren - are expected to joke with each other; when the joking parties are of opposite sex, the joking takes on a sexual and affinal content. Thus grandsons are often referred to as the husbands or sexual partners of their grandmothers and grand¬ daughters as the partners of their grandfathers. In a further play, a woman's granddaughter becomes her sister-in-law; several such layers of kin terms are possible. Sexual joking also holds between nephew and father's sister, between niece and mother's brother, between a man and his wife's sisters, and between a woman and her husband's brothers. The whole universe of kinship is implicated in these joking relations, whether directly, or, in the case of parents and children and that of siblings, by obvious exclusion. Who will joke with whom is highly predictable and the algorithm includes everyone within the set of kin relations. The joking also directs us to another salient aspect of local culture, namely that sexuality is a central aspect of personal identity, especially for women, and is viewed as a primary form of transaction between men and women. Sexuality is the idiom in which the old woman ex¬ presses her claims to continued connection with the community, her claims to life. Women should marry as virgins; when they do so, they receive houses from their parents and trousseaus from their husbands, but this has little to do with feminine modesty. The reservation and offering of her sexuality to her parents for the correct performance of the wedding enhances a woman's social value and autonomy and brings her into the exchange circuit of autonomous adults in the community (Lambek 1983,1990c). It is not unexpected that girls engage in premari¬ tal intracrural intercourse and adults in extramarital liaisons; divorce

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

and remarriage are easy and the rates are high. A woman who sleeps with a man should receive gifts from him; many formerly married women live in this kind of arrangement for periods of time.^ On the other hand, sexual activity is subject to a number of taboos. Each sex categorizes the other into potential and forbidden partners, and trans¬ gressors are chastised, primarily by members of their own sex (Lambek 1992b). Sexuality is expressive of vitality and value, but sexual jealousy forms a major theme in illness, especially in cases of sorcery. If the joking conventions are those of a relatively orderly world, one in which the generations rotate with regularity such that alternate ones are identified with one another, and in which everyone can distinguish permissible from impermissible sexual partners, the old woman's at¬ tention to me suggests an additional dimension. The kinship system is classificatory and hence can be applied to a wide range of people, but more than this, it is open to the addition of new members. The system is, in the model of David Turner (1979), incorporative, permitting the rapid absorption of new members. The old woman's joke had practical import; it placed me as her grandson and thus gave me a point of entry into the system of classification and hence a potential but specific type of relationship with each of her relations. Moreover, if the suggestion of engaging in sexual relations with me was ludicrous, the implicit message, an invitation to marry one of her granddaughters, was not. In partial recognition of this initiative, I have selected some of her descendants for depiction in this chapter and the next. Kinship in Mayotte is bilateral and marriage with either cross-cousin is common, although not prescribed. Marriage within the village is also common, but many people express the preference for marrying someone from farther away. The only constraint on this is that neither party usually wishes to move upon marriage to the village of the other. Women acquire the houses their parents build them and men generally have economic interests in their home communities. Moreover, neither men nor women feel at ease in a spouse's community. Some people move upon marriage, more men than women, and marriage provides a primary channel for bringing new members into the community. Bilateral descent, then, gives members of the next generation a choice of primary affiUation. Polygynous marriages are almost always uxorilocal, with the wives unrelated to each other and based in different villages and the husband moving between them. Women are not secluded. Married couples formed the basic units of production, although sets of siblings often jointly purchased property. Household members coop-

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

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erated in subsistence production; major cash crop production was man¬ aged by men, with sons and sons-in-law often working for their fathers, and men sought wage labour. However, women often had small inde¬ pendent sources of income (Lambek 1992a). Households were linked bilaterally into 'families' (mraba). These overlapping and situationally defined groups were loci of cooperation, but an ethos of kinship per¬ vaded virtually all village relationships. Given this openness, it is fair to ask what constitutes a local commu¬ nity. In fact there are a number of dimensions along which community members are linked to one another and insiders are distinguished from relative outsiders. Both villages were established in the mid-nineteenth century. In each case a small number of individuals jointly purchased a piece of land, settled on it, and attracted some followers. Residents were thus distinguished according to whether they were owners (tompin), i.e., bilateral descendants of the original purchasers, or not. The latter, while often kin or affines of the former, did not have secure rights in the village, although they could play significant roles in its political hfe. Whenever a nonowner married an owner, the children became owners, despite the attempt by some people in times of quarrel to invoke a principle of patrilineal exclusivity. By 1985 the distinction had become less relevant as former nonowners were able to purchase individual house plots. Village membership, as opposed to ownership, was based on an ide¬ ology of equality; it was open to all adult residents who chose to join an ingenious system of ceremonial exchange known as the shungu. Shungu members had the right and obligation to attend one another's feasts held at rites of passage, especially at the first weddings of members, the first weddings of members' daughters, and the circumcisions of mem¬ bers' sons. Each member of the shungu group contracted to take his or her turn in sponsoring feasts of fixed content, size, and number; because the quantities were rigidly controlled, the system produced a set of equals (see Lambek 1990c for a systematic analysis). Both men and women were eligible to join and all but a tiny minority of village resi¬ dents did so. Each village had its own cycle and particular set of re¬ quirements. While credits could not be transferred from village to village, people taking up residence in adulthood could enter the shungu circuit of the new village. Entry into the shungu was by means of membership in the village age groups. In recent years the shungu system has been com¬ ing to a halt as newly formed age groups decline to produce shungu feasts of their own and hence to attend those of older members.

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Islam also provides a means of articulating community boundaries and expressing village sentiment. Each village has a mosque in which a handful of men gather for daily prayers and that serves as a locus of celebration of the major Islamic holidays. The mosques were the most solid buildings in their respective villages, built of stone with tin roofs and whitewashed interior walls. In 1975 Lombeni Be established a Friday service that has been attended in large numbers by men of both villages. (Lombeni Kely was considered too small to support its own.) Mosques are open to all comers, but at the same time they provide a focus of village concern and a material representation of the village as a moral community. Most women prayed at home, though some used the small women's chambers appended along the left flanks of the mosques. There is an annual cycle of intervillage Islamic dance events; at the most popular of these, hundreds of people congregate and dance with mem¬ bers of their own village or appraise the dance teams from other villages. The villages also exist as political units. People distinguished between two political domains, tanana (the village) and sirkal (the state). Each village elected men and women to run the affairs of the tanana, that is to organize the production of village and intervillage feasts, collect money for certain events, and handle internal conflicts. As befits the notion of incorporative kinship, the entire residential group, that is, the tanana, is viewed in some sense as a unit of kin. The story of the chained canoe recounted earlier is an illustration of this. In 1975 each village also had a chief responsible to the sirkal. From the local view, his job was to repre¬ sent the village's interests and otherwise to deflect the government's attention. By 1985 the system of local organization was reorganized into a two-tiered system, whereby Lombeni became part of a commune centred in a neighbouring larger village and subject to a good deal more state penetration. Villagers participated more broadly in island-wide affairs, but at the expense of local autonomy. In 1975 the entire population of both villages was engaged in subsis¬ tence cultivation, combined in varying degrees with a number of cashproducing enterprises. In addition to drawing on the marine resources described earlier, everyone grew dry rice, manioc, bananas, and various other crops in smaller amounts, and kept a few small livestock. Land for subsistence crops was available to everyone, whether through in¬ heritance or free loan, but the increasing emphasis on cash crops, as well as the rapidly growing population, had begun to exert pressure. Fallow periods were short and irregular, yields per hectare were de¬ clining, and much of the land adjacent to the village was no longer

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

83

useful for rice growing. Most families attempted to purchase land being sold off by the government or the plantations, but much of this was quite far from the village. As a result, many people spent the agricultural season hving on their land. The land was sometimes purchased jointly by groups of siblings or other kin who formed a socie (Fr. societe, corporation). The major cash crop in the 1970s was ylang-ylang {Canangium odoratum) whose flowers are distilled into an oil used in the French perfume industry. Producers hired local experts to construct stills and sold the oil to exporting firms. Ylang-ylang provided a reasonable if unsteady supply of cash, but as a tree crop it required permanent access to land. Hence a number of families were not able to grow it. Social differentiation was fuelled by the fact that the main source of income needed to purchase land to grow ylang-ylang was ylang-ylang itself. Other cash crops, less valuable and grown in smaller amounts, were vanilla, coffee, and copra. By 1985 land was no longer readily available for purchase. No one was able to meet their subsistence needs of rice any longer; a sector of the population share-cropped on land owned by nonmembers of the village, and many people worked for wages in construction projects or other jobs, mostly outside the village. In sum, the major social distinctions were those of kinship and village membership and ownership, with emerging divisions of wealth and class. Kinship and marriage formed a classificatory grid that served to link rather than to separate people, and to link them in numerous and overlapping ways. Overall there was little on which to base ascribed status and few prescriptive rules. Both women and men were faced with a good deal of choice: where to live, which branches of the family to affiliate with, how to address kin, whom to marry, whether to stay married, and how to make a living. Within the parameters set by the colonial economy, increasing French investment, and the conventions of village life, social position has been very much a matter of individual achievement. Social links were made through marriages, child fosterage, work arrangements, shungu exchanges, worship, travel, and friendship. Economic relations were not permanent and, until very recently, most people pursued a variety of strategies over the course of their lives, men interspersing periods of wage labour with cultivation, and both sexes choosing areas of specialization in the crafts or other branches of knowledge. In this arena specialized knowledge was not a matter of entitlement or ascription, nor intrinsically linked to descent. Instead, its acquisition became critical for the construction of personal identity and the genera-

84

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

tion of social value, both in an external, explicit way, in choice of career, and less formally in terms of maintaining or developing prestige in the village domain, becoming recognized as an expert or well-informed citizen, and finally, implicitly, in the way that the knowledge provided by spirits, divination, and the like directed and legitimated choices of affiliation and the investment of social interest. The Social Organization of the Village from the Perspective of Knowledge The picture of village organization presented so far is incomplete with¬ out consideration of the place of knowledge in the constitution of social status, differentiation, relationship, and action. Being a person entails knowing things. Although there is some variation in kind and degree of education between families, one comes to acquire knowledge less as a result of where one is born than through what one does subsequently. I have already alluded to a number of experts in the various crafts. In fact, the Schutzian term has its direct counterpart in local discourse. One of the most commonly heard words in Mayotte, used both as a form of address and as a form of reference, is fundi. This is a title of re¬ spect accorded to anyone who is acknowledged as a teacher, curer, or expert at his or her field: a master. When used without qualification by subject, especially when it is followed by the adjective be (large or great), fundi refers to a publicly recognized specialist in one of the major disci¬ plines - most frequently 'Him fakihi. The primary referent is thus 'master of texts.' However, there is a wide variety in the kind of knowledge one can control in order to be called a fundi. One person may be a fundi at Qur'anic interpretation and another at building hen-houses. Among the fundis in Lombeni are the specialists in all the necessary ritual functions - the men who can recite the weekly sermons in the mosque, those who make the call to prayer, who perform circumcisions, who lay out shrouds, and the men and women who wash corpses. Then there are the leaders and teachers, male and female, of the Qur'anic schools and of the various genres of popular liturgical chanting and dancing; the astrologers and diviners; the various kinds of healers; the midwives; the calendrical expert responsible for keeping track of the solar (as opposed to the lunar Muslim) year; the specialized craftsmen: male blacksmith (gone by 1980), canoe builders, carpenters, masons, basket makers, female potters, seamstresses, and so on. None of these people were full-time specialists, nor were any of these

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

85

skills generalized throughout the community. In fact, with the exception of certain (but not all) subsistence and household activities - cultivation of the most common plants, basic cooking, housekeeping, and the con¬ struction of the simplest dwellings - few skills are universally present. Fishing from canoes, for example, is a skill that many men have, but many do not. The community is thus internally diversified according to skills; a person's knowledge and activities - or lack of them - become significant attributes of his identity. In fact, one's activities may be spo¬ ken of as a function of one's knowledge. A man is sometimes jokingly referred to as a fundi of palm wine drinking; one woman, when ques¬ tioned about her knowledge, replied laughingly that she was a fundi of sex. Thus, although most people practise diversified economic and knowledge-seeking strategies, accumulating a range of skills, there is within the community a complex distribution and dense exchange of services and knowledge, more significant than the ordinary exchange of goods. This exchange has grown increasingly commodified in recent years, but not equivalently in all domains of knowledge. If everyone is a fundi at something, everyone is engaged in the process of learning as well. As a term of address, fundi always expresses respect, frequently a specific relationship between speaker and addressee of mwanafundi-fundi. Mwana is the Comorian word for 'child' and mwanafundi may be translated as pupil, student, patient, apprentice, client, or disciple, depending on context. The status of mwanafundi always implies an attachment characterized by a degree of dependency upon and expected loyalty towards a particular/wndz; unlike the term 'fundi,' it cannot refer to a general status within the community. Children are mwanafundis to those who first give them Qur'anic instruction and teach them to read and write. This relationship extends past the termination of schooling, throughout life, thus even beyond the death of the fundi. During rituals at which it is appropriate to say prayers for deceased parents, the name or names of the deceased Qur'anic fundi should be included. A person is likely to engage in many other mwanafundi-fundi relation¬ ships during his or her lifetime and these may be temporary or perma¬ nent. The relationship is always vertical and is one of obligation and exchange. The fundi provides knowledge or expertise; the child returns his labour and the adult student or client often includes cash. Various rights and obhgations may be entailed. Such relationships frequently cut across ties of kinship, village affihation, or residence. Alternatively, the fundi may be a fellow villager, sometimes even a close family member, perhaps transformed through spirit possession into someone more distant.

86

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Some further aspects may be mentioned. The several mwanafundi of a particular fundi may have particular bonds of 'siblingship' (Kelly 1977) that are activated in certain situations, for instance, in an annual mortuary ritual held for a deceased fundi. The commemoration of a particularly renowned fundi of sacred knowledge may involve the whole village, perhaps even the entire island. The interrelationships among fundis must also be considered. In certain fields of knowledge, such as circumcision or carpentry, the fundis form associations; in others there is no formal organization. There may be competition between fundis of the same branch of learning and between those of different branches. Likewise, there may be collaboration, the reciprocal exchange of knowledge or personal services, or a mutual referral of clients. A fundi is someone who knows a good deal more than his or her neighbours on a certain subject and who is recognized as putting that knowledge into practise on behalf of others, whether through teaching, giving advice, or performing a particular kind of task. However, every¬ one has some degree of knowledge and range of socially valuable ac¬ tivities, and the appellation of fundi is not always clear-cut. There is no precise threshold at which one becomes a fundi, although in some branches of learning there may be a ceremony marking the mwanafundi's independence. Being a fundi is largely a matter of reputation, of public acceptance. Nor is the appellation in most cases absolute; rather, it is relative and situational, a matter of social context. Take, for example, Hamisy, an elder of Lombeni who, when he was young, learned the Maulida, a lengthy text in Arabic concerning the life of the Prophet, which is performed on various ceremonial occasions. Hamisy had long ago been made responsible for leading performances of the Maulida within and on behalf of the village and he gained a great deal of satisfaction from doing so. During a performance he was treated with respect. However, there were many other villagers who felt they knew the Maulida as well as Hamisy and no one in Lombeni seriously considered this rather foolish old man a fundi except in this limited context. People were surprised to learn that in town, where he often visited his adult children, Hamisy was much sought after as a fundi to recite blessing rituals. He had a reputation as a highly effective performer whose prayers brought results.^ People of Lombeni laughed and said, 'Well, a person is never a prophet among his own people.' Distance, then, may increase a reputation; people from distant villages have greater powers than those closer to home. Conversely, the knowledge of a man loyally recognized as a leading fundi in the interpretation of texts in his

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

87

own village might be quite insignificant compared to that of people located in a centre of learning. An informal hierarchy, or rather, series of hierarchies exists, precedence being granted according to a number of independent factors whose relative weight may vary according to context and that include scholarly knowledge, performance and teaching skills, age, gender, conduct, and occasionally descent, as well as position in the 'genealogical' lines of pedagogical relationships; a man is a fundi to his students, but not to his teachers. As elsewhere in the Islamic world, scholars are not priests. Their position is grounded in the community, not in the fixed hierarchy of a semiautonomous church institution (Gellner 1981); the fundi is not usually the holder of an office. The reputation for depth of learning is so great for some individuals that the status of fundi becomes the major element in the construction of their total social identity and is no longer simply applied on a selective contextual basis. A handful or more of the leading Islamic scholars in Mayotte maintain such a reputation and are universally referred to by the title of fundi or shehu. However, most of those with somewhat lesser degrees of knowledge, or of learning in a less valued domain, are addressed or referred to as fundi only with reference to a specific role or context. To be recognized publicly as a fundi is to perform as one, to act the part, and to provide assistance in the appropriate manner when it is needed. A fundi's practice, and hence reputation, is a product of selfevaluation as much as evaluation by others (Levi-Strauss 1963). Some people with knowledge do not advertise publicly as fundis, but when pressed will refer to themselves as a fundi ny mraba, that is, someone who restricts their practice within the 'family' (a unit extending over several households). Younger curers, especially women, often begin their ca¬ reers in this manner. Since the mraba is not impermeable, a practice can grow gradually. A person who puts herself forward too quickly might not be taken seriously and might not be able to take herself seriously. A fundi ny mraba considers herself responsible for advising on matters of health and welfare within the family and is often turned to relatively quickly by family members in need of assistance or, alternatively, will attempt to provide it without being asked. The fundi is a highly signifi¬ cant figure in many local families; the fundi ny mraba often plays a role in the articulation and social reproduction or fissioning of the family (see Chapter 10). On the other hand, there are occasions when clients deliberately seek a fundi who is not a family or community member or seek advice both within and outside the family.

88

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

The status of fundi is based on the scope of knowledge no less than the depth. Some medical knowledge is so common that individual practice receives no public attention or recognition. Every household boils herbal teas for common complaints and mothers exchange recipes for diarrhoea or cough remedies. Then there are people who control highly particular bits of knowledge or who practise a single technique relevant to a relatively rare condition, perhaps one that the practitioner has suffered previously. These individuals are referred to as tompin ny audi (the masters or owners of the medicine) and would not necessarily be considered fundis. For example, one woman is reputed to know a cure for asthma, another is skilled at removing fish bones stuck in the throat. One man has the recipe for curing impotence, another keeps the dried urethra of a bull that is its major ingredient, and several others perform blood-letting (cupping). Such skills are not necessarily widely advertised and people with a particular ailment may spend a fair amount of time locating an appropriate source of information. When they do so, they may acquire the knowledge for themselves, recording it in note¬ books for future reference. Juma Abudu, the cosmologer (mwalim dunia), contrasted the medical knowledge he learns from books with that derived from local practice. He said local medicines were learned by someone trying to cure his ailment with one kind of plant, finding it successful, and passing the information on to the next person he heard about who suffered from the same symptoms until the knowledge was widely diffused. This characterization of local medical knowledge as orally and informally transmitted, unstandardized, based on trial and error and word of mouth, and oriented towards symptom alleviation rather than underlying causes seems to be fair. The following account illustrates the informal manner and practical contexts in which it circulates. When his wife's hand was badly swollen with infection (in a manner known as mzus) and so painful that she couldn't sleep at night, Safy Bourahim, who had married into the village, inquired whether there was anyone who knew how to lance it. He was given the name of an old woman who said her hand now shook too much for the job. She recommended her adult son, indicating that the primary prerequisite is having the nerve to do it. At the same time, she had a good deal of experience and remarked that she knew from observation that the condition required holding a piece of hot iron on the affected part rather than simply piercing it, since the infection was not the kind from which the pus would flow freely. When Safy asked the son, he said he had never lanced an

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

89

infection before, but would be willing to try. Their conversation was overheard by a man who recounted that when he suffered from the same condition some years earlier, he was afraid to have the infection pierced. He lay in bed in terrible pain for three months until someone suggested packing it with cow dung. This was effective; the swelling finally opened and the infection drained. Safy ran off to try this on his wife. It didn't work and the next day a close neighbour opened the swelling with a razor blade.

Knowledge per se is not always sufficient to use medicine successfully, especially when one wants to apply it in the public domain. Hence the transmission of this sort of local knowledge can be a little more formal than Juma Abudu described it. Bakar Diva is an elderly man who is able to treat a number of diverse condi¬ tions, such as tsiku (a swelling in the belly, literally, wind), insufficient breast milk (manintsy rununu, literally, cold milk), swollen spleen Qambingana), dental problems (vazana), and grief (ngoma). Each treatment is composed of an objective recipe that can be learned independently of any of the others. Spleen medicine, for example, must be applied on a Wednesday night. The fundi goes to collect the correct plants and cooks them in water. The child drinks some of this and some is rubbed on his left side. The treatment takes seven days and is accompanied, like all medical treatments, by various taboos. The other method, hitting the child with the spleen of a butchered cow, is deemed 'old fashioned.' Bakar is particularly well known for the medicine he supplies young women to strengthen their breast milk. He tells me he is the only one who knows this medicine except for his wife, Fatima Halidi, Dady Nabuko's daughter. He gives the client a grass known as lela ny trandraka (literally, tenrec tongue; the tenrec is a local mammal, rather like a hedgehog) and tells her to cook it and rub it on the breasts. The young woman pays him. A bystander who was listening to Bakar explain this to me suddenly broke in to say that she swears by Bakar's medicine and has raised her children on it.

Now, the fact that the bystander and many other people know all these details would seem to contradict Bakar's assertion of indispens¬ ability, but it does not. These people would only make the patient sicker if they decided to practise on their own, a point with which they concur. In addition to knowledge of any particular kind of medicine, the right to apply it is a necessary condition for your actions to be effective (mwafaka). To gain this right, you need the fundi's radi, his positive dis¬ position towards your practice, which you can generally acquire by

90

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

paying him a small amount. Thus, when Siata wanted to enlarge her growing practice to include swollen spleen, she brought Bakar a chicken. He uttered a Qur'anic verse, adding 'May all people you treat get well.' This demonstrated Dakar's goodwill and legitimated Siata's subsequent treatments of lambingana. Thus individual practices are things to which people have rights and the maintenance of these rights are upheld by the effects, or lack thereof, of the application of knowledge or rather the consensus about this connection. Although Bakar and Siata are not closely related, this sort of knowl¬ edge and practice is often transmitted within families. Bakar gained his knowledge from a distant cousin. Dakar's daughter, Zafy, subsequently married the cousin's son, Darwesh. Darwesh doesn't know any of this medicine, Zafy has learned some from her father, and Zafy's older sister has learned even more. Zafy's older brother has taken up the speciality of treating teeth and makes some money at this in the large village to which he has moved. Bakar is trying to teach Zafy his recipes before he dies and she can already recognize all the required plants. But Zafy defends her lack of extensive knowledge of this subject by saying she is too young to be a fundi at everything and besides, it is hard with young children; some of the medicine can only be performed at night. Zafy is actually more interested in Islamic medicine, which she learns from both her husband and her mother, rather than her father, as we will see below. The Village Fundis Who are the main fundis in the villages of Lombeni Be and Lombeni Kely? Let us review each discipline in turn.

'Him fakihi Although the leading fundis of this discipline are not recognized by holding specific offices, there is unanimity within the community con¬ cerning their identity. Two brothers of Lombeni Be, Saidu Bwana and Yusufy Bwana, top the list, and are followed by a third. These men are recognized as fundis by their knowledge of the sacred texts and their ability to perform interpretations of passages and provide advice re¬ garding religious conduct, as well as by their public performance of recitation and their own general conduct. They teach the simpler works to those older children and adults who come to them, and are them-

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

91

selves continually engaged in studying more advanced works, under the nominal guidance of more knowledgeable fundis living outside the village. They are called upon more frequently than others to participate in various domestic and communal rituals. Lombeni Kely has no resident fundi of this stature. One son of the village was sent as a child to learn from a greatly respected fundi in a much larger neighbouring village. He ended up marrying his fundi's daughter and settling there, but he returns to Lombeni Kely frequently, especially on religious holidays, and he performs the role of fundi then. In addition, the people of Lombeni Kely have at times contracted fundis from outside the village to provide lessons to the community. There are a few people who are considered to be the equals or near equals of these men in knowledge and who would be considered fundis were they to engage actively in teaching. These are people who do not spend much time in the villages or who are socially marginal to them. For example, there is Darwesh who married into Lombeni Be from the outside and who has two other wives elsewhere. He knows how to translate the weekly sermons into the vernacular and has taught this skill to his wife, Zafy Bakar. She is continuing to study, but is still behind the main fundis in her knowledge. She also has a notebook full of Islamic verses (dua) copied from the collection her mother uses for curing. In 1985, due to her gender and relative youth, Zafy did not make a public display of what she knew but limited her practice to running a primary Qur'anic school. There is also an aspiring male fundi in the village who has been studying the texts, but who has not yet gained recognition. Beside the fundis who can interpret texts, there are those who teach recitation and performance of the sacred liturgy. Sometimes the senior fundis themselves perform these roles, but more often the positions are filled by persons of lesser stature. They provide children with a basic Islamic education: the Qur'an, the Maulida Barzanji, and the daily prayers (swala). The 'primary' classes, which meet daily except Fridays, in both the early morning and late afternoon,^ are usually run by married couples. Either spouse may take a leading role; due to work schedules, the wife is often the main teacher. These schools may be attended by children from the entire village or draw their clientele exclusively from within the family. The distribution of children among the schools varies with the 'life cycles' of particular schools. In Lombeni Be, a very large school disbanded with the death of the elderly male teacher and the decision of his widow to return to her natal village. The pupils dispersed

92

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

among three schools, run by each of the three leading fundis mentioned earlier together with their respective spouses. One of these schools quickly declined because the fundi preferred to teach adults. By 1985, two new classes had opened, one run by Darwesh and Zafy and the other utilized entirely by the members of a large extended family resident in a quarter on the fringe of the village. Many adults have the knowledge to become primary teachers. The other kind of Islamic skill regularly taught in formal settings is performance of the various forms of sacred music, to be described in Chapter 5. Each form has its own junior fundis who train the children, and senior adepts, one of whom is appointed village representative {halifa) in an island-wide linkage. Musical and or¬ ganizational skills predominate over textual ones. Since virtually everyone passes through Qur'anic school and has trained in at least one of the musical forms, the teachers are distinguished less by their exclusive access than by the relative depth of and commit¬ ment to their knowledge. There are also people with particular Islamic skills and functions: uttering the call to prayer, washing the dead, and leading the prayers. More generally, as most members of the community are engaged in some form of Islamic study or performance, and as no one feels he or she has complete control of the knowledge, it is virtually impossible to draw the line between fundis and educated serious people. In the tables that follow I have limited the appellation 'fundi' to those few people who are universally recognized as the leading Islamic experts in the village and who are distinguished by their reading knowledge of a number of religious texts and their availabiUty to act as authorities on matters of religion.

'Him dunia Here it is much less difficult to draw the line between fundis and lay persons. Cosmological knowledge is more specialized than knowledge of 'Him fakihi and access to it is more restricted. Hence we can say quite clearly that Lombeni Kely has one mwalim dunia, as the fundis in this discipline are called, and Lombeni Be none. The mwalim dunia, Juma Abudu, is well known and well respected. In 1985 he had one mwanafundi in Lombeni Kely and two in Lombeni Be; a fourth dropped out. These men are somewhat more than apprentices; they have each been study¬ ing for many years and they are consulted independently of the master fundi for divination, but they do not have the right to perform major jobs on their own and they are always on call to assist Juma Abudu. A

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

93

number of other individuals have learned certain functions of 'Him dunia, especially the simpler forms of divination, but, with a few exceptions, they are not aspiring members of the profession. 'Him ny lulu Tumbu Vita and Mohedja Salim, husband and wife, work, in part, as curers. Their primary source of knowledge is not Arabic or Swahili texts but oral tradition, their teachers and mentors not just greater hu¬ man scholars but spirits. Mohedja and Tumbu each suffer, as they would put it, from spirit possession. Each of them periodically enters trance, during which one of a number of spirits who regularly possess them takes control of their speech and actions. The same spirits do not rise in both of them, but each engages its respective hosts in long-term rela¬ tionships, visiting them in their sleep to give advice or warning and rising in them to share an active role in divination and the performance of cures. To a greater degree than most people subject to possession, Tumbu and Mohedja are not simply the vehicles for their spirits but engage them in active and solidary collaboration. They refer to their spirits as their fundis. These fundis are spirit mediums, though much of their work is con¬ ducted out of trance. The support of their spirits allows Tumbu and Mohedja to participate in a wide range of curing activities. There are essentially three kinds of practices here, distinguishable not by label but by their functions and the skills they require, and are not always mani¬ fested in the same individual. Like other types of curers, they are asked to administer herbal medicines and to intercede with God on behalf of clients. They and their spirits are called upon to divine, diagnose, advise, and assist in all manner of situations, ranging from physical debility to mental distress, to problems of love, theft, and interpersonal conflict. A few mediums also remove sorcery; sometimes they are asked (but refuse) to practise it. Third, mediums play a central role in curing the spiritderived illnesses of others, guiding them through their own possession experiences, assisting them to make the spirits speak, and arranging the ceremonies by means of which the host and spirit come to terms with one another. There are different 'species' of spirit, each with its own form of cure and its own specialists; two are particularly common in Lombeni. The trumba spirits, of Malagasy origin, are the manifestations of deceased Sakalava monarchs and their retainers, while the patros spirits are nonhuman and native to Mayotte, though bearing names

94

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

found in Arabic texts. To manage a possession cure, the curers must have been possessed by spirits of the same species as the client and gone through the full cure themselves. Their spirits must, in turn, have offered to work as fundis in cooperation with the human mediums. Lombeni Be and Lombeni Kely each have a woman who is a highly reputed herbalist-medium. Both women received part of their training from a mwalim dunia, a deceased father and a deceased husband, re¬ spectively. Siata, the curer in Lombeni Be, is middle-aged; her reputation grew rapidly between 1980 and 1985. Musy Mat war, the curer in Lombeni Kely, is quite old and reaching the end of her career, but she has both an extensive repertoire and a reputation that extends far beyond the village. She is also the main curer of trumba possession, being pos¬ sessed herself by the leader of the trumba spirits, 'Ndramanavakarivu (Andriantsuly's spirit). Musy Matwar has trained three other women of Lombeni Kely, including Mohedja, to manage trumba rituals (see Chap¬ ter 11). An additional two or possibly three women in Lombeni Kely were in the process of becoming trumba curers. Lombeni Be has no trumba curers, although at least one woman with a trumba has the potential and ambition to become one once she reaches the end of her own cure. Lombeni Be has a number of patros curers, notably Dady Accua, the widow of a man who had a very large practice in this field, and Safy, one of her grandsons, as well as a senior man currently living away in his wife's village, and another woman. There are, in addition, several aspiring patros curers. Lombeni Kely has a male and a female patros curer, Tumbu and Mohedja, as well as a number of aspiring fundis. The practice of sorcery extraction is quite restricted. Tumbu from Lombeni Kely and one each of the male and female patros curers of Lombeni Be performed it in 1985. One or two other people practised extraction only among close family members. The question of the prac¬ tice of sorcery itself, as opposed to its cure, is rather more complex and will be discussed in Chapter 8. All of this gives some sense of the number of curers in the three main disciplines in Lombeni Be and Kely. However, several qualifications need to be made. First, clients are by no means restricted to consulting fundis from their own village and, conversely, many of the clients of the fundis we have mentioned, especially of the master mwalim dunia and of the mediums, come from elsewhere. Second, a number of individuals may be fundis in more than one domain; hence the total number of fundis is somewhat less than may have appeared from the discussion so

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

95

far. Third, the functions of the fundis in the various disciplines overlap, for example, each offers protection from sorcery, and many of the fundis have mastered some of the techniques of their colleagues in other disci¬ plines. Finally, in both 'Him fakihi and 'Him ny lulu it is difficult to draw the line between fundis and highly informed and interested participants. With these facts in mind, we can examine the simplified summary presented in Tables 1 and 2. The column for 'Him fakihi includes only those fundis who are able to read a broad range of religious texts. The sex bias will be addressed in the chapters dealing with the specific disciplines. The Economic Basis of the Experts I spoke earlier of a 'political economy' of knowledge. By this 1 mean that one can develop a model for the production, circulation, and repro¬ duction of knowledge and can examine the relationship of knowledge to the exercise of power. This does not mean that medico-religious knowledge can be viewed simply as a scarce commodity, readily con¬ vertible to other forms of material wealth. Learning may be a form of investment and the accumulation of knowledge a basis for power or prestige, but being a fundi does not thereby provide an individual with a sound economic base. Most fundis are not full-time specialists and the inequality of the distribution of knowledge is not a significant determi¬ nant of economic status or well-being. Expertise may, however, provide a welcome, and in some cases a necessary, source of supplementary income. The ability to support oneself materially through one's knowledge varies with the discipline and, of course, has changed with time. In 1975 virtually every adult in Lombeni was a subsistence cultivator first. Many fundis were also involved with cash crops, fishing, or other enterprises; only one of them saw his special knowledge as his main source of income. Specialists in 'Him fakihi cannot charge fees for their services, though teachers receive some remuneration in labour. The main social advantage accruing to their knowledge was a general increase in respect and authority, as well as the ability to develop a wider and denser network of social ties. Not only did they receive precedence on ritual occasions, but they were invited to more ceremonies, partook of more ritual meals, and received the choice portions as well as small amounts of money given out on certain occasions when prayers are uttered. In 1975 I heard a man say that his son would benefit more from an Islamic

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

96 TABLE 1

Fundis resident in 1985 Total population (= total adults)

'Him fakihi

‘Him dunia Master Apprentice 'Him ny lulu

Lombeni Be Lombeni Kely

3 0*

0 1

3 1

4* 5

628 (245) 240 (95)

Total

3*

1

4

9*

868 (340)

'Him fakihi

'Him dunia

'Him ny lulu

Total adults

3*

5 0

T 7

157

0

TABLE 2

Sex of fundis

Male Female

183

*Not including people who are both active practitioners in the village and village members but resident elsewhere

than a French education, but things have changed rapidly since then. The value of the diffuse remuneration received by an Islamic fundi has declined as commodification has heightened material needs, raised the price of goods, lessened the scope of rituals, and most importantly, put a monetary value on labour time. Specialists in 'Him dunia could and did charge fees for services and often quite large ones, but they too show no inclination to specialize full time, in part perhaps because it takes so many years of apprenticeship before one can keep a significant portion of the earnings. The general issues of how curers organize their careers and integrate their practice with other activities can be illustrated by means of a number of possession curers whose work will be followed in greater detail in later chapters. Like the other medico-religious specialists prac¬ tising in Lombeni, neither Tumbu nor Mohedja viewed curing as their primary activity or fundamental element of their identity. They formed a household whose chief concerns lay with raising children and pro¬ ducing subsistence and cash crops. Both are pious and observant Mus¬ lims and both are active and even central participants in the ceremonial and political life of their community. Mohedja deliberately restricted her public healing activities, claiming she was still 'too young' (she was over forty in 1975). In 1975 Tumbu said that at one time or another.

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

97

virtually every member of the community had passed through his hands. In great demand, he preferred to leave for his fields immediately after dawn prayer so as to avoid importunate clients. He complained he had no time to do his own work and also that curing made him sick. Tumbu was a good curer and committed to the clients he accepted, but he did not actively seek them out, nor, at this stage of his life, did he attempt wholeheartedly to improve his skills or enhance the basis of his thera¬ peutic authority. Much of both Tumbu and Mohedja's practice was informal, occurring among family rather than in the public domain. By 1985 Tumbu had cut back considerably on his curing activities and interests, pursuing emerging opportunities in local government and us¬ ing his spare time to construct a new house. Tumbu was addressed and referred to as fundi by his former, current, and potential clients, but not universally and only in specific contexts. Other curers tend to organize their careers in similar fashion, gradually building up their knowledge, practice, and reputation, and later in life moving on to other interests. There are a good many curers who, even more than Mohedja, restrict their activities within the family. Outsiders may not even know of their skills. One man, somewhat older than Tumbu, who used to have a wide practice, now only accepts family members. On the other hand, before the introduction of modest pensions for the elderly, some old people may have depended on the small amounts they could earn through curing. Safy, a young curer with whom I also worked, was attempting to enlarge his reputation in 1980; nevertheless, he too was ambivalent and he devoted less time to curing than to his family, his fields, his other crafts, and his first love - per¬ forming and teaching one of the forms of sacred music. One of Tumbu's former apprentices, Hasan Mena, operated quite differently from his colleagues. Middle-aged and childless, he left sub¬ sistence production to his wife of the moment and travelled from village to village, advertising his services. He tried to enlarge both his repertoire and his clientele, and his relationships with most of his clients were of a different order from those of Tumbu, Mohedja, or Safy - they were less personalized and more commercialized. His clients were more often strangers and he sometimes charged a set, and to Tumbu's mind, rather high fee for his services. In 1985 Hasan told me he could receive any¬ where from 100 to 300 francs for a sorcery extraction. (But when I asked him whether he would accept 10 francs, he said yes.) Tumbu, Mohedja, and Safy never stated a fee. There are a number of reasons why curers' devotion to their careers

98

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

tended to be partial. First, there are the economic constraints. Most curers could not afford to, and also did not have to, rely on the income gained from their clients, though every contribution helped. The market was too uncertain, the clients poor, large fees poorly viewed, overeagerness for clients suspect, and the competition potentially stiff. A relatively high proportion of the population acted as curers; they were not, for the most part, in serious competition with one another for clients since they were not that committed to the profession, but they would have been in competition had they depended on it for a livelihood. Moreover, a mixed economic strategy was far preferable for the peasant household. Land and subsistence crops provided the basis for security and continuity; beyond this, households attempted to add a variety of sources of income. However, economic considerations do not provide the full answer. There is also a strong social or moral component to the curers' decisions to restrict their careers. When I was in Mayotte, life was not simply the pursuit of highly rationalized goals or the maximization of profit. Singleminded pursuit of a career cut people off from their social ties, narrow¬ ing the ways in which they could fulfil their obligations to family and community, and restricting the range of experiences that were available to them. The fundis were among the most energetic and gifted members of the community and eager to participate deeply in a wide range of experiences, ranging from parent and grandparenthood to performing the liturgy, fulfilhng ceremonial obligations, and being active in political life. Moreover, to be only a full-time curer was to be marginal in ways that devotion to another kind of career was not. People of knowledge, as we saw in Chapter 1, are dangerous and readily suspect. They have the power to manipulate others by secret means. For the fundis of 'Him dunia and 'Him ny lulu, their sources of power are dangerous, disrepu¬ table, and unpredictable, lying beyond the margins of orderly social life and beyond the pale of Islam. Association with these forces often renders the curers themselves ill. Then, too, the curers come to know the secrets of their clients, whose daily relations with the curers are thereby com¬ promised and may be tinged with ambivalence. Most curers thus restrict their role to a part of their social persona, attempting to enlarge their identities in other and more distinctly positive directions. A few curers, like Hasan Mena, opt explicitly and deliberately for social marginality. Hasan married into Lombeni from a distant village some years before my arrival, then divorced and left again by 1985. No one knows much about his family. He is a figure of distrust and fear.

Village Organization and the Distribution of Knowledge

99

but is not a victim of social labelling so much as a man who deliberately manipulates the image he projects to others. For example, he was the one person who in public, with a twinkle in his eye, did not flatly deny dancing on tombs to retrieve parts of a corpse to use in sorcery, an activity that is viewed by others with unequivocal horror and disgust, if not a little fascination. People were embarrassed by him and not sorry when he chose to move on to another village. He picked as a subsequent residence a new village constructed by the government on land fairly close to town, presumably a village of heterogeneous composition of relatively marginal people, ripe for his practice. But Hasan's activity was not simply a manifestation of a major shift in economic conditions and social values whereby the pursuit of a full-time individualistic career became necessary and acceptable, though he took advantage of such changing conditions, as it was an option for marginality in quite tradi¬ tional terms. In sum, the pursuit of specific kinds of knowledge is never an exclusive goal but part of a more diversified life project. Taking on the role of fundi may not even be the most common goal or outcome of study. Everyone studies something, but more people do so in order to become relatively well informed than with the ambition to become 'professional.' Hence my final expression of discomfort with the tables I presented earlier; an exclusive focus on fundis would represent the bias of a social science that seeks discrete objects of study.

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PART n The Social Organization of Textual Knowledge

It is true in a very concrete sense to say that great texts are like spirits out of bodies ... - Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

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4 Islam: The Perspective from the Path

This chapter is the first of three to deal with Islamic practice. I have divided the discussion very roughly along lines suggested by Schutz's distinction between the expert (Chapter 6), the well-informed citizen (Chapter 5), and the man on the street (this chapter). It is useful to recall that for Schutz people on the path have 'a knowledge of recipes indicat¬ ing how to bring forth in typical situations typical results by typical means' (1964:122). Their interest in knowledge is practical and immedi¬ ate: gaining the correct knowledge to get a specific job done. Their means is typically to call in an expert. Thus the question of direct access or control of knowledge is not yet an issue here. The person on the path does not want to control the means of production of knowledge, but merely to make use of its fruits. Nor is the person on the path interested specifically either in adhering to orthodoxy or in questioning the au¬ thority of what is provided. In fact, the boundaries between the disci¬ plines are not particularly relevant from the perspective of the path. An examination of recipes and strategies is unlikely to present a very flattering picture of Islam in Mayotte. Almost by definition, what is primarily at issue are technical interests rather than hermeneutic, ethical, or emancipatory ones. And, indeed, virtually everything that is described here is, in the words of one villager, mere custom (fomba), rather than what is required of Muslims. But what is presented is precisely a partial view, to be complemented by the discussions of the subsequent chapters. The term 'people on the path' does not refer to concrete individuals in their totality, but rather to one kind of attitude that anyone may hold at given times; it is but one component of an individual's larger practice. Thus, while not everyone in Mayotte is an expert, even experts act as people on the path in certain situations, not only in disciplines outside

104

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

their speciality, but in their own. With regard to Islam, while everyone in Mayotte may be situated on the path, virtually everyone strives also, to one degree or another, to become and act as a well-informed citizen. This chapter extends the discussion of several points made earlier: the continuity between the knowledge of ordinary persons and fundis, the interpenetration of the three disciplines in practice, the overlap of their functions, and the multiplicity of loci within the society from which any one of them can be perceived. It demonstrates some of the links between knowledge, power, and morality, in particular, the way in which certain practices generate certain kinds of moral conditions. It also begins to discriminate between the ways these links are formed in Islam and in the other disciplines. Throughout, it shows the importance of Islamic ritual practice for articulating personal identity, group membership, and boundaries at all levels of society, and hence the way in which Islam and society completely interpenetrate one another in the practice of ordinary villagers. Most discussions of the social relevance of Islam focus on the jural dimension. But Islam is socially significant in Mayotte less for the legis¬ lation of a set of prescriptive rules regarding kinship, inheritance, and gender relations than for the manner in which its sacred meanings and ends are used to organize collective and personal activities. Rules exist, but often remain in the background and are not always adhered to. Many norms of Arab life, such as patrilineality, have little or no relevance for local practice, although they may be invoked in situations of dispute. This chapter describes instead a much more salient aspect of Islam in Mayotte, not only following a 'repertoire and performance' approach, but taking these terms, as Mahorais villagers do, quite literally. Quite simply, Islam provides occasions at which social relations - at all levels of society - are orchestrated. Prayer and the Projection of Moral Imperatives Although Tumbu and Mohedja were among my main informants, I never hired them, nor anyone else for that matter, to sit in my room and produce information, to work as consultants entirely on my terms. What I learned, I learned in the course of watching them pursue their own endeavours, inquiring when I could. In addition, I generally ate my meals with them, and after dinner we would discuss the day's events until they or I began to fall asleep. I was never an apprentice of Tumbu and Mohedja, since they recog-

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

105

nized that I had no desire to practise their skills myself. But I was their student, their friend, and frequently their confidant. Although I tried not to interrupt him, at times my questions annoyed Tumbu, they dis¬ turbed his concentration, took up his time, and occasionally appeared to him to be challenging his authority. When I asked, 'Why do you do such and such?' he might reply testily, 'I've been a fundi for fifteen years and I know what Fm doing!' Mohedja was less defensive than Tumbu, although more taciturn in public. From Tumbu I learned more of the objective principles according to which curers operate; from Mohedja, more of the subjective subtleties. Together they formed as superbly complementary a teaching team as they did a curing one. I sometimes had the opportunity for fairly uninterrupted conversations with Mohedja when the rest of the compound and indeed most of the village was off in the fields or when the children were playing elsewhere. But Tumbu was harder to sit down with; he was always busy - working with his crops, looking after his cow, distilling ylang-ylang. When he was home, there were usually many other people around, or he was in the mosque, or seeing a client, or simply exhausted. When he had the chance, he would sometimes come by my house, but then, likely as not, I would be off at the far end of the village or entertaining other visitors. As a consequence, my best conversations with Tumbu occurred when we went on walks and he was free to concentrate on what I was asking. I, too, tend to think better on my feet, listened better, and asked more pertinent questions. As we approached our destination, my head would be crammed with things that I would scramble to get down on paper before I lost them, often in reverse order to that in which they were spoken. Many of the conversations I report were recorded in this manner, hence I do not often quote Tumbu or myself verbatim. On our first expeditions, even before I was aware of the extent of his activity as a curer, Tumbu would spontaneously point to things in the environment that he thought would be of interest. This was how I began to appreciate his intelligence, knowledge, and skill and his inter¬ est in seeing me well informed. So, although Tumbu is both an expert and a well-informed citizen, I begin literally on the path, taking his observations there in order to see how ordinary people attempt to solve their problems.

18 July 1975. One day, early in my stay when we were on an abortive attempt to buy a sack of imported rice (part of my monthly contribution to the house¬ hold) from the commissary at the European plantation, Tumbu pointed to a

106

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

hollow tree stump on the side of the road. Taking me over to it, he showed me branches and leaves, some fresh and some dry, sitting inside. The small branches had been left by people who had prayed for something. They pluck the branch, hold it up to their mouth as they pray and declare their wish, and then deposit it in the stump. The leaves can be of any species or one can deposit perfume or money. With characteristic precision, Tumbu remarked that the green leaves must have been placed in the stump today. Tumbu said there were many such prayer spots and that one can pray for anything one likes - a successful business trip to town, the birth of a child, a good harvest. At first, Tumbu said, you pray here to Ndranahary (God). I asked whether it was like the tomb of the Islamic fundi at Tsaratany I had heard about. Tumbu replied that there were a lot of lulu (spirits) about at this spot. On further inquiry, he said that actually you pray to the spirits to take your wishes to God on your behalf, but as the spirits aren't terribly reliable, it is purely a matter of luck whether God receives your wish and hence whether it is fulfilled or not. The tomb of Ahmad Sharif in Tsaratany is also a place where one can pray for wishes, but it is a much better one. Whereas the spot where we stood is only anala (in the bush) and there are lots of spirits about, the tomb at Tsaratany is inside a house. [As I pieced together later, the inside/outside, town/country opposition is a significant one in Mahorais thought, expressing moral order, groundedness, and its reverse.] In Tsaratany you ask Ahmad Sharif to intercede with God on your behalf. He is much more reliable than the spirits and thus your wish is virtually certain to be granted. When you go to Tsaratany, you first bathe and wear good clothes. You approach the fundi responsible for the tomb. You tell the fundi what you want and both of you enter the enclosure together and recite the fatiha. Then, when it's over, you give the fundi some money, whatever you want. He will put this in the treasury to buy things for the shrine, like kerosene for the lamp or towards building maintenance. There is another tomb in the large village of T that is equally efficacious. Tumbu says he has never used the stump, but he and Mohedja have been to the tomb in Tsaratany. They went after one of their babies died and Mohedja was very sick. After their prayers at the shrine, she became better. Tumbu has also sent money three times with pilgrims going to Mecca for the same sort of purpose. Tumbu added that you could even ask at the tomb for someone to die or go crazy and he or she would. But for this you have to give the proper reading from what he called the Qur'anic dictionnaire and only the really big fundis know where this can be found. God would carry out your request only if you managed to read the passage correctly.

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Tumbu here was describing versions of the most common assistance¬ seeking activity performed in Mayotte, namely prayer, the utterance of a request in conjunction with one or more sacred verses (dua). The ob¬ ject of your request (except in the relatively unusual case of wishing someone harm) makes little difference to the nature of the performance. Good health and good business are sought in the same manner. On the other hand, the degree of commitment to your cause presumably has an effect. There is a difference in intensity, in illocutionary force and perlocutionary persuasiveness, between a lengthy pilgrimage to the tomb of a deceased fundf and casually stopping at a roadside shrine. Although the context is important, the source of efficacy in prayer lies primarily in the formal texts themselves. One can beseech God in ordinary language and such vernacular prayers comprise a part of everyone's practice, but the duas are indispensable and ubiquitous. The duas are sacred Islamic texts recited in Arabic on appropriate occasions and in appropriate ways as invocations addressed to God. The most commonly used verses have been collected in a small book that is owned by many of the villagers and from which, it is said, the Prophet read when threatened by the infidels. In addition, certain of the shorter and more commonly used duas, such as thefatiha, the first verse of the Qur'an, are known by heart by many people. Some of these duas are said daily. They are certainly not the exclusive property of the fundis. They are re¬ cited at the prayer service in the mosque and are uttered at the occasion of all other rituals, at any kind of curing event, and upon the slaughter of animals. More will be said about the nature and significance of the texts themselves in the next chapter; the point in this one is the occasions for their use by people on the path. Many people are acquainted with the use of duas and apply them in their daily lives. Any man who knows a dua can say it, although in general, it is appropriate to invite the participation of pious men (the number depending upon the nature of the event) and to ask the most knowledgeable to officiate. Women are discriminated against by Islam precisely because they are not permitted to lead duas in public or take responsibility for slaughtering or other rituals, such as blessings, in which formal recitation has central place. However, although it is not proper for women to perform the ceremonies, they are almost always among the recipients. In conjunction with the appropriate expression of aims or wishes, the duas are used to positive effect. The duas do not by themselves suggest

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the specific ends to which they may be directed, but rather form the vehicles by which such aims are communicated to God. These vehicles are sometimes elaborated upon by means that only the fundis control. The verses can be combined with cosmological diagrams and sewn into cloth pouches to form amulets (hiriz) that objectify the wishes of their owners. The amulets are worn around the neck or otherwise carried on the person, hung in doorways, or stashed in the rafters of houses. The verses can also be written out in charcoal on a white plate and the writing then washed off and drunk as medicine. There are many other contexts in which supplicative prayers can be performed. One can ask the village imam (prayer leader) to include them at the close of the Friday congregational service. One can invite knowl¬ edgeable male neighbours to one's house to perform a shijabu (blessing) or badri (protection) and eat a special meal. Such invitations can be reciprocal, although the more learned a man is in the sacred texts, the more frequently he will be called upon to recite at the homes of others. Once a year everyone calls upon their neighbours to pray simultaneously on behalf of, and to request assistance from, their deceased parents and other relatives in a ritual known as kuitimia. There are also occasions on which the entire village gathers for a supplicatory ritual, often accom¬ panying the duas with the performance of sacred music and dance. Although one can pray to God directly and quietly for oneself, what is notable about all the other practices is that they entail both interme¬ diaries and objects. The intermediary may be asked to recite or reproduce the prayer on your behalf or simply to help direct it towards God. Such prayers generally entail a swadaka, a sacrifice or offering, which is given to the intermediary or the mosque. The point of the swadaka is not sim¬ ply its economic value, as the leaves left in the tree stump demonstrate. Rather, it is supposed to enhance the process of communication, to clear the channels. The better disposed your intermediary is to you, the greater the chance his entreaties will have in reaching their destination. A well-fed fundi makes better prayers. On some occasions, such as the major life cycle rites, the nature and approximate value of the swadaka may be arrived at through consulting astrological tables. In these cases, the swadakas are less offerings than appli¬ cations or tinkerings with the cosmic machinery that affects destiny. In other contexts, such as the cures for sorcery we will discuss in Chapter 9, there is a sense in which the swadaka represents part of an exchange. In both cases perhaps the goal can be described as reaching a balance. Generalizing about the swadakas used in the Islamic rituals of suppli-

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

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cation, ranging from the handful of leaves in the tree stump to the slaughter of a cow, one can understand them as concrete expressions of the supplicants' intentions, of their will to achieve their aim, as well as objectifications of their supplication. The act of offering helps turn speech into ritual. In order to gain performative force, private wishes need to be presented in public language, in a manner and context that have previously gained public acceptance as the right way to do things and that are distinguished from the everyday. This helps change the request from the locutionary to the illocutionary mode. Rendering a statement performative does not bring about material results, but it does entail moral ones, establishing the fact that the supplicants have done what they can and have gained a reasonable expectation that their request will be fulfilled. The concrete offering legitimates the request and sub¬ stantiates both the donors' ties to the recipients and their own acceptance of the system of power of which they, the recipients, and the objects are all a part. In transforming words into action and intention into substance, perhaps the swadaka also forms a kind of model for what is hoped to be the outcome of the prayer.^ The swadaka may also be seen as a part of the self, situating it in a position where it is accessible and eligible for assistance, rendering it dependent upon, and indeed consumed by, the more powerful other.^ It engenders a substantial connection between client and patron, whether earthly practitioner, deceased kinsman, fundi, or the social collectivity. The intermediary or recipient stands in for God whose social face is unknowable and unimaginable. Where the ritual includes the slaughter of an animal and the preparation of food, these likewise concretize intention, while consumption of the feast marks the completion of the act, the incorporation of self and other, and the initiation of a new state of affairs, namely the expectation of fulfilment of the requests and the moral obligation of the final recipient. Consumption of the feast also signifies satisfaction with the ritual process just completed and evokes the satisfaction that is expected to ensue with the fulfilment of the request. In sum, ritual supplication is not just a request for help but the plac¬ ing of oneself in a situation that requires acknowledgment of one's request (as well as one's own acknowledgment of the terms of that situation). The swadaka marks this transfer and expansion of responsi¬ bility. It is thus a concretization in the material plane of what takes place during the ritual in the moral plane. And, as a combination of act and object, it forms both a means for and symbol of the shift between the material and moral planes.

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

The role of intermediaries and objects is central to Islam as it is prac¬ tised in Mayotte. However, the duas or personal supplicative prayers as I have described them here, are to be distinguished from what is usually recognized as Islamic prayer, namely the prescribed daily prostrations and accompanying verses, the swala, that of course are also practised in Mayotte. In the swala there is no intermediary and no sacrificial object. Although the daily prayers are often performed collectively, it is a basic tenet of Islam that during the act of worship, each individual is equal to every other before God. Moreover, no one stands between the worship¬ per and God; the swala is an act of unmediated communication with the divine. Islam has no priests; the imam merely leads the collective recita¬ tion of the prayers and anyone with sufficient knowledge can take his place. Worshippers, the imam among them, prostrate themselves in awe and obeisance. This is pure acceptance, in principle untainted by request. This is the central rite of Islam, submission. Although the swala is a duty, prescribed in content and form, and an act of worship rather than supplication, worshippers often add silent and private solicitations in Kibushy to the standardized Arabic text. Moreover, at the end of the service the entire congregation may be used as an intermediary by an anonymous supplicant whose private wish is supported by the collectively uttered dua after completion of the swala. The supplicant arranges this with the imam or his representative before¬ hand and leaves a gift for the mosque. Money accumulated in this way was used to buy a shiny floor covering for the mosque at Lombeni Be. Both the swala and the supplicative prayers form the means of pro¬ jecting moral order, casting forward, as it were, through intentional acts, states, and processes of submission, hope, blessing, protection, and sanctification. Performances of the duas establish protected enclosures characterized by spatial, temporal, and social boundaries and affirm the goodwill of the people within them. In committing their performers to Islam, the recitations simultaneously attempt to engage God in a recip¬ rocal commitment to the humans who honour the deity. Outside the context of the swala, the assistance of intermediaries en¬ hances the likelihood that the entreaty reaches its destination. Supplicants call upon others, whether reciprocally and laterally to neighbours and kin, or vertically to those with greater influence - men of superior learning, ancestors, or spirits - to help bring their case to God. This is a kind of displacement of dependency onto figures more directly knowable and understandable than God. Ahmad Sharif, at whose tomb supplicants congregate, is remembered because he was a teacher, not because of

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

111

Figure 4.1 Hierarchical Model of Supplication God

Chain of Request unusual or particularly beneficent deeds, nor because of his holiness (baraka in Kibushy means simply luck'). Ahmad Sharif was an exemplary fundi, one who knew more Islam than his contemporaries and who tried generously and enthusiastically to impart that knowledge to them.'^ Moreover, there is yet another intermediary between the chent and the deceased fundi, namely the current fundi of the shrine. Although he is the deceased fundi's son, his position and reputation are based on his superior learning. His role is structurally similar to that of the spirit curer who be¬ seeches the spirits to seek God's assistance on behalf of a client (Figure 4.1). Knowledge and power thus come together in an interesting fashion. In the role of the intermediary both Islam and the spirit cults share a common practice; from the perspective of the person on the path, one intermediary is acceptable as another. Asking assistance of the spirits violates none of the postulates of Islam and does not challenge the supplicator's personal identity as a Muslim. However, it is worth re¬ calling the contrast Tumbu drew between the deceased fundi and the spirits. The former is responsible, the latter are less dependable. The deceased fundi's intervention in the manner requested is a certainty, whereas the acts of the spirits are a matter of luck. The difference here is that the power of the former is firmly fixed in the social order, 'enclosed in a house' in a human settlement (tanana), while the power of the spir-

112

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

its lies beyond the bounds of morality, 'in the wild.' Spirits, especially those with whom no specific relationship has been developed during the course of possession rituals, are amoral creatures not bound to listen to human entreaties. By definition, they are creatures least likely to accept the moral obligations established in the performative rituals of the supplicative prayers. As a curer who works with, around, and often against particular spirits, Tumbu attempts to ensure that the direction of their activity is not simply fortuitous. In attempting to exert some sort of control over the spirits, inevitably he moves out into their territory, into the margins. He is tainted by this. The spirits come to struggle with him by night, and by day his social reputation suffers. But although he works with spirits, Tumbu himself is firmly grounded in the moral order of Islam. Tumbu prays in the mosque daily, much more consistently than most villagers his age. For Tumbu, everything, suffering no less than well¬ being, stems ultimately from God. The unity of God ultimately tran¬ scends the diversity of means. Tumbu's invocations always begin with a brief recitation of Islamic verses (dua). And then he addresses the spirit: 'I beseech you, let us together beseech God (Zahu mangataka anao, atsika angataka an ndranahary)'. The world of spirits is thus rendered doubly secondary - less certain than the fundis and ultimately depen¬ dent upon God's will. The Social Production of Prayer For the most part, intermediaries are neither suprasocial figures like the renowned fundis nor amoral creatures like spirits, but one's fellow con¬ temporaries. Their engagement requires adherence to social norms. Co¬ operation in ritual production entails careful scheduling as it intersects with and punctuates the normal flow of daily activities, leisure, kinship obligations, and economic pursuits. Islamic ritual invests social organi¬ zation with morality as it embeds itself in the local social fabric, draw¬ ing upon and legitimating the roles, statuses, relationships, scenarios, and specific persons that constitute Mahorais society. A planned performance of supplicative prayer, together with its sur¬ rounding social activities, is referred to as asa, a word that also applies to other ritual productions, such as weddings, and to work in general. Asa does not distinguish between symbolic and material production, nor between the serious and the aesthetic, ludic, or celebratory dimen¬ sions of performance (Lambek 1987). However, asa always implies a

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

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contrast between two relevant categories of participants, namely the sponsors (tompin, literally, owners), who provide the initiative and the bulk of the financial resources, and the guests (mugyen, literally, strang¬ ers). A few of the more significant prayer asas are described in some detail. A common use of duas is in the shijabu, the blessing ceremony. The shijabu is held by or for an individual, a family, or the entire community to provide strength and well-being, to ward off danger, or to celebrate change, both at times that recur regularly in the calendrical and personal life cycles (at the New Year, for an expectant mother, upon leaving Qur'anic school) and at times that are a product of unique events (fol¬ lowing an ominous dream, to express general satisfaction). Whether held on community or family occasions, the shijabu serves to delineate and intensify social ties. The shijabu is composed of a selection of duas. (According to one fundi, a proper shijabu must include forty-one recita¬ tions of the al hamdu prayer and five each of five other individual verses.) Each performer recites part of the total, so that the whole is reached collectively. There should be an odd number of men to a maximum of eleven; the men simultaneously recite the verses assigned them, so that the words of any particular dua are not distinguished by onlookers. The subjects of the prayer sit clustered together on a mat, facing Mecca. Subjects are often joined by the other children or women of the house¬ hold. The performers stand in an arc behind them, reciting in low voices, blowing into their hands, and tossing grains of raw rice onto their heads. Afterwards the performers are served a good meal prepared by the women of the sponsor's household. The shijabu marks out those who are prayed over from those who are excluded from the circle, specifying individuals who are vulnerable or distinguishing kin from nonkin, or community members from outsiders. The shijabu also distinguishes those who are prayed over, typically but not exclusively children and women, from those who do the praying, men. The men stand above and behind the women, their posture in¬ dexing their greater strength and protectiveness. In turn, at the end of the prayer, it is the men who sit and the women who sustain them, this time concretely with a good meal. Such ritual demarcations can be found at virtually every level of the society. Indeed, it is practices such as the shijabu that help to constitute society through their functions of focusing, separating, complementing, incorporating, and uniting. From the perspective of the person on the path, the practice of religion is not fully distinguishable from the duties, constraints, and interests of kinship, friendship, and citizenship.

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

There are many occasions besides the shijabu on which people can choose to pray or to sponsor prayers whose aim is to celebrate God and thereby bring blessing. Performances of sacred music take place to honour a pledge (nadara) and give thanks/ as an expression of family or community goodwill, and, in a more informal and spontaneous man¬ ner, at a holiday such as the termination of Ramadan (Idy, 'Id al-fitr), or solemnly at a death. The dead are also commemorated subsequently with prayer: annual events for the most learned and active fundis or for locally significant ancestors, and, ideally, once for every person some time after his or her death. The large number of people who form the core of the senior adult cohort in Lombeni Kely hold an annual fatiha for their deceased mother and grandmother, although members of the great-grandchild generation, who have no memory of her, complained about having to contribute the 15 francs and 2 kilos of rice demanded in 1985 of each adult descendant. The fatiha continues an annual tradi¬ tion practised by the woman herself when she was alive.^ Likewise, the descendants and former Qur'anic students of a male contemporary of this woman hold an annual Maulida in his memory because that was the text he liked and what he taught. Several other deceased parents of the senior generation of villagers in Lombeni Be are similarly honoured and at least one woman holds a biannual Maulida on the anniversary of the death of an adult daughter. The time spans of these rituals are not very deep, and the kin groups that organize them are correspondingly generationally quite shallow; in every kin-based ritual of commemoration that I observed, at least one child of the apical ancestor was still alive. The rules of contribution show the essentially egalitarian and non¬ segmentary nature of the kin group. Annual dances commemorating famous fundis and sponsored by their home villages may be huge affairs drawing visitors from virtually every village in Mayotte. Lombeni Be and Lombeni Kely had no fundis with such broad reputations, yet each of them sponsors communal dance performances for their own pleasure as well as at least one annual performance to which guests from a large number of other villages are invited. Such events draw heavily upon the resources of the entire community and demand an equal contribution from all households. Constituting intervillage reciprocity, they can also be considered a form of redistribution; at least one person likened them to the Islamic re¬ quirement of alms-giving, suggesting that producing a public feast was a reasonable alternative to private charity. The mandeving is a once-only affair to request the well-being of the

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

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deceased held some time after the funeral. It is said that although God will already have decided the deceased's fate, a mandeving may still have some influence. The mandeving normally includes both prayer and a sa¬ cred musical performance. As Tumbu put it, the prayers make a request (mangataka) to God, while the entertainment (soma) coaxes (mitambytamby) God to accede to it. Offspring have the obligation to hold a mandeving for their deceased parents; every adult attempts to sponsor one mandeving in his or her lifetime at which a number of deceased kin can be recog¬ nized. The mandeving was also one occasion (the others are virgin marriages and circumcisions) at which the obligations of the formal exchange system known as the shungu could be met (Lambek 1990c). The fact that the sponsorship fulfils the shungu obligation renders the ex¬ change dimension of the mandeving explicit; everyone should hold a mandeving and can expect to have one held on his or her behalf sometime after his or her own death. The burden of support and commemoration is passed on from generation to generation, although not everyone is able to muster the resources to hold a mandeving. At the same time, ex¬ change occurs laterally within the community. More markedly than the shijabu, the sponsors are dependent on the other members of the village to actually recite the prayers for their deceased kin on their behalf. The role of the sponsor is to produce the ritual (asa), not to perform the prayers that form its raison d'etre. The sponsor of one mandeving joins the recitation at previous and subsequent ones held by kin and neighbours. These kinds of exchanges are fundamental to a number of rituals and will be elaborated in more detail in the next section.^ The social production of prayer can be viewed as a vehicle for the reproduction of society. In the preparations and enactment of a ritual like the mandeving, we see not only the articulation of a particular family grouping at a significant stage of its history but the expression of more general norms and values. One of these is the strong egalitarianism that runs through village society. In the fatiha held for the ancestress, every adult descendant bears equal responsibility for the ritual. And although one sibling may provide somewhat more for his mother's mandeving than the others do, this is fortuitous and a matter of choice. To the degree that one is able to do so, it is a matter of achievement, not ascription, nor would siblings permit one of their number to carry the whole affair. The organization of these rituals is very different from what one would expect in a lineage-based society in which senior kins¬ men might take the responsibility for managing and presiding over the event, which would also serve to underline the dependency of junior

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

members of the kin group upon them. A good deal of sexual egalitari¬ anism is also evident in the kinship rituals. Although the sexual divi¬ sion of labour is marked, both women and men have the autonomy and bear the responsibility of acting as sponsors - and both of them gain the prestige and social maturity that comes with it. One notable distinction between women and men has to do with the means by which they partici¬ pate as guests. There are many rituals at which men attend on the basis of their public, Muslim persona; any man with a modicum of knowledge of the requisite dua is welcome and, indeed, coviUagers are expected. Women, however, must often wait to be individually invited, and their attendance is based on specific kinship and friendship links with the hosts.® Egalitarianism is articulated and constituted through balanced reci¬ procity. Although the expression of reciprocity is transformed from ritual to ritual, the principles are so ubiquitous that we can speak of a kind of 'reciprocity scenario' (cf. Ortner 1989; Schieffelin 1976) characteristic of Islamic rituals in Mayotte. The principles and scenario can be made more explicit through the following illustrations. Prayer and Reciprocity The kuitimia is an annual ritual that, like most others, consists, in the words of one informant, of 'reciting something, then eating well.' A number of people keep a handwritten copy of the recitation for annual reference. Like the shijabu or mandeving, the composition of participants in the kuitimia articulates kinship ties, and the collective performance of prayer casts particular moral chronotopes (time/spaces). What distin¬ guish the kuitimia are the timing, the basis of group composition, the specific direction of the prayers, and the nature of the intermediaries invoked in prayer. The kuitimia is performed during the Islamic month of pilgrimage (hadj) on behalf of deceased ascendants. In 1975 it took place in December and was held by all households containing people who had a deceased father or mother. People with both parents living do not take part. One is expected to hold the prayer on behalf of a deceased parent or Qur'anic fundi, but not for a deceased grandparent; 'Grandchildren say, "Let their children take care of them.'" Of course, if the children are dead and not able to do so, the grandchildren will be holding the ritual in any case and will add the names of the grandpar¬ ents to those of the parents in the prayer. The names of other deceased kin and of friends can also be added. According to Tumbu, the month of Dilhedj is like a vacance; a vacation

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

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for the dead, in that they can receive greetings from the living. Any dead person who doesn't hear from kin will feel sad, lonely, and left out. Yusufi Abudu, the village fundi, describes the kuitimia prayer more explicitly as sending one's food to the deceased. The saliency of the opening of the channel between the living and the dead is strengthened by its association with the passage of the pilgrims at Mecca. The kuitimia prayers must be said before the fast day on the ninth day of the month of Dilhedj. The tenth is the celebration of Idi {'Id al hedj) when the village gathers for a sermon in the mosque and holds a feast like that terminating Ramadan. The kuitimia itself is sometimes referred to as the 'Ramadan of the dead.' The optional fast is held in solidarity with the suffering of the pilgrims on the day that they have to stand in the blazing sun, compared by Yusufi to standing in the afterworld {kiyama) for judg¬ ment. The bodily mortification, and indeed the entire pilgrimage, likens the pilgrims to the dead; the fasting by those at home is, in turn, linked with the well-being of the dead. The liminality of this period and the heightened perception of the proximity between life and death is in¬ creased by the uncertainty of whether the pilgrims will return home safely from Mecca. The groups that form to hold collective prayers for deceased kin are usually, but not necessarily, larger than individual nuclear households. It is best if a set of siblings holds the kuitimia together; this usually means in effect that they focus around nodes of closely related women. Men are likely to hold their prayers jointly with their wives and their wives' kin unless the wives have no deceased parents, but there are no hard and fast rules as to composition. The hosts pool their food and cook or bake together. The focus on parents as the significant apical ancestors tends to keep the groups rather small, although there is no reason that cousins cannot join together. The groupings tend to reflect residential contiguity and they are often composed of the people who engage in the most intensive and solidary relationships throughout the year. In all cases they are groups that do a lot of other things together; they represent people who have chosen to interact with each other. In addition, the group performing a kuitimia may invite guests. Thus, on 11 December, 1975 seven family clusters in Lombeni Kely held their kuitimias. In the late afternoon most of the village men went as a group to eat at one place after another. At the home of at least one person, many women guests showed up or were called over as they went by and were fed. There was a strong sense in which the entire community, although subdivided into several performance groups, appeared to be constituted as a moral

118

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte Figure 4.2 Egalitarian Model of Supplication God

unit, everyone praying for everyone else's welfare and extending hospi¬ tality to each other, but with the naen, as usual, playing a more mobile, public, and generalized role than the women. Nevertheless, it is the sponsors of each prayer who gain primary recognition and benefit through it from God and their deceased kin. In the kuitimia the living pray to God to help the dead and they request the dead to intercede similarly with God on behalf of the living. The living and the dead each act as intermediaries for the other, a pattern of reciprocity not unlike that found elsewhere among groups of the living, for example in the intervillage performances of the Maulida (Figure 4.2). While the dead are primarily kin and one's own fundis, people also pray to and on behalf of the 'fundis of old,' the Maswahaba: Atman, Abu Bakar, Omary, i.e., the contemporaries and successors of Muhammad. People pray for good for them and for good here on earth at the same time, thereby involving another and powerful set of intermediaries. One man described the entire process explicitly in terms of exchange and communication, drawing the analogy that if I left for Canada and wrote the villagers, then they would write me back. 'You pray that your kin are well treated and go to pevoni [heaven]. And you ask to be al¬ lowed to live with rohu manintsy, untroubled [literally, cool], to marry well, to have enough to eat.' Several other people referred to the prayers and the expected return on them as gifts (zazoad). Once the month of Dilhedj is over, said another man, God gives the dead their colis, (pack¬ ages) from their descendants and surviving family, i.e., their prayers or the fruits of the prayers. Those who receive 'packages' are happy, those who don't are sad. 1 asked once whether the kuitimia was required.

Islam: The Perspective from the Path

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Tumbu replied that it was optional (sunna), but really should be per¬ formed every year. If you don't give or attend any kind of religious feast, whether a kuitimia or whatever, it is simply your own loss. You miss out on entertainment and food, and you bring displeasure to God, who may, in turn, bring trouble to you. Your dead parents will also be sad if you don't hold a feast for them and they may bring you bad things and make you unsuccessful in your enterprises. Prayer is thus a critical component of social exchange and the circulation of blessing.^ The kuitimia is a ritual of the mraba (family) at which neighbours may be invited to play a role, while the mandeving is a ritual sponsored by a single household or specific set of siblings at which the whole commu¬ nity takes part. Rituals, held by and on behalf of the entire community (tanana), are also significant vehicles of exchange. The annual recitation of the Maulida, a celebration of the Prophet's life, which is held in the month of his birth, is an occasion at which the exchange dimension is highly marked. Neighbouring villages pair off and invite each other to their respective performances.’® The guests are no mere spectators; it is they who carry out the recitation on their hosts' behalf and are offered a feast of meat and pastries in return. In a moiety-like manner, each side functions as the intermediary for the other side in its communication with God. 15 and 29 March 1976. In 1976 Lombeni Kely held its community Maulida on 15 March, the twelfth day of the month of Maulida. There was much planning ahead. Each household bought flour and sugar, and the male age groups (shikao) collected money. The village found a cow, ascertained its price, and calculated how much money each household would have to contribute. The money was used to buy meat, salt, and the sugar used in the tea sent to the mosque. Of the 84 kilos of red meat taken from the cow, half went to the guests' pile; from the remainder, a kilo of raw meat went to every household. As was customary, the village invited neighbouring Lombeni Be to the ritual. In effect, this meant that the men of Lombeni Be were collectively invited. Women of Lombeni Kely invited personal guests, individual kinswomen, and friends from Lombeni Be, who helped cook, received a gift {zawad) of meat, and were also fed at their hostess's house. Lombeni Be held their Maulida on 29 March. Three cows were slaughtered and in this case the meat was sold by the kilo. Every household purchased a half kilo of meat for the village and about 1.5 kilos or more for its own consumption.” The village meat was cooked at two designated spots and served

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

to the male guests in the tapa lalahy (men's side) of several houses reserved for the purpose. Due to the difference in size between the villages, at the Lombeni Kely performance each household provided twenty pastries for the supply destined for the guests; each Lombeni Be household provided only five at its feast. The imbalance shows that the reciprocity occurs between villages, not households, although within a given village each household is expected to contribute equally.

In the Maulida the dependency of people on one another for perform¬ ing recitations on their behalf is explicit. The Maulida is always recited by the male guests at the mosque of the host village. 29 March 1976. The Maulida in Lombeni Kely started shortly after the midday prayer. A few of the more serious men arrived from Lombeni Be. Incense was lit and Athman Zaidani, an elder of Lombeni Kely, uttered afatiha and said what the village was wishing for - blessings, no sickness, and so on. Hussein, a local fundi of the Maulida, began the recitation of the Maulida, but quickly passed it to the guests and he and Athman Zaidani left.^^ For the remainder of the afternoon, the guests were left alone to recite in the mosque; their numbers gradually increased as the time to eat approached. The guests read the entire version of the Maulida known as the Sharaf al Anam and then moved onto the porch to re¬ cite another version, the Barzanji. The latter was led by a young fundi of Lombeni Be, assisted by a chorus of small boys from both villages whose number rose by the end to nearly fifty persons. A procession of young men from the host community brought trays with cooked liver and pastries, and pails of sweet tea and hot milk, which they handed over to the performers of the Maulida. They then gave a brief performance of their own, the dinahu, a graceful line dance to the beat of a drum. When the Maulida was finished and the guests had consumed their tea and liver and packed away most of their pastries to bring home to their families, they were directed to several houses where a substantial meal of beef and coconut rice was served to them by the men of the host community. During this time, the women and their guests also ate in their individual house¬ holds. Most of the guests, laden with further personal gifts of cooked food, then returned home. In the evening some of them returned to participate in the mulidi, which was danced under the full moon by boys and young men from both villages. This was simply for pleasure because, people said, they were happy. Likewise, in the evening following the Maulida in Lombeni Be, a women's maulida shengy dance was held.

Although the stated purpose of the Maulida reading is to honour and

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glorify God, the social functions of the ritual are perfectly apparent. The annual Maulida provides an occasion for the articulation of community membership and the reaffirmation and regeneration of community sen¬ timent and solidarity. It is also a vehicle for direct reciprocity between neighbouring communities, articulating their boundaries as well as their mutual indebtedness; each community is implicated in the production of well-being for the other. In a sense, each assists in the reproduction of the other. Of course, exchange does not always run smoothly, and, in Mayotte, unselfishness is not a part of the ethos of egalitarian exchange between groups. Guests eat as much as they can, and one or two of the elders from the guest village postpone their own meal in order to stand watch to ensure that the food is sufficient and fairly distributed. In 1985 the arrangement between Lombeni Be and Lombeni Kely was endan¬ gered when members of the former village accused the latter of not having fed them properly the year before.^^

The Politics of Prayer Although prayers are most frequently used for positive ends, Tumbu's conversation on the path indicated clearly that an alternative possibility is never far from people's minds. If the duas are powerful, they can also be used to harm. People say, 'Ndranahary tsy matity' ('God is not stingy'). If you utter the dua correctly, God will give you what you want. The danger is mitigated somewhat by the conception that the duas that call for harm require special techniques or knowledge that are not gen¬ erally available, but that are restricted precisely to those individuals who ought to be the most moral. This, of course, serves in part to cast suspicion on these very individuals. The use of duas to harm also sets in motion secondary belief structures to account for why God should carry out the evil intentions of his worshippers. Ultimately the beliefs serve to support the conception of a just and moral God and to promote a public discourse of moral values, all the while admitting the injustice, misfortune, and uncertainty characteristic of experience (cf. Geertz 1973; Jackson 1989). The fatiha, the first sura (chapter) of the Qur'an, is the most important of all duas and it must accompany the utterance of any of the others. It provides the commencement to the long and festive sacred chants and dances. It is uttered privately by the sponsors of a ritual to ensure that the affair will go well and that many people will attend. It legitimates events and seals resolutions, anchoring them in morality, giving them a

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serious quality. It is the most common marker used to set off the sacred from the profane. Yet the fatiha is also used agonistically as part of a rhetoric of attack, defence, and reprisal. One serious use of the fatiha is the swearing of an oath between two parties, where one has accused the other who denies the charge. After first washing and performing their ablutions, the two meet to say the fatiha jointly. Salt rather than the usual incense (uban) is added to the brazier. Whichever of the two is in the wrong, whether as liar or false accuser, will die within the week. The power of this kind of recitation of the fatiha is sure, swift, and terrible. The cessation of the life force is likened to the popping noise made by the salt on the flames. The fatiha in this sense normally remains just a threat to expedite judicial pro¬ ceedings and to keep people honest. On occasion, a couple of 'foolhardy' individuals, as most people see them, will be so angry with one another that they will engage in the test. If they are bent on holding the fatiha, their kin will drop their dissuasions and reluctantly allow them to pro¬ ceed. As far as I know, this use of the fatiha only occurred once during my stay in Lombeni, although it was threatened on several other occasions and people can recount past instances of its use. The event during my stay was a case where, I presume, each man sincerely believed himself to be in the right. Sula had been sick for some time and the illness was finally diagnosed as stemming from sorcery planted in his field. Sula immediately accused Lahadj who indignantly denied it. Accusation and denial escalated until the parties agreed to say a fatiha together to see which of them was telling the truth. The fatiha was performed one Friday after midday prayers in the open spot behind the mosque in the centre of Lombeni Be with numerous onlookers present. During the next week there was much speculation about which of the two would die, and the relatives of each man were both sad and angry with them for having taken such a risk. When neither of the men died, it was said that the guilty party had not said his fatiha sincerely and the matter was dropped.’^

Sula, and indeed the rest of the village, had two good reasons for suspecting Lahadj. Lahadj was considered ill-tempered and unsociable and it had been widely reported that he engaged in sorcery. In addition, it was said that when Sula had worked in the office of land survey, he had used his position to have certain field boundaries redrawn so that he could buy himself a piece of land. The land on which the sorcery was

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placed not only bordered that of Lahadj, but was in fact stolen from him. However, sorcery is an illegitimate response to theft and Lahadj would have been better off to have said a quiet fatiha of his own against the thief. Looked at functionally, it could be said that the public fatiha had served the purpose of airing rumours and grievance and formulat¬ ing public opinion about the quarrel. Perhaps it also served to alleviate some of Sula's anxiety, if not his guilt, while permitting Lahadj to vent his justified indignation in a legitimate public form and to attempt to put to rest rumours that he had also engaged in an illegitimate response. The commentary on this case brings up two more common uses of the fatiha as well as of the badri, a much longer dua. These duas may be used both as a deterrent and protection against crime and as a means of identifying the perpetrator and gaining justice when a crime has already been committed. Both these processes also ascribe and elaborate social boundaries. The badri is the most significant prophylactic prayer. It is printed in a small booklet that many villagers own. Like the shijabu, the badri is a performance that can be held for individuals, families, or the entire village. But while the shijabu has an entirely positive tone, the badri car¬ ries intonations of danger. The badri recitation is a text concerning the battle of Badr at which the early Muslims successfully fought the infidels. It is recited not to bring forth good directly, but specifically to exclude or punish the bad. It is referred to as a dua mahery, a tough or powerful dua. Because the dua can kill, some argue that it cannot be performed 'dry,' that is, without spilling blood, i.e., slaughtering an animal of some kind. Moreover, the sacrificial animal is red. And while one has to be clean to perform the shijabu, the badri can be recited unwashed. While the shijabu directs attention towards those who are the objects of the verses, the badri points in the other direction, delimiting specific boundaries and focusing on the distinction between inside and out. The shijabu is aimed directly at the objects of blessing, the badri indirectly, by way of the enemies who threaten them. The badri may be performed to keep thieves out of one's fields, sorcerers out of one's home, or evil spirits out of the village, but its most salient occasion is just prior to a circumcision, in order to ensure that no one interferes with the cutting or healing process or tampers with the auspiciousness of the date. A reading of the badri is a necessary component of the circumcision ritual. The badri underlines the heaviness of the occasion, the blood of the circumcision, and the general anxiety (felt more by the adults than by the boys themselves, I think). Hosted by the boy's sponsors, the badri at

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a circumcision is nevertheless a public occasion; all village men may attend and participate in the reading and subsequent feast. The shijabu and badri are in a sense complementary and there are some occasions that call for the performance of both. One of these is the mwaka, or New Year. Known as 'washing the year' {miseky mwaka), the celebration is scheduled by a calendrical fundi in each village. The count is based on a solar calendar that runs alongside the Islamic lunar one, and the mwaka always takes place in July or August. The precise date varies slightly from village to village as each follows its own fundi, de¬ spite inaccuracies that may have slipped into particular counts. The mwaka is held each year on a successive day of the week so that years are labelled not numerically but according to a seven-year cycle as the Monday Year (mwaka tenainy), etc., a process that articulates the indig¬ enous calendar with the transnational one. The fundis of all villages continue to concur on the day of the week on which the New Year falls. When asked what year it was at the celebration of July 1975, the appro¬ priate answer was mwaka talata (Tuesday Year); in 1980 I was present for a Sunday mwaka and in 1985 for a Friday mwakad^ The discrepancies between the calendrical counts of the various vil¬ lages is not of particular concern to people because observation of the mwaka is viewed explicitly as a purification of the individual village, hence as an internal affair, and because the mwaka serves more to punc¬ tuate and mark the quality of time than to label or count it. The mwaka resonates with the autonomy of the village and symbolically reinforces it. Unlike the annual Maulida, no guests are invited. In Lombeni Kely in 1975, just after dawn a senior woman swept the area outside the mosque. Shortly thereafter the members of the village gathered there for a col¬ lective shijabu}^ Women, children, and some men arranged themselves compactly on mats facing Mecca, while the remaining adult men stood behind them reciting the dua, led by one of the village elders from his perch on the mosque verandah, and tossing grains of raw rice. After the shijabu, the children disbanded, but many of the adults stayed to discuss plans for Islamic activities - inviting a fundi, producing a mulidi - dur¬ ing the year. Later in the day a number of men gathered to read the badri in the mosque and then a few of them, trailed by several boys, circum¬ ambulated the perimeter of the village in a counterclockwise direction while continuing the recitation. Every outlying house was included within the circle of their path and the men returned to the mosque to complete the recitation with the elders who were waiting for them there.

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The function of the badri in forming a shield or barrier that deflects harm is explicit and literal here. One man described it as tying a rope or building a fence around the village so that nothing bad could enter. Another drew the comparison between going barefoot and wearing shoes: The feet of a person without shoes are pierced by thorns, but for those wearing shoes, it is only the shoes themselves that are hurt. The badri is like the shoes.' A goat, purchased and owned collectively by the village, is slaughtered before the badri begins. It is held eyes towards Mecca and head pointing west outside the front end of the mosque. The goat is offered a handful of leaves or drink of water, incense is lit, and the badri book is held over the smoke as the goat's throat is cut. In 1975 in Lombeni Kely the meat was divided among the women's age groups and cooked collectively. Every resident of the village received a morsel of the goat liver; the remainder of the meat and cooked rice was served at sundown in the centre of the village or sent to the mosque for the badri readers. The badri requires blood sacrifice. People emphasized an association between blood and land {tany), saying specifically that there must be blood on the ground {antany) and even that the tany 'eats the blood.' In fact, the bones and blood of the goat are buried every year in a spot in front of the mosque. People said this was to keep the remains away from dogs, but this effort is not made so carefully on any other occasion of slaughter, suggesting a deeper association in this case. Whatever the underlying meaning of the blood, the depiction of the village in terms of its spatial locus is clear and fits with wider Malagasy notions concerning rootedness.^^ In addition to anchoring the village with blood, the badri effectively draws a line around the entire village, sepa¬ rating it from the world outside and excluding the penetration of evil influences, such as illness (areting) for another year. The badri itself is sometimes described as medicine (audy) for the land. These references to illness and medicine speak to the protection and well-being of the collectivity rather than specific individuals within it; when people elaborate, they mention epidemics. The shijabu acts like a beam of light that focuses upon what is in its path, and hence delineates a centre, whereas the badri is deflective and circumscribes boundaries. Together in the mivaka ritual, they nicely articulate the moral and spatial cohesion of the tanana}^ In 1985, consonant with all the socio-economic changes taking place, and with the partial breakdown of the village as a discrete autonomous unit, the mwaka celebration of Lombeni Kely included only a shijabu. The

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chef (manager) of the men's organization was temporarily out of the village on a wage job and no one else took it upon himself to organize a collection to purchase a goat. Older adults feared that most of the younger villagers would refuse to contribute their share, assuming they would complain that all the food went to feed the senior men in the mosque, a point that the Islamic fundi hotly denied. People described the mwaka ritual as 'a tradition, something inherited from the big people of the past [ulu maventy kitaluha].' Some said, 'If we don't do the badri, it's not good, but if we forget it, we forget it.' But others added, 'If the badri is not performed now, the tanana will pay for it later.' A political dimension of the badri in positively asserting and defining identity can also still be discerned. In 1985 a sedentary badri was spon¬ sored by a kin group originally from Lombeni Kely, but who were gradually clustering their houses on a piece of land they inherited known as Bunara that was directly contiguous with Lombeni Be. The cumulative movement of people to the new location and the recent construction of a small mosque led to increasing ambiguity concerning the inhabitants' relationship to Lombeni Kely where they still had strong ties. In 1984 the badri processions at the mwaka ceremonies organized by Lombeni Kely and Lombeni Be both included Bunara within their path. In 1985 the procession from Lombeni Be encircled the houses at Bunara, while, as noted, Lombeni Kely failed to find a sacrificial animal or hold a badri at their mwaka. The badri at Bunara was organized almost three months later after a series of misfortunes led the residents to consult a diviner who said that sorcery had been committed against the tanana. The badri was held to offset the sorcery rather than to replace the mwaka and did not include a circumambulation of the new location, but both the attribution of sorcery and the organization of the badri served to help define and publicly le¬ gitimate Bunara's emerging social identity. The sponsors (tompin) of the ritual were the senior sibling set that owned the land as well as their adult offspring; this included considerably more people than those who actually lived at Bunara. The sponsors chose the model of reciprocity characteristic of several of the rituals described above and invited a few senior men from Lombeni Be and Lombeni Kely to come and read the badri on their behalf. They also invited a number of neighbouring women to help prepare the food. Rather than making a strong case for themselves as an autonomous tanana, they chose to define themselves as a cohesive kin group. Nevertheless, the people at Bunara selected a badri with its emphasis on defensive boundaries and residence rather than a fatiha or

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other ritual in honour of an apical ancestor. The badri was also a much more public event and collective endeavour than the simple extraction of the sorcery would have been. The Economy of Justice The badri and fatiha are frequently applied in cases where the identity of an interloper is unspecified, either because no crime has yet been com¬ mitted or because the identity of the criminal is unknown. The criminal will receive - and hence become identified by - the punishment re¬ quested by the holder of the dua. Alternatively, the reciter may ask for death without specifying a particular sign Qialama) or request that the criminal simply receive the outcome that he had tried to perpetrate upon the intended victim. Thus, to return to a case described above, if Sula were already protected by a badri and Lahadj did sorcery to make him ill, it would be Lahadj rather than Sula who would become sick. Many people protect their fields, their property, and their persons in such a way on a regular basis, periodically updating what one might call their insurance. But if someone has already been victimized, he could still recite a dua that would both identify and harm the perpetra¬ tor. (And, incidentally, this might also have the effect of removing sus¬ picion as to the cause of his own illness.) If the victim were wise, unlike Sula he would not name the suspected party directly but would instead direct the dua to 'whomever he may be, wherever he may be,' thereby avoiding the danger of making a false accusation. The sign of effectiveness requested by the performer of the dua might be simply a confession from the guilty party, but the imagination of punishment is a fertile field. There are said to be duas to make a person's tongue swell up so that he cannot speak, to render him sexually impotent, to make him go about the village naked, and to make the blood drain from all his orifices until he dies (the most typical sign of death by a badri). Here is a case that apparently took place some time before my arrival in Lombeni. Yusufi Be stole a chicken from Rubia and the latter, not knowing the thief's identity, threatened to say a dua if he did not own up. Rubia announced this publicly, but no one responded. According to the story, Rubia then waited for a Tuesday of a waning moon, bathed and performed his ablutions, went out to a rock on the seashore, and recited the dua. Soon after, the blood began to drain from Yusufi Be. As he lay dying, he called out that he saw people coming after

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him with swords, a typical image in which divine justice consequent to a dua is portrayed.

Duas were often threatened and sometimes invoked by the parents of a girl against the man who had taken her virginity prior to marriage. They were occasionally implicated in deaths, especially those of young men. In one case it was said that a man died when the husband of the woman with whom he had committed adultery paid a fundi to say the prayer. However, the wronged parents or husband have to be careful; if the woman entered into the illicit sexual relationship willingly, she too would be struck (vua) by the dua. These uses of the dua may in fact cause less social disruption than the case of Sula and Lahadj. The relatives of the victims know for a fact - after the fact - that they were the guilty party. They may complain about the severity of the punishment re¬ quested, but they cannot complain about the right to apply the dua itself. More frequently, the dua is just a threat that serves to let off steam, to protest innocence, to indicate the strength of one's feelings, or to constrain the antisocial consequences of illicit sexual activity. Wrong¬ doers often argue that their victims would never dare hold a fatiha, but fear of a fatiha is also sometimes used to explain why the parents of a young man paid his fine for deflowering a girl or forced him to abandon an adulterous liaison. The attribution of a death to the invocation of a dua occasionally leads to extreme and prolonged bad feeling between the victim's close kin and the supposed utterer of the dua. This is most likely where the dua is not uttered to offset an obvious crime, but in simple response to insult, and where it occurs between kin. A quarrel over men among several related young women escalated until one of them, Amiaty, incensed at the sexual allegations falsely levelled against her by her mother's sister's daughter, threatened a fatiha. Women are particularly vul¬ nerable to quarrels over men because of the contradiction between the high rate of circulation of partners and the relative shortage of eligible men, on the one hand, and the fact that kinswomen are expected to maintain a state of mutual courtesy by never sleeping with each other's former sexual partners, on the other. When Fauzaty, the younger sister of the woman against whom the threat of fatiha had been made, died in childbirth, Fauzat/s mother and siblings accused Amiaty and her mother of having held the fatiha. They had supposedly been seen entering the mosque for this purpose while on a visit to the village of S. The accusation of having made the dua (which was probably false, although

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believed by the accusers) not only reflected the tensions prevailing between the two groups but served to considerably increase them. The two sisters and their respective offspring stopped visiting one another for a period of about three years, despite the fact that they were close neighbours. The feelings of hurt and suspicion engendered on both sides doubtless lasted far longer.

The duas sometimes work well. In one incident an old woman lost her pension money on the path. After three days of searching, her son threatened afatiha. The very next morning she found the money hanging in her doorway. A case that I observed myself had a somewhat different and perhaps more typical development. A large bunch of bananas were suddenly missing from Kolo Husein's fields. Someone whispered to Kolo that he had seen the culprit on the path, but, beyond saying that it was a fellow villager, he refused to reveal the identity. Feeling that he had been wronged, and in some need of his bananas, Kolo issued a complaint to the village mediator. That Friday, before the men had a chance to leave the mosque after the midday sermon, the mediator made an announcement asking that the bananas be returned, no questions asked and anonymously, if so desired, to Kolo's house. When nothing came of this, it was announced in the mosque the following week that afatiha would be said shortly. The threat again bore no fruit (to make a bad pun), but instead of holding a fatiha, Kolo let the matter drop. He told me that the bananas simply were not worth a life or any of the other torments the dua could have produced. The procedure had provided an established course of action and had given time for his anger to cool. By that time, too, other bananas had presumably ripened in his fields.

In all of these cases we have seen the moral principle on which the

dua is based: it seeks out and punishes the guilty party. The dua is pre¬ ventative or retributive, it cannot be randomly aggressive. Once put into motion at human request, divine justice is certain to work, certain to reach the guilty party. It cannot, in the order of things, be effective against an innocent party. It is thus, in itself, a perfectly respectable means of gaining justice. However, it has another side as well. Punitive justice, meted out during life rather than after death, is not automatic: it must be set into motion by the deliberate acts of human beings. Here there is room for human judgment and human accountability. If the divine power is swift, strong, and sure, it is not very subtle. It works according to a simple binary code: guilty as accused/not guilty as ac-

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cused. But it is up to the persons calling divine power into play to determine the degree of retribution, to make the punishment fit the crime. At the very least, they ought to give plenty of public warning that they are about to say a dua in order to give the guilty party time to make amends. The sponsors of the dua must use their discrimination and judgment and it is they who are ultimately morally responsible and who will pay for their own overzealousness in the afterlife. God will give you whatever you ask for, but you must accept responsibility for having initiated the request. This is why it is said that Rubia, who asked to have a man killed for the trivial act of stealing a chicken, will surely himself be tried and punished after his death (as he already has been in the 'court of public opinion' during his life).'"^ This is also why Kolo Husein did not say his fatiha and why people often prefer to suffer the attacks from someone whom they suspect is a close kinsman rather than to retaliate. When in 1985 a woman threatened a fatiha against her sister's son who, she be¬ lieved, had accused her of sorcery, people were extremely disturbed. 'Where would such a fatiha go?' they asked. A member of another branch of the family argued that to do a fatiha to kill a child or grand¬ child (even when classificatory, as in this case), that is, against someone to whom one is ideally nurturant and protective, would be viewed by people as itself an act of sorcery (voriky). Whatever the means of access to knowledge or power, moral judgments are continually being made by everyone. One particularly frightening thing about the dua is that once divine punishment has been set in motion, it is virtually impossible to stop it. Some people suggest that there is a prayer one can utter to offset a badri, to plead for pardon, in which you have to make a larger swadaka than that offered by the utterer of the original dua (e.g., if they killed a chicken, you kill a goat). Or you might go to the utterer of the dua and beg for their radi (forgiveness, goodwill). But it is more common to hear people argue that the dua is irrevocable. If the dua has been uttered with the request to give someone a lingering, incurable illness, that person cannot be cured. The victim of the dua, unlike the victim of sorcery, is helpless.^® Moreover, and more saliently, if the dua is directed to a spe¬ cific individual who was not at fault, it rebounds onto the perpetrator, who then takes the place of the victim. The same is true if no one was at fault. When an old woman decided that rice had been stolen from her granary, she

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had a fatiha said to identify and punish the thief. Shortly thereafter, she herself died. Since no one had stolen any of her rice, the dua turned back on her. She had killed herself, people said, illustrating that one should not resort to a dua too quickly.

The duas thus form a means that is inherently and severely moral and extremely powerful. The same texts that are used to cut down a guilty man also form the core of village and family rituals of blessing. It is the ends to which people put the duas, not the duas themselves, that are open to question, acceptable or unacceptable. Humans must supply the content to the vehicle, whether to bless or curse, in what manner, and to what degree. People bear responsibility for their requests and a divine record is kept. Payment for the blemishes on one's record is generally postponed to the next world. One cannot extrapolate from a person's negative life experiences the degree of affection in which God holds him. If misfortune occurs, the fault is either directly one's own or that of one's fellows, or the illness is simply a product of the general order of things, in which case it may be said to come from God {bold andranahary), but this carries no implication of blame or punishment. God is not to be faulted for your misfortune, nor does your misfortune imply anything about God's feelings towards you. God is the ultimate source of all misfortune, but almost never the personally motivated direct unmediated source. (An exception might be something like a collective misfortune. After the devastation of a cyclone, some people argued that God was punishing the community.) In other words, attributing an event to God and at¬ tempting to allocate responsibility or fault do not belong in the same discourse. At the same time, however, people also argue that a person who is responsible for the misfortune suffered by his fellows does not have the power to create, terminate, or justify the misfortune since this lies ulti¬ mately with God. A man can only temper the form his fellow's misfor¬ tune takes or revise its scheduling. And although death is sometimes attributed to a dua or to sorcery, it is also said that no one dies until his or her days are up. Although it is rarely mentioned, the same holds true for good fortune. As one of the local fundis said, a shijabu can't protect people from death or illness. People are simply making a request to God; if they get what they ask for, fine; if they don't, that's that (Naka

mahazu, tsara; naka tsy mahazu, bas). Paradoxically, in the end, duas are not seen as having direct and nec-

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essary consequences on their objects but only on those who sponsor or utter them. The duas are an expression of intentionality, which God rec¬ ognizes and for which the sponsor bears responsibility. God is not per¬ suaded or forced by the duas - how could God be subject to human in¬ fluence? - but God recognizes what people ask for and holds them accountable for it. The duas can only carry out God's will; what they do for humans is to implicate them in its workings. To say or sponsor a dua - any dua - is to commit it. In the same sense that one can commit a crime or a good deed, so one commits a blessing or a sanctification, a shijabu, fatiha, or hadri. This is why and how the duas are effective. This is also to say that people cannot evade the conse¬ quences of their acts. The vehicles of morality work both ways. We began this chapter with a sense of the fragile boundaries between Islam and the spirit world, but we have ended with an overiding sense of the depth and penetration of Islam into the pores of society. Islamic performance is fundamental to everyone's experience of being a moral person, of acting as a kinsman and a community member, of looking out for oneself and others, of bearing responsibihty for one's acts. We have observed a number of significant facts about the repertoire in Mayotte. The various traditions or disciplines of knowledge can make use of similar means - supplicative prayers, knowledgeable or powerful intermediaries, material offerings, the enunciation of sacred texts - for broadly similar ends. Those means that are essentially Islamic have their greatest efficacy when associated with the fundis of 'Him fakihi, yet, at the same time, they are available to all members of society and have relevance to all. Hence they are made use of both by ordinary individuals and by the practitioners of other disciplines. Anyone can pray in Kibushy, make offerings, or call in neighbours, kinsmen, or fundis to recite duas on their behalf. Any living male with sufficient knowledge can act as a direct intermediary with God, as can deceased kin, fundis of either sex, and spirits. Women can act as intermediaries in various ways other than the public recitation of dua, for example, by supplicating God in Kibushy, by calling upon the assistance of spirits, by cooking good food, or by taking on a male role when they are possessed by a male spirit. And from the perspective of the path, the means and material offered by the various disciplines are largely interchangeable with one another and the theories behind them are irrelevant; the important thing is to get the job done. If the lines between the traditions are relatively open, we can also see

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the dominance of Islam. The other traditions are Islamicized: their prac¬ tice always includes invocation of God. And, while practitioners of these disciplines incorporate Islamic elements, the reverse is not necessarily the case. Islam incorporates local social practices, but 'Him fakihi remains relatively pure of references to spirits and stars. There is a hierarchy among the disciplines, 'Him ny lulu being the most eclectic, and 'Him fakihi the most exclusive. Persons on the path and possession curers can amalgamate techniques in bricolage fashion,^’ although the degree to which they actually produce a satisfying synthesis is variable. But the Islamic/wndz's do not have this option to anywhere near the same degree. Persons on the path also assume that the Islamic experts know more about duas than the average person and may know how to perform and direct them so that they are more effective. Thus the fundis are re¬ spected and feared. It is sometimes intimated that they even know how to direct duas against the innocent. While it is felt that most of them are doubtless afraid of divine punishment and thus afraid to use the duas malevolently, nevertheless the suspicion remains. The dominance of Islam is most clearly visible in its identification with the moral order and with moral certainty. God's power is absolute, divine intervention indubitable, divine justice inevitable. By contrast, people readily express doubts concerning various aspects of cosmology or the practice of spirit mediums, challenging some of the means utilized by the experts in those disciplines, as well, often, as their motives. There is a certain degree of incommensurability between postulates of divine justice and omnipotence and the allocation of responsibility at the human level. Incommensurability is not the same as contradiction and the two sets of ideas can exist quite nicely together in practice. The incommensurability may even be necessary in the sense that there is no way to speak or think about God in specifically human terms; that would be bringing God down to the human level. Access to God is by means of the Word of God and this Word is not subject to human question. The incommensurability between the human and the divine is not simply what sets Islam apart from the other disciplines, but rather is internal to Islam. When speaking about human intentionality, Islamic ideas of causality fit with those of sorcery and spirit possession so that a logic of the allocation of responsibility is conceivable. This logic will continue to unfold as we progress.

5 Educating Citizens: The Reproduction of Textual Knowledge

Bismilla arahman arahim. In the Islamic world everything begins this way: a book, the Book, a prayer, a meal, a morning, a journey, a life. All human activity is modelled on the scriptures, the Qur'an, and is granted moral value by their utterance. In theory, I was told, an illegitimate child (mwana haram) is not simply one whose parents were not legally married (such legality being established, in part, also through the utter¬ ance of sacred text), but one whose parents did not utter the bismilla upon beginning the act of procreation. Conversation in Kibushy is lubricated with Arabic liturgical expressions, and the bismilla is exclaimed aloud or muttered under the breath numerous times a day, depending on the individual, from the moment of first waking to the beginning of every other demarcated act, however trivial. It is complemented by the phrase of closure, ‘Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alamin.' Pious utterances frame all mundane activities, encapsulating them in sacred order and investing them with morahty. From the very beginning of my study, the significance of Islamic textual knowledge for daily practice in Mayotte was apparent. As we saw in Chapter 1, when I first arrived in Mayotte and said that I wished to learn about local culture, people immediately interpreted this to mean the basic textual material of Islam. This is material that everyone learns. It is the expressly transmitted form of knowledge and it is also knowl¬ edge that is deemed essential for any meaningful participation in social life. Key phrases are recited to a baby at birth and again when the infant is carried to the mosque in a ceremony that marks the first leaving of the house and entry into society at the end of the postpartum period. Final prompting is given to a corpse after burial in order that the deceased may make the right utterance when questioned by the angel of death.

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The Islamic idiom is pervasive and very powerful, establishing order, direction, and meaning in social life. Islam may be said to have been hegemonic in the sense that the sacred quality of the central texts and the necessity or correctness of reciting them at critical moments were unquestioned. Limited referential aspects of the texts - concerning Al¬ lah, Muhammad, and the afterlife - provided the basis for ultimate reality. Islam encapsulated or explicitly devalued all other forms of thought and practice so that they needed to be legitimated by reference to Islam. While some people expressed disagreement with the paradigms or particular contents of spirit possession, divination, and sorcery ex¬ traction, no one could or would explicitly challenge or reject Islam. This chapter and the next continue to explore the role of Islamic texts and textual authority in Mayotte.’ They describe a fissure in the way Islam is constituted in Mayotte (and perhaps in other Islamic societies as well), a discrepancy between the manner in which authority is granted to the central texts of Islam and the manner in which it is granted to the fundis who reproduce and interpret these texts. To say that a society is Islamic is not enough to account for the relationship of Islam to social organization or power, for the manner in which Islam both constitutes order and is in turn continuously regranted the authority to do so. To go beyond the descriptive accounts of previous chapters we have to pursue a 'political economy of knowledge,' discovering the means by which authoritative knowledge is produced and reproduced. Within anthropology, 'political economy' and 'cultural' ('symbolic') approaches have until recently been construed as mutually exclusive. But the analysis I am proposing, rather than being opposed to a cultural interpretation, must take us to the very heart of culture because it is only in cultural terms that the nature of knowledge, its forms, authority, and substance, can be defined. The discussion that follows in the first half of this chapter is moderately technical and some readers may wish to skip it. At the same time, I need to say that we are mistaken if we privilege as 'sensitive' or 'musical' those accounts of 'other' religions that merely conform to a Western, Christian understanding of religious experience. An appreciation of Islam in Mayotte cannot be carried out through a lens of salvationism, of the agony of guilt and doubt or the joy of redemption. This would be, I think, as ethnocentric as a purely Marxist or Durkheimian analysis (with which, it could be said, it shares some cultural features). There is nothing in Islam similar to the way in which Christian sinners 'welcome' Christ directly into their individual hearts. Hence the absence of charismatic

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fervour in what follows ought not be taken prima facie as evidence of a lack of sympathy on my part. Islamic religious experience is mediated by language and it is on language that we must focus. While it is a truism to say that Islam is a text-based religion, anthro¬ pologists have only recently begun to devote attention to the obvious aspects (cf. Rappaport 1979) of this fact. Texts by themselves are silent; they become socially relevant through their enunciation, through citation, through acts of reading, reference, and interpretation. Therefore, we need to examine how texts are used and by whom, when recourse is made to textual authority, and what kinds of entaihnents such actions bring. Moreover, we need to understand the relationships between texts and the knowledge or meanings they are purported to provide. These relationships are a good deal less obvious; not only are questions of sense and reference different for the central Islamic texts than for those texts with which Western scholars deal on a daily basis,^ but they vary among texts within the Islamic corpus, among various kinds of readers, and between Islamic societies. In other words, we need to discover the local hermeneutics, 'the specific problems raised by the translation of the objective meaning of written language into the personal act of speaking ... [that is,] appropriation' (Ricoeur [1975] 1977: 320). Moreover, if the ascription of meaning or knowledge is a product of appropriation, it is a political act. Thus, the question of local knowledge returns to the 'obvious' issues of the last paragraph. The nature of texts and the knowledge to be drawn from them in any given historical context are shaped by a sociology or political economy of knowledge: how textual knowledge is reproduced or circulated; what the social factors are that mediate access to texts; who is able to read, and in what manner; who has the authority to represent what is written; and how challenges to such authority are manifested. In examining access to the means of knowledge production it may be useful to distinguish the constraints that are inherent in the particular cultural forms in which knowledge is articulated, stored, and transmitted (the 'forces of production') from the constraints stemming from the social relations through which knowledge is made available, that is, primarily the forms of training. Some Islamic knowledge is acquired informally, and some conveyed in ritual, but my sojourn in the Qur'anic school illustrates a central fact of Islam, that its divinely ordained model 'is available in writing ... equally and symmetrically available to all literate men [and women]' (Gellner 1981: 1). Hence we will proceed with a consideration of knowledge as text and then examine the trans¬ mission process.

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Gellner begins his major work on Islam by pointing out that, in con¬ trast to other religions: The rules of the faith are there for all, and not just or specially for a subclass of religious specialists - virtuosos. In principle, the Muslim, if endowed with pious learning, is self-sufficient or at any rate not dependent on other men, or conse¬ crated specialists. (If not learned, he is in a loose way dependent on those who are, which is very important.) (1981: 1)

That there is a potential contradiction or paradox here is implied by Gellner's rhetorical device of placing something 'very important' in pa¬ rentheses. We will go on to explore the paradox in the next chapter where we address the question of the authority of Islamic experts. For now the main point is that, given the pervasiveness and significance of the Islamic idiom, everyone needs access to Islamic knowledge in order to function in society. One of the goals of Islam is to make everyone a 'well-informed citizen.' While not everyone ends up taking this stance towards his or her religion, we will begin with the means by which people become religiously informed and the forces that constrain the process. In the following chapter we will examine Islam from the per¬ spective of the experts. It should be clear that we are concerned with a particular kind of production, namely reproduction, that is, with how existing knowledge is incorporated and transmitted by each generation in turn. The question of the genesis of new knowledge is not insignificant, especially for ar¬ guments concerning the degree of 'openness' or 'closure' of the system,^ but, in the first place, the ability to produce new knowledge depends on a certain grasp of the old, and, in the second, new knowledge repre¬ sents a relatively small proportion of the total volume of production. This situation is not altogether different from the production of material goods; a grain harvest is the reproduction of last year's seed, a tool or garment the reproduction of a particular model or recipe. Where knowledge differs from material goods is that consumption (at least in most systems; one could imagine alternatives) need never exhaust the supply. If scarcity is to be maintained, it must be managed entirely in the sphere of distribution. The Three 'R's': Reading, Writing, and Recitation The bulk of knowledge in both 'Him fakihi and 'Him dunia is encoded in texts and is not accessible except by means of these texts. However,

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Mayotte lay on the border between orality and literacy and there were many constraints to full literacy and hence to relatively open access to written knowledge. The first constraints to be examined lie in the texts themselves. First of all, the writing is Arabic, in a foreign language. Because there were few speakers of Arabic present in Mayotte (and, in any case, presumably the texts are written in an archaic form) it is impossible to learn the language through informal oral contact. Qur'anic education provides the means to recite texts, that is, to sound them out and repeat them, but the meaning must be acquired separately, well after recitation has been mastered, phrase by phrase and text by text. The acquisition of textual knowledge requires the presence of a teacher until the language has been absorbed well enough in this fashion so that new texts can be read without much assistance. Few villagers reach this level. Most people cannot 'read' Islamic texts in the sense of the term in which you are reading this; if so, then only very slowly and only texts with which they are familiar. 'Reading' knowledge of even a single text takes a long time and much perseverance to achieve. The difficulty in acquiring knowledge raises its value in a relative sense, but also, I suspect, in an absolute one. It adds to the mystique of what is learned, making it seem more special, more pro¬ found. The following thresholds of access to the texts (not necessarily suc¬ cessive) may be distinguished in the way people described their Islamic knowledge. Most necessary to learn are the daily prayers and verses accompanying ablution. A person who does not know such basic oral formulae might be denigrated as a 'bad person' (ulu raty). But a person who lacks familiarity with written texts is described in more neutral terms as someone who simply does not know how to recite or read imidzor). With regard to the sacred texts there is a difference between being able to midzor by following a written text and knowing how to recite a text by heart. Some people can chant very long passages, in¬ cluding the entire Qur'an, without consulting the written version. Vil¬ lagers also distinguish between being able to recite a text in private (whether by following the written version or not) from having the abil¬ ity, brought about by a combination of confidence and close familiarity with the text, to perform on public occasions. Most informants claim to know the Maulida Barzanji, but when this is recited at the beginning of a dance at which people from all over the island are participating, few would care to be called upon to take a turn. Those who perform in public gain the respect of their audience, not necessarily as fundis, but, to

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slightly twist the meaning of Schutz's term, as well-informed citizens. Knowledge of the less sacred texts, of the kiu, books that are not the direct word of God, can be distinguished according to whether it is gained by reading for oneself (usually under the guidance of a teacher) or merely second hand, that is, not word for word. Knowledge by hear¬ say is considered insufficient (though it is all most people can lay claim to): it is felt one cannot really know, and hence properly follow, the rules of Islamic practice recorded in a basic text like the Babu or Safina without having read it. This constriction on the oral circulation of knowledge, of course, lends support to the position of the fundis. The final level of achievement is the ability to read on one's own rather than simply studying a given text together with one's fundi. These various thresholds show that access to the texts is a matter of direction and degree. Many people strive to become 'knowledgeable citizens' and they achieve this goal in various ways. Tumbu could recite the Qur'an and Barzanji by heart and taught them to children. He was also comfortable with the hadri and various dua and took an active role in all the public and family rituals where such recitation was required. However, he had never studied kiu with a fundi. His daughter had studied the Babu and Safina and explained their contents to him despite the fact that he had already internalized most of them long ago through a combination of advice, instruction, and observation, and puts their rules into practice as a matter of course. Another man would not have been able to accept a turn with the badri booklet during a collective reading, but had begun to study kiu. Each was relatively 'well-informed' in his own domain, but felt constrained or even intimidated by his lack of knowledge in other domains. In addition to knowing what to do with texts, a person must have direct access to them. Copies of the Msahafu (Qur'an) are handy for recitation in the mosque and are also purchased for children once they have mastered the Kurassa, the small, paper-covered primer. These works were readily available in shops and from pedlars. The badri, Barzanji, and certain other texts could be purchased as well, though they were often hand-copied if suitable notebooks could be found. (One of the most frequent requests I received was for wide, thick, high-quality notebooks.) One person paid a fundi for a hand-copied version of the Maulida. She would have transcribed it herself, but the fundi refused to let his copy out of his possession. To study a text with a fundi, the student ought to bring along a pur¬ chased copy. The more advanced the text, the more difficult it is to

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acquire and the more expensive. Most books have been obtained via Anjouan or were ordered from firms on the East African coast, but recently fundis have been ordering books from the senior scholar who is funded by the government to guide the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Even he is hmited by what he can carry back. The senior fundi in Lombeni recently acquired in this manner a hardcover book of hadith (sayings of the Prophet), as well as four large volumes of commentary on the Qur'an, which cost 500 francs - a tremendous sum. He badly wanted to obtain a dictionary of classical Arabic, but could not find a source either on or off the island. Books are thus limited both in the sense that relatively few titles are known and that copies are often unavailable. A final con¬ straint on recitation and reading that many middle-aged and older people mentioned to me and that has undoubtedly played a role in the decHne of their activity, is poor eyesight. Only relatively senior fundis, commit¬ ted to their practice, had invested in eyeglasses. (They have become easier to acquire.) The vernacular is used to write letters, make lists, post notices, and keep accounts. Villagers read and write Kibushy with varying degrees of ease. Only those few who managed to avoid Qur'anic classes as children are completely illiterate in Kibushy. However, Malagasy is not easily transcribed into Arabic script. Consonant clusters in Kibushy are represented by a single Arabic letter. There does not appear to be a fully standardized orthography, and on the page, words and sentences are not distinguished by spacing or punctuation. These conventions, or the lack of them, produce considerable ambiguity, and even in Kibushy the act of reading is not completely straightforward. Only standard formulae are immediately recognizable and thus the contents of letters are often both highly repetitive and formulaic, containing far more salutations than news.^ There are no books in the vernacular that I know of, although many people keep notebooks in which they write various lists, medical recipes, and so on. Occasionally, especially among the Mahorais elite, one finds historical accounts kept in notebooks. No one in the village 'writes,' that is to say, creates, in Arabic. Arabic texts can only be copied. The central texts of 'Him fakihi, especially, of course, the Qur'an, are sacred. The Msahafu, the physical manuscript of the Qur'an, is treated with great care and not permitted to rest directly on the ground. The respect granted the material form indicates that the text is significant in and of itself, apart from its referential content. In 1975 it was hard for people to imagine books that did not manifest something of this quality.

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When I escaped to read a thriller, people reverently assumed that I was immersed in a work of profound import, and when 1 burned my paper garbage, they were aghast. No doubt I added to the deception by my own confused usage of the verb tnidzor. By 1985, when French school texts were common, the notion of a written manuscript had broadened. People recognized my reading matter as bouquins and they distin¬ guished secular reading (mikutwaly) from sacred study and recitation

(midzor). The concept of the sacred text presupposes a particular notion of 'reading.' The verb midzor, which has no easy English translation, means to recite or study sacred liturgy. The liturgy is far from being simply a system of signs on paper carrying meanings. For the most sacred texts signifiers and signified are one, and thus, in a sense, not 'writing' at all. 'Reading' is then merely the following of the written lines in order to produce the texts in sound - that is, recitation.® Each reading is actually a reproduction. This effect is heightened by the fact that most villagers do not understand Arabic, but in fact the Western concept of translation has no meaning here - the texts must be enunciated in their original dialect - and decoding is largely beside the point. And, if signifier is inextricably linked to signified, so is the sign itself tied to the world. What is written is what is true (sacred). Neither fiction nor nonfiction, texts are manifestations of things as they are. In fact, there is a sense in which the texts are more fundamental than the world of action and movement itself. Fate is that which has been written by God. As one fundi explained, when the pen {stylo or kalam) of God is used up, so will the earth be. The world is text. It is thus the act of dzoru (recitation of sacred texts) rather than the insight gained by means of or as a result of dzoru that is paramount. Dzoru is a part of all public ritual occasions and is also performed in¬ dividually and spontaneously. Specific texts and specific performers may be appropriate for specific occasions, but the utterance of the text is of greater consequence than what the text says. In other words, these text have no or very little referential, locutionary meaning;^ the illocutionary force is specified by the context of the performance - the kind of ritual being enacted - and is often described in Kibushy before or during the event. As we saw in the last chapter, illocutionary acts include blessings, oaths, protections, and sanctifications of the events that follow. Correct recitation creates changes in moral state.^ Beyond this, the meaning is always the power, certainty, truth, the reality of Islam itself, of which the recitation is an exemplification and

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an affirmation rather than a description. And thus a significant metamessage provided by the recitation is the indexical one, the creation (representation or re-presentation), identification, and acceptance of oneself as a Muslim. It is sufficient to utter the shahada (the profession of faith) to be a Muslim or, after death, to attain salvation.® The core of Is¬ lam is not a statement of 'belief but an act, largely through words, of submission.^ The analyses of Bloch (1989a) and Rappaport (1979), which demonstrate that commitment to and constraint by the order that is expressed in religious symbols, are intrinsic aspects of ritual performance, thus approximate the point of view made explicit in Islamic thought. Taken just by themselves for the moment, the most sacred texts pro¬ pose a closed, static (if vibrant) system of knowledge. They are not decomposed and recombined to produce new meanings but only to form new orders of recitation. Thus, in the common domestic shijabu ritual the choice of verses (duas) to be recited is up to the orators, but the illocutionary force of the combination is always the same: a blessing for those upon whose heads the words fall. More specific requests are uttered in the vernacular. Speech act theory also allows us to approach the ostensibly 'magical' use of texts in a new light (cf. Ahern 1979; Brown 1985; Tambiah 1973). Wearing Qur'anic verses and astrological symbols sewn into amulets and tied around the neck or waist forms a kind of continuous 'illocutionary' act, though the purification or protection is accomplished through a statement in writing rather than in speech. The amulets pro¬ vide an ongoing declaration of commitment, a fusion of statement and state. There is an intrinsic linkage here between the indexical and the symbolic components of the message (Rappaport 1979). Likewise, singa, the common medicine in which a verse from the Qur'an is written on a white plate, rinsed off, and then swallowed, is a direct way of infusing the body with the sacred liturgy, yet another kind of embodiment of the text and a textualization, hence sanctification, of the body.’° What applies to the most sacred material continues to have a certain relevance for secondary texts - commentaries on the Qur'an, instruction manuals, medical works, and the like. Even here, signifiers and signifieds are less distinct than they are in contemporary European writing. Texts remain true, providing guides to correct action, certain knowledge of the world. These texts make distinctions and identifications, they have locutionary force. But paradoxically, the more referentially 'open' the texts themselves, the more they purport to describe the world, to provide instruction or advice, the less accessible they are to the people of

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Mayotte.” These texts need to be understood; some form of decoding is essential. For the information contained in a text to be retained by the reader who cannot interpret readily for himself, as most cannot, the text must be recited, often phrase by phrase, together with the translation, in a repetitive manner that is similar (except for the translation) to the manner in which the sacred texts are recited. Translation is a clumsy and laborious process, especially because it is usually conducted by means of a third language, Shimaore. Most masters of texts in Mayotte have learned to translate phrase by phrase from Arabic into Shimaore. The phrases of the two languages are linked together in patterns of recitation. Further translation into Kibushy remains implicit. Native Kibushy speakers who learned and understood the Shimaore version of a text often claimed to be unable to omit the Shimaore and found it extremely difficult to make the final step into Kibushy on their own. It is not clear to me whether this is because they felt they lacked the authority to do so and were concerned that the Kibushy be perfectly faithful to the original or because they found it hard to conceptualize the knowledge in another language, albeit their own. Translation from a foreign language is not the only issue in the process of decoding. Rather, as the discussion in Mitchell makes clear (1988: 128-60), reading is also problematic for speakers of Arabic. Since writ¬ ten Arabic does not recognize vowels, and since strings of consonants carry various potential meanings (albeit related ones), depending on how they are enunciated, a text 'must be recited aloud in order to mean' (1988: 151). Moreover, the ambiguity can only be overcome with an authoritative chain of recitations descending from the original author. The verb midzor - to study, to recite, perhaps at heart, to repeat - thus presupposes a known, fixed text. Although the students of a text often approach it with tremendous interest, the plaisirs du texte are not prima¬ rily ones of discovery of new ideas for beginners. But of course, if the texts themselves do not fulfil the functions of breaking down or open¬ ing up, of challenging the assumptions of their readers, it is precisely because they possess power of the opposite sort - the power of certainty (cf. Rappaport 1979). Even when at times the referential contents of secondary texts comprehended by scholars are in apparent contradiction to one other, the texts cannot be disputed. The scholars or their inter¬ pretations may be at fault, but the texts themselves, substantial in their written medium, concrete in the sounds of their utterance, exist un¬ changing and unchallengeable. The texts are the manifestations of an order to which their recitation entails acts of submission.

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If we have begun to see something of the power of texts over their readers, it is time to return to the question of the power of readers over nonreaders, more specifically, the social relations of the reproduction of knowledge. What constraints are placed upon those with the will to learn? How do the masters of the texts regulate access to their domain?

The Transmission of Knowledge and Authority Everyone in Mayotte begins the path of Islamic education, but few reach the stage where the unqualified attribution of fundi can be ap¬ plied to them. In the 1970s, the villages in which I worked had several Qur'anic schools that met early mornings and late afternoons daily. Attendance and attention varied, but every child had the opportunity to learn Qur'anic script and to recite the basic texts. However, iffundis are made and not born, the process begins quite early. The histories of those people who had studied beyond the primary level show the inter¬ vention of several factors. Many of them had parents who were also learned or interested in learning. Most fundis can recount how, while still young children, they were sent away from home for their basic Qur'anic education. They were sent away for two reasons. First and foremost, it was believed that a child, especially a stubborn one, must be forced to learn. Threats and punishment are significant tools; suffering is a com¬ mon experience ruefully acknowledged by adults. In a distant village the fundi would be less likely to succumb to compassion, the children less able to escape their lessons. The second reason for sending children away was that other villages had fundis of greater reputation and more advanced learning than were to be found in Lombeni. The most re¬ nowned and knowledgeable fundis of the island have generally come from elite families with the resources and networks to send their sons to larger centres of learning outside Mayotte. The children suffered while living in a strange village, often at the home of a fundi who was not even distant kin. They have memories, possibly exaggerated, of not enough food, long hours of physical labour, and harsh punishment. In order to survive, they studied hard and many of them proved their parents' theories correct: they learned a lot. Some of them began to study kiu, the works that explain the principles and rules of Islam and that must be translated as they are read. In contrast to the fundis, most members of Lombeni have only begun the study of kiu, if at all, in adulthood, in their own village, and on a relatively sporadic and unsystematic basis.

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Most village children were not sent away, nor did all those who were sent away become fundis. I put the discussion in the past tense because the advent of French schools has changed the entire pattern. Over the last few years a child was more likely to be sent away due to the better opportunities for education in the French system. With the recent es¬ tablishment of primary schools in Lombeni itself, French education has come to take precedence over Islamic, limiting the duration and intensity of the latter and undoubtedly challenging the relationship of reader to text. A major constraint on becoming a fundi is gender. While girls figure among those who were sent away to study and many women are more learned than a good number of their male counterparts, women receive little incentive towards advanced training. Women are usually married, taking care of children, and tied to the household long before the men who become fundis have withdrawn most of their attention away from study towards supporting a household. More significantly, women (and their parents who may be supporting them), know that even with ad¬ vanced training they will be limited in their practice. Unlike male fundis, they cannot be called upon to preside at family or community rituals or acquire the food, small sums of cash, and prestige earned thereby. For women, study (except of the 'women's text', the maulida shengy, which is sung) must remain relatively private in its consequences. Beyond this, access to Islamic learning is quite open. Apart from the constraints of time, fatigue, and access to teachers (limitations that are more or less equivalent for all members of the community), anyone can study, taking up wherever he or she left off, individually, or, during the spurts of popular enthusiasm for study, as part of a group. Knowledge is for everyone and there is a strong ethic that fundis ought to teach, demonstrate, and point out error wherever they can. A fundi's status is legitimated precisely as he performs these acts freely and openly, spon¬ taneously providing interpretations and corrections, looking up answers (to demonstrate their truth) for people who come with questions of conduct, and teaching the texts that he knows. Fundis provide all this information free of charge, although a regular adult student should contribute about a half-day's work per week on the fundi's behalf. Po¬ tential students or clients are thus not held back by expense, nor can a fundi be explicitly selective about whom he chooses to instruct or force a student (other than those children living directly under his charge) to study against his will or even to show up regularly. In fact, some people criticized fundis for not being open enough. One

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old man complained that instead of answering your questions in a straightforward manner, the fundis say 'come and study with me if you want to know things.' The old man had the practical advice that if you want the direct answer to a question, it is better to ask a young fundi who will be eager to show off his knowledge. Everyone shows respect to a fundi and, of course, those who are actu¬ ally studying with him or who have done so in the past, show him the most respect of all. But while the mwanafundis are expected to show loyalty to their fundi, the relationship is not a highly controlled one. We shall observe in the next chapter the weight placed on loyalty in this relationship and the conflicts that sometimes arise. Suffice it to say that the mwanafundi has few obligations and the fundi little power to assert them. Islamic knowledge is not perceived as one man's possession, and a student can seek it wherever he likes. As Gilsenan remarks, the process of study is one 'that depersonalizes and objectifies both the learning itself and the position of the learned in general' (1982: 32). Ideally, Islamic knowledge circulates freely and becomes ever more widely dis¬ persed within the community. Paradoxically, it is the fundis themselves, rather than members of the general public, who, after years of study with more advanced fundis of their own, are more tightly locked into chains of dependent relationships. But even a relatively important fundi can respectfully distance himself from the man who has supervised him for a number of years and apply to a more congenial figure. These shifts are made easier by the fact that all parties are likely to be living in different villages so that day-to-day contact among them, and hence the risk of explicit affront, is shght. Since it is the obligation of everyone not just to acquire Islamic knowledge but to transmit it,’^ and since Islamic knowledge is supposed to be freely given, anyone may attempt to impart bits of it in informal settings. Once while I was chatting with a small group of adults down on the beach, we were joined by a stranger. This man, a young itinerant salesman of basic Islamic texts, proceeded to give my friends a short moralistic lecture on eschatology. After he left, I remarked that I thought he had been somewhat patronizing; what he had said was well known to everyone. To my astonishment, the others defended him, emphasizing that it is always good to state what one knows and to attempt to inform others. Sometimes these attempts turn into what I call 'dramas of competence' in which people provide unasked for advice or attempt to show one another up. There was a good deal of this when the Friday mosque

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service was first introduced in Lombeni. In one incident an unsatisfied villager named Mahamuda pushed aside the man making the call to prayer because he thought it was being performed incorrectly. People were shocked at this and sorry for the man who had been shown up; they said Mahamuda should have taken the other aside and instructed him quietly. 'Mahamuda cannot stand to see things done incorrectly in the village, but what he forgets,' said the village fu7idi, Saidu Bwana, 'is that no one here knows all the rules of Islam and Mahamuda does not know more than any of the others.' On another occasion, a visiting and very knowledgeable son of the village observed women on the street next to the mosque extend their hands in supplication while the Friday sermon was in progress. He denounced them, saying they should enter the mosque and pray prop¬ erly. 'Prayer is the work [asa] of God [Ndranahary] and you will receive your salary [fin de mois] for it.' This successful entrepreneur and former paymaster on one of the plantations then compared the women to people hanging around someone receiving his salary and asking for part of it. This kind of spontaneous public lecturing is not generally practised by the senior fundis, but it occurs most readily along lines that reinforce existing inequality, as in this case. There is little one can say in response to it, and it leaves many villagers feeling somewhat inadequate. If knowledgeable men can challenge the community, the reverse is also true. Minor fundis are particularly vulnerable to slights to their prestige, whether imagined or real. This was evident during the perfor¬ mance of the annual Maulida in Lombeni Kely in 1975 when the practice of a fundi was brought under review. As in previous years, the men from Lombeni Be arrived shortly after midday to recite the Maulida in the mosque of Lombeni Kely. According to custom [see Chapter 4], the Maulida, which is recited for the health and prosperity of the host village, is initiated by a host, but then the bulk of the recitation is to be performed by the guests. The book is placed on a cushion and the assembled men take turns reading passages while the rest of the company recites the refrain. The recitation was started by Hussein, a senior man of Lombeni Kely, who then left, as was appropriate. But partway through, a second man of Lombeni Kely, Hamisy, entered, read a passage, and then left again. Hamisy was the fundi of the Maulida in Lombeni Kely. His father, long de¬ ceased, had been the fundi in the past and was greatly respected. But in the past, fundis earned more respect generally and people worked their fields. Now Hamisy nursed grievances, feeling that he did not receive as much respect as he

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deserved. While admitting that there could be more than one fundi, he told me that he was the fundi in Lombeni, that he had been for years and years, and that now people were trying to push him out. He was correct that the two villages, while in agreement about little else, both wanted to remove him. However, they approached the subject cautiously. I would say that they respected his position, even though they did not respect the man in it. Many people know how to read the Maulida and Hussein had recently also been made a fundi of the Maulida for Lombeni Kely. This had happened quite by accident. The men were sitting in the mosque during a Maulida held in Lombeni Be a few years earlier (the roles of the two villages being reversed in this case), but Hamisy was off somewhere else. Athman Zaidani, an elder of Lombeni Kely, said impatiently, 'Doesn't anyone else but Hamisy know the

Maulida around here?' And so Hussein stepped forward. But Hussein was con¬ tent to take a secondary role to Hamisy. When Lombeni Kely planned the 1975

Maulida, the elders instructed Hamisy to officially invite Lombeni Be. Hamisy kept procrastinating, so the elders finally wrote the letter themselves and sent Hussein to deliver it. Hamisy had told the elders of Lombeni Be that if a letter came that was not signed by him, they were to ignore it, but when they showed him the letter, he lost his nerve and told them to come anyway (which they would have in any case). The members of Lombeni Kely soon heard the story and were very angry with Hamisy for thinking of sabotaging the Maulida. He in turn was angry that his name had not been first on the letter. On the day of the Maulida Hamisy announced in a huff that he would not start it off. He only entered the mosque after Hussein had left it, read a short passage, and then issued a complaint. The elders of Lombeni Kely decided to hold a hearing (malu) that evening and invited the elders of Lombeni Be, some of whom stayed on after the festive meal for that purpose. About a dozen older men were present as Hamisy was invited to explain his case and air his griev¬ ances. He told a long rambling story that received little sympathy. While people backed up some of the details, they felt he had conveniently forgotten other parts and was generally twisting matters in his own favour. There was an air of amusement. Only Athman, the oldest member of the village, sat silent with eyes downcast, quite unlike his normal jovial and verbose self. Later, when I asked him why, he replied that it was impossible to hold a serious discussion with someone who was so stupid. In fact, he was torn between his impatience towards Hamisy and his embarrassment, since Hamisy, though nearly his own age, was his brother's son. The elders were not willing to chastise Hamisy directly; he was the fundi and they were reluctant to insult him to his face. They felt the major problems lay in Hamisy's age, his regular absence from the village, and his inability to delegate

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authority. Whenever he did so, he became resentful and worked his hardest to counter his own instructions. The elders began by saying politely, 'You have taken care of us for many years ...' but they went on to insist that he recognize an additional fundi. Under some pressure, he named Hussein. The elders con¬ cluded that in future, if they saw Hamisy they would consult him, but that in his absence they would consult Hussein. Hussein was to inform Hamisy and Hamisy was not to disrupt things. The hearing ended with Hamisy still feeling insulted and the elders feeling he had no good reason to be, but happy that they had confirmed future procedures.

The case nicely shows the balance of powers between the commu¬ nity, represented by the elders, and the fundis of this sort. While office holding is not characteristic of Islam in general, and certainly not of the senior fundis of 'Him fakihi to be described in the next chapter, the inci¬ dent also shows the distinction the community makes here between the man and the office. The offices of the fundis of the Maulida, the daira, and mulidi (see below) are handed out by the village (tanana) and can be rescinded by them. This was the second major incident with Hamisy and some villagers thought that with the next one he would be removed. Learning as the Embodiment of Knowledge While the objectified nature of Islamic knowledge is patent, it would be misleading and untrue to the experience of the villagers to leave our analysis here. Islamic knowledge is text-based, but it is also memorized and recited. These activities engage the body; recitation is rhythmic, breathing is regulated, and pleasure is gained from the precise articula¬ tion and resonant sound of the syllables as they emerge from the mouth. The untranslatability of the Qur'an is not due simply to the fact that the signifiers are the signified, but also that they are linked together in beautiful, melifluous passages. At the heart of every sacred Islamic text are the many names of God, Allah, the compassionate and the merciful. In the right circumstances the utterance of these names is not a mechanical act but a means of imbuing the body with the numinous qualities of the holy. This union of word and body may be seen as an embodiment of knowledge and also as a disembodiment of self into knowledge. In either case, it forms a radical transcending of the objectivist paradigm in which individuals 'possess' knowledge, in which there is a clear separation between the knower and the known.

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and in which individuals can be alienated from their possessions. At the end of my first stay in the village, I wanted to hold a party as a way of reciprocating my hosts, showing my thanks, and saying goodbye. When I announced my plans, I was immediately disabused of my ideas for entertainment. A feast was an excellent idea, 1 was told, but it must be in the form of an asa, an Islamic religious performance. I agreed to hold a daira, and then watched as it was organized for me. My position only really came home to me at the performance. Night had fallen, a sheep was found at the last minute, paid more for than what it was worth, slaughtered, and butchered. I seated myself on the mats where the preliminary recitation was to take place, relieved and expectant, musing about my privilege to have been permitted to enter so fully into the lives of others, and at the same time proud of having produced such a large and culturally appropriate asa for the community. Tonight I would sit with the performers rather than the audience. I looked forward to the dance and wondered how fully I would join in, whether I too would get so caught up in the rhythms as to enter the collective state of ecstasy. Incense was lit, the manuscript of the Barzanji placed on a cushion, and the chanting began. Outsider, insider; observer, participant; patient, agent; friend ... I was wrenched abruptly from my reverie by a figure looming over me and a voice ordering me off the mats. The man was a good deal older than I was, his bearing straight, and his tone peremptory. He was dressed like a fundi and acted like one. Astonishingly, he was someone I had never seen before. This dance is for Muslims only,' he said. Who the hell did he think he was ordering me away from my own asa? And what rights did he have? He hadn't even been invited. 'If you want to join us, you have to dress properly. Go and put on a kanzu be [long gown] and a kufia [hat].' I looked around. It was true that everyone else looked clean and relaxed in crisp cotton gowns and embroidered hats. I was dressed in my usual uniform: T-shirt, tennis shoes, and very dusty trousers. My dirty green army bag with its notebook and flashlight was hanging over my shoulder. I had been in the field for over a year, and I looked it. I backed off, jolted, angry, and determined to find out who the inter¬ loper was and how he'd got there. I went up to the house of the people who were acting as my sponsors. They had just finished counting the pastries that would be served during the night and were relaxing. The

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glow from the kerosene lamp fell on their contented faces. 'Everything is going fine/ they said. 'No it's not/ I began, fighting off tears of humiliation. My friends were sympathetic but unperturbed. The fundi had lacked courtesy, they agreed, but it was true one had to dress properly for sacred performances. He had not been specifically invited, but anyone who hears of an Islamic performance has the right to attend. All comers are welcome, and the more participants, the better the dance. Moreover, he was well known as a fundi of the daira and had the right to take charge. Being the sponsors of the event did not give us the right to run the show; we must accept the authority of the fundis. They suggested I go home for my hat and offered to lend me a gown. There are several lessons to be found here, although at the time, already in transition from attempting to be the ideal egoless ethnographer towards the doctoral dissertation-writing authority on Mayotte, I was not particularly willing to discover them. One lesson is that, rather than my having simply and objectively learned local 'culture,' what had happened over the course of my stay was that the villagers and I had come to a sort of mutual accommodation, creating a new kind of 'dialect' with which each of us had become comfortable. No one commented on my dress for months; for my part, I never overcame the sense of feeling slightly ridiculous in a gown. It required the presence of a powerful stranger to disabuse me of the assumption that I had simply assimilated local knowledge, and perhaps equally, to disabuse the villagers of the idea that I had become a good Muslim. More to the point here, the chastisement showed that my under¬ standing of Islamic knowledge - of what Islamic knowledge was for them - was flawed. With the bias of a Westerner and an intellectual, I had assumed that I could acquire knowledge of Islam in the abstract and that practice was somehow secondary, to be indulged or not on a whim. But Islamic knowledge and its reproduction in education and performance are far more concrete and immediate. I had also assumed that knowledge was somehow objective, that I could pick it up and put it in my notebook or into the pockets of my pants (which, experience was showing, were all highly invested components of my practice). But Islamic knowledge is not subject to the dictates of possessive individu¬ alism. Muslims do not 'consume' their religion; if anything, it consumes them. Although I have emphasized the objectified quality of Islamic knowl¬ edge throughout this book, it is a mistake not to recognize that its

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acquisition is also embodied. Islamic knowledge exists not only in the publicly accessible forms of written texts, but in the bodily practices of individuals, in their dress, their comportment, their propriety, in their breath, their sweat, and their digestion. To 'know' Islam is to practise it. To 'read' a text is to perform it; such performance makes use not only of the organs of speech, but of the whole body. Dress, posture, gesture, and movement all come into play. Islamic knowledge is thus lived knowledge and in the end cannot be separated from other life processes. The performance of the shijabu ritual is one in which the force of the recitation is transferred via the breath of the performers onto the subjects who are to be blessed. The performers also partake of food; the bodily satisfaction brought by the proffered meal in turn enhances the efficacy of the recitation. Islam is incorporated not only in the posture of prayers and patterns of ritual intonation but in the intimacies of daily life. A Muslim follows codes of politeness, food, dress, posture, and cleanliness, along daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms. When I confronted people about why they infrequently attended the mosque, the reply was never igno¬ rance or disbelief, and rarely indifference. Most often they said that they had no clean clothes to wear.’^ Not only do Muslims perform ab¬ lutions in a highly formalized sequence before each period of prayer, but they eat, urinate, expostulate, and make love in an Islamic manner. Islamic knowledge is etched into the forms of spontaneous and regular behaviour. Learning makes use of the whole body, the physical and material relation of pupil to teacher as much as the intellectual one. The young pupil learns to recite the morning lesson on an empty stomach while the teacher prepares her own breakfast, and later how to fast during the month of Ramadan and how to break the daily fast with the special evening foods and prayers. The pupil learns to obey the teacher and, in obeying and deferring, enacting and performing, to exemplify and per¬ sonify Islam. For Muslims, Islamic knowledge is not only present in the abstract as a realm for speculation or calculation but is also found in the concrete practices and holistic experiences of daily life. It is second - or rather, first - nature. Body and word are brought together most strikingly in the perfor¬ mances of Islamic music and dance such as the one I sponsored and that are a characteristic feature of Islam in Mayotte. The three most popular forms are the daira (literally, circle), the mulidi, and the maulida shengy. The latter, in which the majority of the performers are women.

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is a version of a text commonly recited in East Africa in honour of the Prophet's birth, whereas the former, performed by men, is based on recitations of the dhikr, 'the "remembrance" of God by the repetition of [God's] name and attributes ... co-ordinated, when recited in congrega¬ tion, with breathing techniques and physical movements' (Trimingham 1964; 96) and is associated with a particular Sufi order. The dhikr of the daira is regularly performed in the mosque after prayers by a small group of interested men and boys seated in a circle. Despite their different associations, the three types of performance are closely linked in function and intent. The mulidi, performed by men, is associated with a Sufi order, yet contains the story of the Prophet. In fact, both of the Sufi performances are preceded by the recitation of the Maulida (Arabic mawlid; Swahili maulidi) of al-Barzanji (1690-1764), which is considered to be the most important, sacred part of the performances; and the maulida shengy, which incorporates drumming and dancing similar to the mulidi.^* The daira and mulidi are associated with the Sufi twarika {tariqa, 'or¬ ders') Shathuly {Shadhiliyya) and Qadiry (Qadiriyya), respectively. The orders were introduced to the Grande Comore during the nineteenth century and spread from there (Martin 1976). In both mainland East Africa (Martin 1976) and northern Madagascar (Fanony et Gueunier 1980) they have been used as an avenue for conversion and this may have been the case in Mayotte as well. As in Egypt, and to an even greater degree, 'what originated as an arduous ritual often associated with total dedication to the mystic life, became a popular means of arousing collective religious enthusiasm' (Gilsenan 1973: 157). The vil¬ lagers that I knew all learned how to perform the dances during child¬ hood. Boys began to specialize, according to their individual aesthetic tastes and the local availability of teachers, in either the fast-paced and arduous daira or the slower and more graceful mulidi, while girls learned the maulida shengy. Virtually all adults continue to perform the dances, greatly appreciate watching them, and have frequent opportunities to do both. Thus, while only a few people go on to become fundis, everyone has access to the basic knowledge of the dances. The fundis achieve their position primarily as a result of their sustained interest and musical skill; everyone else in the community may be considered 'well-informed' with regard to their aesthetic judgment. Some people are extremely devoted to one kind of dance in particular and will go out of their way to attend performances. They may enter states of ecstasy during a per-

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formance and they report dreams in which they encounter the medieval founder {tompin, shehu) of the order. Unlike many other parts of the Islamic world, the orders themselves maintain no control over their members, hold no meetings outside the public performances, do not expect particular fellowship among members or devotion to a single Sheikh, and are not distinguished, so far as 1 know, by particular politi¬ cal or theological doctrines. Thus the orders have little significance in themselves, their existence being largely realized in their musical per¬ formances, which are open to and supported by everyone. Adherence to one order as opposed to another has been a personal decision that has neither great social nor ideological significance from the point of view of the villagers. Many adults have affiliated (mikubain, mikubuayY^ with one or an¬ other of the orders. Most adults of Lombeni joined the Shathuly order some time in the early 1940s or thereabouts when a leading fundi came to the villager on a recruitment drive. The pledge is recited with knees pressed to those of the fundi and hands clasping his. Thus, as Gueunier (1988: 42) notes, there is a chain of physical human contact that goes back to the founder of the order, and, it is believed, beyond him to Muhammad himself. This parallels the chain of oral transmission of the texts we have already discussed. Initiates and students thus take up places in a progression that persists through time and space and reaches back to the sacred centre and beginning, to the human heart of Islam. Every Muslim embodies the history of his or her religion. Although the orders are not centrally organized in Mayotte, each has a rough hierarchy of male officials. At the lower tier is the village halifa (Arabic khalif), usually an elder, who is responsible for conducting local performances and training students. The execution of these tasks is usually carried out by skilled and more enthusiastic junior adepts. Invi¬ tations to performances between villages must be carried out and re¬ ceived by the official halifas and it is the halifas who are responsible for leading local dancers to performances in other villages. Each village has the authority to select or replace its halifa. On the occasion of an island¬ wide event, the village can introduce new specialists who thereby gain recognition and, if well respected, the title shehu. In Mayotte as a whole, one or two men are recognized as the leading shehus of each order as a result of the combination of several factors; their age, the order in which they became active, descent (whether Sharif or not), reputation, learning, performance skills, and enthusiasm. They take a central role in the largescale performances. In general, the success of a performance depends

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largely on the energy of the halifas, although other people also take turns conducting. The maulida shengy is not associated with a Sufi order, yet it too has its halifas. The leading shehus of the past are the foci of annual performances held in their home villages to which people come from all over the island. Performances of the daira, mulidi, and maulida shengy are intense, vivid, total experiences, syntheses of sacred words, music, and move¬ ment. In Trimingham's words, 'the governing motive of the collective dhikr is the attainment of spiritual effects through rhythmical physical actions (control of the breath and physical repetitions) accompanied and regulated by vocal and sometimes instrumental music which frees the physical effort from conscious thought' (Trimingham 1964: 97). The power inherent in the words themselves reinforces this effect. Perfor¬ mances draw on enduring sacred values, yet have a tremendous imme¬ diacy, bringing people an experience of the beauty and power of their own and the collective faith. The performances are exhilarating. As one participant put it, 'Performance is a means of gaining strength from God.' Writing of comparable Egyptian dances, Gilsenan (1973: 170) de¬ scribes the 'feeling of freedom, luxury, and expansiveness' they produce. The boundary between performers and spectators is a fluid one. Par¬ ticipants often reach a state of euphoria and occasionally some lose consciousness. While much more could be said about the aesthetic forms, organiza¬ tion, and meaning of the dances (see Lambek 1987), the main point here is that the embodiment of universal knowledge is also the dissolution, the disembodiment of the autonomous self. The key symbol of the dhikr is 'the word, God's own name for Himself, Allah; the dominant purpose is the "saturation" of the self in the Name of the All Powerful Being who sent down his revelation to the Prophet Muhammad' (Gilsenan 1973: 167). If the Name represents God, so too does the entire text of the Qur'an, which is God's direct message to humankind and not simply a representation of it. Qur'anic language is less an instrument of reason than a manifestation of being: to a significant degree the word of God is God. Therefore, to speak God's language is to make God manifest. In their attempt at 'absolute harmony of sound, breath, and movement' (Gilsenan 1973: 175), the performers attempt a dissolution of self into sacred language. Piety is ultimately submission to God as logos; com¬ munion is the attempt of the performers to become one with the words they utter. God, word, and world are brought together in performance and their indissoluble unity made manifest.

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Individuation through Learning: An Example of an Educated Citizen Although the Sufi performances have moments when the self is tran¬ scended, and although Islamic knowledge cannot be simply consumed and discarded in the Western sense, it is nonetheless true that the pur¬ suit of Islamic knowledge individuates. Knowledge is a source of per¬ sonal validation; its acquisition helps to define and substantiate a per¬ sonal, that is, a socially recognizable and psychologically meaningful identity (Obeyesekere 1981) that the social structure, with its lack of ascriptive status markers and prescriptive rules, has otherwise left dif¬ fuse. This is so even where the goal or outcome is not that of a profes¬ sional or an expert. I will close the chapter with the description of one of Dady Nabuko's daughters, whose smiling face I still see looking up at me over her mother's bedside in that scene from the first weeks of my stay (Chapter 3). My account, however, is taken mostly from a conversation we had a decade later, in 1985. Fatima Halidy is a woman whose particular self¬ construction by means of knowledge is unique. Yet self-construction through knowledge is itself typical for members of the community. In Fatima's case the knowledge she values and that she employs to give herself value is Islamic. Although she would not be recognized as one of the fundis of 'Him fakihi, like many members of the community she has acquired sufficient Islamic knowledge to gain a sense of control. Her story also demonstrates that Islam, while favouring men, is not devoid of fruitful opportunities for women. Together with the brief accounts of her husband Dakar and her daughter Zafy, begun in Chapter 3, Fatima's story also illustrates the diversity of knowledge that may be found within a single family. Fatima was in her late fifties in 1985. She is a devout Muslim and especially proud of all the verses (dua) she knows. Indeed she has sev¬ eral notebooks full of them and delights in pulling them out when I visit her. Throughout our conversation, she leafs through their pages, reciting particular passages and expecting me to write them down, so that I too will 'have' them. Most of them she knows by heart (kamo). The verses are all in Arabic, a language Fatima cannot speak and therefore does not translate, but she can attribute a particular subject or function to each verse. She uses certain verses to cure, holding the ailing body part of her patient and reciting the appropriate verse. Or, for example, when she receives a gift, she will secretly turn it into a sacrifice (swadaka) on the donor's part by uttering a verse silently to herself {amtin rohu).

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Most of her subjects are her children and grandchildren. Fatima feels strong and effective in this domain. At first she says she knows more than anyone else in the village, but when 1 ask her to compare herself to the recognized fundis of 'Him fakihi, she quickly qualifies this by referring to the latter as 'real' fundis. Perhaps her state¬ ment can be understood to mean that her practice is unique; the fundis do not do all the things with the verses that she does. In any case, her confidence is undiminished; she knows far more than her husband, she asserts. Bakar concurs and says with pride that he learns from her. She has also taught Zafy and some of her grandchildren what she knows. Although Fatima says her daughter will take over her practice when she dies, Fatima did not acquire her knowledge from her own mother. The strongest influence on Fatima appears to have been her father. She says that Halidy was a rich man and well known and that he bought her many books, the Msahafu (Qur'an), the Maulida, and others, but he was not her teacher. As a young girl Fatima was sent with her brother to another village to study. She learned easily, so the fundi liked her and never hit her. Much to her regret, her fundi died after a few years and she returned home without having begun to study more advanced works. However, study is a lifelong activity. 1 recalled that in 1975 during the nonagricultural season, Fatima and two of her daughters spent most mornings studying kiu with Saidu Bwana. Fatima learned the verses she uses now as an adult from an affine in Tsaratany over repeated visits to that village. Fatima's case shows the influence of family knowledge in the particular direction her interests took, but such influ¬ ence is by no means inevitable. Fatima's older sister and close associate, Mwana, says she never prays, knows neither the Qur'an nor the Maulida, and shows no interest in religious matters; one of Fatima's daughters is the same. Fatima was diagnosed with spirit possession about twenty years ago. But the patros fundi was a good friend of Bakar's and was also her fundi of the Maulida, which she was studying at the time. As a result, he provided her with a trick to get rid of her spirit. He invited a number of other women to a possession ritual on her behalf and after it was over, he told her privately that the spirit had shifted into three of them. He also instructed her to send food out to the rocky promontory, which the spirit then followed, and, finally, he taught her how to avoid going into trance at other possession ceremonies. Fatima stresses her good fortune at having had this particular and unusual fundi; but the story also shows how her own intentions kept her away from the spirits. Bakar does

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have a spirit; it doesn't rise directly in him, but it demands that he follow certain taboos ifady) and it needs to be propitiated from time to time in order not to make him or his descendants sick. It rose in his mother and his sisters and has begun to put in an appearance in one of his daughters (Chapter 10). Zafy distinguishes her mother's knowledge as audy ny dua (verse medicine), from her father's knowledge of audy ny vilang (pot [herbal] medicine). Unlike many other women, Fatima has remained faithfully married to her first husband. Dakar was at least twenty years older than Fatima, in 1985 still alert and vigorous and practising his medicine, and he also has remained faithful to her. Although one sees the recurrence of positive father-figures in Fatima's life story, Fatima and Dakar attribute the success of their marriage to other factors. Fatima says Dakar's previ¬ ous wives had cheated on him so when Dakar married her, he did medicine so that she would see no other man but him. He laughs with her in the telling of this story and agrees that this is what he did. The medicine worked even while he was away working for the French army in Madagascar during World War II. Much of what Fatima knows is straightforward and possessed by a number of other villagers as well. For example, she is an expert in the verses that need to be recited when a corpse is washed. In every village a handful of men and women ensure that they have this necessary skill. Fatima's daughter expressed her reasons for learning the verses in in¬ strumental terms: one needs to be able to wash one's kin so that people cannot speak badly about you in a quarrel and remind you that they washed the corpse of your mother. Dut Fatima's interest goes far beyond this. She describes the corpse washing in some detail, noting that there is a small verse for each stage, washing the ears, the nostrils, the finger¬ nails, etc. She also knows a verse to utter on the grave in order to wash away all wrongdoing so the deceased will not have cause to suffer in the afterlife. Fatima is distinguished by the intensity of her commitment to what she knows. She probably spends hours daily reciting. She likes to stay on in the mosque after the other women leave in order to recite her verses and she also prays extensively at home. She is a fundi of the Maulida. She has large notebooks with handwritten copies of the text, but she knows the whole thing by heart and can take the lead in public performances of the women's musical version (maulida shengy) without fear of forgetting the part. She estimates that about ten other women in the village also know the Maulida well enough to take the lead; neither

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of her parents were familiar with it. Maulidas generally begin in the middle of the night and last until dawn. Fatima says she is is always too excited to sleep beforehand and that 'perhaps 1 am infatuated with the

Maulida' {‘Maulida donku tiaku loatra'). Fatima sometimes sees visions when reciting during the night. Once during Ramadan she saw kiyama (the afterworld, the resurrection). She was praying late at night, reciting many verses in her house. She saw herself with her husband up in a high tower; looking down, they saw the sea and people under it. She woke up with a start and was sick for a week thereafter, so she gave up reciting. Her husband reported her experience to a senior fundi of 'Him fakihi in another village who said that she had seen pevoni (heaven) and should keep seeking visions (manamy). She speaks with great certainty about this. 'After uttering the special verses during the night, you sit or lie down and the angels come; it's frightening, but they speak to you and say they're your friends. They remind you of death because they are the angels who escort people to the afterworld.' But she likes to do it, she says, 'because 1 really want to know (mahay).' At the end of this conversation, which took place a few days before 1 left Mayotte in 1985, Fatima and her husband expressed regret that they hadn't studied with me. They asked me for some English vocabulary and wrote a list of animal names in their notebooks. The Value of Learning In the field of sacred knowledge it is the Muslim community as a whole that encourages, maintains, or controls access and that legitimates ac¬ quisition. By contrast, as we will see in subsequent chapters, in cosmol¬ ogy relations are more formalized and it is the senior fundis who take the main role in both these functions. When we turn to spirit possession, we will find yet another dominant factor. There the student herself (obviously in communication with both the community at large and with the fundis) plays the major role both in determining her access to knowledge and in legitimating it. Thus, although the three domains of knowledge articulate with one another in practice, the forces and social relations of production of each are quite different. Despite the rigours of learning texts, it is important to emphasize the tremendous devotion to Islamic learning found in Mayotte. In general there is a craving for accessible yet authoritative knowledge. If the strict rules and proscriptions of Islam lead its adherents to sometimes liken

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their religion to a prison (lajoly), nevertheless, the Qur'an is said to be water (ranu). It refreshes, comforts, and even cools the burning fires of hell. Before the mourners leave the graveside, actual water is poured over the earth and the dead person is reminded of the words with which to respond to the angel of death. Utterance of the shahada, the testimony of faith, can absolve one's sins. Knowledge of the phrase is the key to the gates of Paradise. Many people, like Fatima, are passion¬ ate about what they know. In Mayotte there has been a universal desire to approach closer to an ideal of Islamic society. Religious study is a means to this end in two ways. First, it increases the overall state of knowledge within the com¬ munity of the components of such an Islamic ideal. Second, study itself is known to be one such component. Because Mayotte is on the periph¬ ery of the Islamic world,^® study also forms a field of discourse about the relationship of Mayotte to that world and a means of situating oneself with regard to it, even while the content communicated in the study forms the major avenue of Islamic penetration. The study of Islamic doctrine is felt to increase morality: knowledge implies practice. It is for this reason, of course, that knowledge can also be dangerous to the community (as we will see in some detail in subse¬ quent chapters), but in the realm of the sacred scriptures and moral postulates of Islam, knowledge works largely to the good. There is a certain minimal amount of knowledge that is felt to be absolutely nec¬ essary to the proper conduct of social life, and this material is taught to all children in daily Qur'anic classes. Local adults who have not had such training or who have not retained it, are sometimes viewed as harmful to the community. Of course, there is no agreement as to what constitutes sufficient knowledge; the advancing frontier is an arena of competition and occasional conflict. The idealization of Islamic knowledge also has its limits. For example, villagers are highly selective concerning which aspects of Islamic family law they are willing to appropriate. Their acceptance of senior fundis is also ambivalent, as we will see in the next chapter. In particular, they mistrust the cadis, the Islamic judges who adjudicate legal cases. These men, who live in town, are mostly perceived not to understand local custom, to have local interests at heart, or to be above taking bribes. Marriages are duly registered in the cadi's name, but the village does its utmost to prevent local conflicts from reaching their courts. In general, the atmosphere is one of tolerance. As Tumbu put it, there are two parts to following God's law. One consists of praying, studying.

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participating in religious ceremonies, and observing the various restric¬ tions; the other consists of speaking and dealing well with people. If you ignore the latter, observance of the former will not help you. Even if you have made the hadj (pilgrimage to Mecca), you will end up in the fires of hell (mahamay) if you have treated others badly. However, if you do not observe the prayers and other rules yet you treat others well, you will go to heaven.’^ In Islamic terms, the study of religion both increases the student's understanding of what God desires of man and it fulfils one of these desires. By studying God's laws, the student is accepting God's greatness and accepting God as the source of knowledge. The act of study itself is a paradigm for the relationship between God and humankind via the metaphor source of knowledge is to the seeker of knowledge as God is to humankind. The more one has studied the primary texts, the laws, and the commentaries of religion, the greater one has demonstrated virtue. One is not only better acquainted with God's laws, but one is demonstrably better for having engaged in the activity of studying and reciting them. Religious study is itself the quintessential act of piety.

6

Islamic Experts: Practice and Power

We have determined that the distribution of Islamic textual knowledge is uneven. This chapter considers the people who know more texts of 'Him fakihi or have access to deeper sources of interpretation than do others. Does their greater familiarity with this 'discourse of authority' (Gilsenan 1982: 36) thereby give them power over others? I will argue that such power is neither immediate nor unproblematic. To be sure, the fundis are granted a great deal of respect, yet they are not to be identified with the texts they claim to know. Access to the sacred texts is in theory fairly open and therefore it is possible for new readers to claim to know more than the leading teachers, to devise or acquire fresh interpretations. Moreover, fundis can lose legitimacy through their own actions. Texts and their interpreters each lend authority to one another, but scholars are by no means infallible, inviolable, or always in agreement with one another. Hence the central conflict of Islamic au¬ thority in Mayotte: personal versus textual authority.^ We are interested here in those people who can lay some claim to be fundis of 'Him fakihi, sometimes referred to as 'Him mtrume (knowledge of/ about the Prophet), concerned with the reading and explication of the kabar ny Ndranahary, with God's affairs, with the matters of religion, dini. The masters of this tradition are considered to be the upholders of standards of morality and ritual behaviour in the community and are consulted on matters of morality or religious law. The fundis within the village have some familiarity with the content of the Qur'an and with Islamic history, mythology, and jurisprudence, none of which is by any means common knowledge in the community. It is they who understand the weekly sermons read aloud in the original Arabic in the mosque and who can provide explanations for why certain rules exist. The most

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learned fundis have a grounding in Islamic theology and may achieve an island-wide reputation. The Vulnerability of Authority Knowledge and the problems of knowing are viewed locally through the perspective provided by Islam. Nevertheless, while the problem of knowledge must be situated in the context of this world religion, at the same time, Islam itself has to be discussed in terms of the specifically Mahorais context of the problem, especially the local forms and means through which personal authority is constituted. Acquiring sacred knowledge is necessary for gaining and maintaining the authority of a fundi, but at the same time it is not sufficient.^ While the central texts are indisputable, fundis are judged by their practice as well as their knowledge. To begin with, the people of the Kibushy-speaking villages of Mayotte view their religious knowledge with some modesty. They believe the advent of Islamic learning here to be relatively recent and their knowl¬ edge of it not nearly as great as it might be. They expect to learn refine¬ ments of religious practice as their fundis acquire more learning and they do not suppose the knowledge of their fundis, especially the more jun¬ ior, local ones, to be complete. Thus, while they accept without doubt the major tenets (or those they view as such) of Islam, they remain in a state of uncertainty, and sometimes even dissension, about the minor points, as the episode discussed later in this chapter will show. There is also a general feeling that they and their fellow islanders are not as good Muslims as they might be, that they do not even adequately follow the rules that are known. Thus at the end of Ramadan when the story went around that a message had been found at the kaaba in Mecca indi¬ cating that because of lax observance, additional days of fasting were to be required that year, it was popularly assumed that the injunction was directed specifically at Mayotte, and a number of people, notably women, fasted an additional few days. These attitudes towards religious practice are not unique to Mayotte, of course, but the modesty and self-consciousness, almost a sense of inadequacy, tend to give to the persuasion of Islam a certain flavour of its own here. In brief, as we have seen in previous chapters, the whole community views itself as being in a state of learning. While there are evident differences between the more and less learned - the shame of those who absorbed little during the years of primary school and the

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pride of those who memorized the entire Qur'an and advanced to training with a superior fundi - nevertheless there is also an underlying feeling of equality in relative ignorance and unity of intention. People who violate this assumption, who claim to know a good deal more than their fellows, are viewed with some ambivalence. Islamic textual knowledge is objectified, discrete, and absolute. Hence it is in theory available to everyone. In addition, one of the requirements of Islam is the active dissemination of such knowledge. Thus, there is an overall tendency for sacred knowledge to be diffused, and the more important the knowledge, such as the prayers, the more widely it is known. Moreover, to the extent that fundis know more than their fel¬ lows, they ought to be sharing their knowledge. From the point of view of the public in Mayotte, a distinguishing feature of religious authority ought to be the willingness to share one's knowledge; the more people know, the more they should teach. Hence the very magnitude of a person's knowledge that makes him stand out as a fundi also serves to undermine his authority if he does not share it. In any case it renders him suspect of not sharing as much as he could. As one man remarked, fundis are stingy. Because of the egalitarian ethos present in the villages of Kibushy speakers, there is some reluctance to single out individuals as worthy of great respect. The open circulation of knowledge and the absence of specific religious offices, both characteristic of Islam, also support this egalitarianism.^ But at the same time, the sense of collective inferiority and distance from the sources and centres of Islamic learning renders people vulnerable to the influence of outsiders deemed to represent that authority and encourages the reservation of great (though not un¬ equivocal) respect for people who can claim more direct contact with the sources. Thus Arabic speakers, people purportedly of Middle Eastern descent, and sharifus, people successfully claiming descent from the family of the Prophet, carry a certain authority irrespective of their actual state of learning. Such authority is bolstered by habits of dress and comportment that may be imitated by wealthier villagers. This embodied authority may enable its bearers to evade being evaluated for textual knowledge. But when the latter is found wanting, or when such people appear to have acted unethically, their comportment is not suf¬ ficient to enable them to retain prestige in the eyes of the Kibushyspeaking villagers. Greater knowledge brings prestige and possibly personal satisfaction, but not necessarily autonomy or force. This is clear from the situation of

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women. As we have seen, many women in Mayotte study as actively as the men and know as much, but they are prohibited, on principle, from officiating at the performance of rituals. More generally, Muslims are judged by others not only for what they know, but for how they act and, indeed, the more one knows, the more responsible one is for cur¬ tailing certain kinds of acts. Thus, for example, Rosen (1984: 59) argues that in Morocco intention, and hence responsibility, is read from overt acts and their consequences, and that unlettered men are not held to the same standards of conduct as learned ones. So, while Islamic knowledge and its display in daily and ritual contexts are a source of power, they are a self-limiting source. Given the general attitude towards Islam, the study of 'Him fakihi is viewed extremely positively, even while the resulting scholars are not necessarily regarded as being absolutely trustworthy on matters of doctrine. But the central paradox is that the more one knows, the more responsibility for morality one bears, and hence the more open one becomes to having one's reputation, and hence authority, eroded through what the public attributes to one's practice. Almost everyone has studied something of God's laws and thus everyone in the community is to some degree responsible for the maintenance of morality. There is a sense in which the corporateness of the village exists in this moral realm. The community shares in the responsibility of maintaining its mosque and, if it has a Friday service, of ensuring regular attendance. When Lombeni Be instituted the Friday sermon, the village established a procedure for fining adult male members of the community who failed to attend. The community must also celebrate Islamic holidays properly; some of these, such as the Prophet's birthday, entail collective exchanges of hospitality and recitation, as we saw in Chapter 4. But the responsibility of individuals is proportionate with their religious roles. As we will see shortly, the preachers, the men who take turns reading the weekly sermons in the mosque, are specifically singled out to be the bearers of the moral righteousness of the community. It is not simply that the value of study generates diffuse public ex¬ pectations of a scholar's behaviour. A much more direct relationship stems from the embodied dimension of Islamic knowledge. Scholarship is a basis for authority, yet this occurs not only because the scholar is deemed to have control over his knowledge, but more importantly be¬ cause the scholar ought to be more Hkely than others to accept and recognize its control over himself and his fellows. The situation may be described as inverse to that of the 'postmodern' discovery of the in-

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scription of the author's authority in the text; in Islam, it is the text's authority that is enacted in the course of the scholar's life. Islamic knowledge is recited; as I argued in the last chapter, recitation of the sacred texts is an illocutionary act. Illocutionary acts, or performatives, are acts that commit performers to their utterances. They establish moral states and expectations. As Rappaport has argued, 'the relationship of performatives ... to the state of affairs with which they are concerned is exactly the inverse' (1979:198) of descriptive statements. If we judge the adequacy of a descriptive statement - about the weather, for example by the degree to which it conforms to actual conditions, in the case of performatives, for example, an oath or promise, 'we judge the state of affairs by the degree to which it conforms to the stipulations of the performative ritual' (1979:198). Hence, the subsequent behaviour of the Muslim who performs a recitation is judged according to its uncompro¬ mising terms, that is, according to the moral condition the recitation brings into force. This relationship can be seen most clearly in the role of the man who recites the weekly sermon in the village mosque, although I believe it holds true for all recitations of sacred text.** Sermons are selected in se¬ quence from a book of prepared texts that are rotated throughout the Islamic calendar and are recited in Arabic. The reciter uses different voices for specific sections within the overall recitation and these have to be learned along with the text, for example, lowering his voice when he shifts from passages of explanation to blessings. Since virtually no one in the village understands the referential meaning of the text and since it generally remains untranslated, the sermon comes to have a heightened performative force and empty or weakened referential con¬ tent, much hke the shorter formulaic utterances.^ Indeed, while the texts of the sermons may not themselves be sacred, the performance of the recitation of the sermon is sacred in Mayotte, a fact underlined by the state of complete silence strictly enjoined upon the congregation for its duration and by the fear of the preacher at making a mistake. In order to give the sermon the reciter climbs a set of steps covered with a slippery carpet. Should he fall off the steps, it would be a sign that he had committed a sin, presumably that of adultery with another man's wife. The members of the congregation would rush out and ritually slaughter one of the reciter's cattle.® His state of impurity, demonstrated in his fall, would place the entire community in extreme danger, open to an epidemic. The reciter of the sermon is at once icon and index of the purity of the community, representing in a complex manner both its

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ideal and its actual moral condition. Although it is up to the community as a whole to produce and maintain a state of morality, the reciter is singled out due to his public role in invoking utterances that establish moral commitments and conditions. With each sermon preached, the reciter reconfirms his knowledge, purity, and commitment, and hence his authority to continue preaching. His success is a source of pride to the community and to the man himself, but his vulnerability is also evident. The reciter's authority does not continue to rise in cumulative fashion; he is put to the test weekly, and if he falls, he falls absolutely. In the case of the sermon giver who falls, we see explicitly that knowledge alone is not sufficient to maintain a scholar's authority. His personal behaviour must be seen to accord with the purity of knowledge he invokes. Thus, if one main¬ tains no authority without some reference to Islam, that reference correspondmgly presupposes certain forms of conduct without which it may become virtually meaningless. The reputation for knowledge that lends a person authority in social action also curtails the variety of possible action.^ So far we have examined the authority of scholars with regard to texts whose referential meaning is not at issue and hence remains uncontested. The situation is more complicated for the kinds of texts to which experts make reference, works of commentary and instruction. Since sacred knowledge is absolute, only a single version ought to exist. This fits the experience of the people on the path with the kinds of texts, prayers, and Qur'anic invocations (swala and dua) they use regularly. However, it is not true of the written commentaries on the primary texts. Given the long history of textual interpretation in Islam, the sec¬ ondary knowledge, the knowledge directly accessible only to scholars, is precisely that for which contradictory written versions often exist. The people of Mayotte are not equipped to compare the validity of written sources. Therefore, when two scholars disagree over an inter¬ pretation and implicitly challenge one another's authority, ordinary people have to use alternate means, that is, means no longer intrinsic to Islamic knowledge itself, to decide which of the two interpretations to follow. Again, the authority of Islamic scholars is vulnerable to factors external to the texts themselves. The more senior the fundis, the sharper the issues. The interplay of textual and personal authority and the dilemmas or contradictions to which it gives rise will be examined by brief illustrations from the lives of two of the most senior fundis in Mayotte and then through a closer consideration of the practice of the Lombeni fundis.

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Islam and Politics: Two Public Figures Perhaps the leading fundi of the island through the 1970s was Shehu Ahmad, who lived in the former capital of a precolonial sultanate. Al¬ though his tasks have since devolved to younger men, in 1975 Shehu Ahmad was still responsible for organizing the annual pilgrimage to Mecca from Mayotte and for coordinating the scheduling of religious dances to which sponsoring villages invited people from across the entire island. Shehu Ahmad's reputation for great learning was consid¬ erably enhanced by his manifest purity. Indeed, he was said to fast throughout the entire year (in Islamic fashion, this means from sunrise to sunset) with the exception of Idi, the day of termination of the Ramadan fast. Shehu Ahmad thus combined in his person both the embodied and the objectified qualities of Islamic authority. Shehu Ahmad had periodic dreams in which he was warned that every village should say certain prayers in order to avert disaster; when he had these dreams, the message was transmitted across the island. Ordinary people may have such dreams as well, although they are usually on a smaller scale, involving a threat to a single village, family, or individual. But whether the dream was acted upon depended entirely on the strength of the dreamer's personal authority. The use of dreams illustrates the personalistic basis of Shehu Ahmad's authority, which is under challenge from reformist scholars who rely strictly on the texts. In one of Shehu Ahmad's dreams reported in 1975, he was visited by Maouana Madi, a Mahorais sultan of the last century, who warned people to remember an old taboo (fady) against cultivating on Wednesdays. While it was remarkable to me that the leading Islamic fundi of the island should have been visited by a former ruler, albeit an Islamic one, concerning a non-Islamic taboo, the admonition received a very half-hearted response from the populace. Unfortunately, I cannot interpret the implications of the dream for the relationship between religious leaders and secular power in the former sultanate. In the present the dream seems to have been an unsuccessful attempt to reinvigorate a historical model of Mayotte, indicating the limited means for political action at a fundi's disposal. Such limitations hold even when the political intervention is much narrower in scope. Like more junior fundis, Shehu Ahmad was some¬ times petitioned to act as a mediator in local or domestic disputes. But a fundi must be cautious in how he goes about this; no matter how large his reputation, his authority to intervene is by no means certain. Twice

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during my stay in 1975-6 Shehu Ahmad wrote letters to Lombeni on behalf of individuals who had quarrelled with the village. Yet the village did not have to accept his advice, and, indeed, the relevant members were annoyed at his interference in their affairs and ignored it.® These examples illustrate an important constraint on the fundi's power. A senior fundi may be treated with a great deal of respect, but it is felt that he should stick to matters of religion and not meddle in politics. The concerns of religion are supposed by ordinary villagers, if not by the fundis themselves, to be above those of petty politics, the kabar ny dunian (worldly affairs). Precisely because they are so knowl¬ edgeable in matters of religion, the fundis are very open to criticism in this regard. Study demonstrates morality, but the moment study appears to have been put aside for prejudicial action, then the assurance of morality and the authority it carries are put aside as well, and the lapse is all the greater for coming from someone who should know better. The fundis create and uphold the morality of the community by being fundis; once they engage in partisan politics, they threaten the very nature of morality itself. This suggests both that there is a partial disconnection between rehgion and politics and that the boundary between them may be a matter of some dispute between senior fundis and ordinary villagers.^ While the villagers are less well versed in textual knowledge than the fundis, they are firmly committed to the egalitarianism implicit in scripturalism (Gellner 1981). Their historical experience of being dominated by groups claiming greater proximity to the sources of Islam has also made them suspicious. While the separation of politics from religion may seem odd by comparison with events elsewhere in the Islamic world, it follows directly from the points made earlier concerning the moral entailments of scholarship. In fact, the dilemma may be sharpest for those senior scholars who attempt to rely primarily on the texts and who claim no links with the increasingly irrelevant authority of the former sultanate. While challenging the personalistic basis of the authority of men like Shehu Ahmad, they actually simply transform the relevant personal attributes. The complaint against Ali Addinan is a case in point. Ali Addinan was once one of the most popular and important/wndis on the island, and people would gather from all over for the annual performance of the daira (religious dance) he conducted. When Mayotte became divided over the issue of political union with either France or the emerging independent Republique Federale Islamique des Comores, Ali Addinan

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was said by some to have sided with the pro-Comoran party instead of remaining impartial. During the years of dissension the majority proFrench party held a separate daira in another village, and when they finally won the conflict, they refused for years to accept Ali Addinan's attempts to pay the fine required of all the other former members of the pro-Comoran party for reinstatement in the community. In the meantime Ali Addinan lived quietly, writing and teaching in his wife's village, in a sort of exile. His critics argued that of all the transgressions committed by members of the opposing party, his alone had been too great to be atoned for. It was said that he had mixed a written spell - a text - into the communal drink at a feast in his home village, a spell that was responsible for the tragic division along party lines there during the years of crisis.’® In fact, by having himself engaged in dissension, he seemed to make dissension legitimate; he removed the standards against which dissension might be judged. This case illustrates the fact that the attitude towards knowledge is a mixture of respect and fear. The man who knows more has more power to cause harm. No one is exempt from suspicion, even those most in¬ volved in sustaining the moral order. Although such people are rarely accused of immoral acts, when they appear to become so involved, their power to harm is felt to be greater than that of any other kind of fundi and the gap in morality to be wider. Styles of Practice: Two Village Fundis We can pursue the problem of authority and the diversity of approaches that can be taken to it at the local level by examining the contrasting practices and opinions of the two leading Quv'anic fundis in Lombeni. We turn to the village fundis in order to show not only the limitations they face in daily practice but their commitment to action as well as the diverse ways they actually construct their practice.” These two men are full brothers from a large family important in village affairs. Their father, who died some years before my first visit to Lombeni, was a mwalim dunia (cosmologer) and their mother, an asser¬ tive and extremely intelligent woman, maintained an active therapeutic practice that combined techniques she had learned from her husband together with herbal knowledge. One of her daughters, a full sister of the two men, has in turn recently become the leading and reputedly most powerful healer of the village, combining herbal knowledge with divination by means of spirit mediumship.

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The brothers are relatively young. In 1985 Saidu Ali was in his early forties, while Yusufi Ali was perhaps thirty-seven. Each of the brothers had been sent away from the village during their childhood in order to study Islam, Saidu to a large village north of Lombeni and Yusufi to town. Both suffered in the process, though in retrospect they feel the knowledge gained was worth it. Neither of them beats his own students. Both men returned to Lombeni as young adults and, as was expected of them, both took up an active role in the religious life of the community, teaching, participating in village and life cycle rituals, and providing advice on religious matters. Both men are highly intelligent and have each maintained a lively interest in continuing to acquire learning. Saidu, for example, has pursued studies with at least two more advanced fundis in the region over the last decade. However, although their back¬ grounds are similar, the brothers' personalities and their respective ap¬ proaches to knowledge and practice are not, nor are their positions within the village. Saidu is somewhat impractical and unworldly. He has a great thirst for knowledge and would have liked to devote his entire career to its pursuit. He dreamed of going to the Grande Comore to continue his studies free of distractions, but his parents would not support him; his mother told him he could learn just as well here. And, although he married relatively late, the obligations of a wife and children prevented him from devoting full attention to study. He had also wanted to study Erench, but his fundi forbade it, saying it would lead him away from Islam and into other matters. At one time he hoped the government would provide a salary for village fundis and that he would be given the post in Lombeni, but the program never materialized. Nevertheless, when the members of Lombeni decided to estabUsh a Eriday mosque service, he took it upon himself to see that things ran smoothly.’^ He organized a rotation of prayer leaders and sermon reciters, ensuring that anyone sufficiently qualified who wanted a turn could have one. As his agricultural activities did not provide adequate income, he even¬ tually acquired a job as a semiskilled labourer. Nevertheless, he remains quite poor and spends what money he has on books rather than on his house or clothing. For years Saidu has tutored within the village groups of both men and women who wish to study Islamic books and men who wish to improve their diction so that they may perform the role of imam (prayer leader) or reciter of the sermon in the mosque. He is not paid for this, but receives occasional assistance in his fields, fencing his courtyard.

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acquiring firewood, and other similar tasks. Students owe him one morning of labour a week. Most 'well-informed citizens' of Lombeni, including the fundi who is ranked third in knowledge, have at one time or another either studied with him or sought his advice concerning questions of practice. Many villagers have also used his services to help settle disputes. Yet in 1985 few people were engaged in active study with him. The villagers agreed that while Saidu probably knew more than his brother, they all preferred Yusufi. In fact, the latter had earned the epithet Fundi 'Suf, a name that combines the respect of the title 'fundi' with the fond¬ ness and familiarity of the shortened form. Saidu, though granted re¬ spect and precedence on ritual occasions, is referred to much as any other villager. The difference in popularity of the two brothers may be accounted for by a series of interrelated factors, their respective person¬ alities, their teaching methods, and, perhaps most importantly, the relationship each draws between Islamic knowledge and daily life. Although Saidu was, in his way, a modest soul and unconcerned with appearances, people were a bit afraid of him. For one thing, he has a short temper. Several people said that he had lost students because of his lack of courtesy towards them when he lost patience. As one person explained, 'People are not all the same, some know, some do not; some understand readily, some do not. Therefore you should not humiliate someone in public for a mistake, but take them aside and correct them gently and diplomatically.' This is, in fact, the strategy of the mildmannered but deliberate Yusufi. However, if Saidu is guilty of insulting people, it is not, as is the case of many men with less learning, with the desire to show off his own knowledge and build himself up at the expense of others. Saidu's impatience is a product of his general disatisfaction with himself and with his community. Saidu finds the sacred texts the sole source of authority. He is scornful of many traditional beliefs such as those manifested in his mother's and sister's practices. It is not that he is narrow-minded; in fact, he is intellectually nimble, fond of philo¬ sophical speculation, quick to see the humour in situations, and readier than most people to embrace Western medicine. Rather, he is acutely aware of the gap between the ideal world of the texts and the reality of actual behaviour. Whatever the sources of its particular strength in Saidu's personal history, this central experience of idealism mixed with disillusionment is in part a product of immersion in rules produced centuries ago in an entirely different sociocultural context. The fundi is

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thus a disaffected and marginal man in the very community in which he has a good deal of prestige and in which he leads performance of the central rites. Yusufi's story illustrates other aspects of the fundi's situation. Of a sunnier disposition than his older brother, he is far less uncompromising. First of all, Yusufi is a fundi of many things in addition to the Qur'an. He is a skilled furniture maker, the first person in Lombeni to learn how to fix transistor radios, and by 1985 the only one to have constructed indoor plumbing. He has trained many villagers in masonry and new methods of house construction, was the main trustee of the fishing cooperative, and the moving force in a public works project that em¬ ployed villagers to build a community drainage system. Here he was not only planner and paymaster, but was also found daily performing manual labour in the trenches alongside everyone else. He was also the first man in the village to recite the Friday sermon when a regular service was established; often he leads the prayers as well. It is for all these skills, performed with energy, enthusiasm, efficiency, good humour, and tact, that he has earned the name Fundi 'Suf. Despite his relatively young age, there is probably no one in either village who is more widely respected or better liked. Yusufi's appeal lies in very real qualities: he can build a house better than anyone else; he will rise in the middle of the night to help someone who is in trouble; he avoids quarrels. He is virtuous and indeed his virtue is a matter of public record since he performs as reciter of the sermon without mishap. This virtue is recognized as well in his control of public finances. Yusufi is milder and appears more disinterested than his brother; nevertheless he is equally if not more persistent and his actions are carried out with a quiet determination. Two main themes emerge in conversation. The first is pleasure in his own growth in stature since 1975. He is justifiably proud of his young family, his house, his abilities, and the respect shown him by others. Unlike most craftsmen who since 1980 have been forced to seek paid labour at long hours and low wages outside the village, Yusufi has been able to find work within the community. Yusufi's second theme is that he wants to improve the village. Thus he tries to teach people to help themselves: autonomy rather than dependence is his goal for his students in all subjects. He often turns down jobs in house construction, offering instead to serve as a consultant if the owner is willing to learn to build it himself. He wants his own students to be able to go ahead and teach others. He also charges less than the going rate. This value placed on the maximal

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dispersion of knowledge stems from the model of 'Him fakihi with its emphasis on instruction and conversion. This is quite contrary to 'Him dunia, in which knowledge is closely guarded. The fundi of 'Him fakihi gains his reputation by his generosity and by his ability and willingness to articulate what is supposed to be public knowledge. Both Saidu and Yusufi can appear simultaneously self-assured and self-effacing since, in theory, their authority stems not from their personal attributes but from their books. When people come to Saidu with specific questions of doctrine or practice, he looks up the answer in the book even when he already knows it himself. He reads the passage in Arabic to the client in order to demonstrate its verity and then translates it so that the client undertands what he is saying. Yet he complains that people just tend to follow their own ways without trying to change or improve. He says he does not dare tell people what he sees them doing wrong for fear they will become annoyed at his interference (and every once in a while he proves his fears correct). Yusufi, however, has given considerable thought to the art of instruction and prides himself on his techniques of gentle persuasion and painless lessons. Yusufi was shocked when Saidu, frustrated by the faulty practices at the mosque and the anger with which his own observations to the perpetrators were received, temporarily withdrew from the mosque to pray at home. Yusufi suggests that the problem lies not with people's willful desire to argue but with the fact that Saidu does not know how to teach. With tact, he says, there is no way people will not follow you. Dzoru (recitation, sacred learning) is like vaovao (news) - people are ea¬ ger for it; they want to improve themselves. Thus, while textual knowl¬ edge is potentially attractive, to be effective it must be transmitted by means of local norms of interaction. Yusufi's problem, like that of popular/wnd/s in other fields, is that he is continually pressed with requests for assistance of all kinds. For ex¬ ample, one Friday as he arrived on the mosque porch to perform his ablutions prior to reciting the sermon, Yusufi was asked by a young man for medicine (audy) to handle an aggressive bull. The medicine was very simple, replied Yusufi, and you just rub it on your hands and the guide rope, but he had no time to prepare it. He directed the client to another villager who knew the recipe. Another day, just after he had finished participating in the performance of a badri recitation prior to a circumcision, he was approached by a woman for what she called audy fahamu (memory medicine), taken in order not to quickly forget dzoru (recitation). Again, he was too pressed to stop and prepare it for her.

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Because these requests were relatively trivial and made in an infor¬ mal manner, Yusufi could turn them down without creating offence. But when he or Saidu are called to more important duties - prayer, giving the sermon, joining in recitations for blessing, protection, or commemo¬ ration, teaching texts, and so on - it is more difficult for them to decline. The sense of time shortage is, of course, greatly exacerbated by the increasing commoditization of the island and by Yusufi's own entrepre¬ neurial response to the situation; as he says, he wants time to make a living. If being a fundi of 'Him fakihi was once 'making a living,' it is no longer so. Nevertheless like other fundis, Yusufi often takes on tasks, such as initiating the mediation of quarrels, on his own accord. The following case illustrates both Yusufi's moral commitments and his diplomatic and personalized technique. Like the interventions of Shehu Ahmad, it also shows the limitations of a fundi's power: he can merely propose changes, he cannot enforce them. Indeed, he and his brother were fond of quoting the French phrase ‘I'homme propose mais Dieu dispose.' Finally, the case shows how in practice a fundi is confronted by material that is not Islamic in origin. Moral Intervention and Understanding On 27 August 1985 I met Yusufi on his way to attempt to mediate a marital quarrel on his own initiative. He agreed to let me accompany him and as we walked to Zaina's house, I discovered to my surprise that I was able to fill him in on background about the case. For several weeks Zaina had been waking from nightmares in which she was at¬ tacked by her dead mother. The mother had died some time previously, angry at Zaina for refusing to part from her husband Madi. Some years before, Madi had angered Zaina's mother by getting Zaina pregnant before their marriage, refusing to pay the fine for having taken her virginity, and, finally, refusing to hand over the mahary, the payment that legally seals the marriage transaction. Zaina's mother had forced the couple to separate. Zaina was married off against her will to an older man in another village, but when this marriage ended she returned to Lombeni and to Madi and proceeded to have three more children with him. Now, according to what I had heard, after her mother's death, she had finally carried out her mother's wish and sent Madi packing. Yusufi listened to my story with interest, but when we arrived at Zaina's he merely said he was hoping to bring about a reconciliation and wanted to hear her side of the story first. The two of them sat next

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to each other on the bed that practically filled the single room of the hut made of flimsy palm leaf matting. Zaina spoke readily, but without referring at all to her mother or her dreams. She said she had asked Madi to leave and for one reason only, namely that she was ashamed (menatra) not to have a proper house. (Married couples in Mayotte live in two-room houses made of more solid materials.) He had kept prom¬ ising to build her one, but there she was, still living in her older sister's kitchen shed. Yusufi agreed that she was right (misy haky) to expect a house^^ and said he would speak to Madi about it. When he asked whether she had any other complaints, Zaina said no; the family did not suffer for food or clothing (both the man's responsibility to provide). If it were not for the matter of the house, she would be happy to live with him, but she has told him she will not take him back until the house is finished. Yusufi suggested that Zaina accept Madi once he had obtained a commitment in writing, observed by several witnesses, that Madi would put aside part of his pay towards the new house. Since Madi was at that time under Yusufi's employ in the public works project, this was not an idle suggestion. However, Zaina remained silent, thereby expressing at once her disapproval of the course of action and her unwillingness to oppose the fundi openly. So Yusufi took a new tack, beginning a long disquisition on how everyone suffers misfortune in different ways and at different times. Zaina should seek her solution from God. God is the ultimate source of well-being. Yusufi advised Zaina to pray and perhaps to give a little money to the mosque. And, he added, turning the con¬ versation in what he hoped would be a useful direction, if her parents were dead, Zaina should pray to them to plead with God on her behalf.^^ Yusufi's second theme was not to give up hope. There are seasons of poverty and seasons of prosperity in a marriage, and one can easily shift from one to the other. Yusufi illustrated from his own life, how near the beginning of his marriage his first two infants died, how there were days when the family had nothing to eat, and when he had no confidence in his ability to build a successful career. At last, after this long, indirect, and highly personal persuasion, Zaina broke her resistant silence and admitted there was something else on her mind. She began to recount the story of her married life, emphasiz¬ ing how Madi had failed to pay the mahary and how, since their re¬ union, she has been tormented by terrible dreams: her grandmother holding an iron bar to her head, her mother appearing at the foot of her bed and swallowing her up to the waist. She had told Madi her dreams.

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but he had done nothing, even then. He had not even offered to have a prayer said at the mosque, but instead retorted that she would get her mahary in heaven. And he was offended when she had gone on to speak about it to his sister. Yusufi listened to this truly unusual story, first with an expression of horror, and then with clucks of sympathy. When Zaina finished, he promised to try to help, but reminded her that it is ultimately only God who can change things. As we left, Yusufi told me he felt he had accomplished a good deal with Zaina. He had discovered the true extent of her complaint and come to realize that she had 'almost too much right on her side.' It was clear to him that Zaina loved Madi. Whether he also cared for her, and thus, whether something positive could be done, would become clear when Madi reacted to Yusufi's request that he commit his pay into Yusufi's hands in order to collect the mahary. Yusufi told Zaina that he would not try to force a mediation on the couple if Madi did not agree to these terms of his own free will. Yusufi also felt that he had provided Zaina with some reassurance, giving her confidence in the future and encouraging her to take positive action, through prayer, in her own right. Over the next few days Yusufi reported initial success with Madi. The latter had responded to Yusufi's request to be more flexible and had agreed to pay the mahary directly to Zaina and to begin to set aside money with Yusufi for the house. Yusufi thought this was equally agreeable to Zaina, but from other sources I learned that she was not prepared to accept Madi until the house was actually built and was therefore hiding from Yusufi so that he would not be able to talk her into a greater compromise. One woman attributed her main motivation to fear of her mother. She had stopped suffering from the bad dreams since she had thrown Madi out; only once she had received the mahary could she and Madi approach her mother's grave to pray and convince her spirit to 'lie down again.' In fact, Zaina proved to have a shrewder appreciation of Madi than had Yusufi. By October, Madi had still not paid the mahary and Yusufi gave up on the case, aggrieved that Madi had deceived him.’® Madi tried to coax Zaina back to him with offers of jewellery and clothing, but when it came to the house he was too lazy or too insecure. He offered to build one for their children on his own family's land, but this was not at all the same thing as a house of Zaina's own and merely strengthened Zaina's resolve. She became engaged to someone new. The case illustrates not only aspects of Yusufi's outlook and methods.

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but the extent and limitations of his authority. When he first went to speak with Zaina he wore his white prayer robe, frequently invoked religion, and sprinkled his conversation with specialized terms and knowledge. As a result, Zaina was forced to respond seriously and to be reasonably acquiescent; her only defence was silence and to avoid further encounters. Yusufi was reasonably successful in getting Zaina to confront her problems positively. He deftly managed to get her to say what was really bothering her and he used the story of his own life as a foil to extract hers. But while his authority enhanced his persua¬ siveness, it was insufficient to produce the desired resolution. In fact, Yusufi has no clear right to intervene in domestic matters, even when, as in the case of the mahary, they refer to the violation of Islamic rules. While Yusufi's actions may be viewed as simply intrusive, I do not think this is how they were taken. Yusufi's intervention is moral rather than legal. Yusufi counsels putting one's faith in God; this is not a passive philosophy but an active assertion of the will to improve one's lot. The exercise of will is what stands behind Yusufi's own intervention in the case. Yet Yusufi is not willing (or able) to impose his will on others, to force Madi to sign an agreement he does not wish to carry out. At the same time, Yusufi will not lend his name to a settlement he finds personally unacceptable. He told Madi that if he wished to have him mediate, Madi would have to agree to Yusufi's terms. His role as mediator is not simply to facilitate or smooth over but to provide a just and equitable solution in hne with certain norms and standards (for example, that marriage ought to be preserved, but not simply as a coercive following of rules). Having been unsuccessful, Yusufi will not compromise his principles and, were he to do so, he would lose his authority for the future. Hence, he failed at achieving a reconciliation. In sum, Yusufi had the authority (as, to a lesser degree, had any concerned adult) to attempt a mediation, but he lacked the power to ensure its successful conclusion. He also had the wisdom to realize when a less orthodox solution might in fact be preferable. What success that he had stemmed more from his personal attributes and comport¬ ment, his total performance, than from his explicit knowledge of the sacred texts to which, in fact, he scarcely made direct reference. Viewed in practice, Yusufi's knowledge is not as fully objectified and abstract as the textual basis of Islam might lead us to suppose. Rather, as we have seen, Islamic knowledge is embodied in speech acts, ritual performances, and narrative. It is striking that Yusufi uses narrative as the mode to present and legitimate his argument and that the narrative

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encompasses aspects of his own life and experience. What Yusufi dem¬ onstrates here is less objective knowledge than sympathetic under¬ standing, something that is constitutive of, rather than detached from, his being. Shaped to fit the situation, it thus approximates what Aristotle referred to as phronesis, ethical know-how, distinguished from episteme, scientific knowledge of what is universal, and techne, technical know¬ how. Neither fully objective nor fully subjective, his understanding me¬ diates these categories.'^ Implicit in this view of practical or personal knowledge is that there is more than one position to take vis-a-vis the accepted and absolute knowledge of the texts, more than one way in which to incorporate them within one's life or suggest their incorporation within the lives of others. This has already been apparent from the contrasting styles of the brothers. Further exploration of the ways in which they handled a dispute over correct ritual procedure and then the competing claims of cosmology and spirit possession will demonstrate this divergence and its local basis and limitations much more clearly. Friday Prostrations: A Conflict of Interpretations and Modes of Legitimation In 1985 there was considerable debate in Lombeni over the appropriate way to conduct the Friday prayer, forcing the fundis to address the question: 'What is a man to do if his studies suggest that the custom of his community is at variance with what the text-books say?' (Lienhardt 1980: 289). Muslims are supposed to pray five times daily according to the posi¬ tion of the sun. Friday is the Muslim sabbath and the Friday noon prayer, often referred to simply as juma (Friday) is special, the climax of the Muslim week. Preparations are relatively elaborate and considerable attention is given to order and precision. Attendance at the mosque is greater than on any other occasion outside the major annual celebrations, and all adult male villagers are expected to participate. Some male members of the village living elsewhere attempt to return home for the weekly event, though labourers in town are not always let off early enough to make it. In Lombeni about forty to fifty men were present, as well as about ten to fifteen (mostly elderly) women secluded in the side chamber. Worshippers bathe in the morning and dress in clean clothing. The men wear shirts and striped cloths wrapped around their waists. These are covered by long gowns, usually white, sometimes pastel-

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coloured or brown or gauzy, with embroidery at the neckline and cuffs. Additional finery may be added: tailored western-style jackets, scarves, black velvet coats with gold braid and little mirrors. Headgear varies from the common small cotton hats with elaborate stitching to Bedouin head scarves and fezzes. No one in Lombeni wears a turban, which is considered the mark of a senior fundi or someone with pretensions. The juma prayer is different from others in that it is preceded by a sermon and then always performed in unison. The worshippers begin to assemble in the mosque as early as an hour before the service begins, individually reciting sacred texts as they wait. At 12:30 PM, once every¬ one has performed ablutions and is seated on the mosque floor, the mkuadin (who shouts the call to prayer) announces and ushers in the reciter of the sermon, leading him through the congregation from the back of the mosque to the front. The reciter, who is very finely dressed and carries a long rod, climbs several steps of the minbar, turns to face the congregation, opens his book, and begins to recite the sermon in Arabic. Everyone must sit quietly even though few understand more than a few words. As soon as the sermon has ended, the reciter descends the minbar, the imam steps forward, and the congregation begins to pray (mikuswaly) in unison. Occasionally, at the conclusion of the prayers a learned man will turn to the congregation and interpret the sermon, but this was a rare occurrence in Lombeni. After the prayers and any additional instruction or brief announce¬ ments, the male congregation rises and forms a line so that each congregant has the opportunity to perform a special handshake with everyone else. Most men then leave the mosque while a few remain behind to sit in a circle and chant the wathifa. People leaving the mosque are greeted on the street and return home to a good meal. All in all, juma is an occasion when the community confirms and displays its Mushm identity to itself. In addition, it is supposed to be an occasion of celebration and unity. In 1985 these two requisites were in conflict with one another. The prayers (swala) performed in a mosque are not a form of suppli¬ cation (though they may be followed on juma by a collective supplicative duo) but an act of submission to God. As they recite the standard words of the prayer, the worshippers stand, bow, prostrate themselves, kneel, and rise again in a prescribed sequence. Every gesture is precise. The number of cycles (rak'a) of such prayer required for each time of day is established in the books. (Additional rak'as are optional, performed in¬ dividually either before or after the service, and often represent a

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'catching up' of prayers missed earlier in the day.) According to textual authority, four cycles are to be performed at the daily noon prayer iadhuri) and two cycles are to be performed along with the Friday ser¬ mon. In Mayotte, then, a total of six cycles have been performed at the Friday service. However, in 1951 Sheikh Ibrahim, a member of the old elite who was highly educated abroad, started a reform movement.’^ He argued that islanders had been incorrect in the performance of six prostration cycles at the Friday prayer; in fact, the textual prescription of two cycles for jutna was meant to supersede, not supplement, the four noon cycles on that particular day. Sheikh Ibrahim's ideas spread slowly. In 1975 I was not aware of the controversy. Lombeni Be had only just initiated a Friday service (prior to this, worshipers wishing to participate in the sermon would attend the service in a large neighbouring village), and the six cycles were performed without comment. However, in 1985 the two leading/wndis of the village, Saidu and Yusufi, held opposing views on the matter. At the completion of two cycles, Saidu and about ten other men would quickly and quietly rise and leave the mosque. The remainder of the congregation stayed to perform four more cycles. Two 'well-informed citizens' explained their respective positions as follows. The reason one gave for omitting the adhuri prayer (four rak'as) was that God had made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Junta was a day of rest, so God lightened the normal load of noon prayers from four to two. By combining both rules, people in Mayotte had been praying six cycles, which, by making the load even heavier than normal, was precisely contrary to God's intention. A man on the other side agreed that the texts lightened the Friday load, but he added that the texts also said that in order to omit adhuri certain conditions had to hold: there had to be present forty men who understood the sermon, who did not doze off during its recitation, and who performed their normal load of five daily prayers regularly and precisely on schedule. Otherwise, the additional cycles had to be performed on Fridays. Both of these highly rationalized explanations draw on textual knowledge for their authority and both sides of the argument reflect the common theme that Islamic knowledge and practice are deficient in Mayotte. But neither represents the central issue for either the general public or the Lombeni fundis themselves. In fact, the key issue was not the correct number of prostrations, but how one could know what was correct. The debate concerned not the facts themselves but rather the authority by means of which facts could be ascertained. The issue con-

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cerned what Lyotard (1984) calls the metanarratives of legitimation, through which practice could be governed. Popular opinion on the matter was that one should follow one's fundi. Thus, those people who studied kiu (books) with a renowned fundi in a neighbouring village cited his opinion that one should pray adhuri with junta since the texts say the former is more important. Fatima Halidy said that she prays adhuri because Yusufi does; if he stopped, then she would too. Another person admitted she does not know which side is correct, but stays simply because all the other women who attend the mosque do. In other words, without direct access to the texts themselves, most people rely on their fundis or on the public opinion, which the fundis presumably shape. Adherence to the word of the fundis legitimates practice. The dilemma is, of course, that the fundis do not agree among themselves. The men who left the Lombeni mosque did so because they were following the opinion of Saidu, who said it was wrong to pray adhuri in addition to junta. Many of them were currently or had been his students. Saidu himself did not demand that his students leave and expressed to me little concern over whether they did so or not. He claimed that not everyone who left the mosque was his mwanafundi (pupil) and that not all his mwanafundis left. Saidu's interest lay not in the loyalty of follow¬ ers but in the correctness of the practice. Indeed, had he been concerned with maintaining a following, he would have taken the more popular course and remained in the mosque. Saidu says he does not tell his students what to do, he merely tells them what is right. This statement represents a shrewd appraisal of the practical limitations of a fundi's authority. As we will see, it also provides a complete summary of Saidu's position. At least one of Saidu's students quietly stopped studying with him because of his stand on the issue of the Friday prayer. Another, having heard that I had visited Sheikh Ibrahim, came to me to verify the latter's opinion. As a student of Saidu's, this man left the mosque after two cycles, but was ready to stay on if that was what the more senior fundi advocated. He wondered if he were 'lost' {very). Thus, students rely on their fundis to interpret the texts for them, but may seek higher authori¬ ties. And at least some of them find close personal association with a fundi incompatible with disagreement over some aspect of his teaching. This is precisely because, as Saidu's comment suggests, all Islamic knowledge has a moral dimension. In fact, a fundi only has the right to tell others what to do when he tells them what is right. And what is

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'right' is right both in the sense of being accurate or true and in the sense of being just, appropriate, and worthy. Saidu himself draws the authority for his action not from the higher fundis - he feels he knows enough to make his own judgments - but directly from the texts. He points to the place in the book of hadith that gives the precedent regarding Friday prayer. He says that people should follow the authority of the Prophet {Mtrume) - whose traditions com¬ prise the hadith - rather than worrying about maintaining the traditions of their fathers as most villagers seem to prefer. For Saidu, truth and rule are established by the texts. He does not expect me or anyone else to take his word for the correct practice, but insists on showing me the written passage. This theme is repeated in many of our conversations. For example, Saidu does not believe in cosmological predictions of destiny (nyora) nor does he practise the precautions advocated by others to ensure good destiny. People talk, he says, but without knowledge. He knows what he knows not because he is a 'predecessor' (literally, a person from the past, ulu ny taluha) but because he reads books. He makes use 'not of talk but of a little learning' {‘tsy kurana fo 'Him hely'). Since the text is his authority and since he still claims to know little, Saidu is in a sense quite open-minded, changing his opinions as he reads more deeply. He says simply that the reason he now leaves the Friday service after two prayer cycles is that he knows more than he did before. His discussion illustrates the contrast between oral (personal) and written confirmation. Another man who leaves the mosque after two prostration cycles and who claims he had to resign from his post as the sermon reciter's usher because of the community's displeasure at his behaviour - rein¬ forces the point. He says, 'Knowledge grows ['Him misusku]. People in the past knew things, but now we know more. We cannot say the fundis of the past knew nothing; that would be forbidden [fady] and show lack of respect [ishima], since it was they who taught us. But students can over¬ take their teachers.' He compares the situation with knowledge in the Western sphere: in the past a person could get a job as a medical orderly with just two or three years of school, but now the standards have increased and an applicant needs additional training. People have learned more than what was known in the past, yet, he complains, most people in Lombeni prefer to follow the ways of their grandparents. Yusufi, the more popular of the brothers, recited the sermon every week in 1985. He was supposed to alternate months with other reciters, but the latter had all dropped out. One man who had formerly taken

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his turn now held a job as a carpenter in town and could not be certain of reaching the village in time to perform. The remaining candidates stated that they were not capable of following the rules of purity required of the reciter or that they lacked the discipline to learn the sermons. Many were probably simply embarrassed to get up before such a large crowd or afraid they would lose their place. Other men who knew the sermons either no longer had the eyesight for the job, were considered ineligible be¬ cause they were not full members (tompin) of the village, or, like Saidu, were too closely related to Yusufi; the position was supposed to circulate among different 'families' (mraba). So Yusufi recited the sermon every week and then often took the role of imam (prayer leader) as well. He led the congregation through six cycles of prayer and, because he did so, most people, whether they were his students or not, also performed them.’® Two opinions were put forth as to why Yusufi continued to practise in the traditional manner. Some people, such as one of Saidu's students, asserted that Yusufi was merely following (rather than shaping) public opinion, sticking with the safety of the majority. Others said Yusufi was following the counsel of his own fundi. When the dispute first emerged, Yusufi had told the villagers he would check with his fundi and this in fact was what he had done. Whether Yusufi was more influenced by the opinion of the community or that of his own teacher, the source of his decision was personal rather than textual authority. Here, as elsewhere, Yusufi was far less uncompromising than Saidu, who allowed intellectual concerns to pre¬ dominate at the expense of social relations. Yusufi argued that his brother was showing disrespect to the senior fundis of Mayotte (such as Shehu Ahmad), who advocated six cycles. And Shehu Ahmad, in turn, ac¬ cording to some people, wished to follow the ulu be kitaluha (the big people of the past). Age, or rather temporal precedence, was taken into consideration along with contemporary knowledge. Hence, the empha¬ ses on the chain of personal authority, on seniority, and on community consensus tend to blend into one another in terms of 'the traditions of our forefathers.' The contrast is clearly that between a mode of legitimation emphasiz¬ ing personal, oral transmission and one that asserts the primacy of written, impersonal, abstract authority. Each relies on an underlying 'metanarrative.' The former is based on respect for social norms and conventions, making social harmony a primary goal, while the latter seeks a prior truth, established by God and inscribed in the texts. To oversimplify, for Yusufi and the consensualists, what is good is true.

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Saidu inverts this: what is true (written) is good. This conflict clearly speaks to issues raging in the larger Islamic world, in nearby northern Madagascar, for example, where the respective protagonists were much further apart, the one side conducting syncretic performances of Sufi dances at the tombs of royal ancestors, and the other supported by Libyan-financed schools and mosques (Gueunier 1988). But my point is not to oppose a fundamentalist to a liberal interpretation. Both modes of legitimation can be applied flexibly or rigidly. The textualist still has to interpret the text; in Saidu's case he does so modestly and reflectively, claiming to know little. He uses the texts to build autonomy, not to constrain it; textual knowledge contributes to practical knowledge or ethical know-how, rather than detached objectivity. Each source of authority is a necessary component of the Islamic practice of each brother. Eollowers of Saidu take his personal authority into account and, to maintain credibility, Saidu cannot stray too far from public opinion. Conversely, Yusufi and his teachers would retain no credibility if they did not ultimately draw upon the texts for their authority. Hence, debates such as the one described are the virtually inevitable consequence of shifts in the relative weight given by sectors of the community to textual or to personal authority, rather than the product of exclusive, competing, and independent ideologies. The Articulation of Heterogenous Knowledge in Practice Yusufi is more open than Saidu to the variety of forms of knowledge and practice found in the community. His perspective, just as much as Saidu's, can be gauged both by what he says and by what he does. Each brother had two children who died as infants, but whereas Yusufi then took his wife for mtrambunu medicine, engaging the assistance of a me¬ dium and his spirit to protect future births, Saidu simply said, 'When God gives, God gives' ('Naka Ndranahary manamia, manamia'). Yusufi and his wife have also performed the customary ritual to take their infants out of the house for the first time, engaging a cosmologer to select an auspicious day.’® Yusufi does not know how to choose the day himself; he said, 'There are many kinds of knowledge and each person knows only what he himself has studied.' This is the sort of remark I have heard from spirit mediums defending their own knowledge against the dominance of Islam. Yusufi has, in fact, studied a little 'Him dunia on his own, but he stopped when he realized how many more people would be coming to him for advice.

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Saidu, on the other hand, took his children out without consulting anyone and with little ceremony. Although Saidu once attempted to study 'Him dunia, he was not accepted by the fundi. He never uses the services of 'Him dunia for diagnosis, he says; when he is sick he just prays and goes to the clinic. His dismissal of cosmology was demon¬ strated when I accompanied him to a consultation with the French doc¬ tor on a matter that was of grave concern to him but of no immediate urgency. On the way home from the highly successful expedition, he laughingly told me that he had been warned by a friend that the day was nuhus, an extremely inauspicious day on which to commence an enterprise. He referred his lack of concern to a passage in one of his books, which stated that there are no such things as lucky and unlucky days, but that all fortune comes directly from God. As may be imagined, the two men hold rather different views on spirit possession. Saidu acknowledges the existence of spirits, but is ready to reject outright the local curing process by which one comes to an accommodation with them. Yusufi's position is a good deal more complex. He argues that if spirits are used for healing the sick, that cannot be bad. The books say that a sick person should entreat God's mercy and then go find a fundi who will treat him. Use of a spirit is all right as long as it does not entail violation of any of the tenets of Islam, most importantly, that of not placing the spirit or fundi ahead of God in one's estimation. The client should also refrain from following those customs of the spirits that are forbidden by God. If the client has no doubts in God, he could remind the spirit that 'God is one' and ask it to accept something other than what is haram (forbidden). For example, the client could say to the spirit, 'Since I will not buy the liquor you want, why not just help me pray to get better?' Since God is behind all things, the spirit should give in. This advice on how to speak with spirits - and on how to speak to their clients - once again illustrates Yusufi's sense of diplomacy. He says, if you want to make an old custom fall, you must dig into it little by little. Yet another perspective is put on Yusufi's remarks by something about himself, which he did not tell me. An illness that had plagued him for many years and necessitated several operations had recently been attributed to possession. Yusufi held a spirit propitiation ceremony, but discreetly, in a distant village. When he was in trance, the spirit gave its name; it was the same spirit who had possessed his deceased father and who possesses his sister, the curer. Two other sisters of Yusufi, including the one who raised him and with whom he is closest, are

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possessed by this spirit's son. Saidu has no spirit.^” Yusufi's possession illustrates his vulnerability on two fronts: vulner¬ ability to possession and vulnerability to the public conceptions of fundihood. On the one hand, he accepts at some level the existence of possession as a fact and participates in it through the identity of his spirit in a perfectly coherent way. On the other, the secrecy with which his treatment was conducted demonstrates a concern for public opinion: it is not appropriate that fundis of 'Him fakihi participate in spirit posses¬ sion. Whether the issue is that he would feel embarrassed or whether it is simply that he does not want to set a bad example, his behaviour is significantly constrained by notions of Islamic comportment. And yet the dilemma works the other way for Yusufi as well. If he is possessed despite public opinion, he is also forced to conceal his rejection of spirit possession. The other side of the coin that indicates even further the constraints placed on a fundi's actions is Yusufi's comment to me that if a person were sick and the diviner diagnosed spirit possession, he (Yusufi) would support the performance of the propitiation ceremo¬ nies with his lips but not with his heart (rohu)-, he would not want other people to say that he didn't want the person to get well. And yet, he says, he knows that all illness comes from God. If Yusufi's position appears inconsistent, this may be in keeping with the situation in which he finds himself. To the degree that the various disciplines or discourses present in Mayotte are incommensurable with one another, they can be articulated only through a local hermeneutic in which each constructs an interpretation of the other. Thus we see a kind of ongoing conversation between - and within - persons, where positions and contradictions are sometimes rationalized but often staked out tacitly, lived out. We see also, in the case of both fundis, the brother who seeks com¬ promise and the brother who does not, the limitations to their autonomy and authority created by public conceptions of appropriate behaviour. Access to knowledge is not enough; a good fundi, especially in the early stages of his career, should be patient, courteous, and modest. He should spread his knowledge freely, not be stingy or shy nor wait to be asked, yet at the same time he should give precedence to the fundis who have trained before him. He should guide his students calmly, without mak¬ ing a lot of zistoires (des histoires, fusses, trouble). He should show con¬ cern for others and yet stick to matters which concern him. He should not put on airs (manan mpwary) nor make too many conditions to give assistance, however humble the client or modest the circumstances. And

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he should be a model of piety - without being overly critical of those who are not. The matter of reputation is of concern to all young fundis. Even Saidu compromises a little: he says he refrains from making all his rejections of traditional practices public knowledge for fear of giving offence. Perhaps the central tension in the villages in which I worked lies between the respect for knowledge and the resentment against its being used for telling other people that they are wrong (or, in the opposite direction, by introducing innovations, to impute that senior fundis are wrong). This may have its source in the manner in which Islam originally diffused to the region in the hands of an elite coupled with fact that Lombeni was founded upon the rejection of stratification. In the face of the contradiction, one brother sacrifices consistency and the other brother sacrifices popularity. Being the guardians of morality is a tricky business. When Saidu changed his performance of the Friday prayer, one man summed up his evaluation of the innovation this way: If Saidu really believes that what he is doing is right, then his behaviour is acceptable; but if he doubts the correctness of his actions, if he is only trying to make trouble or impress people, then God will be angry with him. The model of expert practice held by the person on the path is an agonistic one. Saidu is suspect because it is felt that he wants to play the role of big fundi in the community a little too badly and because he has made too many zistoires in the past. And yet, it seems to me that in their actions at the mosque one can see the good faith of both the brothers. While Saidu and Yusufi disagreed with one another, they did not set out deliberately to stake opposing positions, nor were they attempting to harm each other's reputations. The brothers did not engage in much intellectual discussion with each other and in fact said they had never discussed the issue of Friday prayer face to face, each of them preferring to consult with their own teachers. They were not in open conflict, and occasionally borrowed books or asked each other's advice about issues with which they were relatively unfamiliar. They participated happily in the same ritual performances. Whether or not there were underlying feelings of sibling rivalry, their respective positions on various issues stem naturally from their broader perspectives even while exemplifying each man's commitment to Islam. The differences between the brothers demonstrate at least two things. One is how different people can situate themselves or come to terms with the same body of knowledge, which each of them accept as true.

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in different ways. The other is how the position of the fundi is not one of simple power or final authority, but depends ultimately on his relation¬ ships, subtly derived, with both the texts and the public, as well as on his own thoughtful, knowledgeable, and flexible agency. In the case of both the expert who seeks compromise and the one who does not, the limitations to their autonomy and authority created by public conceptions of appropriate behaviour are apparent. Certain Knowledge, Contestable Authority At a structural level Islam may be seen as the hegemonic ideology in Mayotte, with the sacred texts providing the final authority and baseline reference for people's actions. However, the fundis who recite or inter¬ pret the texts within the village, who act as the texts' mouthpieces, do so not from an ivory tower but from within the heart of society. The ability to read texts is not an automatic source of power; personal au¬ thority is constrained by ritual performance and must be continually confirmed in social performance. The power of the fundis is contingent on their authority; their authority is based on the unquestioned author¬ ity of the texts - as well as on the fundis' manifest knowledge of the texts. But a fundi's authority is also subject to the constraints on personal ma¬ nipulation imposed by his very knowledge and performance of the texts, since such knowledge and performance have moral consequences. Fi¬ nally, a fundi's authority depends on the public interpretations of his daily conduct, which do not permit him to stray too far from local norms. Where text and public opinion contradict one another, the successful fundi will negotiate delicately between the two poles of his authority. For the fundis of 'Him fakihi, rightful political action is restricted to furthering religious ends as well as constructing social harmony. Any deviation from these goals invalidates their authority. Thus, in the debate about the correct form of prayer there is the suspicion that the experts have chosen their respective positions in order to display their own importance. Likewise, they enter factional disputes at their own risk. In this manner ordinary villagers have been able to maintain a certain resistance to the penetration of further political arguments couched in the idiom and with the authority of Islam. This is not a conscious resis¬ tance to the texts of Islam themselves, but rather to the men who purport to represent the texts. If the advocates are to be heard with respect, they must retain the purity of disinterestedness and they must not appear to flout local standards for respecting the positions and practice of others.

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

However great the public appreciation of their learning, the fundis must respect the ground rules of social life if they do not wish to find them¬ selves isolated, propounding their social knowledge alone in the wil¬ derness. At the same time, we have seen that fundis are not simply passive ve¬ hicles of knowledge nor products of public opinion. Fundis such as Saidu and Yusufi have ethical goals and agendas; they are, not strictly speak¬ ing, apohtical, nor are they powerless. They are thoughtful agents, whose actions are determined by their own ethical understanding and by their models of how Islam should articulate with the other forms of knowledge present in the community as well as with prevailing community senti¬ ment. The contrasting outlooks of Saidu and Yusufi illustrate the way a fundi's knowledge, situated in the context of his own personality, life circumstances, and ongoing social relations produces a personal style of practice. The fundi's conduct is influenced by community norms, but it is also shaped by his integrity and his moral sense, a moral sense that, in turn, is highly informed by Islam. The issue here is not to set up a simple opposition between Islam and tradition, but rather to capture a sense of the complexity of the whole. We must be clear about the discursive possibilities within Islam (cf. elZein 1974, 1977); the contrast between Saidu and Yusufi is offered in precisely this spirit. I suspect that the tension between textual and per¬ sonal authority is, in one guise or another, intrinsic to Islam. As Messick has written. The transition from the unity and authenticity of the Word of God to the multiplicity and disputed quality of the words of men is perhaps the central dynamic problem of Muslim thought' (1989: 28-9). Textual prescriptions can never be sufficient to govern lived experience; the gap between them establishes the space for moral debate within Islam. Finally, if one cannot hold strictly to either one position or the other, then they must remain in dialectic tension within the practice of every Muslim. Thus the division I have drawn between the two fundis is also internally characteristic of the practice of each of them. The bipolar model bears some resemblance to the pendulum swing theory of Islam proposed by Gellner.^^ Gellner distinguishes puritanism from mysticism and tribal heterodoxies; the former is 'proper, rigorous Islam' (1981: 146), based on literacy and opposed to all privileges in religious life except those based on piety and learning (1981:147), whereas the latter 'requires hierarchy and incarnation in persons, not in script. Its ethic is one of loyalty, not of rule-observance' (1981: 41). Gellner em-

Islamic Experts

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phasizes two distinct forms of Islam, which are rooted in different social contexts and which, because of the functionally organic links of these social contexts with the physical environment of North Africa and the Middle East, alternate with one another over the longue duree. By contrast, I have been concerned to show the coexistence and logical interconnections of two forms of legitimacy within a single manifestation of Islam and the tension between them at a particular historical moment. Neither the community I have described nor the individual fundis in it belong exclusively to either of Gellner's types. Instead, we see people engaged in dialogue in which personal and scriptural authority each play a part, both as subjects of debate and as the means by which positions in the debate are staked out and evaluated. Without wishing, or indeed being in the position, to challenge Gellner's characterization of rural 'tribal' Islam, I have found his depiction of the 'proper' scripturalist and urban religion a useful starting point. The ideal of equality of access to the rules of order through literacy that scripturalism proposes requires us to examine how knowledge is actually reproduced and circulated on the ground. Where Gellner claims that it is specifically 'tribal society' that 'requires that the Word should become flesh' (1981: 54), I have argued that the embodiment of Islam stems from the fact that the texts are enunciated, that illocutionary uses domi¬ nate over locutionary ones, and that access to knowledge of the texts is not in practice equally distributed. The main challenges to the situation I have described for Mayotte might be expected to come from the growth of literacy and from changes in the pattern of Islamic education, writing, and reading. These have indeed given rise to 'modernist' versions of Islam in some Middle East¬ ern countries. But, paradoxically, it is precisely in contexts such as these, where Islam comes to be identified with nationalism, that it is signified by individual national leaders or parties. And, as politics are Islamicized, so Islam becomes highly politicized. As access to the texts is democra¬ tized, and as referential meaning becomes as relevant as illocutionary force, so the texts become subject to debate and lose their moral au¬ tonomy. No longer the guarantee of moral order and a constraint upon the action of individuals, Islam becomes an ideological tool used to legitimate political actions.^^ If there was Islamic hegemony in Mayotte (and, by extrapolation, in premodem Islamic societies generally), nevertheless, no one has complete authority to represent Islam or to use Islam to authorize political action. Personal and textual forms of authority coexist in dynamic tension. The

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

fact that the leading representatives of Islam are judged by criteria that are at once broader and more challenging than any that are addressed to the tenets of Islam itself suggests that a subtle analysis of the 'position' of Islam in this African society must move beyond a structural account. While Islam cannot be seen as a bounded institution separate from the social whole, at the same time it cannot be identified too closely with society as a seamless unitary whole. Instead, we must conceive of a field of discourses in which considerations of both moral order and daily and ritual practice, certain knowledge and contestable authority, are granted a central place.

PART m Counterpractices: Cosmology and the Ins and Outs of Sorcery

Ndranahary tsy matity. God is not stingy.

- Kinyume, proverb

7 Knowledge with Power: The Discipline of Cosmology

The fundi who astonished Gabriel in the introductory story was a cosmologer, mwalim dunia and it is in this discipline, 'Him dunia, that the conjuncture of knowledge and power and the disjuncture between knowledge and morality are most apparent. 'Him dunia comprises the most esoteric knowledge found in Mayotte, yet at the same time it is knowledge that has had tremendous practical import. Access to it is quite restricted, yet necessary. Hence the position of the expert, the mwalim dunia, is sharply defined. He is a powerful figure and, from the perspective of the path, a dangerous one. The story of Gabriel and the mwalim illustrates the ambivalence felt towards him. The mwalim dunias are not responsible for formulating moral attitudes, for directing or representing moral public consensus. Their practice is essentially private; they don't initiate action but work on behalf of clients. Their clients are individuals or families, and only on rare occasions the community as a whole. One mwalim dunia explains that their title de¬ rives from the fact that they 'support many people' {manday ulu maru), but dunia means 'crowd' rather than 'community.' In Arabic dunia refers to the secular world, the here and now. In Kibushy this meaning is con¬ veyed by dunyan; nevertheless, it seems reasonable to translate 'Him dunia as worldly or secular knowledge. This translation serves to set the field off from Islamic sacred knowl¬ edge {'Him fakihi), but is still too broad to indicate what it is about. The critical feature of 'Him dunia is that it concerns the nyora, the constella¬ tions, and uses their configurations to provide practical advice.* Because of its central and practical import in Mayotte, I have decided to translate 'Him dunia as cosmology. Astrology obviously would not be inappropri¬ ate either.

196

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

The practice of the mwalim dunias is composed of a number of ele¬ ments. Like the fundi in the opening chapter, the mwalims use their books to discover things about the present and future, based on an elaborate system of conjunctions. This is a process that may be described as divi¬ nation isikidy). The Kibushy verb is mampizaha, from the verb mizaha, to look, with the addition of a prefix that indicates agency, hence to 'make visible,' or to show. In addition, and even more consequentially, the mwalims keep a record of the nyoras of their clients, beginning with the time of birth, and are responsible for scheduling life crisis rites thereafter. They also construct amulets. Finally, practitioners make use of a number of Arabic medical texts that do not directly concern the stars and treat clients for various kinds of conditions, most notably for harassment by unwanted spirits (not possession). Both 'Him fakihi and 'Him dunia are text-based, yet by and large the texts are used in different ways and for different ends. In 'Him fakihi oral recitation is critical. The general public and the fundis share this oral domain; only the senior fundis work in the written domain of the com¬ mentaries. The oral dimension is insignificant in 'Him dunia and there¬ fore access to the texts is much more restricted. Moreover, whereas the texts of 'Him fakihi are often used performatively, those of 'Him dunia are locutionary, providing keys to the world rather than being, affirming, or making the world. In sum, in providing astrological advice and divination and in or¬ chestrating life crisis rituals, the means drawn upon by the mwalim dunias are essentially amoral and secular. The practice of the mwalim dunias is directed to the body. It is they who schedule the social births of infants, who purge boys and girls of the spirits that cause seizures and convul¬ sions, who schedule circumcisions and deflorations. The end of this bodily practice is to ensure a good destiny, that is a good, healthy, productive, and reproductive life. This is all in marked contrast to the fundis of 'Him fakihi, whose means are moral and whose practical con¬ cerns always keep an eye to preparing for the afterlife. Nyora is the key concept in 'Him dunia) it refers not to ethical principles or judicious and compassionate divinity but to the endless rotation of the planets and constellations and to personal destiny, as well as to the fundamental link between them. Relations of (Re)production If my access to 'Him fakihi was that of a potentially well-informed citi¬ zen, my relationship to 'Him dunia stayed pretty well at the level of a

Knowledge with Power

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person on the path. I describe what I know of this field, but what I know is largely that of an outsider. My knowledge is based on popular opinion, on occasionally following clients to the mwalim or hearing about the reasons and consequences of their visits, on observing the mwalims at curing and ritual occasions, but rarely on lengthy discussions with an expert. At times a mwalim would show me his books, but my lack of reading skills in Arabic, combined with my ignorance of the constella¬ tions, made this not as fruitful as it might have been. The information the mwalims gave me appeared unsystematic, isolated facts in a strange vocabulary. 1 lacked a sense of the whole into which the parts could be fitted. Had I been better informed about a popular discipline from my own society, astrology, I might have known better what to ask. Hence, what I present in this chapter does not pretend to be as thor¬ ough an account as what I write on Islam or spirit possession, although of course in neither of those two areas do I claim full knowledge either. It would be impossible to construct a neutral and omniscient objective account of any of these fields. I never got to the bottom of what cosmologers do, but in a sense that is the point. They live in a world of suspicion, speculation, and innuendo. What I present is closer to the person on the path's view, but a description of this position is no less 'true' than that of the expert. Each is a perspective characteristic of social life in Mayotte, and it is this social life rather than a pure and abstracted field called 'Islam' or 'cosmology' that I am after. Moreover, each tradition is not simply an open field of knowledge but a discipline; each, in its own way, establishes constraints on access to knowledge. In the case of 'Him dunia these constraints are more severe than in the other disciplines and I did not have the time or perseverance to submit to them. My experience is by no means atypical. Just as, like every village child, I was pushed in the direction of Islam, so, like most villagers, I was given no encouragement to learn 'Him dunia. Virtually everyone is, that is, 'aims at being' (Schutz 1964: 122) a well-informed citizen with regard to Islam. Knowledge of 'Him dunia, unlike that of the sacred texts, is not expected of the population at large and partial knowledge confers little social advantage. So much for apologies. The important point is that the social relations of production of 'Him dunia are very different from those of the other fields. The knowledge is not widely available, but restricted to a few fundis and their apprentices. Apart from some elementary aspects of divination, the knowledge is esoteric. There are few well-informed citi¬ zens and the person on the path is apprehensive about what the mwalims know and the means by which they have gained access to such knowl-

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

edge. For example, it is widely believed that in order to become a mwalim, one must kill a close relative. Such beliefs tend to restrict the number of applicants, both because they do not wish to carry out the sort of practices described and, even if they doubt their actuality, because they do not want such practices to be attributed to them. And it is certainly true that the course of becoming a mwalim entails the performance of a number of acts that require courage and that might easily be construed as antisocial. I have not observed the full training of a mwalim, so I can¬ not vouch for the accuracy of the claims, but it does seem likely, as an advanced apprentice admitted to me, that midnight expeditions are not infrequently engaged upon, chiefly to learn the constellations, but pos¬ sibly also occasionally to dance at the cemetery or in order to meet spirits face to face. The latter activity is carried out by rubbing the eyes with the soot obtained from a burnt cat skin.^ But, as one man who was insufficiently interested in the discipline said, 'to gain the knowledge is not worth killing a cat.' 1 shall have more to say about dancing in graveyards in Chapter 8. Like the fundis of the 'Him fakihi, then, advanced students are largely self-selected. However, they are fewer in number and only begin their studies in young adulthood. They also have a much more exclusive relationship with their teachers and are bound to them not only by the secrecy and apparently antisocial nature of their practices but by vari¬ ous obligations. They must be ready to carry out the duties of the pro¬ fession when called upon by the mwalim, receive only a minimal share of the fee, and, even when they receive their own clients, must check their astrological calculations with their teacher. Professional autonomy arrives only after many years. It is finalized by a large payment from the new master to his teacher. In Lombeni, some men have been ap¬ prentices for nearly twenty years.^ The acquisition of 'Him dunia like that of 'Him fakihi, is based primarily on reading Arabic texts. However, the texts are read in a somewhat different manner. An apprentice may begin by reciting the text along with his fundi in order to learn it, but recitation is not a goal in itself. The mwalim uses his books in order to look things up. He must be able to rapidly find his place, to locate specific pieces of information and to translate them. He also has to learn the extratextual rules that tell him when and where to look and how to interpret what he finds to his clients. One reason for the long period of apprenticeship, then, is that an active mwalim must learn to read a significant number of texts. Reci¬ tation is not sufficient here; the mwalim must be able to look up recipes.

Knowledge with Power

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make calculations, and the like. Given the teaching methods, acquiring fluency is a lengthy process, and, compared to 'Him dunia, there is less to be gained from the instruction by taking only the first steps. On the other hand, once fluency has been achieved, the number of books that can be read is virtually inexhaustible and hence even estabhshed mwalims continue to study texts that are new to them. Reading and writing are less embodied in 'Him dunia than in 'Him fakihi. Texts are neither recited nor put to music and sung. Fundis read texts for the information or instructions contained within them not for the sake of the texts in and of themselves. Their use is generally locutionary rather than illocutionary. Texts are not prayers or invocations, although a mwalim dunia may combine duas with various other kinds of computations in order to construct spells. The oral recitation in 'Him fakihi creates a large zone for participation by well-informed citizens that is lacking in 'Him dunia. The public hears less and sees less of 'Him dunia. People who wish to become better informed must make a deliberate and sustained effort to seek out the knowledge. Not only do students have less incentive to begin training in 'Him dunia than in 'Him fakihi, but the mwalims are under absolutely no obligation to accept aspiring students. Thus they effectively control access to their profession. Such students as they do accept are initiated into the secrets gradually and only when they can be trusted to keep them in turn. I know two men in Lombeni whose requests for instruction were turned down by Juma Abudu, the senior mwalim dunia. One of these was the leading fundi of 'Him fakihi who wanted to study the new texts simply out of intellectual curiosity, I think. He said Juma Abudu turned him down for lack of time. Teaching is a very extended business and the mwalim does not enter into it lightly. Juma told me that Saidu had no business studying something new when he should have been out sup¬ porting his family. (Not only was the mwalim dunia by far the older of the two men, he was also much wealthier.) The second man thinks he was turned down because the mwalim felt his personality was such that he would use the knowledge for aggressive, antisocial ends. I suspect it more likely that the mwalim considered that he lacked the discipline to study. The mwalim may also have turned the men down on grounds established by astrological calculation. Both men had to accept the mwalim's decision, though they could have attempted to receive in¬ struction from someone in a different village. When an apprenticeship is at an end, the apprentice terminates it by offering a gift to his fundi. If anyone can be said to grant legitimacy to

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

the new fundi, it is the old mwalim who, through accepting the gift and no longer interfering in his affairs, grants him the right to practise au¬ tonomously. If the community has no formal role in this process, people do, however, observe the practice of fundis and sometimes test them. Community members can vote with their feet, provided they have an alternate source for the knowledge they need. The senior mwalim dunia in Lombeni during my fieldwork was Juma Abudu. He was feared and respected locally and his reputation extended well beyond the village. Juma's father, Abudu Butsy, had also been a mwalim dunia, as had one of Juma's brothers. Abudu Butsy apparently held an even greater reputation than his son, although this is difficult to judge in hindsight. Abudu Butsy became blind in adulthood, the result of a conflict with another mwalim. The infirmity served as an index of Abudu's power; his opponent was killed in their battle. There seem to have been more mwalims in the past; perhaps the profession was more attractive when it was more central to the community. Several of Abudu Butsy's contemporaries in both Lombeni Kely and Lombeni Be were mwalims. They had all died by 1975, but some of their knowledge was reputed to have been passed on to their widows. A number of strong old women, whose practice was more closely identified with possession and herbalism, were also said to make use of knowledge and techniques learned from their former husbands. Although 'Him dunia is primarily a male preserve and few women become officially recognized as mwalims, it is understood that women form a repository for much of the knowledge, especially for that which can be transmitted orally. There is no rule preventing women from becoming full-fledged mwalims and there are said to have been a few in the past. However, the picture of the mwalim as someone working with an abstract and morally neutral system, one that is based on neither ethics nor compassion and that operates essentially outside the bounds of kinship, probably does not make the profession appealing to many women and, moreover, precisely because of their association with kin¬ ship, would place women at greater risk than male mwalims of being accused of sorcery. Women in their child-rearing years are also less likely to have the extended periods of time and flexible schedules nec¬ essary for apprenticeship (Brown 1970). Juma Abudu preferred to teach young men before they had engaged upon the commitment of marriage and family; similarly unmarried girls would be on the average several years younger and not be considered suitable candidates, nor themselves yet interested, on that count.

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The story of the feud between the two old mwalitns illustrates another important point, namely that each fully trained mwalim is autonomous and not part of an integrated hierarchy. The senior mwalims are reputed to be competitive rather than cooperative and to indulge in shows of strength. For example, one man says that if one mwalim sponsors a mulidi, another might use sorcery to spoil the meat to be served at the feast so that they see which of them is the stronger. These amoral exploits have a heroic and magical quality about them. Long ago, Ali Rary was a very big mwalim. He had leprosy and was put by the French administration onto the rocky leprosarium out along the reef. Without access to a canoe or any evident means of transport, he reappeared the very next day and people were astonished at his powers! Juma Abudu did not learn 'Him dunia directly from his own father but after his father's death from a man who spent some of his last years married to a woman of Lombeni. At the time of my first visit to Lombeni, Juma Abudu was one of the senior men of the village, in late middleage, but strong and vigorous. He owned more land than most villagers, some inherited from his father and some purchased himself, and he had planted extensive fields of ylang-ylang. Although he must have been relatively wealthy, he did not display it either with new clothing or a nice house. His one obvious luxury was polygyny. Having divorced the mother of his grown children in Lombeni, he married a woman some distance away who was herself the daughter of a mwalim dunia. She did not wish to live in Lombeni and Juma spent most of his time living in her village. However, his obligations in Lombeni - as kinsman, vil¬ lage elder, landholder, and, not least, as mwalim dunia - forced him to spend at least one week of every month in Lombeni. Finding temporary bachelorhood not to his taste, he took a second wife in Lombeni, a middle-aged woman who was agreeable to his infrequent visits. Juma was well respected in the community for his achievements and his judgment, and people wished he would spend more time there. Unlike other men of his status, he paid relatively little attention to village ceremonies and he almost never prayed at the mosque, a fact that was commented upon but, in his case, tolerated. Although Juma was perfectly friendly to me, he always claimed to be too busy to have a sustained conversation. His visits to Lombeni were irregular and short, and his claims seemed justified. In 1975 none of his apprentices appeared very welcoming either: one was extremely shy and spoke Shimaore rather than Kibushy; another, who later went mad, was gruff, taciturn, and a loner; and the third, Mussa Malidi, was an

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

inveterate jokester whose company I enjoyed, but whose information I felt I could not trust. I was learning things almost faster than I could absorb them from Tumbu, Mohedja, and other spirit mediums and their clients, and 1 did not press things with the mwalim.

Blindness and Insight In 19801 finally began a series of more useful conversations with Mussa, then in his early forties. Mussa had begun his studies in the village of D, but the mwalim dunia there had grown very old and it proved too difficult to continue. The mwalim in D, whom Mussa continued to think of as his primary fundi, directed him to Juma Abudu. That man and Juma Abudu are colleagues and this arrangement was acceptable to Juma (a fact that provides counterevidence to the popular picture of the senior mwalims at war with each other). When you finish your studies, you pay your fundi either a cow or the equivalent in cash. Only after this do you have permission to practise and collect payment on your own. Until then you rely on your fundi to give you a share of the re¬ wards for your work. In 1980 Mussa said that the fundi he would pay would be the one in D. By 1985 Mussa had still not paid and he also seemed somewhat more of a client of Juma's and less ready to assert his independence. He said he was postponing payment because once you've paid, you won't learn any more and he wanted to wait until he knew things really well. He added that he would pay 500 francs, a large goat, and a big meal to each of his fundis. The other apprentice mwalims in Lombeni will pay Juma alone and seemed more dependent on him than was Mussa. 8 July 1980. I followed Mussa to Juma Abudu where he went for advice about his daughter, one of the few children of the village at the time to have reached secondary school. The daughter wished to leave school and seek work. Juma established what day of the month it was and the day of the week and used this correlation to check his books. The conclusion was that the girl should write her job application letter on Thursday and send it on Friday. When we discussed the possibility, once again not to materialize, of my starting lessons, Juma said he would begin by teaching me to identify the stars. After we left 1 asked Mussa whether he couldn't have made the calculation concerning his daughter on his own. 'Oh, yes,' he replied, 'but it is a matter of courtesy [ishima] to go to one's fundi with one's own problems,' thereby, pre¬ sumably, demonstrating trust and deference. Mussa practises in Lombeni Be

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and claims to have many clients of his own. He has already scheduled life cycle rituals, mostly, I think, for people in his family, but it is not clear how much authority he has. I know one man who mistrusts Mussa and specifically did not wish him to schedule his son's circumcision. So he went to Juma Abudu - who in turn passed on the task to Mussa! I think Mussa did not set the time on his own and merely carried out Juma's directions. 9 July. I visited Mussa at his house for a lesson. Mussa says he knows which nyora, that is, which marked constellation, fits each client, apparently by doing a count based on the numerical values of the letters in the client's name. His book, the Santil Ahabar tells him whether the client's problem is due (for ex¬ ample) to being bothered by spirits in general or whether the client actually has a specific spirit rising in his or her head. Only in the latter case would Mussa refer the client to a patros fundi. Another book, the Mukhtwar il Ayyam tells you how to remove spirits by providing a list of the appropriate swadaka [offerings] for each. The book lists the names of the spirits and their home towns. The world started with twelve spirits, each of whom had many offspring. The book also provides spirit genealogies. Thus, for example, Lallah bun [offspring of] Marwan had eleven children, in order: Hadush, Dadush, Mamdush, Damdush, Kaish, Twaish, Zaharukush, Faharush, Katwarush, Kartush, and Zahurush. Hadush, in turn, had 11 offspring, and so on. The spirits were prolific and Mussa says there are now more of them in the world than humans. Some of the names recur as patros spirits in possession activities. The constellations [nyora] are given in Arabic and correspond precisely to the signs of the zodiac in European astrology, indicative of an earlier transnational spread of culture [cf. Goody 1968]. The names are also very close in pronuncia¬ tion to those used by the makers of horoscopes in Madagascar [Decary 1951]; knowledge of Arabic divination spread there long ago, and much more exten¬ sively and profoundly than did Islam [Bloch 1968]. The nyoras rotate in se¬ quence; Mussa says you can recognize the current nyora by noting which con¬ stellation is close to the moon at night. In addition to the rotation of the constel¬ lations, there is a sequence of seven planets [kawakibu] moving on an hourly basis.‘‘ Because there are seven planets, their order on a given day repeats in a weekly cycle. By knowing which planet begins each day of the week at 6 AM (approximately sunrise), one can rapidly calculate the planet that is relevant at any given moment. Thus each day and hour can be given a precise astrological reading, that is, a correlation of constellation and planet. This explains why, in the case described above, Juma Abudu asked for the day of the month and week. The planet that begins the day appears to influence the entire day. Thus, for example, Tuesdays [talata] always begin with the planet mirihi [Mars]; in the

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

nyora al karabu [Scorpio], Tuesdays are good days to carry out projects. There are a great many books, Mussa says, and even a big fundi like Juma does not own them all. Mussa has a number of printed books, but of other manu¬ scripts he only has handwritten copies transcribed in notebooks. One of the most valuable, because it is no longer available in print in Mayotte, is a manu¬ script that tells you the times at which individual spirits may be contacted, knowledge that is necessary for doing sorcery [see Chapter 8]. Mussa copied Juma's version, which was in turn copied from a much larger book. Mussa estimates the book might cost as much as 800 francs if one were able to order it from Mombasa. In addition to written knowledge, Mussa has had a number of experiences that contribute to his training. He says he paid 140 francs to learn to recognize the constellations and planets in the sky; you go out with your fundi until you can identify all of them. With his fundi from D, he says, he also went to manamy, that is to see the spirits [lulu] directly. They went out on the rocks along the beach at night, bringing a swadaka for the spirits. The fundi put gwena [black paste] on his thumb and forefinger and then stuck these on Mussa's eyes. Then he saw the spirits rather than his ordinary surroundings. The spirits were very ugly, with tails and horns, but Mussa was not scared because he had brought the swadaka. When they were done, he passed his hand over his face to return to normal. 18 July. Mussa says he knows the plant medicines associated with 'Him dunia. He claims the Arabic names of medicines found in his books can all be translated into local names. He links the twelve medicines of the trumba ritual with the twelve patros ancestors, surely a bit of individual synthesis. In fact, many of the key ingredients in the mwalims' pharmacopoeia are imported from Zanzibar [Ngudja] by way of the Grande Comore and need to be purchased in a special¬ ist shop in town. Mussa concurs with Tumbu that spirit mediums learn the medicines from their spirits, whereas the mwalim dunias learn it from their books. Both kinds of curers use local plants, but only the mwalims use imported medi¬ cines. I have seen a number of small bottles and packets at Juma's. The two kinds of experts use their respective medicines for somewhat differ¬ ent ends. The mwalim dunias treat people troubled by hefty [fatatra] spirits who drive their victims mad, but who are not given individual identities and do not rise in them. Mediums treat clients with spirits who wish to possess them. In the normal course of events, the client learns to enter trance and to accommo¬ date to the presence of the spirit, who in turn takes on a stable social identity. Mussa points out that whereas mwalims use medicines that stink in order to drive away evil spirits, the possession fundis use a combination of stinking and fra¬ grant medicines in order to negotiate and come to terms with the spirits. Much

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healing frona all three traditions is conducted as a kind of battle of scents. Many of the mwalim’s imported 'medicines' are what Westerners call 'spices.' It is interesting to realize from Mussa's discussions of both books and medi¬ cines that the knowledge of the mioalim dunias has depended on access to re¬ gional trade networks centred on the Swahili coast. Some of the books and medicines on which the mwalims rely were undoubtedly more accessible in the past when regional trade and travel were greater. The encapsulation of Mayotte within the world capitalist economy together with the solidification of national boundaries has occurred at the expense of regional movement; by 1980 it was far easier to acquire goods from a mail order firm in Paris than books from Mombasa, and easier (if more expensive) to travel to Paris or La Reunion than to northern Madagascar or Zanzibar. 21 July. Mussa explains that the mwalim can know what's wrong with a client according to the time at which he arrives for consultation. For example, 5 PM on a Monday might mean there is a spirit pestering the person, but not one who wishes to rise; 5 PM on a Tuesday could be evil-eye, and so on. You count the set of seven planets beginning at 6 AM (although the shifts occur on the halfhour). At 1 PM you can start over. The order of the planets is always the same, but the list begins at a different point at each day of the week. Then you look up the correlation of planet reached with the day (and possibly the constellation) and also take into account whether the client is male or female. When people outside the field practise divination, it is usually the planetary cycle upon which they rely. There is another book, the book of life, which records when every person will die, the day and the year.® The calculation is made according to the value of the letters in your name as well as the nyora of your birth. Mwalims know how long each person has to live, but it is forbidden [fady] to reveal this information to anyone. On the basis of such knowledge, a jundi could advise a client not to purchase an expensive swadaka if he sees that the client is going to die soon anyway. Clients might understand your meaning, but you cannot inform them of their imminent death outright. Mussa says he has looked up neither his own nor his wife's or children's lifespans. 3 August. Today Mussa explains that the nyora may be distinguished according to whether they are earth [fotaka], wind [tsiku], water [ranu], or fire [mahamay]. The list of the constellations and their associated elements is as follows:® Al hamali

(Aries)

mahamay

(fire)

Al thawra

(Taurus)

fotaka

(earth)

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

206 Al jauza

(Gemini)

tsiku

(wind)

Al saratani

(Cancer)

ranu

(water)

Alasad

(Leo)

mahamay

(fire)

Al sumbulat

(Virgo)

fotaka

(earth)

Mizani

(Libra)

tsiku

(wind)

Al karabu

(Scorpio)

ranu

(water)

Al kausi

(Sagittarius)

mahamay

(fire)

Al jadi

(Capricorn)

fotaka

(earth)

Adalu

(Aquarius)

tsiku

(wind)

Al huti

(Pisces)

ranu

(water)

Mussa describes how he spent a whole night alone on the rocks seeing spirits and being taught by them. You go with your fundi who calls the spirits and in¬ troduces you; he tells them you're his mwanafundi and then he leaves. You bring milk and a red chicken - red because the eyes of the spirits are red like fire. If you don't bring an offering, they stare into your eyes until they are damaged; if you bring it they stare at their food. [This demonstrates a primary aim of the swadaka outside the sphere of 'Him fakihi, namely to deflect the spirits' gaze or attention.] When you go to study in this way, you do not blacken your eyes as he did on the earlier occasion. You sit there; it can be a night with a moon or not. The spirits tell you things. You just listen, and don't write. Since the first occasion, the spirits have come several times to teach Mussa at night. They rattle the key in the door. Mussa rises and goes outside to learn. He always does this outside because he has many children sleeping in his house [and the spirits could harm them]. He may do this a few nights a month, but not when there is rain or high wind. He goes down to the rocks to avoid the shitters on the beach.

I was not completely happy with these notes. Mussa's comments were often vague or evasive, and the language esoteric and unclear to me. Unlike Tumbu or Mohedja, Mussa often seemed to contradict him¬ self from one conversation to the next, and he liked to pull my leg. There were many gaps to be filled. 1 missed having a second opinion and a forum in which the points raised in our discussions could be pursued more systematically. I felt that the only way my understanding could improve would be to observe Mussa in practice and, in particu¬ lar, to accompany him on one of his nocturnal expeditions. In 1985 we began another series of conversations and I gradually broached the subject. In 1985 Mussa was still an apprentice of Juma. In August I observed

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him come to Juma's house to study a book of plant medicines and later he carried out Juma's instructions regarding a number of circumcision ceremonies. But Mussa also said he was the fundi of his own mraba. He consulted his books for all family matters. His wife consulted the spirits in her mother and grandmother, but Mussa said he never cooperated with them. (There had not for a long time been any love lost between Mussa and his mother-in-law.) He gave a concern with the well-being of his family as the reason for having studied ‘Him dunia in the first place; he wanted to ensure his children's rituals of transition took place on good days. Mussa had broadened his interests to include 'Him fakihi and for the last three years had made occasional trips to A to study with a renowned fundi there. He had even become a modest fundi of 'Him fakihi himself, teaching a number of basic books (kiu) to a few village youths. Despite his light-hearted attitude, it was evident to me that he really could translate these works. His personal library had expanded to over twenty printed works covering both fields. He attributed his rapid acquisition of knowledge to the fact that he had learned the Qur'an well as a child and thus began reading with a solid base. Mussa said he was not prepared {tsy mahasaky) to teach ‘Him dunia, not because Juma Abudu was still alive, but because the knowledge could be used to kill people. He could not trust his prospective students not to apply it. He would turn down students even if that made them angry with him. He would rather teach people to distinguish what is good from what is forbidden by God. Comparing the two disciplines, he said 'Him fakihi is for people who want to learn the word of God {kabar ny Ndranahary), whereas ‘Him dunia is only for people who like meat. The reference to meat explicitly concerns the reward the mwalim dunias receive for their role in scheduling circumcision ceremonies, a subject that was on Juma's mind since several were being held in the village that season. When the boys go under the knife, they must be fixed precisely in time and space. The mwalim sets the time for the cutting and also orients the boys in the right direction. If they are to survive cir¬ cumcision, the boys have to face away from hawahany, something in the sky whose position, ascertainable in the books, shifts regularly. When hawahany lies towards Mecca, the boys have to be faced in an alternate direction. The mwalim consults a book that records the auspiciousness of the various conjunctions of nyora and hours, in order to produce the time (manaboka wakat) for the life crisis ritual, and he also regards the heavens.

208

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Mussa now adds something new. According to the books, four nyora are hidden under the earth. In establishing the wakat for a circumcision, one has to manamy, to see what is hidden. At first I thought he meant the purpose was to see the constellations themselves, but this appears not to be so. He describes how he and Juma Abudu prepared for the circumcisions. They cooked together the skin of a black cat and a black coconut in order to create a sooty paste (gwena), which they rubbed over their eyes. They then saw spirits (lulu) who told them the current loca¬ tions of the underground nyoras. It is unclear to me whether the stars located through the vision are ones that are temporarily or permanently absent from the night sky. Mussa also wavers between referring to them as nyora and as bad spirits (lulu ratsy). To conclude you simply write a verse onto your hand and wipe it over your face. This erases the vision and you see normally again. What is particularly interesting about all this is how the mwalims supplement - or claim to supplement - their reading knowledge with what they gain through their hidden actions. Hence they legitimate their own authority through experience as well as books. It would be difficult to conceive of knowledge more objectified than the regular conjunctions of endless cycles. But ‘Him dunia is comprised of more than this objectified knowledge; it too has an embodied pole. Practice of the difficult art of establishing auspicious times is embodied, entailing the experience of the cosmologers as they produce visions for themselves of the hidden side of the world. Mussa by now had become quite offhand in his discussion of seeking visions with the spirits. He did it whenever he felt like it, he asserted, day or night. In that case, I said, I would like to go with him the next time. My request proved in part to be a test of his authority. When pressed, it was clear that he felt he had to ask Juma Abudu's permission (or else he used this as an excuse). Juma, as usual, had gone out of town. A month later, along with the first rains, the response came back. Juma apparently had told Mussa it was too late in the season. It would have had to have been done in preparation for the circumcisions. These are always held at the end of the dry season (people say it takes the wounds longer to heal in the wet season) and so they were able to put me off, telling me I would have to wait for another year. At this point, the business about rubbing the burnt cat skin into ones eye's struck me. I am highly allergic to cats. Clearly, sharing visionary encounters of wild spirits together with the mwalims is something I will never do.

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Divination as Calculation I have spoken of the mwalim dunias as diviners, but divination has a more hmited scope here than it does in many African societies. For one thing, while a diviner can tell you the cause of affliction, and might attribute it to sorcery, he should not identify the perpetrator. Divination can indicate whether the sorcerer was male or female, Hght- or dark-skinned, and from which direction of the compass he hails, but it should not be more specific than that. Moreover, divination is not appropriately used to discover the cause of death. On the contrary, unlike many societies, death is not viewed as 'unnatural'; its cause is straightforward, death comes simply and directly from God. The role of human mediation in this process is relevant while the victim is still alive, but the context changes with death. Death is evidence of God's will and that is that, lienee divination is less politicized than in contexts where it routinely seeks out murderers. Not only is there less likely to be controversy surrounding the con¬ clusions of the diviners, but there is less need for the kind of social Control over the outcome than is exerted, for example, by Zande royalty over oracles in their domain (Evans-Pritchard 1937; cf. McLeod 1972). The conclusions of the diviner are not incontrovertible. The products of divination never gain public jural status and have no external sources of legitimacy (like Zande royal backing) to add to their force. Hence divination does not function like a court in casting a legitimate verdict. It is used more to confirm or direct private opinion than to definitively establish public opinion. This is a limit on the power of the mwalimsJ To anticipate an argument I will put forward in Chapter 12, the mwalim provides merely one element in an ongoing construction of the story of what has happened or what is happening. Other voices enter into the composition of this story, and other ears share in the interpretation. Stories are open-ended, changing course as the context of life changes. The only fact that is conclusive is death and it is precisely the fact for which the diviners can have nothing to say. Consultations are also generally much more private than in much of Africa. The concerned client goes alone or at most with a few close kin. Nor does the diviner perform in anything hke the elaborate manner described for the Ndembu, the Kalanga, or the Tswana. Divination is a matter of calculation and checking various correspondences. To what degree the mwalim contributes his own intuitions or social and psycho-

210

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

logical understanding, I cannot say, but the questions addressed to the diviner do not necessarily demand a great deal of subtlety in reply. Many of the questions, like those put before the Zande chicken oracle, require a simple binary response, although, unlike the Zande case, not exclusively so. An ill person might inquire as to what kind of curer he should go to, whether light- or dark-skinned. A curer might inquire whether she was effective or compatible (mwafaka) with a particular case. The diviner might also be asked to ascertain the underlying causes of affliction, whether sorcery or spirit possession was involved. Divination is based primarily on ascertaining the nyora of the client and linking this with the time of the consultation. There are a number of bases for making such calculations. The cycle of planets, which is the most popular way of establishing the time of consultation, was described above. The nyora of the client may already be known to the mwalim. Alternatively, Mussa describes a method by which a client's nyora may be ascertained. The mwalim reads a special dua while standing behind the client. The client scratches; by noting the spot scratched the mwalim can classify the nyora - whether it is hard or soft (mahery or malemy), good or bad {tsara or tsy tsara). I will discuss the meaning of these terms shortly. Doubtless there are many esoteric methods. Yusufi Bwana, the young Islamic fundi who has dabbled in ‘Him dunia, describes another hisabu (calculation) that he knows, based on the fact that each Arabic letter stands for a particular number. If a client comes seeking a lost item, you add the numbers formed by the person's name, the day of week, and the item lost. You divide by a number given you in the appropriate book and then decode the remainder back into information. If it is a question of marriage, it is wise to choose a partner whose name comes to the same count as yours; since it appears that God has already linked the two of you, you know it is a marriage that will work. Ever open to new sources of knowledge, Yusufi likens the latter process to the Euro¬ pean method of taking blood from each prospective partner to a mar¬ riage and seeing whether they match. Another means of calculation is to lay out a special kind of roasted seeds {voa n'sikidy). You divide the seeds rapidly into four piles, remove the seeds two at a time from each pile until either one or two remain and lay these in a column, repeating the process until you have four parallel columns of ones and twos. The resulting binary message pro¬ vides a nyora, if you know how to read it. This method, similar to forms of divination found elsewhere in Africa, was not particularly common

Knowledge with Power

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during my fieldwork; once again, the knowledge, although oral, ap¬ peared to be controlled by the mwalims. Divination need not be motivated by the question of a client. That a highly educated mwalitn dunia has an ear to the workings of the universe is apparent in his ability to decode the significance of the sounds that certain animals make, such as the tapping of lizards on house walls. Saidu Bwana, whom we have seen was on many issues a sceptic, himself recounted to me how one day when Juma Abudu, the mwalitn dunia of Lombeni, was out in the fields he heard a crow cawing. Taking account of the day and the hour, Juma did a quick count on his fingers and announced to the company that they had better head back to the village as someone had just died there. They immediately returned home and found that it was true. The work of the diviner in Mayotte has more to do with the immedi¬ ate future than with the past; Will my expedition be successful? Is this curer (or this client) right for me? Are prospective marriage partners compatible? Some months after I began my stay I learned that when I had first requested permission to reside in Lombeni, the chef went to the mwalim to determine whether the outcome would be auspicious and then whether the house he had selected for me would turn out to be suitable. Likewise, when their son wished to marry, Tumbu and Mohedja put the names of three girls the boy had selected before the diviner. Two were rejected as incompatible by the mwalim, and marriage nego¬ tiations were taken up with the parents of the third. A young man went to Juma Abudu to inquire regarding an auspicious day to go to town for supplies to start his shop. He had planned to set up the shop in his house, but when the divination warned that would be inadvisable without the supplementation of much medicine, he decided to install it at his mother's house instead. Divination of this sort can be viewed as a sort of wild card that can throw off the best laid plans. Similarly, it may randomize choice, pro¬ viding direction where two paths are otherwise equally desirable or where the rejection of both could have negative social consequences. For example, when faced with two suitors, the parents of a marriageable girl can resort to the diviner in order to avoid giving insult to the rejected party. Conversely, when people have already made up their minds about something, they can falsely attribute their choice to divi¬ nation in order that no one loses face and to avoid causing insult. Given the contrary pulls exerted within a bilateral kinship system, this strategy

212

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

is commonly employed. It is useful, for example, when one receives an unwelcome request from a kinswoman for a child to foster. On the other hand, even if the divination is performed in good faith, if the reason for withdrawing a child is not explained diplomatically it can cause a good deal of bad feeling. Finally it should be pointed out that any adult in Mayotte can consult a diviner. Adults in Mayotte are autonomous and equal; while one may wish to go to a consultation accompanied by a spouse or parent, one need not. Hence there are no 'gatekeepers' to the mwalims, nor is cost a prohibitive factor. Mwalims do not expect significant remuneration for a simple consultation and in any case one can pay what one likes. Most people would take an uncontroversial case to a reasonably accomplished apprentice within their own community, especially if they were linked to him by ties of kinship or friendship. World and Body The most important knowledge of the mwalim dunia, that which makes him indispensable and hence extremely powerful and dangerous, con¬ cerns individual destiny and the ability, via the scheduling of life crisis rituals, to manipulate it. It is the mwalim dunia who at the birth of a child recognizes and records the horoscope, based on the month, day, and hour of birth. This is known as the person's nyora (destiny, make-up)® and refers in particular to how well people will be able to withstand or dominate the forces, events, and people around them or conversely how vulnerable they will be to circumstance. The nyora is established at birth, but there are a few occasions - rituals of transition in the life cycle - at which it may be changed. It is as if the moments of social and corporeal change are part of yet another cycle that has to be articulated precisely with the astral ones. The life and character of the person thus interlocks with the movement of the cosmos. The human being is situ¬ ated in the world not only spatially but temporally, and temporally not at a single moment in time but in motion through, or rather, with time. This kind of time is cyclical rather than linear. A person's nyora is virtually unchangeable. It is set at birth and even praying to God and doing things to please God won't change it. How¬ ever, as I have said, there are a few openings, at which its subsequent course can be partially redetermined. Intervention, in the form of scheduling the ritual at an auspicious time and making the correct of¬ ferings (swadaka), is necessary at each of these moments. The knowledge

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of how to intervene well is held exclusively by the mwalims. The mwalim sets the wakat, the precise day and hour at which infants are first brought outside the house, at which boys are circumcised (once the parents or other sponsors have settled on the particular year), and at which mar¬ riages with virgin brides are to be consummated, as well as the day on which marriage contracts are sealed. He also designates the appropriate offerings and at a circumcision he is responsible for orienting the boy in the most auspicious direction for the particular wakat. Scheduling a life crisis ritual of this kind reverses the procedure of divination. The diviner begins with a time that is brought to him, as it were, whether this be the time at which the client arrives, the day he wants to make a journey, or whatever. From a known time he constructs a probable outcome. The scheduler begins with a desired outcome and must discover for it an appropriate time. The stakes are much higher here and the calculations correspondingly more careful and elaborate. Only a senior mwalim would be given the authority to do the scheduling. The mwalim also bears a certain responsibility for the outcome. The timing and associated details of these events are believed to have sig¬ nificant influence on the future course of the individual's life, on the nyora. When a child is taken outside (antany) the mwalim can 'straighten' a bad nyora from birth by calling for the necessary swadakas. But he can also destroy a good nyora by choosing inauspicious moments to perform the rituals. Thus, if the fundi sees that an infant is born with a particularly good nyora, he is capable of deliberately reversing it by taking the baby out of the house at an inauspicious time. At a single stroke he can affect the entire course of an individual's life. The mwalim dunias thus form the clearest case of the problematic relationship between knowledge and power. This gives rise to the sort of anxious speculation about the mwalims that 1 describe below, but it rarely if ever leads to the direct or formal accusation of a mwalim for a specific act of incompetence or mal¬ ice. This is because the effects that might be linked to the mwalim's ef¬ forts take place long after the ritual and because so many other factors intervene. A family member, usually the father, informs the mwalim of the time of an infant's birth. The mwalim then ascertains the day and hour on which to hold the ceremony at which the child first leaves the house (described briefly in Chapter 2), as well as the nature of the offering required. He records this information and perhaps gives a copy of the information to the parents. Since the mwalim knows the infant's nyora, he can continue to provide advice throughout the subsequent stages of

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

life. The mwalim also gives each infant an Islamic name appropriate to his or her nyora or checks to see whether a name selected by the family is appropriate. The time at which the infant stays in the house may range anywhere from the forty days required of infant and mother for health reasons up to three months or more. The size of the swadaka also varies. When Juma Abudu and his apprentice supervised the ritual for two infants leaving Zaikia's house, they received the combined swadaka of five chickens, two drinking coconuts, a metre of white cloth and some cooking oil. This was a relatively large offering (although the size of the chickens for a swadaka is never prescribed and they are usually very young and scrawny birds). The mwalims also received rice and milk served at the shijabu and carried food home to share with their families. The larger the swadaka, the more it may offset a bad nyora. The fundi never tells you specifically whether the infant's nyora is good or bad, but whatever the case, if you do not provide the swadaka, the child cannot fulfil the potential of its destiny. If the nyora indicates the child will be rich but the parents don't offer the correct swadaka, then no matter how hard the child works, he will never be rich. Thus you depend on the fundi to know and to tell you the truth and then you must act on it. Although the fundi never explains a nyora, there are certain cases where the client can get a sense that the nyora is a difficult one. For example, there is the rare case where the mother is told she cannot touch her baby for up to a day after it is born. The baby is washed, dressed, left to sleep, and not fed for that day. In addition to life crisis rituals, the intervention of the mwalim is needed at the collective celebration of the New Year (mwaka). The mwalim provides not the day but the time of day at which the shijabu ceremony should proceed, as well as the colour of sacrifice (or whether one is needed at all) for the blessing.^ He also determines whether the village needs to 'wash in' (miseky) additional medicine, depending on the as¬ trological prediction for the upcoming year. The fact that the mwalim is needed at the New Year ritual as well as the rituals of individual transition - social birth and Islamic masculinity or womanhood - shows clearly the relevance of van Gennep and Turner's general discussions of liminality. These events contain symbols of thresholds, separation, and cutting; the baby carried through the door¬ way, the penis cut, the vagina penetrated. The moments at which these symbolic acts occur are quite literally out of time (or, viewed another way, the only moments fully in time), moments at which the clock can be reset. But in order to understand more about the consequentiality of

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the mwalim's intervention in the life crisis rituals, we need to explore further the culturally specific meanings of nyora as they apply to the life and character of persons in Mayotte. In actuality, nyora covers a fan of meanings from the constellations themselves to the times at which particular conjunctions of stars are present, to the forces acting upon people undergoing transitions at those times and the longitudinal effects of these forces upon them. We have already described the nyoras as constellations and temporal conjunctions. As attributes of the person, nyora refers to both a kind of destiny and a kind of temperament, things that are not as distinct in local thought as they are in the West. In particular, nyora does not distinguish between mind and body. Two types of nyoras are distinguished, although the pair of adjectives used shifts depending on the reference. People speak in a straightforward way about destiny as good or bad. Someone with a good destiny {nyora tsara) is rarely sick, someone with a bad one {nyora ratsy) is frequently so. More complex is the attribution of nyora as mahery or malemy, terms whose meaning overlap with good and bad, but have more extensive connotations. In ordinary usage mahery and malemy mean respectively hard and soft, and mahery covers both main senses of the English word 'hard,' i.e., both 'firm' and 'difficult.' A nyora mahery is a difficult one, requiring many large swadakas. Many troubles can be envisaged. Without the of¬ ferings the person will suffer and in fact he can never become quite all right {tsy mety manzary izy). Yet, if the correct swadakas are presented, people with a nyora mahery become alert and full of energy {tsantsaha). They are strong and do not give in easily. Hence, they are less vulnerable to illness or attack than someone with a soft nyora. For example, they are less likely to succumb to sorcery or spirit possession. But being more resistant also means they are readier to put up a struggle, so if a spirit is persistent and they struggle against it, they may become initially much more ill than someone who just accepts possession. As references to temperament, soft and hard are indicative of vulner¬ ability versus invulnerability, passivity versus activity, weakness versus strength, pliability versus stubbornness, sensitivity versus toughness. The nyoras indicate whether people are quiet, complacent, and reasonable or whether they never give up a struggle; whether or not they will be successful; how long they have to live. People's professions, interests, and skills, whether, for example, they have been ready to listen to others and take instruction, may also be attributed to nyora.^° But nyora cannot account for most of what we think of as 'character'; here we must bring

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Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

in the additional concept of rohu. When a person is spoken of as well intentioned or malicious, generous or stingy, trustworthy or a tale-bearer, the reference is to rohu rather than nyora. Rohu is the word for character stemming from 'Him fakihi, from the Arabic ruh. It refers concretely to the pulse and the life force, yet also to what remains after death when the flesh rots. It is the seat of the emotions. Although it is not an organ per se, it has a corporeal location at the base of the throat, just above the breastbone, and is used somewhat like the English 'heart.' A person with a good rohu (tsara rohu) is someone 'kind-hearted.' It also overlaps with the English 'feelings'; if you are calm or anxious, happy or sad, the condition can be ascribed to your rohu. What is striking when one compares the terms in use is that nyora carries no connotation of either personal accountability or consciousness. The absence of both these features fits with the notions of destiny and inevitability, and with 'Him dunia more generally. By contrast, rohu is a matter of agency and consciousness. A person with a calm or anxious rohu describes what he or she feels. Someone with a good or bad rohu is acting deliberately; indeed, the terms could be translated as well or badly intentioned. The rohu is also the part of the person that survives after death to receive reward or punishment for actions during life; by contrast, the nyora is completely irrelevant after death. Hence the use of rohu invokes morality, accountability, and freedom, themes prevalent in

'Him fakihi. Nyora is not without moral connotation. But whereas the moral entailment of rohu lies with the free individual, the moral connotations of the nyora refer to social status. If the contrast in nyoras is between hard and soft, active and passive, it is no surprise that nyora enters the dis¬ course of gender, relative age, and achievement. The moral implications of nyora lead not to individual accountability but to the relative appro¬ priateness of certain kinds of dispositions and associated behaviour in certain kinds of status relationships. In theory, both women and men have an equal chance of having a nyora that is mahery or malemy, but in practice, a man is more likely to claim to be mahery than is a woman. Eor example, Mussa considers himself to be mahery, his wife and daughter malemy, and his mother-inlaw mahery. He says this is not governed by gender. But he also argues that it is better for a woman to have a nyora malemy and a man to have a nyora mahery. His explanation is that, if all things were equal, it would be better for everyone to have a soft nyora; a soft nyora doesn't bother a person nor require a large swadaka. But since men are frequently in the

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public eye and more likely to be under attack by others than are women, it is better for them to pay the price of a nyora mahery in order to be able to withstand these attacks. This argument is vitiated by Mussa's subse¬ quent remark that when he is attacked by sorcery, it is usually his wife or children, more vulnerable than he, who are struck {vua). The dis¬ course here is riddled with gender ideology. Individual cases are influenced by a variety of circumstances and the distinctions between men and women are by no means absolute. Even as he spoke to me, Mussa said he knew that he was himself at that moment suffering from sorcery that was affecting his hearing in his right ear and indeed bothering his whole right side. He planned to go to an extractor when he had the money. By contrast, when I asked about a woman who was hard of hearing, he attributed her problem to spirits. Mussa said that his mother-in-law had a nyora mahery. Since she was well known to be a tough and feisty individual, I wondered if the attribution were based on observable behaviour. So I asked whether her son, also known for his brash manner, was mahery as well. 'Oh, he's malemy/ said Mussa. 'He just has a big mouth, that's all.' Mussa claimed to know the nyora through his astrological calculations, not by observing the man. Most people do not have access to the astro¬ logical tables and are more likely to rely on observation in making their judgments. But what they observe in order to ascertain a person's nyora is not only the way in which a person interacts with others but their general life conditions as well as their vulnerability and responses to spirit possession, sorcery, and illness. The situation is complicated by the fact that mahery and malemy may also be used to refer directly to a person's behaviour or disposition without the speaker implying anything about the nyora. Thus, one may say that 'Ali is malemy/ referring to the fact that he is agreeable to a specific proposition. Attributions of the nyora as mahery or malemy serve more to support existing assumptions about social status than to extend or challenge anyone's identity. When a child is diagnosed as suffering from sorcery, it is often said that the attack was aimed at his father, but that the child was more vulnerable (malemy) and inadvertently became the victim. This merely reaffirms gender and age hierarchies in a locally uncontroversial way. There are few occasions at which the definitive attribution of a specific individual as mahery or malemy would become an issue or at which such an attribution would be subject to challenge. Having a nyora that is mahery or malemy is not a significant part of most people's public

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identity. The exceptions are people who themselves are exceptional. Thus, a woman of manifestly less than normal intelligence is universally attributed with a nyora mahery}^ She was born with a very hard nyora that indicated the imminent death of both her parents. The mwalim redirected the force of it against her, thereby saving her parents but leaving her with a 'not quite full head.' Excursus: Theory and Ethno-Theory Are rohu and nyora two discrete entities? It would certainly be a mistake to reify or personify these concepts and hence essentialize them. More¬ over, I am not aware of any circumstance where people would attempt to make an abstract or absolute distinction between nyora and rohu. If nyora is closer to 'temperament' and rohu to 'disposition,' there are many places where they overlap and where specific attribution has to do with where one wishes to allocate responsibility. For example, someone's lack of energy in farming might be attributed to passivity or a sedentary destiny (in both cases nyora and not a fault) or to sheer laziness {rohu, and a failing over which one has control). The lack of clarity at their borders is possible because the terms originate in different discourses. It would be an illogical task to ask people to discriminate between rohu and nyora as if they were two terms within a single semantic domain. There are no distinctive features to be elicited and it would be a mistake to assume that rohu and nyora are products of a unified proto-scientific theory, an ethnopsychology designed to map a world of discrete objects or pro¬ cesses. Instead, what is found in Mayotte is a pragmatic ethnopsychology, one that retains terms from different sources because they are useful.’^ The uses to which the terms are put are complementary but not discrete. Like the two traditions and disciplines from which, respectively, they stem, nyora and rohu are compatible without being strictly commensu¬ rable. Their copresence forms a basis for reasoned thought and argument, the terms in which such thought or argument can be conducted, rather than a summation of the limits to which such thought has gone or is capable of reaching. What we have is not a well worked out psychological theory but a mutual accommodation of concepts. The ideas of freedom versus deter¬ minism, or consciousness versus the unconscious, do not lie behind the terms rohu and nyora so much as ahead of them, implicit and continu¬ ously ready to be developed from their use. For example, in our discus¬ sions Mohedja and I have explored whether one can use the rohu to fight

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and perhaps overcome negative tendencies in the nyora. The meanings are the hermeneutic product of conversations, tasks, or struggles in which the terms are applied, not the bedrock to which the terms refer. The fact that they stem from different discourses rather than being organized into a discipline or discourse of their own bears this out. But even societies that attempt more fully to rationalize systems of religion or psychology borrow words from various sources and use as concepts terms that do not owe their origins to the cross-product of distinctive features within discrete semantic domains. This is where the notion of distinct, internally unified, and logically integrated cultures breaks down as do the borrowings from phonology in ethnosemantics and structur¬ alism that go along with it. While the phonological analogy may be fine for semantic domains that describe concrete and visually determinable objects like plants, it does not work where the referents of the terms are themselves abstract.’^ Likewise, to speak of specific and reified theories in these domains, for example, of 'the [single and unique] ethnopsychological theory of the Kibushy speakers of Mayotte' requires demonstration of the devel¬ opment of a rationalized theory, collectively accepted by, at the very least, local intellectuals or experts on the subject if not by the community as a whole. In the absence of such demonstration, local theory remains a continuously emergent product of the use of the terms, not something that itself produces that use. This is not to denigrate the thought of the people of Mayotte or anywhere else, but merely to point out that they have not developed nor institutionalized a rationalized theory in this specific domain. Indeed, the description I have presented is probably characteristic of many conceptual repertoires mislabelled as 'systems' of thought. It may also be characteristic of more so-called sciences than we imagine, for example, (and despite vociferous protests) of psychology and of anthropology themselves. Whatever the case for the latter point, it is by no means clear that the development of a systematic theory in a domain like psychology enables people to have any deeper or finer insights into either the human con¬ dition or the pain of their neighbour than recourse to a repertoire of diverse concepts applied in public conversation and story building.’’* Indispensable Knowledge, Amoral Authority If the purveyors of Islamic religious knowledge carry the authority of the hegemonic tradition yet have little real power over their fellow

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villagers, the situation of the cosmologers, the mwalim dunias, is quite different. Whereas the fundi of 'Him fakihi finds the source of his influ¬ ence largely in his own exemplary behaviour, the mwalim dunia finds substantive power in the texts themselves and in the exclusivity of his control over them. The fundi of 'Him fakihi has direct access to power in some of the duas and related invocations, but as we have seen, his au¬ thority depends on the fact that the pubhc finds his use of them justified. The mwalim dunia, though perhaps personally sensitive to criticism, is subject to no such constraints. Although his knowledge carries less prestige, the established mwalim dunia is more powerful within the vil¬ lage sphere than his counterparts in 'Him fakihi or 'Him ny lulu. He does not traffic specifically in morality and hence need not bow to its con¬ ventions. The knowledge of the mwalim dunia is intrinsically powerful; its use can have direct, immediate, long-term, and significant effects on people's lives. Since the circulation of this knowledge is highly restricted, the mwalim gains the power as soon as the public comes to recognize his privileged access. Unlike 'Him fakihi, public acceptance is not a product of observation of the fundi's general conduct. The mwalim dunia remains powerful no matter what the moral evaluation of his actions on the part of the public. In fact, a negative evaluation may enhance his reputation. The mwalim dunia's reputation is based on the effectiveness and accuracy of his work, not on whether the outcome is appreciated as positive or not. Even where the mwalim's intervention proves unsuccessful, this may be attributed less to ignorance than to deliberate witholding of aid. The chief constraint on the mwalim is that he must instil sufficient trust in his clientele to keep them returning. Since loyalty is one way to deter a mwalim dunia from using his power against you, this is not generally a problem for the established mwalims, though it may hamper the career of someone starting out. The senior mwalim dunia is thus a much more autonomous figure than the fundi of 'Him fakihi. In contrast to the latter, he need be far less concerned with public accountability. On the other hand, precisely because access to cosmological knowledge is highly constricted, the mwalim dunia becomes much more dependent on his teacher than does the fundi of 'Him fakihi. The apprentice works for years for his master; as he learns more, he becomes more and more 'on call,' and must be ready to go anywhere to perform on the master's behalf. Although the apprentice performs most of the work, he turns over the reward to the master and is dependent upon his generosity for a small share. The mwalim dunia is thus embedded in relations of power.

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subordinate to his teacher, but, if he perseveres, eventually dominant over his own students and independent and feared by the community. Positive personal qualities are unimportant in constructing the au¬ thority of the mwalim since, if anything, it is assumed that the mwalim's character is negative. This is the precise inversion of the Islamic fundi whose knowledge of 'Him fakihi implies morality. This is related to the fact that the mwalim's knowledge itself is intrinsically amoral; the stars tell you what will happen, not what ought to. The amorality of his knowledge taints the reputation of the fundi. Over and over, I heard people say that mwalim dunk tsisy iman, a cosmologer has no compassion. The general attitude towards the mwalim dunks is that they are dan¬ gerous and inconsiderate, that they do not feel bound by the canons of Islamic morality. This is related to both their original choice of profession and the subsequent effects of their study upon them. One person made the not untypical remark that people who study 'Him fakihi like their fellow man, while those who study 'Him dunk do not. Others suggest that apprentice cosmologers may not be this way when they start out in their studies. They may be encouraged to take up the training by parents who feel that it would be useful to have a mwalim dunk in the family because it is safer, more private, and less inconvenient and expensive to rely on a close family member, or they may be moved by these sentiments directly themselves. But it is felt that power is corrupting; once he has acquired a solid knowledge of his material, the mwalim dunk will be tempted to use it in antisocial ways. While the fundi of 'Him fakihi gains greater respect for the laws of God as he studies them, it is as if the mwalim dunk takes on the amoral character of the knowledge he masters. This theme is repeated in various ways and by various people. The mwalims are believed to be stingy with their knowledge and to play their cards close to the chest. They are said to be of bad character {ratsy rohu). People worry that the mwalims will give their children a bad nyora or even steal a good one. When a woman experienced a psychotic breakdown, many people attributed her troubles to the mwalim from another village who had been hired to treat her. It was said that he had intentionally provided her with the wrong medicine. Of an elderly male who had remained a bachelor his entire life and who was labelled and had come to take on the image of himself as half-witted (daba), it was said that his mwalim had deliberately provided his parents with an inauspi¬ cious date and inappropriate swadaka for his circumcision in order that he would be uninterested in women. One young man thinks the mwalims always weaken a really good nyora, perhaps not so much as to render

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the person crazy, but enough to make him poor. He has made use of Juma Abudu's services, but he is afraid of him. 'After all,' he says, 'he knows and I don't.' Even the little trumba spirit who sometimes rises in Mohedja warned me in its childish voice never to trust a mwalim. One man described it this way: Mwalims are not afraid of God (a point that is also implied in the Gabriel story); all of them are ready to change people's nyoras. Once a person goes to study 'Him dunia, God removes their iman (compassion, faith). In a striking metaphor, he likened them to European soldiers (militaires). Study of 'Him fakihi leads to fear of punishment in the afterlife. But 'Him dunia has no moral constraints or limits {'Him dunia tsisy fady). Some people would go further than this, suggesting that in order to become a mwalim in the first place, it is necessary to perform antisocial acts. This point of view may even be perpetrated by the mwalims them¬ selves. In fact, the mwalim dunia is the epitome of the sorcerer. The practices and images associated with him in this regard will be explored in Chapter 8; this highly embodied view of the mwalim may be seen as a popular reaction to or resistance towards the correspondingly highly objectified quality of the knowledge he controls. However, it is likely that attributions (never mind execution) of these immoral acts, such as killing a kinsman in order to become a mwalim and test one's knowl¬ edge, really do enhance the mwalims' power since they make it clear to people that the mwalims do not feel bound by social mores, but are ready to do whatever they like. Power here is constituted as freedom from the local and human conventions of morality. The mwalim dunias may treat the prevailing attitudes towards them with disdain. After all, few people would dare insult them to their face and they are able to carry on ordinary social relations in the community. Indeed, their close kin exempt them from censure. They may also be prepared to defend themselves. A mwalim like Juma Abudu argues that he selects as apprentices only people who are well intentioned and who are able to control their anger. Hence he admits the danger inherent in his knowledge while denying that he or his apprentices are guilty of abusing it. The mwalims have an additional means to transform their reputation, an avenue that may serve to convince themselves as much as anyone else. And that is, as both Juma and Mussa have done, to take on the study of 'Him fakihi in addition to cosmology. This is a much easier matter for a knowledgeable mwalim than it is for the average well-in¬ formed citizen because the mwalim already possesses the ability to read with understanding in Arabic.

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Whatever the public opinion about them, it is also true that mwalims observe rules of conduct. They are aware that one of their sources of power is the fact that people are dependent upon them to solve their personal problems and acknowledge that clients often reveal a good many personal secrets. Mussa points out that it is forbidden (fady) to reveal one's clients' confidences, for example, that so-and-so thinks his wife no longer loves him or has an open sore under his clothes. However, whereas Tumbu argues that indiscretion renders a possession curer like himself ineffective (tsy mwafaka), Mussa gives the more rationalized ex¬ planation that people will simply stay away from a fundi who is known to be indiscreet. Juma Abudu points to other rules of conduct: one should never reveal to clients how long they have to live or indeed anything about their nyora that looks bad. It is also recognized that the mwalim can act by error rather than de¬ sign. Unlike the sacred texts of 'Him fakihi that exist complete in them¬ selves and that always work, the nature of the material the mwalim dunia uses is such that it requires calculation and precision. There is much more room for error. The following story as told by the principal actor, Vola, illustrates an attribution of error to a mwalim dunia, as well as the effects of the error on people's lives. But it shows as well the acceptance of cosmology by persons on the path as well as the various kinds of experts to whom they make recourse. Vola and Dauda were married for nine years and suffered from fertility problems [dzao]; Vola could not become pregnant. They tried all kinds of fundis, but their diagnoses were all incorrect, ascribing the problem to a spirit, and so on. Finally, a fundi had the right answer: he told Vola that if she separated from Dauda and later remarried him, they would be able to have children together. The fundi [mwalim dunia] who had originally set their marriage date had made an error. Upon hearing this, Vola went home, made a big fuss, and ordered Dauda to get out. He finally left and moved to town. Islamic law says that if you are sepa¬ rated for three months during which time you do not sleep together and the man does not support the woman financially, you have to go through another legal ceremony [kufungia] in order to become married again. This is what they did; the wedding was scheduled by another mwalim and the couple were re¬ united. One day shortly thereafter when Vola was returning home through the fields, she saw a large snake [bibilava] eating. She watched the scene carefully and when she reached home she described it to her grandmother. This old woman was a spirit possession fundi [whose life was briefly recounted at the end of Chapter

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2], but she also knew some divination. She told Vola that it was not usually a good thing to see a snake eating. She asked Vola what time it was and then did a quick calculation on her fingers. Suddenly she began to laugh. 'What is it, grandmother?' asked Vola anxiously, 'Am I going to die?' 'No,' replied her grandmother, 'you're going to receive something very good soon.' Within the same month, Vola became pregnant with her first daughter.

It may be objected that this entire discussion of power is misguided since it has little import for the mwalim dunia's daily actions. Like ev¬ eryone else in the villages of Mayotte, the mwalims struggle to make a living, they perform their own labour in subsistence and cash crop production or, in the case of one apprentice in Lombeni, work as wage labourers. Their power does not enable them to command significant resources or labour, nor does it distinguish their material well-being from that of their neighbours, nor give them the final word in village decision making. The power attributed to them in fact does not let them advance their own interests in any clear material way. Moreover, the power attributed to the mwalims by local theory is also less than they are able to manifest in their practice. For example, while the mwalims have a certain power to define or elicit the personhood of others, it is actually rather limited. If the mwalim's calculation of the client's nyora tells him whether it is mahery or malemy, this does not become a public fact and the individual concerned or his parents are not even informed. Moreover, although in theory the nyora is permanent, in practice the at¬ tribution of a particular individual as mahery or malemy is somewhat context dependent. Cumulative experience plays a larger role in a person's self-evaluation than does the particular assertion of a mwalim. It is also doubtful whether the destructive power attributed to the mwalims is much exercised against people or whether it could in fact be effective in such an enterprise. Indeed, such power is largely imagined; it source lies not in arms or men but in books and shadowy encounters with spirits and death. Even the direct psychological effects are dubious since to be effective action must be secret. Nevertheless, it is a funda¬ mental fact of culture that the imaginary, when objectified and legiti¬ mated in public constructions, is also real. The mwalims have power be¬ cause people attribute it to them and act as though they do. Culture deter¬ mines what are critical resources; the constraints on the circulation of these resources combined with the training of the fundis does the rest. People feel dependent on the mwalims and frightened of them. This colours interper¬ sonal relations and grants the mwalims greater than average autonomy.

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A mwalim dunia's knowledge, and hence his power, is evaluated less according to his range and rate of activities (offering consultations, teaching, etc.) or according to how he reaches his conclusions (since the clients and general public do not observe the process and lack the knowledge to judge it) than according to the outcome of his advice, the accuracy of his predictions or the fit of his conclusions with the general unfolding of events. As Mohedja says, a fundi is someone who knows something, whether he is an active practitioner or not. Conversely, not everyone who practises really knows what he is doing. Yet broader factors also influence a mwalim's reputation. An unhappy outcome may be attributed to deliberate malfeasance rather than ignorance; paradoxi¬ cally, ostensible errors can serve to enhance a particular mwalim's repu¬ tation. Although there is no unanimity on the matter, the senior mwalim dunias are those with the broadest reputations for thorough knowledge, hence their recommendations are more often accepted by their clients. In sum, the sole means to judge mwalims is according to the quality of their advice and the main means of making this judgment is by observ¬ ing the accuracy of their predictions and the acuity of their diagnoses. But this tells you nothing about their immediate disposition towards you. People cope with the problem of their dependency upon the mwalim dunias, whom they mistrust, by trying to establish a close relationship with a particular fundi. They attempt to develop a relationship in which clientship is but a single strand, so that the principles of morality inher¬ ing in kinship or friendship will operate. A person or family generally develops loyalty to a particular mwalim, registering the times of birth of each of their children with him and consulting him at all the subsequent rites of passage. And when these children reproduce in turn, they tend to make use of the same mwalim's services or those of his successor. This is a form of patron-clientship; an element of inequality, dependency, and mistrust lingers in the relationship unless the kinship ties are par¬ ticularly close. It is clear that conceptions of knowledge implicate social relations here. An example will illustrate the point. Two young men, Amada and Mdala, are the children of full sisters and thus call each other older sibling/younger sibling. When his wife recently gave birth, Amada made a careful note of the time at which it occurred and then hastily made a trip to report it to a mwalim dunia in a distant village. His mother's fa¬ ther, himself a mwalim dunia but now deceased, had recommended his associate there. As the associate was now also deceased, Amada had

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beconae the client of the associate's younger brother. However, should Mdala's wife give birth, Mdala will simply inform the mwalim dunia in his own village. His mother's father is the same as that of Amada and their grandfather's recommendation held for Mdala as well, but it is overrid¬ den by the fact that Mdala's father had made a pact of friendship with the local mwalim, whom Mdala subsequently addressed as father and whose harvest he helped transport from the fields. Each individual thus goes to the mwalim to whom he feels closest and with whom he has been able to develop or inherit a generalized social relationship.'^ The ties that bind people to the mwalim dunias were made visible when Juma Abudu was laid up in bed for a few weeks with a painfully swollen leg. It is customary to pay a visit to the ill and a sick person can expect regular visits from kin and occasional courtesy visits from others. The mwalim, however, had a constant stream of visitors; his house was full from dawn to beyond nightfall, many of the guests staying for long periods of polite conversation. In addition, his main apprentice waited on him night and day, finding, mixing, and applying the appropriate medicines. His neighbours were very impressed by all the attention he was receiving and remarked that he had a good deal of luck (bahaty). Having heard from numerous people that the mwalim was a powerful sorcerer, I inquired whether fear could account for the special treat¬ ment. The answer came that it was not out of fear of his malevolence but recognition of his indispensability that people called upon him. The villagers worried that if they did not come and pay attention to Juma when he was sick, then he, in turn, would not pay attention to their ritual needs. The mwalim's knowledge is a scarce commodity to which people are concerned to maintain sufficient access. Juma's careful control over the means of knowledge and his privileged access to and dispen¬ sation of that knowledge rendered him a 'patron' or 'big man' of sorts. The well-known mwalims are treated with a good deal of cautious respect. For example, they often ride on the bush taxis for free. One wouldn't charge them because one never knows when one is going to need them. Another vignette illustrates that having the goodwill of the mwalim almost counts for more than access to the knowledge that he controls. When Amada grew impatient and wanted to take his baby out of the house before the end of the three-month period that his mwalim had established, his father warned him not to. The father's reason for caution was not that Amada might pick a bad day, but rather that the fundi might hear about it, get angry, and cause harm to the child.

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Interdisciplinary Challenges In the past the mwalims may well have been the most powerful men of knowledge in the local community, their authority challenged only by other mwalims. In the present their power is challenged on several fronts: by the fundis of ‘Him fakihi who downplay the importance of the nyora, by the spirit mediums who take over various functions of the mwalims, and most recently by the increased penetration of French knowledge and practice (the latter evident in the changes in birthing practices described in Chapter 2). In general, then, the legitimation and maintenance of the authority of an individual mwalim has to be viewed in terms of the challenges presented to the discipline as a whole. Any breakdown of the mwalims' power leads not to an absence of power but is itself the conse¬ quence of displacement by forms of power provided by alternate disciplines. Although access to cosmological knowledge is highly restricted, few doubt that it is knowledge, that is, accurate depictions of how the world in fact is. It is not appropriate to speak about belief and speculation here any more than with the sacred texts, but rather of knowledge of reality, of things as they most deeply are. The mwalim dunias have ac¬ cess to the great cosmic machinery. Comparing the fundis of the various disciplines (excluding the French state) it is more appropriate to say by and large they have different, but complementary, knowledge rather than opposed beliefs. Cosmology is less anti-Islamic than ante-Islamic. Even Saidu Bwana, the fundi of 'Him fakihi who held cosmology in some disdain, was curious about it and felt there was knowledge to be gained by perusal of the books. He argued that 'Him dunia originated with Moses (Mtrume Mussa) and was in use at the time of Abraham.However, he claimed that since the Muslim era its relevance has been replaced by that of Islam. 'Him dunia is not wrong so much as irrelevant. Saidu Bwana discusses the month of Karu. Many people call it inauspicious for the following reason; Mtrume Mussa had three chiefs who were his followers. One of them accused Mussa of sleeping with an unmarried girl and getting her pregnant. God was angry at this slander and had the earth swallow him up. It was during the month of Karu and thenceforward people were afraid to com¬ mence activities during this month. But Muhammad broke the 'taboo' [fady] by going on a trip to Busra. Therefore Karu may, in fact, be called the month of journeys, but not everyone knows this and many people are still afraid of the month.

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This account illustrates the place and interplay of pre-Islamic knowl¬ edge within the tradition of Islam. Muhammad's life and actions reor¬ ganized the older paradigm, though knowledge of the latter continued to be transmitted in the Islamic world. Most villagers are concerned about avoiding inauspicious days (nuhus) and go to the mwalims to en¬ sure this. But Saidu says that once the Prophet was bom all the inaus¬ picious days were removed together with their associated fadys (taboos; here he uses a Malagasy word, from yet another tradition). The month of Maulida must be good since Muhammad was born then, but some villagers don't recognize this and refuse to let their children marry in this month, thinking it will lead to a quick divorce. But, says Saidu, a marriage is like a birth. You can't schedule precisely when you are going to separate from your mother, you are just born. Marriage is the same, you just marry; if you believe in the Prophet, that is enough, you don't need to worry about good or bad days. In turn, 'Him dunia does not dispute Islam so much as disregard it. Moreover, as was mentioned above, individual mwalims may also de¬ velop expertise in 'Him fakihi. Although the two bodies of knowledge are fairly discrete, there are some fundis in Mayotte (none in Lombeni) who are identified with both disciplines. When one senior fundi arrived on a private visit to Lombeni, I overheard one member of the village asking another to which branch of learning the visiting fundi belonged. The two agreed that the fundi's conversation demonstrated a knowledge of both fields; however the decisive factor that placed him in 'Him fakihi in their minds was the fact that in conversation he never once referred to the nyora. The fields are not entirely commensurable, and there are some areas where they clash. These are concerned more with what one can do with knowledge than over its truth per se. The main conflict between the fundis of 'Him fakihi and 'Him dunia of which I am aware concerns how much it is possible, or desirable, for humans to know. This conflict is, of course, the theme of the Gabriel story. The most salient area around which the debate turns concerns the knowledge of death, especially one's own. Fundis of 'Him dunia claim to have access to such knowledge, whereas those of 'Him fakihi deny this is possible. As we have already begun to see, the experience of death, its finality, unexpectedness, and swiftness are primary sources for meditation on the meaning of God, illustrations for the people of Mayotte of the omnipotence and inter¬ vention of God, and conversely, of the limitations of human agency. This understanding of death is not fatalistic but precisely what grants

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meaning to life. The birth ritual at which the infant is brought out of the house and carried to the mosque provides in miniature a model of and for the life course. Life is a matter of moving outward from one's local roots - in a particular woman, house, and family - towards broader and more generalized identities. These are at first social and public, but eventually these levels of being are transcended as one approaches God. In Saidu Bwana's words, 'God says people know where they were born, but not where they will die.' Saidu Bwana, the fundi of 'Him fakihi, emphatically denies that the mwalim dunia or anyone else can see the future. Paraphrasing from his books, Saidu says a person himself cannot know with certainty what he will do tomorrow. A European may die in Mayotte or someone from Mayotte die in Europe; people set out on a trip not knowing they will die when they reach their destination. The theme of death far from home illustrates both how death is out of one's hands and how it wrenches one from previous forms of social identity. Saidu also em¬ phasizes that the fact that fate is in God's hands does not alleviate us of responsibility; to the contrary, since none of us, not even the fundis, can know for certain whether an ill person is about to die, we must always provide succour. The hubris of the mwalim dunia in the Gabriel story is now clearer. Knowledge of death is out of our hands precisely because life and death themselves are. It is precisely these differences in knowledge and agency that mark the distinction between divinity and the human con¬ dition.’^ It is striking too that funerals are the one major life crisis rite at which 'Him dunia does not play a routine and salient role; with death, human scheduling has been definitively transcended. The formulae and data supposedly held by 'Him dunia trivialize what is for Muslims a profound truth. Saidu is the only person in Lombeni I have heard challenge the very basis of nyora, not only its irrelevance at death, but throughout life.’® He bases his challenge on what he has read in his books. For example, he read me a passage describing Islamic conception theory. Forty days after intercourse, the semen that has remained inside the woman's body turns to blood. (If the semen has all run out, there will be no conception.) Forty days later, flesh (ambumaty) is formed, and forty days again after this, God sends down an angel to blow rohu (life, pulse, consciousness) into the fetus. At this moment the mother first feels she is bearing a child. At this time, too, the fetus receives its life-span (the day of its death) and its riziki, its portion in life. There is no way that the configu-

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ration of stars at the time of birth or the time of first taking the child outdoors can change any of this. It has been decided on by God and that is that. One should, however, hold a shijabu (blessing ritual) and in fact the books suggest performing a shijabu each month during pregnancy. 'What is the point of the shijabu/ I ask, 'if the infant's fate is already decided?' 'The shijabu is good for its own sake,' Saidu replies. He quotes a line about how the things one prays for may be granted and says that prayers by the parents at this time can lead God to change the person from someone bad to good. This is what 'Him fakihi has to say on the subject. In most ways the principles of the three disciplines do not directly contradict each other and they share the similar aims of providing health and well-being. Hence each kind of fundi makes claims to carry out by alternate means the sort of tasks typically associated with the other kinds of fundis. The overlap of functions provides sites for the intersec¬ tion of the various forms of knowledge but also the grounds from which the members of each discipline can challenge the others. The relationship between 'Him dunia and spirit possession is instructive in this regard. In general the two disciplines are complementary. 'Him dunia does not deny the world of spirits found in possession. On the contrary, the books of 'Him dunia list the patros spirits, and individual cosmologers often diag¬ nose spirit possession and send their clients on to mediums for appro¬ priate treatment. The fundis of both disciplines are in agreement con¬ cerning the distinction between the kinds of spirit attacks that each have the means to treat. They also respect the validity of each other's means of communication with the spirits and agree, as we will see in subsequent chapters, that while the cosmologers control the most efficient ways to commit sorcery, spirit mediums provide the best means to extract it. Members of each discipline frequently enjoy collegial relations and refer clients to one another. Conversely, there are a number of conditions for which each discipline affords virtually identical means of treatment; the choice here is up to the client. Occasionally, a particularly talented individual is recognized as a fundi of both disciplines. At the same time, and perhaps because of their common understand¬ ings, each discipline is also well placed to challenge the other. Most commonly, spirit mediums make claims to take on the functions of the mwalims. Several of them argue that they have no need to study the cosmological texts because they can gain the information contained therein directly from their spirits. Indeed, some of them say that their spirits have studied the texts and are mwalim dunias themselves. In this

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respect, spirit mediums issue a challenge to the whole weight of power and authority that writing from the Muslim tradition carries with it. The most frequent task of the mwalim dunias, and also for them the simplest, is divination: distinguishing the root causes of misfortune, directing their clients to effective curers, ascertaining the outcome of new enterprises or problems in love. This is also the task on which they face the most competition from outsiders. Although the mwalims are the primary practitioners of divination and the only ones to know and use the cosmological texts that continue to be its most highly regarded means, they do not have a monopoly on divination. A number of other practitioners know the planetary counts, and still others circumvent the texts; some spirits, by way of their mediums, perform with almost as much authority and almost as frequently, if by rather different means. Although the mediums claim to have learned the contents of the texts directly from their spirits who, in turn, are supposed to have read the texts, in fact, their divination is carried out intuitively, through dreams, or by means of simple devices such as counting on the fingers. While both the mwalims and certain spirits are accepted as knowing how to divine, the question always remains, in any particular case, whether they have chosen to tell the truth (in addition to whether they have got things right). Unlike either the Azande case where the procedure is objective and open - the chicken either lives or dies when it is fed the oracle poison and both diviner and client observe what takes place - or the Tswana case in which the diviner constructs his story in front of his clients and by means of his throw of the bones, which also lie visible between them, the sources and procedures of divination in Mayotte are more esoteric. Hence the client is dependent on the integrity of the person of the diviner as well as on the accuracy of his procedures. The advice provided by a mwalim dunia is often checked by a second opinion from another cosmologer or from one of the spirits of the family. The means of 'Him dunia themselves are not directly in question here. Even though the mwalim dunias don't hold a monopoly on divination, they are in no danger of having their authority completely disregarded. Their means of divination are considered the most direct, complete, objective, and they form the model for competing practitioners who attempt to discover alternate routes to the same source of knowledge. Someone who only makes the planetary counts 'on their fingers' and does not consult the written texts themselves has less legitimacy than a full-fledged mwalim. Other diviners may be considered personally no more reliable than

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the mwalims. For example, while Mohedja's spirit often advises clients (while Mohedja is in trance), Mohedja herself claims not always to be convinced that her spirit is telling the truth. For a personal matter of her own, she will generally go to a mwalim dunia for a second opinion. Of course, this is a means by which she endeavours to acquire a more disinterested view. It is also a strategy through which she attempts to distinguish her knowledge and sentiments from those of her spirit and thus, deliberately or not, to grant the spirit greater authority. Moreover, when her spirit rises to challenge the advice of a mwalim, it is the spirit who is considered to have her interests at heart. Through their practice these mediums undermine the monopoly of the mwalims, but not the authority of their discipline. Spirits may be used to double-check the mwalims but, with very few exceptions, not to replace them. Hence Mussa is probably correct when he argues that the professed scepticism regarding 'Him dunia is mostly lies. He observes correctly that while some people take their own infants outside the house, they all call the mwalims for circumcisions and weddings. The challenge from spirit possession occurs not only on an abstract and theoretical basis but over the intentions of real people; it is linked directly to the suspicions that specific people have concerning the in¬ tentions of specific mwalims. While many people are in no direct position to challenge the mwalims, those with spirits are. They may go into trance spontaneously, their spirits rising in order to utter a warning. The fol¬ lowing story of how the arrival of a spirit arrested the nefarious plans of a mwalim is not untypical. It makes the point that, by challenging the monopoly of their knowledge, possession forms an effective assertion of autonomy and means of resistance against the power of particular mwalims in particular instances. Safy's mother's brother asked a mwalim dunia to schedule his infant's first exit from the house. On the morning the ritual was to be performed, one of her spirits suddenly rose in Safy's grandmother and ran across the village to warn them not to take the infant out that day. The spirit told them to call in another mwalim dunia. He came, talked to the spirit, and agreed that the child would die if taken out that day. They gave a swadaka to the first mwalim [in order not to appear discourteous or challenge him directly] and told him they no longer needed his services. Several days later, the spirit took the infant out.

Spirits are invoked not simply to challenge or resist mwalims but as a source of certainty in what are perceived to be potentially dangerous

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situations. In the story below, the tnwalim dunia of Lombeni and the spirit are on the same side in apparent opposition to the fundis of a dif¬ ferent village. Tumbu and Mohedja's daughter Binty was to marry on 8 October 1975. She had been divorced for some time and her parents were delighted she had found another husband. The only drawback was that after the wedding she was to accompany her husband to live in his village at some distance from Lombeni. At the last minute the wedding was postponed because Juma Abudu, whom Tumbu had consulted, advised him it was a bad day for a marriage. There was no upset in the family about this; following Juma's advice they merely resched¬ uled the wedding for 11 October and sent word to that effect to the groom and his family in the village of C. On 10 October, the word came from the groom's party that the fundi in C had decided that the morrow was not good for a mar¬ riage either. People sighed and said that one suffers when the two parties to an agreement each consult separate fundis who cannot agree. During that night Mohedja's trumba spirit appeared to her in a dream and warned her that the groom's fundi wanted to cause trouble, though the groom himself did not know it, by planning the marriage for a bad time. Sometimes when a woman marries someone from far away, the affines bring her bad things such as sickness. So in the morning Mohedja sewed an amulet for her daughter, filling it with bits of certain plants. The amulet was to wash off the evil imanasa ny raty), and Mohedja explained that she was trying to avoid trouble later by taking this preventative measure now. As it turned out, the party from C arrived by midday and the wedding was carried out as planned on 11 October. The marriage has been a successful one.

A Cut in Time It would be a mistake to overemphasize the conflicts between the three disciplines and the rivalries among their respective proponents. Cir¬ cumcision provides an arena in which one can see the significance and centrality of 'Him dunia as well as the interplay of all the three traditions in a mainly complementary rather than competitive mode. Each disci¬ pline ensures its participation is felt at this highly significant event without thereby challenging the premises of any of the others, and each works towards the same goal, the well-being of the boys. This is not the place to describe or analyse the ritual in detail; a very brief sketch, ignoring in particular the affective elements, will suffice to make the point. The circumcision ritual is composed of several discrete parts that

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may take place over an extended period of time or be compressed into a period of two or three days. Parents wishing to have their sons or grandsons circumcised in a particular year inform a mwalim dunia and leave it to him to schedule the operation. They also inform any spirits of the mraba (family), especially those who have taken a particular interest in the children, as well as deceased kin, and ask for the support of all parties in their prayers to God. The spirits are informed by calling them up in the bodies of their hosts or by speaking over incense, while the deceased ascendants receive a small kuitimia prayer. Ever touchy and unpredictable, spirits who were not informed ahead of time might take insult and cause the boy to faint during the operation or bleed excessively. Hence all three domains of power are harnessed for the common cause. The first segment of the ritual is presided over by the mwalim dunia. The initiate or initiates are shut into a house and forced to inhale foul¬ smelling smoke. The smoking is supposed to conclusively rid the children's bodies of spirits (lulu) that are present in everyone from birth and that might cause their bodies to convulse when they undergo the cutting. It thus serves to purify and fortify them for the occasion and perhaps build up their confidence or, more likely, that of their parents. In fact, the smoking is much more painful and unpleasant than the operation and lasts for much longer; when adult men recalled their circumcisions, this was the element they tended to focus on. The children emerge after an hour or longer in the smoke-filled room, where they were forced under a sheet as close to the fire as possible, with breaks during which their bodies were oiled and rubbed with the burnt medi¬ cine by the mwalim. In one smoking that I observed the children (three girls^^ and two boys) were kept under the sheet for periods of three to four minutes at a time. The second important com.ponent of the circumcision is the recitation of the badri to protect the boys from harm (see Ch. 4). The badri is pre¬ sided over by the fundis of 'Him fakihi and generally takes place the day before the cutting. It is usually a public affair with most of the village men participating. Towards the end, the boys are brought in to receive a fatiha from the company. A good meal is served to both the reciters and the boys themselves. In many instances the badri is performed as part of the parents' ceremonial exchange cycle (shungu), hence as a very large feast with the entire village invited (Lambek 1990c). The operation itself requires the cooperation of the mwalim dunia and the circumcision fundis, the men who have trained to perform the cut.

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The mwalim has set the wakat, the day and time, but for fear of sorcery, only the parents and the circumcision/undzs are informed of the day. The following description includes material recorded on a day in 1985 when twelve boys were cut. On the big day the entire village is in suspense. Although the time of the cutting has not been announced, people begin to gather early in the morning and no one is prepared to leave the village until the cutting is over. The cir¬ cumcision fundi of Lombeni has called in his teachers as well as his colleagues from neighbouring villages. The circumcisors prepare their pocket knives, re¬ served exclusively for this purpose, by disinfecting them with alcohol. Awnings are set up in the washing enclosure of each of the households where boys are to be cut and the mwalim or his assistants carefully place a chair facing in the most auspicious direction. A shijabu prayer is held over the boys in each of their houses. As the correct hour approaches the waiting is replaced by a frenzy of activity. The cutters, who have been told when to start by the mwalim and have disappeared a short while earlier, suddenly return en masse, creating a tremen¬ dous excitement. They race together from house to house, trying to get each operation completed as close to the ideal moment as possible. Many of the village men run with them to participate by holding the boys or to observe. Other men, claiming to be unable to bear the boys' cries, have deliberately absented themselves. The women cluster just outside the fence of the bathing enclosure, some watching through the cracks. One woman says she's afraid when the cutting takes place. Her rohu throbs and feels as though she were pos¬ sessed by a spirit. In some watchers spirits rise at the moment of cutting and the shrieks of the spirits mingle with the singing of the women (and, in the past, drumming), performed to drown out the boys' cries. The spirits rise in pleasure, to help protect the children, or, if the family forgot to inform them of the event, in anger. A red chicken is killed on the threshold of the enclosure and each boy is carried over it in turn. The bloody animal diverts the attention of any illintentioned (nonpossessing) spirits from the boys and cutters. The cutting itself is done as rapidly as possible in order to minimize the pain. A senior man sits on the chair and holds each of the boys on his lap as he is carried into the enclosure in turn. Two other men hold the boy's legs open as the cutter pulls the foreskin and wields his knife. Seconds later the boy is carried out of the bathing enclosure by his father or other male kinsman and placed on a bed denuded of mattress indoors, his legs spread wide apart. When all the boys have been cut, the circumciser then applies medicine; in the past the penis was dipped into a raw egg, now antiseptic and bandage are applied.

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There is no set fee for the circumciser's services; payment depends on the parents' will. Diny told me he received a mshia of rice (over 12 kilos) from each household, plus 15 francs for each boy cut, as well as pud¬ ding and a good hunk of fresh meat, the vudy (rump) of the cow slaughtered for the badri. He divides this among his colleagues. The mwalims get no cash payment for their efforts, only pudding and part of the rump meat.^° If the circumciser were to botch the job (I never heard of a case), the parents would blame him and demand a compensatory payment. But if the child were to die, they would blame the tnwalim dunia. Skilled experts are necessary both to ensure safety and to perform tasks that many prefer to avoid. To be a good cutter, it is said, one must be able to remain calm, keep a steady hand, and not flinch from the task. The implication is that most people would flinch. Overall, the ritual demonstrates the overwhelming importance of specialized knowledge to offset the anxiety it generates. Each discipline is brought in to protect the children, to prevent mishap, to ensure life and well-being. The function of each phase of the ritual duplicates that of the other phases, while none is redundant. In addition, the fundis of the various disciplines do not argue among themselves but work successively or jointly to serve a common interest and bring about a common goal. There is a sense of a positive division of labour. At the same time, this collective endeavour shows the centrality and indispensability of 'Him dunia. It is the mwalim dunia who manages the climaxes and turning points of growth and reproductive life. Only the mwalim can ensure that the cut in flesh is also a cut in time, precisely accurate in both dimensions. All else in the child's life hangs on it.

8 Knowledge and Antipractice: Committing Sorcery

The Dark Side of Knowledge In Mayotte the possession of knowledge is morally ambiguous since all positive applications of knowledge are potentially balanced by negative ones. The same knowledge that can be used for good can also be misused or abused. Much is made locally of the proximity of healing and harming, of the fact that knowledge of the correct application of medicine entails, by definition, the knowledge of its incorrect application. Intentional abuse of knowledge in order to harm is a pervasive theme in Mayotte. It is what is meant by voriky, a word I translate in somewhat less ad¬ equate shorthand as sorcery.’ One of the best, if left-handed, compliments I received in the field was from a man who said near the end of my first field trip that it was a good thing I was leaving for home so soon. When I asked why, he replied that I would surely begin to practice sorcery if I stayed. With some surprise, I protested my innocence, but he brushed that aside saying that I simply knew too much. People are curious; no one with power will forgo the experience of trying it out. No one with knowledge is innocent. Sorcery is inherent in human practice. It is no wonder that the subject of sorcery comes up frequently in Mayotte. Although few people would admit to practising it, virtually everyone has suffered from sorcery. Tumbu claimed that most of the villagers had passed through his hands at one time or another in order to have sorcery extracted from their persons or premises; his services were in much demand in other villages as well. Most people agreed that there were many sorcerers about on the island. Those who were not currently victims of sorcery were effectively protecting themselves

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against it, uttering daily prayers, hanging amulets over their doorways or around their waist, sponsoring recitations in their fields, and so on. I once asked Tumbu why, if everyone was so concerned about sorcery, did they not run the worst offenders out of town. He laughed and replied that the villages would then be virtually empty; practically ev¬ eryone was engaged in sorcery (meaning by this not just the practitioners but their clients).^ A significant point that he did not add, however, was that sorcerers were rarely publicly identified; if there were many sor¬ cerers, no one could be certain precisely who they were. And an addi¬ tional reason that sorcerers were not asked to leave was that their knowledge is also indispensable to the community for its positive effects. This is not to say that everyone was preoccupied with sorcery. For many people it was a delicate subject, but the attitude of Dauda, an easygoing man in his mid-thirties, may have been typical. For Dauda, avoiding sorcery was a practical matter, to be carried out without much second thought. Dauda says that he is not interested in either sorcery or curing. He is not afraid of sorcery because he doesn't engage in quarrels with other people; he minds his own affairs. At the same time, he says a fatiha in the mosque every day to ward off sorcerers. In the midst of the Arabic prayer, he interjects in Kibushy, 'Naka misy ulun mkunia zahu, ratsy impudy aminazy.' ['If there is someone who wishes to harm me, may the evil return to him.'] This keeps him safe. Nor does Dauda wish to learn about sorcery. In fact, the entire discussion only takes place because I ask my questions. Dauda is not reticent, merely uninterested. As soon as he possibly can, he turns the conversation back to his favourite topics, work and money. 'Ahh, maybe work will end after death,' he sighs. [This conversation took place in 1975. Five years later, as we shall see shortly, he was deeply embroiled in a sorcery case.]

Sorcery can be used to accomplish various goals. The sorcerer can make medicine (audy) to render people sick, drive them crazy, or bring them home, to split up a loving couple, or to cause people to fall in love. As a condition, sorcery implies no symptoms in particular, but can be a factor in virtually any form of affliction. Once the presence of sorcery is diagnosed, it must be specifically addressed if the victim is to recover. Sorcery, then, has no specifically delimited content to it, neither in terms of technique nor in terms of product; it is constituted not as a thing but as an act, an action that is distinguished on moral grounds. More specifically, sorcery is characterized by its inversion of morality.

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As an act, sorcery denotes the secret, deliberate, illegitimate exertion of con¬ trol over the lives of others. This is an abstract definition and one that I have constructed rather than repeated; nevertheless, its features are im¬ plicit in the way the term voriky is used. Both means and ends are significant in the conceptualization of sorcery, although the relative weight placed on each varies somewhat according to the person and the context. Most people consider sorcery purely malign, yet love magic and other forms of secret control are viewed as voriky as well. The end is usually, but not necessarily, one that afflicts the victim with illness or other misfortune. According to some informants, sorcery denotes unjustified and mali¬ cious intent. If you have right (haki) on your side, then your actions are not sorcery. For example. Navy says that if he found another man having an affair with his wife, he might go to the mwalim dunia and request the man's death. This would not be death by sorcery but suicide; the man had 'stolen' (nangalatra) and therefore deserved to be punished. The fundis can judge if their clients come to them with good reason and can then act accordingly. This argument would not be accepted by most people in Mayotte, who would place more weight on the illegitimate means. There are socially correct ways of avenging oneself of a wrong; secretly hiring a fundi to kill someone is not one of them. What Navy could do, should his desire for retaliation be strong enough, is ask a fundi of 'Him fakihi to recite sacred texts (duas) that would have the effect of punishing the adulterer. As discussed in Chapter 4, the duas put into motion divine justice, a force that itself distinguishes between right and wrong. Other¬ wise, Navy and his fundi are guilty, like the mwalim dunia of the open¬ ing story, of hubris, of claiming the knowledge and the right to act upon it that is God's. Moreover, in contrast to the duas, sorcery works whatever the justice of the case. Since recitation of the dua is usually open and above board and exclusively and certainly effective in cases of right, it is felt that if some other, secretive means is resorted to, it must be because the agent himself is bent on initiating aggression. Hence he is a sorcerer. In other words, the means render the ends suspect.^ Sorcery, as a set of means, is always illegitimate. Sula is a young man being cured for sorcery who has engaged in numerous sexual adventures. He doesn't know the identity of the perpetrator of the sorcery against him beyond the fact that it was an outraged husband. He says he's not angry with the man. But if he caught someone sleeping with his wife, he would

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beat him.^ He certainly wouldn't commit suicide over the matter; one can always find another wife. Nor would he murder the interloper, since that would land him in jail. Nor would he perform sorcery, because sorcerers [both practitioners and their clients] earn dambi [sin] and will be punished by God. I ask whether this isn't true for adulterers as well. Yes, he replies, but while the sin of adultery can be expiated by prayer at the mosque, the sin of sorcery cannot. It is fear of God, people say, that keeps them from practising sorcery. Not only will God punish you with the fires of hell, but after death sorcerers will walk around with spiny projections erupting from their backs, revealing to everyone their former occupation and the depths of their depravity.

Sorcery, then, is always morally wrong (by definition). Conversely, virtually any act that incites great moral disgust can be called sorcery. In a sense, then, voriky is less the label of a specific kind of act than a moral judgment and a rhetorical device. In fact, the reality of sorcery is itself socially constructed in acts of diagnosis and acts of judgment. But while this helps us understand the discursive use of the term, we must go further since some people do practise what they and others consider to be sorcery and many more people are cured of it. As it is practised or is believed to be most commonly practised in Mayotte, the act of sorcery entails specific techniques and the general condition it produces in the victim requires quite specific counteraction in order to be removed. The techniques of removal will be described in Chapter 9; in a sense, since the process and product of sorcery extraction are the main concrete manifestations of sorcery, they are also the main source of validation for sorcery's existence in the first place.

'This Tabulation of a Reality Unknown in Itself^ Since sorcery is inherent in all human knowledge, it does not form a special branch of knowledge. The techniques of sorcery are as varied as the kinds of human knowledge, the universal criteria being secrecy and illegitimacy. An open attack is not sorcery and, in any case, can be readily defended against. But any fundi can make you sicker under the pretence of heaHng. A spirit possession curer, instead of removing the spirit inside of you, can give you medicine to make it stay. Even West¬ ern doctors can administer poison or deliberately tamper with pharma¬ ceutical dosages. Any intentional misapphcation or tampering with audy (medicine, broadly defined) is sorcery.

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The intrinsic link between knowledge and sorcery is underlined by the fact that the word 'Him is used euphemistically to refer precisely to sorcery. When it is said without further comment that a particular fundi has 'applied his knowledge' {'namangu 'Him') everyone takes this to mean that he has committed sorcery. The close link between knowledge and sorcery also means that the discourse of sorcery forms the basis of a critique of power and the powerful to the degree that power emerges from the uneven distribution of knowledge. If, in theory, the means of sorcery are infinite, in imaginative practice they are fairly limited, linked precisely to local forms of knowledge and practice. Although European sorcery may work by means of poison or stealing the heart or liver (a Malagasy attribution to white foreigners), sorcery in Mayotte generally entails enlisting the help of spirits in quite specific ways. The manner in which this is done is particularly associated with 'Him dunia (cosmology). While the fundis who are possessed by spirits, like Tumbu or Mohedja, are supposed occasionally to perform sorcery, especially if they are people of ratsy rohu/fanahy (ill will, nasty character), all mwalim dunias are believed to do so. They engage spirits in nature, not those who have appeared in humans. It is claimed that cosmologers lack compassion and that the temptation to use their knowledge always becomes too much for them. Moreover, acts of sorcery are considered by the public to be necessary steps in the training of the

mwalims. There are several reasons the mwalim dunias come under greater sus¬ picion than the spirit fundis. As was discussed in Chapter 7, the mwalims are essential for the auspicious scheduling of life crisis rites and people feel quite dependent on them. Their intervention is a necessary part of everyone's life, whereas spirit possession is viewed as a discrete interest that need not impinge on everyone. Second, while several of the spirit curers know how to remove sorcery and spend much of their time doing so, the mwalims do not. Third, there is a close association between the particular skills of the cosmologers and the techniques of sorcery believed to be in primary use in Mayotte. Why else would one study the books of spells if one did not intend to put them into use? One of the most prestigious mwalims, who probably would not readily admit to performing sorcery himself, and who, for all I know, does not do so, himself informed me that the knowledge to perform sorcery is Arab in origin and comes from the study of written texts. In explaining why he was selective in choosing his apprentices, he added that cosmological knowledge is highly dangerous and therefore cannot be taught to the

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kind of person who is impulsive and quick to anger. Of course, the very exclusivity of this knowledge, the restrictions to its access that we saw earlier, makes the practitioners of this branch of learning more suspect than their colleagues in other fields. Most important is the fact that as 'Him dunia is the quintessential objectified knowledge, so does it most easily lend itself to misapplication. As understood by well-informed citizens, a typical performance of sorcery, that is, one that is achievable by local means, entails two main tasks. The sorcerer must construct or acquire a sairy, the package of harmful material (which is later extracted from the victim by the curer), and he must enlist the help of a spirit to attack the victim. The sairy is composed of 'bad things' {raha ratsy): the nails or hair of a corpse, or those of one's victim, or even one's own; mud from a grave, broken glass, a needle, carbon paper, pieces of a poisonous centipede, harmful plants, and so on. The whole is sewn into a piece of material ostensibly torn from the shroud of a corpse. Occasionally it is discovered in a snail shell. The precise recipe varies with the individual/wndz and not all sairys need be composed of material from graveyards. An unskilled sorcerer simply buries the sairy in the ground under the intended victim's house, threshold, or path. When the victim walks over it, a spirit will grab him, entering the victim and beginning to harm him. If someone vulnerable, such as a child, passes first, the sorcery may be misdirected. An expert sorcerer gives the sairy directly to a spirit (manifest as itself, not in the body of a human host) with instruc¬ tions to find the victim and insert it in his body. Not only does this ensure greater accuracy, but the sorcerer avoids appearing on the scene of the crime himself.^ In either case, the sorcerer needs knowledge of the precise time {wakat) at which his actions must be performed in order to be effective. This information is found in the books of the mwalim dunia. One well-informed citizen explained the technique this way. If you wish to give instruction to a spirit, you have to know how to reach one. A record of the times and places when each of the main spirits is available to humans is found in the books of ‘Him dunia. The book will say whether a given spirit lives in a tree-trunk, a stone, a promontory, or a stream. It is not the particular stone or tree that is important, merely the class of object. Each spirit is also associated with a particular hour. So, you go to the right spot at the right time to reach the particular spirit you wish to enter your victim. If you already know the spirit well and it is your friend, it may appear to you in human form. Otherwise it will come as an animal, perhaps a dog, cat, cow, lizard, snake, donkey.

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chicken, or goat. Some of the mwalim dunias know how to converse with the spirits face to face, seeing them as they really are. To do this the fundi plucks out the eyes of a living animal, such as a cat, and covers his own eyes with a black paste, such as that made from burnt cat skin. Then the things of this world are blotted out and you can see in the world of the spirits. You tell the spirit what you want done and you give it a gift of food. If it accepts the food, then you know it will do your bidding. You write your name, the name of the person to be attacked, and the wafaku (a spell in a grid diagram that indicates how you want the victim to be affected) on a piece of paper. Then you fold the paper and put it around the neck of a chicken like a hiriz (amulet), whispering over and over again the name of the person you wish to harm. You slaughter the chicken, drenching the sairy and the written message in its blood. The spirit comes to eat the blood, reads the message, and immediately rushes off in search of the victim. It is unclear from this account whether the sairy is incorporated into the amulet or replaces or is replaced by it. This ambiguity corresponds to a discrepancy between the practices of the sorcery extractors, for whom the sairys are an integral part of the process, and the mwalims, whose concern is with written spells. A mwalim dunia told me the way to practise sorcery was to write a wafaku and bury it under the intended victim's doorway. Another said the mwalim ascertains the specific time and place for the burial of the written paper. They did not mention the sairy at all, yet it is precisely the sairy that the extractor discovers and removes from the victim's body. However, despite this division of em¬ phasis between the practitioners of the two disciplines, we see the close and complementary linkage between them and the striking importance in the act of sorcery, but not in its removal, of the written word. We also see an inversion between the written sorcery spell and the amulets containing written verses used to ward off sorcery or bring blessings of various kinds. Writing is the quintessential medium of esoteric knowledge in Mayotte and is the kind of knowledge to which the mwalim dunia has privileged access. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the popular imagination, the misuse of knowledge takes place primarily by means of writing. However, there are alternate traditions that locate sources of power and knowledge elsewhere. There are thus parallel literary and nonliterary means of engaging spirits to sorcery. For example, if you are a medium with a spirit of your own, the technique for sorcery is much simpler.

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You simply prepare some plant medicine, light incense, and call upon your spirit, telling it where to go and why. The spirit makes the sairy and goes to do the host's bidding. The chicken is optional; the medium is more likely to give his spirit gifts of perfume. The fundis who have spirits at their disposal don't need to make use of written spells and indeed don't know how to write them. Mussa alternated between tan¬ talizing me with intimations of the mwalims' sorcery practice and argu¬ ing that in fact it was only the spirit possession fundis who were pre¬ pared to carry out sorcery. It is interesting that while Tumbu, the spirit fundi, says the written spell is necessary, Mussa, the mwalim, says all you need is glass, dirt, and plant scraps (katsakatsa). The members of each discipline are thus engaged in a complex discourse of ascribing the means to sorcery to the other, all the while claiming superior powers for themselves. Both sides agree that the removal of sorcery necessitates having a spirit of one's own, that is, being active in spirit possession. Hence removal is not within the sphere of competence of a mwalim dunia unless he happens to be a spirit medium as well. Mussa told me he could remove some of the harmful effects of sorcery without being able to extract the sairy itself. His method is to write out a verse on a plate. This might 'kill' the sorcery, but cannot remove it. The technique, found in 'Him fakihi as well, is not a very popular one, and in practice everyone agrees that one needs the assistance of a qualified spirit medium in order to be cured of sorcery. Extractors do, however, make use of the recitation of Islamic prayers as one of their tools. In sum, the theory of sorcery can be viewed as an internal critique of the situation of knowledge in Mayotte, an expression of resistance to the power relations that the prevailing political economy of knowledge engenders. Each source of power suggests its abuse in sorcery. Every position of power stemming from knowledge is under suspicion. Even the reciters of the Eriday sermon, depicted in Chapter 6 as icons of village morality, are sometimes described as carrying out sorcery in order to make each other stumble in their reading. The greater or more direct the power, and the more objectified the knowledge that forms its basis, the more likely the sorcery. Above all, sorcery is a critique of the power of writing. The act of sorcery usually entails writing, while the cure of sorcery never does. Hence the mwalim dunias, whose literacy provides them with the power to arrange their clients' destinies and who most strictly control access to their written knowledge, are the people most likely to engage in sorcery. But all fundis are potential sorcerers.

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The Imagination of Evil Although most people in the community know (in the sense that I have been using the term) that these are the ways in which sorcery is carried out and understand the procedure at the theoretical level in more or less detail, the popular image of the sorcerer is nourished as well from another source. If the conceptualization of sorcery is a political critique, it also draws upon symbolic sources of a deeper nature deriving from perceptions of life and death, sexuality, motherhood, and dependency. These sources are evident in the terrifying, emblematic person of the grave dancer, someone who is supposed to go out at night to dance naked on a fresh grave. The grave dancer sings a song and the corpse rises to the surface. The sorcerer takes bits of the shroud, hair, and nails of the corpse, and sings another song to return the corpse to the earth. The grave dancer stores the ill-gained materials for future use in con¬ structing sairys. Alternatively, the sorcerer might go and dance naked outside the door of his victim, calling to the spirits, defecating on the threshold, and rubbing his dirty anus along the door-frame. In the morning the victim wakes up sick. Such practices are looked upon with a mixture of horror, disgust, fascination, and embarrassment, an ambivalence that is expressed in humour. I first heard about dancing on graves from a lively crowd of women engaged in fixing up a house for newlyweds. This is a time when otherwise lewd behaviour is not inappropriate. The joking pro¬ ceeded from offers of sex to my quest for knowledge. Inviting me to join them in dancing on graves, the women stressed the fact that pro¬ spective dancers had to leave their houses naked. Throughout my stay in Lombeni, one woman maintained a joking relationship with me in which we were continually suggesting to each other a midnight expedi¬ tion to the cemetery. Other people in joking relationships would often point one another out and warn me loudly, 'Beware of so-and-so, he dances on graves!' Or 'So-and-so is the big fundi of grave dancing; he'll teach you.' The jokes were in part clever expressions of their view of my insatiable and often inappropriate questioning. That I would want to learn about dancing on graves showed the ludicrousriess and perhaps the voraciousness of my ethnographic endeavour. In their more serious moments people said that dancing on graves was a custom that had died out in Lombeni, although it was still prac¬ tised in town. The practice had been abandoned because people were afraid of being spotted and because they became aware that God con-

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siders it very bad. In the past a person would hear the sorcerer outside his door and would shake with fear. No one dared retaliate then, but today the sorcerer would receive a sound beating, they said. It was rumoured that a few of the elderly women in the village, together with their now deceased husbands, used to dance on graves. Some people argued that they did it merely for sport (soma) and that it was not then a shameful activity. But if, in fact, the practice once took place (possibly for reasons other than sorcery), there has been a change in the hold it has over people. The story was told about an old woman in a neighbouring village who danced on graves. Her granddaughter knew it and said, TVhen I die. Granny, don't dance on my grave; if you do. I'll attach myself to your back [slung behind the hips, the way a mother might carry a baby] and won't get off and everyone will see.' When her grandchild died, the woman went ahead and danced on the grave. The corpse rose to the surface as expected. But at the end of the dance, when the old woman instructed it to go back into the ground, the corpse did not obey. Instead it climbed onto her back and refused to release its hold. Try as she might, the woman could not remove it. Finally, with the approach of dawn, the grandmother had to go home with the corpse still attached to her back. She covered it with a cloth and went to bed with her back against the wall. The next day the woman lay in bed and one of her children said to her, 'What's the matter. Mother, why don't you get up?' She replied, 'I don't feel well. I'm sick.' The daughter busied herself, fixing up water so the mother could wash and preparing a rice gruel for her to eat. And when she was finished she said, 'Come and get up now. Mother. I've fixed hot water for you to wash with and a good gruel for you to eat.' The mother still didn't want to get up, so the daughter began to help her out of bed, thinking to wash her. Then they saw the corpse clinging to her back and another grandchild called out, 'Oh Grandmother, what have you got on your back? What have you been doing? You've been dancing on the grave of your grandchild!' The daughter of the woman would never have dared say anything to her mother, but the grandchild was unafraid. Then the grandchild called everyone in the village to come and see. The old woman was very ashamed and when everyone had seen her shame, the corpse got down off her back and they reburied it. And then everyone knew she danced on graves [practised sorcery]. A man told me of someone he knew who was once married to a grave dancer.

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The man had been told the woman danced on graves, but not believing it, he married her anyway. One night he heard her get up. He pretended to be sleeping as she took some plants and ground them, then rubbed them on his face, whis¬ pering that they were to keep him sound asleep until her return. He could hear the sound of owls gathering in the courtyard. She went out and he stealthily followed and watched. She was actually flying and there were owls and some other kind of birds both behind and ahead of her. He returned to bed and divorced her thereafter.

It is apparent that the figures in these stories are constituted by means of inversion to social norms. They operate at night, unclothed. They go backwards, offer fecal matter rather than food to others, keep the com¬ pany of frightening birds who dance with them. They have no respect for the dead, for kinship, morality, or religion. Instead of being nurturing to children, the grave dancers feed upon them. The images of witchcraft are, in Monica Wilson's concise and often repeated formula, 'the stan¬ dardized nightmare of a group' ([1951] 1982: 285). In a kin-based society like that of Mayotte in 1975, evil is constituted by an inversion or per¬ version of kinship. The stories also feed upon ambiguous social catego¬ ries and relations and the anxieties these give rise to: the elderly who cling to life while children die, spouses whose faithfulness is suspect. The emphases appear to vary somewhat according to the gender of the storyteller. Reference is to the past and to other villages; grandchildren consider themselves more enlightened than their grandparents were. More stories refer to women than to men; the person who was probably subject to more rumours than any other in Lombeni was a very intelli¬ gent, active, and forceful old woman, with many claims to prestige. The images of witches found cross-culturally render it unsurprising that the primary subjects of these fantasies of inverted love and nurturance are women. The imagery also has a complex relationship to death itself and needs to be interpreted not only in light of the comparative literature on witchcraft but also on that of death (indeed the two literatures ought to more closely inform each other than they do). Exposing and defiling a corpse is particularly offensive in Islam where purification and protected burial are essential steps in ensuring the well-being of the deceased's soul. Sorcery makes illegitimate claims to transcend death, both the claim of being able to cause it at will and the claim of being able to raise the dead and reuse them for the ends of the living. At the same time, the associations with sex (here through nakedness), nurturance, and

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women suggest that sorcery is a kind of impure or antideath opposed to the pure death of Islam. In the Islamic funerary ritual the corpse is dramatically removed from women and the domestic realm as it makes a last exit from the house (echoing the ritual of first exit shortly after birth) and is carried exclusively by men first to the mosque and then out of the residential space of the village to the graveyard (Lambek and Breslar 1986). At each step it receives greater purification until, buried in the grave, it is ready to be received by God. Indeed, the whole life passage - from womb to tomb - may be viewed in this light; the funeral is a microcosm of the life course, which receives its direction and legiti¬ macy from the ends proposed by the funeral and from the proper en¬ actment of the final rites. The sorcerer's violation of the corpse and the return of the corpse or its parts back to the village and domestic realms reverse and hence subvert these processes. The symbolism here is highly suggestive of Bloch and Parry's argu¬ ment that, 'it is the necessary defeat of women, sexuality and biology which is enacted' in funerary rituals in order to conceive (a word I use advisedly) a superior and permanent realm (1982: 21). In Mayotte, where the sobriety of Islam prevails, the depiction in ritual action of the tran¬ scending of sexuality is a good deal less explicit during the funeral than in most Malagasy societies. Yet the negative imagery of the naked grave dancers can be seen to fill precisely this role. The pure death is the incorporation of the deceased into an increasingly impersonal world, whereas the impure one is signalled by the inability to detach from maternal or child figures and by the continued involvement in the emotions and politics of the household and village. Moreover, impure death provides the means - the fragments of the corpse - to create more death. The individuality and insubordination of the sorcerers is marked by their rejection of the moral authority of Islam and its collective and decorous disposal of the corpse in the funeral ritual. Sorcery symbohzes the individual, the transient, and the unique that must be overcome in mortuary ritual 'if the social order is to be represented as eternal' (Bloch and Parry 1982:15) and if death can come, finally, to signify the renewal of life. Possibly less unrealistic, and certainly more concrete than views of the afterlife, the sorcery scenario helps construct by inversion the purity and abstraction of Islamic death. However, despite the imagery of female witches and the strong, if indirect, connection to Islam, the practices described in these stories are empirically more closely associated with men, and specifically with the mwalim dunias. When the stories shift from abstract fantasy to practical

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considerations, the mwalims are said to be the ones most likely to know how to dance on graves or to have the courage and interest to do so. It is not irrelevant that the woman referred to above as most suspected of having danced on graves was the widow of a mwalim dunia and reputed to have learned the practice from him, nor that she remained an active curer with a wide reputation.

A Dead End I never knew how to respond to the teasing about grave dancers since my questions only led to more jokes. I had begun to assume that the whole business was just a fantasy when a neighbour told me that if I took people aside and offered to pay to see the dancing, someone would surely take me up on it. 1 replied with vague interest, but after some intrigued speculation, privately dismissed his suggestion. 1 had ethical qualms about it and moreover doubted whether my tact was sufficient to the task of finding an informant. To my amazement, within the week the neighbour, on his own initiative, had made contact with a man we both knew in a neighbouring village who admitted he had been taught to dance on graves in his youth and said that he would be willing to show me. However, Seleman, as I shall call him, was very frightened of being observed or identified to others, so we made a rendezvous deep in the woods. He refused to meet at the cemetery since, he said, he was not an actual practitioner of the dance himself. 1 had hoped Seleman would provide me with a rationalized explana¬ tion from the dancer's point of view of the meaning of the practice, but instead he reinforced the image of inversion and immorality. Unlike others, he claimed that the dancer actually ate the corpse and that this was the main purpose of the dance. He was quite emphatic that the dance had nothing to do with collecting material for sairys or with con¬ versing with spirits. In fact his entire account was at some variance with the practice associated with the cosmologers and the sorcery ex¬ tractors. He did, however, perform a dance for me, full of strange con¬ tortions and awkward movements. How had he come to learn the dance? Seleman said that he had been taught by his grandfather who came from Mrima [East Africa] and that he had been unable to refuse to learn for fear of being harmed by his grandfather. One morning Seleman awoke feeling tired, with a sore neck. His mother said that meant her father had been harming him in his sleep, harnessing him to a cart

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and making him pull the old man to a distant village and back. Seleman there¬ upon immediately left his village and has never gone back there to live. He was just at marrying age at the time; when he danced for me he was, I judged, in his sixties. He provided more detail. The dancing must be done the night of the funeral, before the corpse has had a chance to rot. Dancers may travel to a neighbouring village when they hear of a death there. There must be more than one dancer present; a single individual would be too frightened to sit alone with the corpse. He described a situation with four dancers, one situated along each side of the rectangular grave. At the head stands the leader. He starts singing and the others hum along. Then the leader initiates the dancing, which appears to rotate clockwise among those present. The dance itself, which Seleman assumed was of much greater interest than anything he might have to say about it, was quite unlike any other I have seen in Mayotte. Sharp sudden movements, staring eyes, hands held out, thumb and forefinger stretched apart, sudden measured jerks of the side and arms, sudden crouches over the grave or squatting by it and grabbing towards it. The dancers sing to the corpse to rise and later to descend again. Seleman knew the dance well after so many years and must once have had a lot of practice, but he denied ever having gone to the graveyard to dance. He claimed to be frightened of the moral implications and also of just being present to see the corpse rise and hearing it groan as it did so. Even a vazaha [white person] like me would get frightened and run away. When the body has risen to the top of the grave it moves beyond it, to the south [away from Mecca]. As the dance continues, the corpse sits up. Then the dancers unwrap the shroud. The hands are cut off at the wrists and the legs at the upper thighs. The flesh is cooked. The recipe is an ordinary one; the meat is sliced and put in water to boil with salt and spices. Was I being had? Would this man do anything for a bit of money? How much was he concocting on the spot? Since it's all fantasy anyway, does it matter? The skull is scraped out and used as a drinking vessel, he continued. The dance proceeds until what remains of the corpse descends. The end of the dance contains movements of someone pushing the earth back into the grave. As he danced, Seleman sang a song in what he called the language of Mrima [Kimrima, 'East African']. The dancer calls, 'Come, let's see one another. Don't you know God? Aren't you coming? Today let's see one another here.' Equiva¬ lent verses accompany the corpse back into the ground. The words are uttered, to my ear, as though by someone attempting to cover his fear with brash commands.

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When the dancers wish to harm someone they do it simply by dancing at the victim's door at night. There was no mention here of sairy or spirits and Seleman was quite emphatic about their irrelevance. [This puts the practice beyond the relevance of either the mwalim dunias or the spirit mediums who extract sairys.] The dancers harness their victim to a cart [charette] such as there used to be on Mayotte, and ride him for long distances, bringing him back before morning. When the person awakens, he doesn't remember anything but feels very tired and his neck and shoulders ache. Seleman used no specific term for 'sorcery,' 'witch,' or 'witchcraft,' and did not recognize the word mwanga that I had taken from reading Trimingham on East Africa. I asked more questions and learned a few more 'facts.' The dancers do not fly through the air, though they are associated with owls [vurundulun] who also dance at the graves, are given bits of meat to eat, and often sleep in the dancers' houses. The dance is performed naked; dancers can be men, women, or both together. It is unclear why people participated. He said this was an activity only of people from specific places in Mrima. He could even elaborate: Quelimane, Kongo, Sena, Lomwe! His grandfather wanted him to do it because that is the way people from Mrima are; if they do something, they want every¬ body else in their family [mraba] to do it too. People in the past knew that what they were doing was wrong and they were embarrassed about their activities, but they continued to pursue them anyway. The reason is that they were urged on by bilisa [iblis; the devil, devils]. Seleman continued: There are two kinds of beings around, shetwan and bilisa. The first warn you against doing bad things, while the second encourage you to do them. God created two houses in the afterworld, pevoni [heaven] and mahamay [fire, hell], and wants them both to be full. Said Seleman, 'If you made two houses, you would want them both filled with people, wouldn't you? Well, it is the same with God. If God hadn't wanted things this way, God would have built only one house. Therefore God created the bilisa. The bilisa asked God if they would have to live alone and God told them no, that their havana [kin, close as¬ sociates] would be all those people who listened to their counsel. So they come about, trying to convince people. Their home is hell and they are looking for people to help them in their labours there.' People who eat the flesh of the dead are certain to go to hell. This is because all the sins accumulated by the dead person will be passed on to those who consume his flesh. The deceased, however mutilated his corpse, is cleansed of his sins by his victimization and will go to pevoni.

Seleman was someone I knew informally both before and after our encounter in the forest. He was always friendly, but generally quite

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dull. His fellow villagers considered him a gossip and also a bit gull¬ ible; the young girls liked to flatter him and pull his leg. He was not what most ethnographers mean by a 'good informant/ but the question remains, what was his relationship to what he showed and told me? Was he an expert, a well-informed citizen, or a man on the street? Did he care enough about his knowledge to reproduce it accurately? For me, our conversation was a bit of a dead end. 1 couldn't pursue it with anyone else, though it didn't seem a breach of confidence to make a brief report to my neighbour. However, 1 could not explain to him that even though Seleman had performed the dance as contracted, this bit of commoditized ethnography, our comedy sketch in the forest, had left me unsatisfied. One point of interest was Seleman's theodicy. Evil is a necessary and inevitable part of the world. Like good, it stems ultimately from the will of God; but there is room here for human freedom too. People do not have to listen to the bilisa. However convincing their words, we have equal access to another message, from another source. Even though Seleman had some critical details 'wrong' - most people would place the shetwan in the position of the bilisa - and his optimism regarding the fate of the mutilated corpse strikes me as a highly idiosyncratic ratio¬ nalization, his overall conception was sound and clear. But this was merely an appendix to his dance. With hindsight, what 1 think 1 did gain from Seleman was a glimpse of the past. Seleman's home village was situated on one of the last European plantations. The descriptions of his dream and of the way the dancers harmed their fellows suggest the experience of colonial labourers, subject to excessive and demeaning demands. The dancers or sorcerers evoke none other than the European plantation owners or their overseers mistreating the bodies of the workers as though they were no more than cart animals, consuming their flesh. Even the bilisa, who seek to fill their houses with labourers conjure the plantation owners or perhaps, standing further in the shadows, the slave traders who dragged the first generation from their homes and brought them to Mayotte. Hence 1 think that what 1 heard was a story suited to one sociopolitical context but no longer relevant to most people in Mayotte. Sorcery stories are transformed according to the needs and particular experiences of suc¬ cessive generations, while drawing on a reservoir of fears and images common to all of them (and, perhaps, all of us). The story of Seleman's dance illustrates the diversity of sources of

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local culture and the way that the proponents of each reproduce their version with reference to the others they have heard, hybrid products of a local intertextuality that do not thereby necessarily deny their au¬ tonomous origins/ It is likely that Seleman was led to elaborate and to embroider his story with vaguely Islamic trappings in response to my questions, but this does not delegitimate it. After all, any other islander would also have listened and observed with as great curiosity as I, providing sufficient interest to propel Seleman to go further in like manner. Or perhaps his remarks were the product of years of private reflection. The trouble with the web he spun was not its fantastical nature, but rather its decontextualized quality. Not just the silliness of our secret colloquy, the fact that it wasn't night, we weren't naked, or in a graveyard, but more important that what he was demonstrating and describing seemed so divorced from current practice and interests. Not only were we not serious about calling up a corpse at that moment, but it seemed implausible to me and, I think, to Seleman, that anyone we knew in Mayotte could be engaged at that time in such an endeavour, at least in the way that Seleman was able to present it. Harking back to Mrima and to the exploitation of labour on the plantations, his perfor¬ mance had little relevance to the contemporary disciplines that I knew. What I had hoped for and what was so obviously missing was any elaboration from an expert on what happens if the corpse does not rise, on the justifications for the imagery that is propagated to the public. Divorced from the logic of any practice except the shamefaced perfor¬ mance for a visiting anthropologist for a bit of cash, Seleman was unable to come up with (or perhaps simply did not wish to offer) anything more than an elaborate fantasy and a vivid but awkward dance, some¬ thing that was ultimately more embarrassing than disturbing. Perhaps the story illustrates my limits as an ethnographer. I simply did not pursue it far enough, gain Seleman's trust, build the context that would bring the event to life. As I write now, fifteen years later, I wonder whether I could not have tried harder to uncover a submerged history of slavery and resistance, another tradition to add onto Islam, cosmology, and spirit possession, to which Seleman's dance provides a privileged glimpse. If there is such a tradition, it lies in the shadowy world of the implicit, the unspoken, not the public, socially constituted disciplines I have been de¬ scribing. The shame of the perverted dance is also the shame of slavery and a Wstory that finds no one who wishes to give it voice. Or perhaps any pursuit of sorcery must lead eventually to the same kind of impasse.

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Sorcery in Practice To the degree that sorcery has a social reality, it is expressed in diverse forms. Sorcery can be uncovered in what the fundis say about their practice and in observing that practice. Its importance can be gauged by the numbers of clients who approach the fundis to help them carry out sorcery or to be cured of it, in the allegations and accusations of sorcery, and in the consequences for victims, accusers, and accused of such allegations. Seleman was the voice (or body) of a marginalized tradition. More central during the period of my stay was the association between danc¬ ing on graves and the mwalitn dunias. Mussa, who had continuously joked with me about the subject in 1975, finally took a new tack in 1980. He told me he had been dancing on a grave together with his fundi from D. He wanted to learn everything, so he had to do it. They went to the cemetery in D. The grave does not have to be of someone recently deceased, but if sorcery made from the remains is to work, the dead person selected must have been a bad person in life. Mussa and his fundi left all their clothes on the path and walked naked into the cem¬ etery. The corpse rose, they took a small piece of the shroud, they danced again, and the body descended. I showed Mussa one of the crouch positions from Seleman's dance and he told me it was correct. He said he wouldn't dance again without his fundi, but he would be prepared to accompany him a second time. He named two other men he was sure also danced on graves. Seeing my association with Mussa, other people joked to me that he danced on graves. Mussa explained that while no one had ever seen him, people know that mwalim dunias engage in the practice and there¬ fore they assume that he does. It seemed to me that he was not interested in discouraging the rumours, although in his hearing they were always kept at the level of light-hearted banter. In our next conversation Mussa remarked that the mwalims dance on the graves only rarely since the activity brings sin (dambi). Afterwards, you go to the mosque and pray to have the sin removed. He told God he only did it in order to learn. The fragment of shroud remained at his fundi's house. He could get a piece of it if he needed to use it. He paid his fundi 100 francs to go dancing. He paid because he 'saw the other man's shame.' On 7 September 1985 Mussa announced that he wanted to tell me a secret. Every mwalim goes to the graveyard once a year, on any day he

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chooses so long as it is cosmologically suitable. The mwalim's spouse would surely throw him out if she knew he were dancing on a grave, so he makes some excuse and says he's going fishing or off to the next village. Mussa went and danced naked with his fundi. They recited a Qur'anic verse and the grave cracked open.® As they danced, the corpse rose. They took a fingernail, some cotton with which the corpse is packed, and a bit of the shroud. You can take nails from either hand or foot, but no hair or flesh. Or, if you are afraid, you just take some dirt from the side chamber of a new grave before the corpse has been put in. The mwalims keep these materials for use in sorcery, but, Mussa rap¬ idly made a number of qualifications. First, they would only perform the sorcery against someone who had done something very bad, for example, someone who had stolen the spouse of a close kinsman or friend. It would only be done on behalf of a client who had right (haki) on his or her side, and it would not kill them but only make them move to another community. If the mwalims actually killed someone, they would be burned in hell. His fundi doesn't even try to make his target sick. Mussa also denied at this time the rumour that one has to kill a close relative, such as a child or parent, in order to become a mwalim. Some people have a bad character {ratsy rohu) and are prepared to kill, but they are spirit fundis, not mwalims. Mussa said that some years he just takes the material from the grave and leaves it aside in case he gets a client; as often as not, no one asks for it. When a client does come, it's a man, at his wits end (setry) be¬ cause he loves his spouse so much. Once Mussa used the material to remove a married man from the village for having 'stolen other people's spouses' (committed adultery). This is asa mahery, difficult, powerful work. You write a lot, go to the mosque and pray; after all, you're separating a married couple. Since the work is so hard, you get paid well, perhaps 450 francs for a job like this. Mussa has been offered up to 200 francs by other prospective clients to do sorcery, but has not ac¬ cepted the commissions. One of my rationalizations for repeating this confidential account is that I doubt its verity. I have no idea whether the mwalims practise what Mussa described; the status of the account remains that of rumour and my publishing it does not grant it any greater authority than that. The facts as Mussa presented them over a series of conversations were never quite the same twice and the main aim seemed to be to tantalize me and convince me of the mwalims' powers. In this version, Mussa emphasized that one can only dance at a grave once a year; since he had already

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done it that year, unfortunately, he could not take me along. The im¬ portant point, I think, is that, whatever its accuracy, the knowledge was presented to me as secret. Not only could I not verify it through obser¬ vation, 1 could not confirm it through discussion with others. Mussa implied that I was privy to knowledge not accessible to the general public who hear jokes about grave-dancing mwalims, but are never told directly that the rumours are true. And yet, to exist as a secret, it must be told to someone; it must be simultaneously present and absent from discourse. The reproduction of the mwalims' authority operates in part by the manipulation of such secrets. They want to keep suspicion and speculation alive without giving anyone the grounds to specifically prove or disprove it. It is also clear that unless one believes that the corpse literally rises on command, there must be yet another secret or secrets beyond this one. These other secrets would explain what actually takes place when the mwalims dance and what the sources of the materials they use in sorcery are, if, indeed, they dance on graves or practise sorcery at all. And if I knew what these secrets were, this would certainly be the time to break off and be silent in my turn. Is sorcery currently practised in Mayotte? It is clear the answer to this question depends on who one asks and that persons on the path have a very different sense of it than do the fundis. If anyone dances on graves, it is undoubtedly a rare activity and one whose meaning for the dancers only they know. The mwalim dunias and the spirit curers from time to time do receive clients asking them to perform sorcery. In fact, despite the greater reputation of mwalim dunias for sorcery, in 1985 Tumbu thought that most clients preferred to address their requests to the spirit curers. Because their technique is simpler and requires less learning, they are much less expensive. Tumbu estimated that a spirit curer pre¬ pared to do sorcery might charge his client 500 francs, while a mwalim dunia would ask ten times as much. Whatever the accuracy of these particular figures (and they need to be compared with Mussa's more modest estimates), it is clear that the costs of hiring any kind of sorcerer are meant to be prohibitive. I do not know how many sorcery clients any given fundi is willing to take on, but there is undoubtedly some variation among them. It is reported that a leading mwalim dunia will take on a case only if he con¬ siders that the potential victim has done something very bad to the client. But people are also afraid that the fundis might choose to commit

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sorcery for their own personal reasons. One young shopkeeper, who was usually very fast to collect his debts, did not dare approach a fundi who owed him money for fear of what the man might do if pushed. In 1975 Tumbu said that he was often approached with requests to perform sorcery, especially as retaliation. The request usually occurs just after he has removed a sairy from his client (i.e., cured them of sor¬ cery) and the former victim or his kin then want to return the harmful substance to the person who sent it. Tumbu also has clients, mostly women, who ask for love medicine: to attract a lover, to keep a spouse, or to get rid of one. Here is an example of such a case, one that illustrates perfectly the complexity of deciding whether sorcery has been practised. The first wife of a man in the village of B asked Tumbu for medicine to make her husband divorce his second wife, on whom she felt he wasted too much money. The client was in her late middle-age and had been married to her husband for many years, whereas the second wife was a young woman who had only been married to him for a short time. Tumbu agreed to take on the commission, although he told me in private that, since it is bad to destroy marriages and would make God angry at him, he had no intention of actually carrying it out. Although the client and Tumbu spoke about 'medicine' {audy), Tumbu told me later the procedure was just like sorcery. The woman would bury the medicine or give it to her husband to drink. Tumbu said he agreed to do the job so as not to offend the client. He planned to give her some harmless herbs, but to refuse payment, telling her that he would collect his fee only when the couple had actually separated. It is interesting in this case that from the client's perspective, a certain kind of act was engaged upon, whereas from that of the fundi, at least if his words to me are to be believed, it was not. It is unclear to me whether the client herself viewed the act as one of sorcery; I did not meet her and in any case it was not the sort of question I could have asked. The whole business is shrouded in ambiguity, from the allusions to 'medicines,' to the precise nature of the substances that are prescribed or handed over. I suspect that many cases are like this. From the fundi's perspective, he has acted correctly, neither carrying out an immoral act nor collecting payment for it, yet not accusing his client of wrongdoing either nor sending her on to another fundi who might be willing either to commit the sorcery on her behalf or to charge her for it. A significant dimension of the fundi's practice is his ability to handle new circum¬ stances diplomatically and this was something to which Tumbu gave much thought and at which he excelled.

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On other occasions Tumbu says he always refuses his clients' requests for sorcery. It is a bad thing to do and his own fundi who taught him admonished him not to put his knowledge to such use. It makes God angry. I do not doubt Tumbu's sincerity here and it is not a contradiction of his word that when he is in trance, his spirits appear less concerned with morality or propriety and more willing to consider taking on a case. The spirit's attitude may be more talk than action. Moreover, a judgment would always be made about the appropriateness of any particular job and the spirit might well check with Tumbu himself or with Mohedja who would attempt to dissuade it. Again, arhbiguity. Here is a case where Tumbu used his knowledge in order to break up a marriage, but he argued that he was countering sorcery rather than practising it. Abudy Mady was a polygynist who sought Tumbu's advice when his first wife refused to sleep with him. Tumbu explained that this had been caused by sorcery on the part of the second wife and advised him to check this with an independent diviner. When the diag¬ nosis was confirmed, Abudy washed in medicine supplied by Tumbu and left the second wife. In my experience such manipulation or abuse of privileged or con¬ structed knowledge was quite rare on Tumbu's part. In this case he was probably motivated by his respect for Abudy and his ambivalence to¬ wards the second wife, a sexually voracious woman who had already had several husbands and numerous lovers, causing much anguish in the process to a number of other women. Tumbu also felt that she had made fun of his spirit activities on at least one occasion. We see here that the power attributed to fundis in the popular imagination has some basis in fact. It is also worthwhile to note how much private knowledge a fundi like Tumbu has; in this case he is aware of circumstances sur¬ rounding the breakup of a neighbour's marriage of which even she remains ignorant. In another case where Tumbu's spirit agreed to assist a client break up the marriage of her daughter, his action was more an expression of kinship obligation and concern than aggression and personal interest. The client was Tumbu's sister-in-law and her daughter his niece. The girl became pregnant despite her parents' warnings and had insisted on marrying the baby's father. At the time, her parents were so angry with her that they wished to God that she would never get another husband but be stuck with him until he died. Now they wanted to take this back. The husband was a ne'er-do-well who refused to work or even to go to the fields. The young couple were incapable of taking care of themselves

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and both sets of parents were fed up with their lack of responsibility and felt they could be better disciplined if they were separated. Tumbu's spirit listened to the story and only remarked that it hoped the woman was telling the truth. It then agreed to help her. This undoubtedly gave the woman confidence and enabled her to feel that she had done some¬ thing towards taking back her hasty wish. The mother's interference in her daughter's marriage was socially acceptable since the manifest irre¬ sponsibility of the young couple indicated they were not yet mature enough to be married. Once again there is ambiguity. It is not completely clear what Tumbu's spirit - or, for that matter, Tumbu himself - did, nor is it clear whether interference on his part would be labelled wrong and therefore sorcery, or whether it was justified action on the part of a concerned parental figure. Doubtless, the daughter's opinion on this subject would not have been the same as her mother's. (In any case, whatever he did or did not do, the marriage continued for many years. Tumbu had a warm joking relationship with the niece and her husband, and the parents-inlaw became resigned to the situation.) Another spirit curer and herbalist, an elderly woman in Bemanga, had a number of medicines that might be considered sorcery. Her grandson and apprentice, a young man named Safy, enjoyed describing them to me. Sandwiched between accounts of medicine to cure 'wind' (tsiku), an abdominal ailment that, if left untreated, can lead to death, and medicine to prevent one from being imprisoned by the government, was this description of audy famaiky tranu, axing a house medicine. This medicine causes a fight between a married couple so that they separate. One grinds a combination of various ingredients, including antakiltru (a plant that sticks to and irritates the skin), empty snail shells, and wood from a latrine platform. The mixture is burned and spread about in the house and courtyard of the couple. Safy knows it works because he has observed a case. A man who wanted to divorce his wife came to his grandmother. She applied the medicine, the couple quarrelled, and he left the very same day. When I asked Safy why the client needed medi¬ cine to do this, he replied that the man had been too embarrassed to start a quarrel on his own since he had no justifiable complaint against his wife nor reason to admonish her. Safy, like Tumbu, is a spirit curer, but his techniques and interests vary somewhat from Tumbu's. His recipes for sorcery are much more concrete and specific than Tumbu's and use more local plants, many of them selected for their symbolic properties. These seem designed to

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convince the curer rather than the client, who may not know what is in the mixture he receives. Safy is also more credulous than Tumbu and more prone to bring up treatments that verge on fantasy, both in their aims and their means. Some of these carry a kind of perverted poetry, for example the notion that sorcery placed at a spring can make a woman suffer continuous menstrual bleeding. Safy can list an array of recipes to make spouses talk in their sleep, to keep other people away from one's spouse, and, most spectacularly, to thoroughly shame an unfaith¬ ful spouse by rendering the adulterous couple unable to separate from their copulatory embrace. The fundis who know these sorts of formulae for practising sorcery are generally the same ones who are called upon to diagnose and heal it. The oral knowledge and techniques upon which they rely are not only less systematized than written knowledge (though Safy has a notebook filled with his grandmother's recipes), but are more or less likely to be remembered and used according to the personal meaning they have for the curer (cf. Obeyesekere 1981). Hence there is a certain amount of diversity in the flavour of the practice of various curers, diversity both in their treatments of choice and in how they conceptualize their interventions. If Safy's particular psychological concerns appear fairly close to the surface (though he enjoys a long and happy marriage), it must be remarked that all the curers rely in part on their psychic energies. Thus, in his practice Tumbu drew actively upon what he was told in his sleep about who would be coming to him for help, what medicines to give them and what taboos to impose, and who was speaking badly about him. Tumbu's paranoia was weaker than Safy's, but perhaps Victor Turner is correct when he attributes a paranoid style to most diviners. Turner speaks of near-paranoiacs [whose] early experience, which may have involved the swal¬ lowing down of anger in the face of taunts and insults [a common enough experience of childhood in Mayotte], gives them clairvoyance into the ill-natured motivations of others, but also imparts a 'paranoid style' into their mode of sifting truth from falsehood ... W.H. Auden's line 'The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews' epitomizes the prevalent attitude of diviners toward human nature, that is, the view that the most common qualities of human beings are inhumane. The paranoid style does not impair the diviner's ability to sift evidence in a rational way ... Diviners as a class may be said to exact a

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subtle revenge on a society which has rejected or belittled them as individuals ... diviners provide for the solid citizens a coherent if illusory scheme which translates into cultural terms the mental structures of paranoia (1975: 24).

Of course the first thing that must be said about this passage is that most anthropologists are obviously very little different from diviners. Nor would I single out the curers in Mayotte as sharply as Turner does his diviners. For one thing, they are engaged not only in pointing the finger but in healing, and in the latter activity demonstrate a good deal of compassion. Indeed, one could turn the issue around and remark on how little, given the potential of his situation, someone like Tumbu exercises paranoid or other negative tendencies. Second, the fundis in Mayotte do not generally have the satisfaction that Turner describes for Ndembu diviners of publicly identifying witches and humbling the smug and successful. Third, a point to be developed elsewhere, I believe that spirit possession provides some mediums with the means to transcend their emotional problems. Fourth, many people exhibit similar degrees of paranoia, but it is only the curers who have the opportunity to direct their paranoia to positive social ends, a point that, of course. Turner himself expands on at great length. The range of variability of paranoia and fantasy is equivalent among the people on the path to that among the curers. Thus one couple I knew locked the gate of their compound every night in order to stop people from entering it and, as they put it, 'performing sorcery in the water pots.' Most people would not worry about such matters nor bother with such precautions. The significance attributed to sorcery varies both from person to per¬ son and context to context. Thus there is no unilateral answer to the question: Can or will a sorcerer kill a person? Safy and Mussa, who for awhile teamed up in their practice, were sometimes ready to assert that if someone had committed adultery or deflowered a virgin, they would be prepared to do sorcery to kill him. If the criminal had merely stolen an object, they would do sorcery to make him sick. They would not commit sorcery for other reasons. In the event of a death, however, no one should look to sorcery as an explanation. Specific deaths are never immediately attributed to sorcery; in the context of death all talk of sorcery is suppressed and subordinated to the perspective of Islam. Philosophically-minded individuals like Saidu Bwana elaborate that sorcery cannot supersede God's will. All death and disease comes finally from (2od who decides all things.^ But sorcery occurs as well. Sorcery is

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a very bad thing to do and the sorcerer will be punished by God. Despite the fact that life and death are in God's hands, God has ordered people to help one another. This returns us to our original discussion of sorcery as a kind of act. To the degree that a ritual act, whether killing a chicken, uttering a verse, or dancing in a graveyard, is performed according to conventional means, its primary consequences are moral rather than material (Austin 1965; Rappaport 1979). In the end, the diversity of means ascribed to the sorcerer is irrelevant. In his act the sorcerer does not and cannot cause significant events, but he assumes moral responsibility for them. An act of sorcery perpetrated against someone changes not the intended victim, but the significance of the victim's subsequent misfortune. It also estab¬ lishes a fundamental relationship between the perpetrator and the mis¬ fortune. He is punished not for killing, but for demonstrating and acting on his wish that the victim die. A man leaves his wife, a person sickens. No one in particular need be accused, but once sorcery is diagnosed, it is recognized that the sorcerer knows his own identity and must acknowledge to himself - as God surely will acknowledge - his responsibility. Responsibility is allocated in theory; someone is responsible, even if no one except the sorcerer himself knows who he is. The practice of sorcery is believed to be ubiquitous. Yet its presence is also ambiguous and hard to trace in any given instance. Viewed as an implicit critique of dominant relations of knowledge and power, it is attributed by the public largely to experts, and by the experts of any given discipline largely to those of another discipline. Who practises what, in what manner, and for which reasons is a matter that shifts with social perspective, with the kind of knowledge a person lays claim to, with immediate practical interests, and with psychological disposition. 'Sorcery' is a product of the intersection of multiple discourses and forms of practice. And yet, at its logical core is the conceptualization of a simple and unambiguous act. The act of sorcery is the act of committing oneself to one's malicious intentions, of accepting responsibility for their (ostensible) consequences. Postscript: Unleashed Accusations The social reality of sorcery is, of course, found less in its practices than in its consequences. The response to sorcery generally slides between resignation and indignation. For one old woman, being a victim of

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sorcery was greeted happily as an index of her continuing social relevance. Suspicion of sorcery and the general sense of its prevalence creates an undertone of knowing resignation at the state of the human condition. Accusations of sorcery can be hurtful and socially disruptive, but they are not devastating. To be identified as having carried out sorcery is not to be revealed as being radically different from others; sorcery is viewed as something that anyone with sufficient knowledge might carry out. The most practical thing to do when faced with a diagnosis of sorcery is to have it removed; accusations are quite rare. Both the revelation by the fundi of the name of the sorcerer and the victim's subsequent attempt at confrontation are strongly frowned upon. A good curer refuses to reveal the identity of the sorcerer. Moreover, such revelation carries no legal weight; it need never be accepted by the public as definitive. Extractors who reveal names on a regular basis are regarded as trouble¬ makers; and the more ambiguous the reputation of the curer, the less authority his pronouncements carry. Hence, while victims or their sup¬ porters may suspect someone, they never have the evidence or autho¬ rized verification to raise a publicly acceptable confrontation. Victims ought to leave it to God to punish the guilty party rather than risk making a false accusation. In addition, there is nothing to be gained from such an accusation. In most circumstances the curing of sorcery does not require the acquiescence of the sorcerer, nor is there any legiti¬ mate way of exacting revenge except through the recitation of duas, where the identity is unneeded. The duas themselves reveal the identity of the perpetrator de facto (as described in Chapter 4). By contrast, making an accusation can unleash forces whose consequences the accuser cannot readily predict. There is no direct procedure to restore harmony once an accusation has been made and the repercussions of an accusation can reverberate for a long time. The attribution of sorcery sometimes escapes the control of the fundis. Indeed, the effects of an unfounded accusation may be more pervasive than those stemming from the authority of experts. I followed a lengthy case in which Dady Zalia thought an accusation was made against her by her sister's son. Although Dauda denied he had accused her of anything, the conflict rapidly escalated among their kin. Sorcery accu¬ sations rarely come out of the blue and people try to make sense of them by linking them to past and present tensions. Hence their ramifi¬ cations can grow rapidly. In this case, each attempt at mediation seemed to be matched by the eruption of two new quarrels, many of them about things that had taken place years before. Everyone felt badly.

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Although no one persisted in accusing Dady Zalia, she was confronted with a situation for which society did not provide an unambiguous and face-saving scenario. Likewise, Dauda was clearly embarrassed about the accusation, but there was no explicit means by which he could withdraw it, especially while Dady Zaha was too upset to accept his apologies. Sorcery accusation is full of hazards and ambiguities; there is very little authority or legitimate means through which events can be con¬ trolled and directed. People were genuinely concerned for Dady Zalia, but did not have the means to transcend her feelings of hurt and social isolation. At the same time, everyone expressed opinions about who should have done what. It is striking that while the act of sorcery is one of antikinship, the moral discourse generated by the quarrel was precisely about appropriate kinship behaviour. I knew people well enough that the quarrel was embarrassing to me as well, but this discourse on kinship that it threw up was also welcome as a source for new understandings and as a context in which to see formal ideas expressed in practice. For example, at one point Dady Zalia's daughter was chided for entering the quarrel between Dady Zalia and the latter's brother, 'because they were both her mothers,' a statement that beautifully demonstrated the identification of siblings with one another in local kinship, to the degree that 'motherhood,' includes mother's brother (as 'fatherhood' includes father's sister), and hence that parenthood is not fully gender specific. All this talk about kinship did not provide an easy solution to the set of conflicts that had been established or rekindled by the accusation, nor did the fact that people showed a genuine concern with getting the facts straight. Those outside the heat of the argument were careful to distinguish personal observation from hearsay. Only a fatiha could have provided a legitimate and verifiable version of the truth, but the fatiha was also undesirable as it would have produced precisely the sort of consequences that led to the quarrel in the first place - kin hurting kin. Indeed, the hurt would have been much greater. The reluctance to utter the fatiha underlines the moral concerns behind people's actions and their desire not to let the quarrel get further out of hand. The question of whether or not someone did sorcery was ultimately less important to them than that people show the appropriate wise, caring, and compas¬ sionate behaviour to one another that ought to be a characteristic of kin relations, especially between generations. A preferable alternative to the fatiha was mediation (suluhu) to restore harmony. Mediation was attempted a few times, once 'with a fundi of 'Him fakihi, but without notable success. The density of cross-cutting ties within

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the mraba (family group) contributed to the confusion; the situation al¬ lowed people to apply the ideology of kinship in their rhetoric, but to various and divergent ends. The case did not provide a social drama in Turner's sense, or rather, not a social drama that draws automatically upon regular ritual procedures in order to proceed in Aristotelian order towards a climax and satisfactory denouement. Sorcery accusations are a messy business with no institutionalized procedure for catharsis. Not all sorcery accusations operate the same way. Perhaps the fact that no one was sick was one of the reasons this one lacked a focus. There was no clear victim of sorcery for whom the kin group could have harnessed its energies. Had there been such a person, the first thing that would have happened would have been the extraction of the sorcery from the victim's body. This might not have settled things in the long run, but it could have provided an affirmation that they were changing for the better. Sorcery accusation is not the same order of phenomenon as sorcery diagnosis. Sorcery diagnosis is much more common than accusation and here the plot structure is condensed and regular. Diagnosis is followed by extraction of the sorcery on the part of an appropriate fundi. The extraction, to be described in the next chapter, is climactic, cathartic, and transformative.

9 Removing Sorcery: Committing (to) the Cure

When the sorcerer claims to suck out of the patient's body a foreign object whose presence would explain the illness and produces a stone which he had previously hidden in his mouth, how does he justify this procedure in his own eyes? - Claude Levi-Strauss, 'The Sorcerer and His Magic'

We have seen that in Mayotte sorcery is understood as a condition of all human knowledge. As such, it can occur in a myriad of ways. The methods dwelt upon in the public imagination may be outrageous and obscene, but while sharing the general view, the sorcery curer works with a much narrower and more precisely delineated conception. His or her job is to remove sorcery and its effects. To accomplish this he needs a clear theory of the mechanics of sorcery. He undoes what the sorcerer has done. As someone so close to sorcery, he also needs a clear set of guidelines in order to distinguish himself from the sorcerer and to demonstrate his good faith to himself and to others. It is these things we will attempt to understand through an examination of Tumbu's practice. Our ultimate goal (one that, to be sure, is not fully realizable here) is to share with Tumbu what he understands by what he does rather than simply what he tells his clients. Tumbu's view is a sophisti¬ cated one. At the same time, it is not necessarily something he carries around in the form of an explicit finished model. So we will approach his understanding gradually, naively, in much the same manner as I learned it. The chapter considers sorcery extraction from the perspective of Tumbu's practice in 1975-6. In order to become a sorcery curer the first criterion is that you must be possessed by a patros spirit and have

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achieved a good relationship with it.’ Sorcery cure requires a spirit (lulu) because sorcery itself is a 'matter of spirits' (kabar ny lulu). Moreover the condition of sorcery may develop into spirit possession and the curer must be prepared to recognize and handle this. In addition to having a mature relationship with a spirit of his own, the extractor must possess a certain kind of temperament as well as objective knowledge concerning the material procedures for removing sorcery from the bodies of his clients. Extractor and Client Three days after our first attempt to buy rice (Chapter 4), Tumbu and I again set out. This time we were successful, and while we waited for his son to arrive with the mule that would transport the sack home, Tumbu began to tell me about one of his major curing successes. Salima Miradj was a prosperous middle-aged lady who lived in the large vil¬ lage of B, a half hour or so on foot from Lombeni. We were entertained at her house on the occasion of a large festival, at which time she was introduced as Tumbu's sister. The siblingship was, in fact, fictive, an expression of solidary friendship based upon her satisfaction with the cure. 21 July 1975. Tumbu said he cured Salima only last year, although she had been sick for a long time before that. For six years she had been taking medicine, but once Tumbu took over the case, he cured her in two weeks! She washed in and ate his medicines. No other doctors, local or European, had been able to cure her. Salima had been very sick and had tried many healers. One day she heard that there was a good doctor living in Lombeni named Tumbu Vita. Early in the morning she sent her daughter to him, asking him to come to B and see her. Tumbu refused because it is not proper to go to a married woman unless invited by her husband. That same evening, Salima's husband came and renewed the request, so Tumbu agreed to see her. Tumbu explained that it was a case of marary shetwan, illness involving a spirit. To find out more precisely the nature and appropriate treatment of the disease, it was necessary to perform divination. For this, Tumbu's spirit was called up. Tumbu knows a little divination, but not as well as his j5indi, his spirit. He prefers to do the divination himself [i.e., out of trance], but at the beginning Salima had no confidence in him, he said, and insisted that the spirit be called. So Tumbu's spirit arrived and talked to Salima. The spirit announced

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that her illness was caused by sorcery [voriky]. He told her to collect a goat of three colours - red, white, and black - a chicken and 3.5 kilos of white rice. The items were determined by the diviner's calculation; they vary from person to person and circumstance to circumstance. When the seance was over, Salima told Tumbu what the spirit had said. Tumbu then returned home while Salima busied herself collecting the necessary materials. At some point she also bought Tumbu's spirit a bottle of perfume. When all was ready, Salima called Tumbu back to B. This time Tumbu did not make use of his spirit. He knew what to do on his own. The rice was laid out in seven small piles in a circle around Salima who was seated on a mat. On each pile was placed an open sea shell [ahkiya, a word I did not understand at the time], and in each shell some coconut oil and a wick. The goat and chicken were placed outside this circle facing Salima. The seven oil lamps were lit and Tumbu stood over Salima, a little of the rice in his hand, uttering prayers [dua] and tossing bits of rice over her. The badness entered the shells and these were tossed back into the sea. The goat, chicken, and rice were referred to as swadaka [ritual offerings]. They were taken home by Tumbu to eat. It was forbidden [fady] for Salima or any close member of her family to eat this dedicated food. Tumbu then collected plant medicines, which he cooked up. He also wrote out an amulet for Salima to wear around her neck. There are many kinds of amulets, said Tumbu, and he knows them all. Salima washed in the medicine and ate some, and she was cured. She was extremely happy and grateful. She asked Tumbu to be her 'brother.' She told her husband this and forbade him to be nasty in any way to Tumbu. Now she wanted to adopt Tumbu's two-yearold daughter, Mwanesha. Tumbu knew who caused the sorcery, but he did not tell Salima. It is fady to identify the person to Salima or any other victim because they would then go and start a fight. The fundi prepares the medicines and that's it.

The specific treatment Tumbu describes here is actually appropriate to the 'evil eye' (dzitsu) rather than to sorcery per se, but because my language abilities were still very poor and 1 had not yet seen any healing rituals, 1 did not recognize this at the time.^ Given the state of my knowledge, Tumbu probably did not think it worthwhile to make the distinction. While the anthropologist may consider that he or she is gaining objective 'knowledge' from an 'informant,' in fact the question of what constitutes 'knowledge' is based equally on the judgment of the person providing it, who shapes his or her conversation according to an appraisal of how much the anthropologist is presently capable of un¬ derstanding. My comprehension at this point was obviously still inad-

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equate, but there is never an end-point, never the cognitive unity as¬ pired to by the mwalim dunia of the lead story. Hence the product of the conversation is always a negotiated reality and ethnographic knowledge is never final or complete. The account illustrates a number of services that a curer like Tumbu provides. Tumbu diagnoses the case, he provides and applies herbal medicines, he prays on behalf of the client, and constructs a protective amulet. Most importantly, he drives out the source of the illness. The knowledge to do all this comes from a variety of sources. While the size of the goat and chicken were up to the client, the fact that both these animals were needed for the swadaka (offering) was a product of divi¬ nation. How Tumbu (or his spirit) knew this and arrived at the general diagnosis are explained in terms of 'Him dunia. Yet, although the kind of divination practised by Tumbu and his spirit makes reference to the cosmological system, it is less formal, at once more empirical and more subjective, based on careful observation and intuitive appraisal of the client, her situation, and her relationship to the curer himself. Based on his theoretical understanding of medicine and mindful of the practical problems of any given case, the curer attempts to construct the cure in a manner that the client will find convincing, meaningful, and ultimately helpful. The client, too, helps to shape the encounter. In this case, Salima's gratitude and respect for Tumbu's impressive per¬ formance, especially in light of her history of past failures, led her to pursue a more diffuse and enduring relationship with Tumbu. Tumbu liked her and agreed; they initiated a bond of friendship and began visiting each other like kin. Tumbu felt satisfied with himself and proud of his success and it was of interest to him to develop a relationship with a relatively wealthy and well-placed woman in a large village that was the terminus of the paved road and the first station en route to town. Many clients suggest such a personal relationship with their curers, but few carry it through with the determination of Salima. She began a pattern of visiting and exchange that served repeatedly to deepen the relationship. Despite the fact that her return to health proved temporary, rather than rejecting Tumbu Salima became, in the short term, even more dependent upon him. By March of that year Tumbu was ready to tell me that he found the situation a nuisance. Salima's symptoms re¬ curred frequently and each time Tumbu felt compelled by the moral bond that now existed between them to go to her assistance. This was especially true once he and Mohedja had acquiesced to her insistent

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request to raise their small daughter, Mwanesha. Mwanesha's well¬ being depended on Salima's. In compensation, Salima has provided him with a useful base in a village that has developed increasing im¬ portance as a regional centre over the years. That March Tumbu explained Salima's problem as one of repeated acts of sorcery. Each time he cured her, the same person or persons reapplied the sorcery. The problem, said Tumbu, was that the sorcery did not come from far away but from among her own kin, in fact, from her sisters. Tumbu implied that the sisters' motive was jealousy over material possessions. Despite his general caution about such matters, Tumbu eventually informed Salima, as he then told me, that the perpe¬ trators were close kin. She guessed the rest. However, she did not want to confront them and anyway it would not have done any good. Tumbu told her the only way to stop them was to hold a badri, the Islamic reci¬ tation that turns evil back on its perpetrators. Salima was not prepared to do this since the sorcerers were her own close kin. Instead, she kept pestering Tumbu for more medicine and treatments (this was when Tumbu was feeling exasperated), treatments that were considerably simpler and cheaper than the one described above. In this case Tumbu was able to rationalize his lack of permanent success. However, it was Salima, perhaps still impressed by his initial success, who perpetrated the relationship and who seemed at that time to gain most from it. Tumbu was not exploiting her; it was clear that he would have preferred that she did not keep calling upon him. Salima had essentially replaced one set of siblings with another, although she was not ready to release herself from all moral obligation to the former set and was not prepared to harm them. Thus it is the practice of the client, no less than that of the curer, that determines the direction and outcome of the case, that is, that informs, and perhaps transforms, the situation and gives it meaning. This is little different from the situation of ethnographer (client) and informant (fundi); reality is constructed jointly. However, it is also the case that both the therapist and the client may have understandings of the situation that they choose not to share with one another. Extraction in Theory Our original conversation about Salima led Tumbu to make some general remarks about sorcery. As we slowly led the donkey home with the rice, Tumbu made the point that Salima's case was far from atypical.

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Lots of people are victims of sorcery. He described in detail how the sorcerer worked (as recounted in Chapter 8). The next day, as 1 typed my notes, I was still confused and asked Tumbu for some clarification. 22 July 1975. Tumbu stood over my shoulder describing the sequence of events in committing sorcery in a stage whisper. 'When the bad spirit called up by the sorcerer enters you, you feel a sudden start' - and he hit me sharply on the back to produce the appropriate reaction. The person then becomes sick, he explained. He may take to his bed, try aspirin, nivaquine, and so on. If none of this works, he goes to a diviner who may recommend a fundi to extract the sorcery. The fundi recites duas to the client and, while reciting, looks into the person's eyes. While doing so, he can see precisely when the spirit moves. He waits for it to enter the arm and then pulls it down the limb. Tumbu illustrated the extraction by taking my right hand in his. He held it and began to squeeze hard. [The typescript of my notes skip a line here.] He pulled his hand down my arm, then wrenched it away and made the motion of dropping an object onto the floor. In this way he pulls the sairy, the little cloth bundle of harmful objects, out of the body of the client. If, after the extraction of the sairy, the client remains sick, a shijabu ceremony is held and various duas, including the fatiha, are recited. If the client still remains unwell, it probably means that his years of life, arranged with God before birth, are up.

In conversations with Tumbu and Mohedja over the next few months, the relationship of sorcery to other forms of affliction became much clearer. They consistently maintained that there were basically three sources or classes of affliction. Some clients are 'just sick' (marary tu), suffering from problems that come directly from God. Second, there is sorcery, and third, spirit possession. These form a kind of hierarchy. The first class, which we may translate simply as 'God-given' or 'natu¬ ral,' in the order of things, is by far the most common and also under¬ lies the other two. Anyone suffering from sorcery also has a 'natural' ailment; virtually anyone who is possessed owes the origins of his or her condition to sorcery and therefore has an underlying God-given ailment as well. One cannot tell from simple observation of the manifest physical complaint how many of the causal factors are present in a particular case. They explained that the sairys, the objects that cause the trouble to the person suffering from sorcery, can be inside the body or they can be buried inside the person's house or courtyard. These are not different

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kinds of sairy, merely different loci. It is up to the fundi to find the sairy and extract (manaboka) it. Other people, as we shall see, posit a substan¬ tive difference between these kinds of sorcery, finding it easier to accept the recovery of an object from a hole in the soil than its passage through the skin. According to Tumbu and Mohedja, sorcery cannot cause either illness or death, it merely prevents cure by conventional procedures. No one but God can make a person sick or cause death through disease. Once a person has been the object of sorcery, the spirit enlisted by the sorcerer merely follows the potential victim around. It is only when the person becomes vulnerable through suffering a God-given illness that the spirit is able to attach itself to that part of the body. Until such a time, the spirit can do nothing but wait. Thus there may often be a long interval between the time when the sorcery was committed against someone and the time when the victim begins to suffer its effects. If it is a 'natural' illness that determines susceptibility to sorcery, it is sorcery that determines the persistence of natural illness. Once the spirit has entered its victim, the original, God-given illness can only be healed when the sairy is extracted, that is, when the spirit is removed. As long as the sairy is not removed, the illness continues to linger. Treatment that is normally effective against the particular illness is necessary, but will not work by itself. Tumbu and Mohedja cited the case of a woman who suffered severe menstrual pain for fifteen years because the case was never correctly diagnosed as sorcery. This model determines the curing procedure. Tumbu usually removes the sorcery first. After the sairy is out, the way to curing the natural ail¬ ment is opened and the fundi proceeds with the standard treatment. In some cases where the patient has been successfully treated at the clinic but continues to complain of various symptoms once he or she has been released, the order is reversed and the sorcery extraction occurs at the end. In other cases, the extraction leads on to a third phase: after the sairy is removed, the spirit may decide of its own accord (i.e., no longer at the bidding of the sorcerer) to move to the person's head and initiate a long-term relationship with him or her. This is the beginning of spirit possession and the task of the curer changes from attempting to remove an anonymous spirit to beginning to establish communication and dis¬ cern its identity. Here again, treatment for possession must be initiated (though not necessarily completed) before the symptoms of the 'natural' illness can be expected to go away. Thus, in the case of the woman suffering menstrual problems, Tumbu removed the sairy and then at-

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tempted to contact the spirit who had begun to possess her. Only when the sorcery was out and communication with the spirit begun did he begin to treat the menstrual problems directly. With the diagnosis of spirit possession, the conceptualization of the invading spirit changes quite radically. It is no longer a vague and unspecified source of harm, but gradually emerges with a specific name and relatively coherent personal identity. It becomes visible as it acts in the body of the host (i.e., the client) when the latter is in trance and in this manner it develops a specific social presence. In some cases it may even announce the identity of the sorcerer who sent it in the first place. However, in sorcery extraction the spirit is invisible, silent, abstract, and unidentified, even its species being irrelevant. It is manifest only in the sairy. In this context, spirits are simply amorphous and menacing beings who have been lured and contracted by the sorcerer to infect the victim. They are not 'within' the victim in the same sense as are pos¬ sessing spirits who can temporarily replace the host's voice with their own and who develop articulate and continuous social relationships with their hosts. The extraction of the sairy does not absolutely determine the subse¬ quent welfare of the client. This again is subordinate to God's will. If God wishes the person to die, then he will die, whether or not the sairy is removed. Sometimes a fundi may know that God intends a prospec¬ tive client to die soon. The fundi has no right to tell the patient so and he will extract the sairy anyway. This is not unethical deception, since the curer's fee is actually a swadaka, a sacrifice, and pleasing to God in its own right. And in such circumstances, the curer would not make the swadaka very large. Moreover, it is always possible that God's mind will change. Fundis do not have the right to presume to know God's will nor to cause their clients to give up hope. L'homme propose, dieu dispose. Sometimes curers hesitate to take on a case that they suspect is hope¬ less since they do not wish to be associated with failure. They offer the client some sort of excuse without revealing the true nature of the case. However, even if a client dies while under a curer's care, it is not considered the fundi's fault. No one would explain such a profound event in terms of such a relatively trivial cause. By contrast, a fundi is much more readily credited when a seriously ailing patient recovers. The cause of death is found on another plane and can only be a product of God's will. God's will is a final cause, a fundi's incompetence merely proximal. This view is characteristic not only of the fundis but of the 'people on the path' as well. When a kinsperson dies, almost no one

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blames the fundi under whose care the deceased was, nor should they demand the fee back. This matter of causation is a complex one, one that we have encoun¬ tered before and will again. It lies at the heart of the juxtaposition of the various disciplines and the attempt by all to struggle with the problems of the human condition. Hence while they and I can lay out clusters of ideas logically, and while I try to discover and elucidate the chains of logic as far as I can, in the end the layout of the whole repertoire is not a product of abstract logic. Likewise, when people are confronted with a threatening condition, they do not always approach it in a deliberate and consistent logical manner. Tumbu in Practice The work of the sorcerer and the work of the sorcery extractor make better sense when they are seen as two sides of a single system. I gradu¬ ally began to understand this after I observed several sairy extractions and was able to question Tumbu about the details. Two cases are described below; in the first the sorcery is removed from a house floor, in the second from the body of a client. Both these cases are fairly straightfor¬ ward; more complex examples will be presented later. Despite the variation, each case is consistent with Tumbu's theoretical principles and each is a product of a unified therapeutic procedure. 2 August 1975. I went with Tumbu to B and saw my first extraction. Tumbu says he can do divination in his sleep and will often know during the night who is going to come to him for medicine the next day and what is wrong with them. Today's client, an elderly woman, came to Lombeni accompanied by her adult daughter for medicine for a swollen leg. Tumbu gave her the medicine, but at the same time he told her, as he knew from a dream the previous night, that she was the object of sorcery. She took the medicine home and treated her leg. Some days later she sent her daughter to Tumbu to come and perform the extraction. Tumbu and I went on 20 June, but she was not at home. Tumbu was annoyed and returned to Lombeni, waiting for her to call him again, which she did several weeks later. By this time her leg appeared to have healed and I asked Mohedja why the extraction was necessary. Mohedja replied that the woman would not sleep well until the extraction was performed. When we arrived in B Tumbu examined the rocky plot on which the woman's house stood and decided the sairy must have been buried in the house, not her courtyard as he had previously said. He sent the daughter to fetch a small

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amount of earth from each of the four corners of the yard. Tumbu then dug a hole with his shombu [a ubiquitous all-purpose tool shaped like a pointed ma¬ chete] in the mud floor next to the woman's bed. She sat on a mat nearby and watched the proceedings idly. Tumbu lit incense on a brazier and began to recite softly to himself. He mixed the earth from the four corners with a little water and poured most of the mixture into the hole. He held the remaining mud in his closed right hand over the smoke, picked up the red chicken that had been requested as the swadaka, and held it over the hole with his left hand as he dropped in the remaining mud with his right, all the while continuing to recite. With his machete he etched five lines up to the hole in the floor. Then he opened his right hand as he recited, blew on it, and repeated the act. He dropped coals from the incense burner into the hole, followed by more water, and blew again. With his right hand he stirred up the mud in the hole, then pulled up a handful and threw it dramatically on the floor. He searched through it and found a small cloth pouch, about 2 cm in length. The client on the floor and her daughter seated in the doorway sat up and began to take notice as Tumbu cut open the pouch to display the material inside: hair, paper, nail clippings, broken glass. He pointed out that the material was already rotten from having been in the earth so long. He refilled the hole and washed his muddy hands over it. The old woman counted out the payment and also handed over the red chicken. 23 October 1975. This morning after a night-long dance performance in D and before Tumbu had a chance to leave for home, he received a message to go to someone's house to perform a cure. The man was sick with painfully swollen limbs that looked full of infection to me. He asked for Tumbu's help. Tumbu told me on the way home that he was not surprised. Earlier the daughter and wife had been sick with the same condition. Both times Tumbu had cured them, but had told them that the root of the problem was a sairy that had been placed out in their fields. Once cured of their bodily ailments, they had not bothered to have the sairy in the field removed as the swadaka required was a goat. Tumbu now told them he would heal the man by removing a sairy from his body and they should find a red chicken. A red chicken is usually necessary for a personal sairy removal, a goat for a removal from a field. Tumbu explained to me that this would cure the man, sending the lulu [spirit] back to the field, from where it should really be removed as well in order to prevent future trouble. The client said he dreamed of being attacked by a light-coloured man; this is the sorcerer, but Tumbu says the sorcerer might just as well have been a woman. However, it would be a woman with a male nyora, who thus appears in dreams in the form of a man. Here Tumbu used 'male' and 'female' to refer quite literally to the distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' nyoras [discussed in Chapter 7]. A man

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can have a 'female' nyora and a woman a 'male' one; it depends simply on when they were born. 24 October 1975. Today we returned to D so that Tumbu could perform the cure. We entered the house and shook hands with the patient. Tumbu asked for a mat to be placed on the floor and inquired whether they had found a red chicken. The patient said he feared it was too small, and indeed it was tiny. The client then very painfully got out of bed and lowered himself onto the mat. Tumbu placed the patient facing him and asked for a bowl of ash mixed with water, as well as for some green leaves that he then held in his left fist. He lit the incense and placed the burner between the man's outstretched legs. Tumbu held the chicken over the incense all the while reciting, stood up, and passed the chicken counterclockwise around the man's head seven times. Then he hit him on the chest with the chicken twice. Next he placed the bowl with the water and ash mixture between the man's legs, tore off some of the leaves, dipped them in the bowl, then wiped them on the man's chest and right shoul¬ der. (It is his right arm and right thigh that are painfully swollen and cannot be straightened.) Tumbu wiped the man's arm and his legs and made the motion of pulling away from the skin. He dropped the leaves in the bowl and continued the process with more leaves. As Tumbu rubbed the infected arm and leg, it was obvious that the man was in great pain. But Tumbu appear¬ ed oblivious to this, repeated the process several times, and finally tried to straight¬ en the bent limbs. The man cried out and looked as though he were about to faint. Tumbu pushed away the bowl and passed it without comment to the wife and brother who were sitting just outside the doorway. When they returned the bowl, he casually stirred the mixture, found and opened the sairy. The client appeared to be in too much pain to pay any attention. Tumbu then instructed the family to purchase a litre of kerosene and some matches, to bring them home and quietly talk about the family illness over them and then to place them under the sick man's bed for the night. Early the next morning someone is to carry them to the mosque and leave them there as an offering to God. The person is to make certain that no one sees him or her doing this. This is a somewhat unusual procedure and when I queried him about it on our return home, Tumbu explained that it was to take the place of a shijabu ritual. Doing a shijabu would mean that Tumbu would have to return yet another time to D in order to partake of the meal and this is just too inconvenient. Before we left, the question of money came up. The wife tried to give Tumbu a small bill, but the man, by now sufficiently recovered to be able to speak, intervened and said it was up to him. He counted out the money and gave it to

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Tumbu. Tumbu asked for the chicken, which had to be recaught, and we left. In parting, Tumbu told the family to send a child to Lombeni first thing in the morning in order to pick up medicine for the swelling. They asked Tumbu to write out the instructions for taking the medicine so that they would be certain to get them straight. When I asked Tumbu about the fee, he reminded me that the amount was entirely optional on the client's part. But he said that although this family was poor, they pretended to be poorer than they were. He said he bet that now that the husband himself had become infected, he would try to round up the goat in order to have the sairy from the field extracted as Tumbu had advised him twice before to do.

Of course, it was incorrect for me to assume that there was a hardand-fast rule about goats. On 6 November I observed Tumbu extract a sairy from the field of an aged uncle of his who lived in C. When we arrived, Tumbu asked him, 'Have you prepared the tools (zombu) as I asked?' referring to the soured milk and sugar that we subsequently ate over rice as the shijabu meal upon the completion of the treatment. Af¬ terwards I pressed Tumbu on this: hadn't he told me that extraction from a field required a goat? Tumbu replied that there were different kinds of sairy; difficult ones required goats, but the old man's needed only milk. I was very frustrated at this. Privately I wondered whether Tumbu could ever give me a straight answer to a question and how I could ever figure out the system that I was certain underlay his demands. Or maybe he simply asked greedily for as much as he could get out of any given client? But of course my question was mere tactlessness. Tumbu did not wish to press the old man for more than he could provide, nor was the old man as sick as the family with swollen limbs. Moreover, the food Tumbu ordered was precisely what the toothless elderly eat on festive occasions. 29 December 1975. Today Tumbu was called to extract the sairy from the field of the man who had had the swelling. The field was located way out near K. The client fetched Tumbu from his own field; not knowing about it in advance, I was unable to attend. Tumbu was well fed and, more important, received a small goat for which he was very pleased. He was already determined to use the goat to hold a long promised ritual for his daughter. He referred to the goat as a swadaka from the people whose field it was and added that they are going to have a hadri ceremony performed by another fundi next week in order to keep the field from becoming reattacked.

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On another occasion, I observed Tumbu make a small boy cry during an extraction, slapping his face with a handful of leaves. Disturbed by this event as well as the evident cruelty to the man with the swollen limbs, which were far from typical of the numerous extractions I saw him perform, I asked Tumbu whether it was necessary to be so rough. He replied that sometimes when he is extracting, he feels a surge of anger, he doesn't know why. He looks in the client's eyes and they tell him if and when he should hit the client and he does so. It is actually the spirit who cries and the pain frightens it so that it leaves the patient. This helped me to understand that from Tumbu's point of view, he is involved in a struggle with an evil being. The spirit does not leave the client except by force and it fights back against the extractor, visiting him in his sleep at night. This helps to explain why a curer must be mahery (tough). Sometimes the client's eyes provide other messages and Tumbu can be very gentle, as in the following instance. 22 January 1976. Ali Be arrived from S last night with his younger half-brother who lives there. This morning he brought the brother, a youth in his teens, to Tumbu and simply requested an extraction. Tumbu responded by asking them precisely what the physical ailment and symptoms were. The boy's left testicle is swollen and extended and the diviner in S has said it is due to sorcery. Tumbu sent Ali out for ash and faiikabuka leaves. He placed the boy on a low block of wood and sat above him on a chair. He spread the boy's legs out and placed the coconut shell with ash and the incense burner between them. Ali sat to one side and tended to look away from the proceedings. Tumbu recited over the incense, holding the leaves in his right hand. He took his left hand and gently squeezed the boy's left forearm, then his upper arm, then touched the spot above the shoulder blades at the base of the neck, the right wrist, and the neck again. He poured some water into the ash, dipped the leaves in the mixture and applied them to the left side of the boy's waist, squeezed, and dropped the stuff into the dish. Tumbu looked silently at Ali and his brother. When they made no move to the dish he pulled out the leaves, one by one, until he reached the sairy ,which he dropped onto the floor. He told Ali to open it and the latter did so gingerly. They peered at the contents and Tumbu said gently to the boy, 'You're taken aback' ['Anao kushanga'; shocked, made anxious by a turn of events]. Tumbu then proceeded with a medical lecture. He said the boy was sick and had to be treated right away, otherwise he would end up in hospital. He told Ali to collect mud from the hoof print of a black bull already old enough to be chasing cows. It should be from the right front hoof. He warned him not to let

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the owner observe; he would surely think that Ali was trying to practise medi¬ cine in order to harm the bull. Ali should put the mud with the roots of lambuhenzana and ginger; this mixture should be applied as medicine. When Ali looked a little vague, Tumbu asked him whether he would like him to do the treatment. Ali replied affirmatively, so Tumbu told him to gather the ingredients and return. The boy gave Tumbu the payment and as they left, they were told to throw out the sairy. Tumbu told me that the hoof print was required because it is something strong and will help raise the testicle. Lambuhenzana [a plant whose name means literally 'boar-taut'] is good for the huzatra [corporal filaments: blood vessels, ligaments, nerves] and helps strengthen them. Ginger is an 'Arab' medicine and is good because it supplies heat. The metaphorical associations between the young bull, the 'boar-taut,' and the hoped-for condition of the youth are obvious.

During this period each extraction seemed to add to my knowledge. At any given extraction I could not observe or remember every element and the repetition was useful to give me a more complete picture. At the same time, each case offered something genuinely new; each situation was conceptualized by Tumbu in its specificity as well as its typicality and it was this specificity as well as the specific procedures applied in consequence that has continued to fascinate me and that, indeed, has formed the primary impetus for my writing on 'practice.' In this par¬ ticular case the surprise came when after the clients had left, Tumbu explained to me that he did not believe the boy had been the victim of sorcery at all. Tumbu can tell if a person is being troubled by a spirit because such people have a glint in their pupils and they tend to dart their eyes or heads from side to side and often jerk nervously when touched. He looked into the boy's eyes and saw none of these signs; and when he touched him, the boy remained calm. But since the diviner in S had told the client he had a sairy, Tumbu had to go through the motions of removing it. Otherwise a subsequent treatment for the 'natural' condition would not have worked, and anyway, the boy prob¬ ably wouldn't have believed Tumbu if he had told him he was not suffering from sorcery. Hence what primarily concerned Tumbu in this case was curing the physical ailment. He explained that the reason he touched the boy's arms and neck was to check his pulse. In really bad cases of this kind, it would be throbbing heavily. This case was not so bad, said Tumbu, and he did not prescribe the strongest medicines.

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A few days later, Tumbu spoke again about the eyes. He said that when new clients arrive, his first step is to ask them what is wrong and to stare in their eyes as he does so. Cloudy eyes indicate dzitsu (evil eye), while the presence of a shetwan (generalized, unnamed spirit) makes the eyes look like slits and the person cannot meet your gaze for long, unless the spirit is of a particularly nasty variety.^ On removal of the sairy, there should be a change in the eyes; if not, Tumbu knows the extraction has not yet been successful. Tumbu's diagnosis by means of gazing into the chent's eyes and observing his or her mannerisms suggests that for him the condition of suffering from sorcery may correspond to what I (but not he) might call a state of anxiety and explain in psychological terms. In any case, although Tumbu had earlier explained his process of divination in terms of the abstract but authoritative cosmological cycles of 'Him dunia, it was apparent that he also makes use of direct empirical observation and considerable psychological insight in his diagnoses and in his decisions about how to proceed in specific therapeutic situations. The psychological dimension is also apparent in Tumbu's claim that a client's cognizance of a diagnosis of sorcery, whether or not the diag¬ nosis is correct, is sufficient to render extraction necessary. As Mohedja said about the woman in B, the client does not 'sleep well' until she is certain that the sorcery has been removed. If there were no sorcery to begin with in this case, then what Tumbu has done is to apply the local version of the placebo cure. But this raises the very interesting question about whether and how this differs from his other extractions. Does Tumbu in fact conceptualize all his extractions in this manner? If not, what by comparison to the placebo is taking place in the real thing? Scepticism and the Conversation between the Disciplines There are a number of sceptics in Lombeni who argue that the extrac¬ tion of the sairy is nothing but a trick. For example, one couple whom I spoke to said that if you go to a fundi pretending that you are sick, he will still extract a sairy from your body. According to them, this proves his insincerity, although, as we have just seen, the fundi might be per¬ forming what he himself recognizes as a placebo cure in order to satisfy the client. Hence the insincerity would lie not with the extractor but with the client who has deliberately lied about his condition. Or perhaps the client really is suffering from sorcery but does not know it. The scepticism and spirit of experimentation is interesting in its own right, but in practice it has its limits. Tumbu asserts that everyone, sceptics

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included, have passed through his hands at one time or another. And indeed the couple who expressed their doubts went on to say that they believe that a sairy extracted from the ground as opposed to the flesh is the real thing. If a fundi like Tumbu is eclectic, open-minded and incorporative in his methods, the divisions among the disciplines reappear when we look at the perspective on extraction taken from the other side. Saidu Bwana, fundi of 'Him fakihi, said flatly that the sairys are 'fictions' on the part of the fundis.'^ Anyone can make up a sairy; the fundis pretend to extract them because it brings them money. Most people do not realize this, but he does because he has studied Islam and read about it. He shakes his head over the state of morality, the fact that people are willing to trick one another for profit. This pessimistic view of society in Mayotte is similar to the attitude that many of his neighbours express regarding the prevalence of sorcery. At first I thought that Saidu meant that sorcery itself did not exist, but this proved not to be the case. It is only the sairy that he does not accept. Real sorcery has nothing to do with sairys but is based on a taktubu, written duas that are buried. (This links up with the opinion of the couple who grant greater validity to the buried sairy than to one ex¬ tracted from the body.) The only way that a person who has fallen victim to such a spell can escape death is by finding another fundi who knows how to compose a countertaktubu. Sorcery occurs when spirits have been instructed to fight inside of you. This can only be stopped by counterinstructions. If a person were actually suffering from sorcery, then a real cure would require a taktubu. If there were no actual sorcery, then plant medicines alone would be sufficient to cure the illness. In either case, the sairy is superfluous. This argument neatly attempts to put sorcery extraction back into the domain of writing and written knowledge. And it serves to point up how sairy extraction is a form of resistance to the hegemony of writing. A young man who believed in sorcery and sairy described how he was once cured by Saidu. He was living out in his fields at the time, there was no sorcery extractor nearby, and he couldn't walk without the help of a wooden stick. So he called on Saidu, who was planting a field in the vicinity. Saidu wrote out a dua in soot on a white plate, washed the writing off, and told the man to bathe in the liquid. As soon as he rubbed his ailing knee with the medicine, he was able to walk freely again. Saidu told him not to bother going to a sorcery extractor, saying that he would just be paying for nothing. So, the man told me.

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the sairy remains inside his body, but it is no longer harmful. The words of the dua have neutralized its power. Clients, too, are able to come up with pragmatic resolutions to theoretical inconsistencies.®

The Muslim scholar has an alternate view to Tumbu's in which it is the written word, even when converted to material form, that is crucial. Tumbu was outraged when, in August, I presented him with this opin¬ ion. He said that in the past sorcery cures used to be performed with taktubu, but that fundis had since switched to sairy extraction. He did not know why there had been the change, but he was emphatic that without the extraction of the sairy, the victim of sorcery cannot get well. He said that whoever had given me this argument was ignorant or lying and he wanted to know who it was; should that person ever suffer from sorcery he would refuse to remove the sairy and let him remain ill. Tumbu responded to the challenge presented by Saidu's opinion by giving a more sophisticated version of what happens in extraction. He explained that the spirit holds the sairy over the sick part of the body. The sairy never actually enters the skin, but it is invisible to the client. Through his recitations, the fundi has the power to see it and is able to snatch it from the spirit's hand. This is, then, a second level of explana¬ tion offered by a fundi of extraction, one that avoids the puzzle of how the sairy passes through the client's skin. It was also the version ex¬ pressed by Mohedja when I pressed her. It is noteworthy that Tumbu also invoked the authority of the Islamic word, though not exclusively and not in its written form. Tumbu's version was not 'pure' local theory set in opposition to Islam any more than Saidu's was 'pure' Islam in opposition to local custom. The proponents of various disciplines have been engaged in conversation for centuries and have modified their respective positions along the way. Hence, too, what I can present are not definitive statements: 'The people of Mayotte believe in x,' or even 'Some of the people of Mayotte believe in x,' but rather 'At moment a in a conversation, certain people of Mayotte argued x in response to cer¬ tain other people who argued y.' I pretended to be satisfied with Tumbu's answer, though I was not, and let the matter drop. A few weeks later I ventured to ask whether the extractor held the sairy in his hands and Tumbu denied it. So things remained for a number of months. During that time I observed many more extractions, but although I watched him carefully, I never once saw the sairy in Tumbu's hand before he extracted it from a client (nor have I since).

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During this time my understanding of other aspects of sorcery extrac¬ tion and healing continued to deepen. In particular, I began to appreci¬ ate that extracting the sairy is only one element in the removal of the offending spirit, though it is the element most clearly to come to the client's attention. Other elements draw on the authority of other dis¬ courses. Tumbu once likened removing the sairy to pulling out a chair from under the spirit: the spirit has no place to sit, its base or source of strength is gone, but the spirit itself is still present. The recital of the Qur'anic verses (whichever the fundi happens to feel like using at the moment) helps to chase off the spirit. As the curer blows on the client between the lines of recitation, the evil is forced out. Tumbu compared his methods and abihty with those of his colleague and former student, Hasan Mena, along these lines. Hasan is a very active healer, but unlike Tumbu, he does not know how to recite Islamic verses; as a result, he can only perform an extraction when he is in trance. If one knows how to recite, as Tumbu does, one does not need to have one's spirit rise to perform all the cures. Although both Tumbu and Hasan Mena have the pair os spirits that are necessary for practising extraction, Hasan enters trance at each extraction, whereas Tumbu rarely does so. Hasan's spirit has the necessary strength to make up for the absence of duas. We see here that although Tumbu's knowledge is classified as be¬ longing to 'Him ny lulu, knowledge of the spirits, his practice is highly eclectic, composed of means borrowed from both 'Him fakihi and 'Him dunia, as well as being grounded in the fact that he has possessing spirits and has been trained quite specifically in extraction. Tumbu has adapted Islamic prayer to the extraction ritual and considers his whis¬ pered recitation to be central to his means. When he blows on the patient, this is like the blowing at a shijabu ritual and helps transmit the power of the verses in order to force out the evil. For Tumbu, the duas and the helpful possessing spirit are not opposed concepts but rather alternate items of the extractor fundi's 'tool kit.' A pragmatic curer makes use of the tools he or she has at hand. The leaves that the curer holds also help render the sorcery harmless. They are known as fankabuka, which means literally 'rendering bland' or 'powerless.'^ A species of plant that commonly grows in courtyards is usually used. The leaves, ash, and water perform a kind of cooling or 'uncooking' of the sorcery. The property of things that are fankabuka is that they sap the strength of any medicine they come into contact with; thus they can destroy good medicine as well as harmful substances. Coconut shell husks (papadz) are fankabuka; if medicine is mixed in them

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or cooked over a fire made from them, it is rendered powerless or at least considerably weakened. Tumbu remarked that many people don't know this; if you see someone cooking medicine over a fire made from coconut husks, you know at once that they are not good doctors. The swadaka is also extremely significant in the curing process. For most sairy extractions, the swadaka is a chicken, although when the client cannot find a suitable one (a not infrequent occurrence given the epi¬ demics and fluctuation in the chicken population), cloth may be substi¬ tuted. The cash paid the curer can also be viewed as part of the swadaka. The swadaka is significant first of all because, like the recitation of the dua, it helps Islamicize the cure, linking the extraction to the numerous other Muslim rituals in which swadakas are found. In the shijabu (blessing) ceremony the good meal with which the fundis who recite the texts are fed is a swadaka and their satisfaction is said to help speed the prayers to God. The chicken that the extractor fundi receives is viewed in like manner. Tumbu says that God is pleased by the donation of the swadaka, as long as the fundi does not ask for too much. The occasional substitu¬ tion of kerosene for the mosque is another indication of the religious dimension of the offering. If possible, the client should gaze at the swadaka during the cure. The swadaka is a concretization of intentionality and dependency, of the request to God and the curer for assistance, and an expression of the hope or expectation of receiving it. The swadaka also links the extraction to the cosmic machinery of the nyora. As we have seen, one function of cosmology is the determination of appropriate swadakas to fit the time and nature of the occasion. In distinguishing particular features of the swadaka, such as the colour, type, or number of animals needed, Tumbu is borrowing the authority of 'Him dunia and attempting to render the cure as efficacious as possible. The swadaka also refers directly to the spirit that is causing the sorcery. It functions to lure the spirit away from the victim and to mollify and satisfy it. As Tumbu explained in a conversation we had in November, when the sorcerer calls up a spirit to do his bidding, he kills a chicken as a gift to the spirit. He leaves his instructions next to the slaughtered animal. The spirit is attracted by the smell of blood, eats, reads the message, and goes off in search of the victim. So you have to do the same when you want the spirit to leave.^ The chicken even has to be the same colour as the one the sorcerer used. To arrive at the correct colour entails a calculation of the nyora based on the time at which the fundi receives the client's request for a cure. During most cures for sorcery the swadaka is passed seven times around the head of the client, as if to

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unbind him. This, too, is supposed to help force the spirit to leave. The chicken must be given to the fundi. If the chicken stays in the client's house, so will the spirit; hence, despite the removal of the sairy, the client will not get well. Some fundis apparently slaughter the chicken immediately; Tumbu does so at his leisure. When Tumbu receives a small or scrawny bird, he takes it home to raise. Whatever the case, when the chicken is finally killed, it is the spirit that was removed from the client who drinks its blood, leaving the flesh for the fundi and his family. There is one exception to the general requirement for a swadaka. This occurs when the fundi observes that the spirit did not enter the person the sorcerer intended it to, but someone else, usually a close relative of the intended victim. The perpetrator would have to make a new deal with the spirit in order to reattack the person he had originally intended to make sick. The spirits make such mistakes when someone particularly vulnerable (malemy) comes their way first. The vulnerability of adults varies according to their nyora, but children are always more vulnerable than adults. Child victims of sorcery have almost always been attacked by mistake; the cure of children is thus generally a good deal cheaper than that of adults. By having made a mistake, perhaps the spirit has lost the right to a second meal. Or perhaps the spirit is not as firmly lodged in the wrong victim and therefore easier to remove. More to the point, the swadaka is in some way tied to the identity of the intended victim. When he is not relevant, then neither is the swadaka. It is also clear that the most salient sorcery victims are ones who carry a certain social weight, who are full and active social persons. Most critically, by taking the swadaka from the client, the curer takes on the client's relationship with the spirit. The spirit follows the swadaka and the curer becomes the spirit's new target. Although I never asked Tumbu about this precise point, it fits with another extremely important element of the sorcery cure. This is the fact that on the night immediately following the extraction, the spirit comes to struggle with the curer in his sleep. When commenting on the small size of gifts he usually receives from clients, Tumbu complained that most of them do not realize what the cure entails for him. During the night he tosses and turns, plagued with bad dreams. A younger curer, Safy, described what happens this way. At night the fundi is visited by the spirit who asks the fundi how he dares to try and remove him from his victim, his source of food. The spirit

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climbs on the fundi and fights. The fundi wakes in the morning and his whole body aches, like someone exhausted from physical labour. The fundi sees the spirit in his sleep in the form of a human being. Sometimes it has hair all over its body, sometimes it is red-eyed. Mohedja substantiated the fact that Tumbu suffers during the night following an extraction, but she added that he does not suffer long since his own {patros) spirit is strong. According to Tumbu, this is why you need to have a spirit of your own in order to be a sorcery extractor, why a man like Juma Abudu, who knows well how to commit sorcery cannot also cure it. During the night your spirit fights on your behalf against the intruder. If you don't have such assistance, you will feel very sick the next morning and not be able to get out of bed. If you have a spirit who fights back, you will pass a bad night, but be fine in the morning. All sorcery extractors have spirits that possess them, but not all indi¬ viduals with spirits can become extractors. In addition to having a spirit, you must be 'tough' (mahery), that is, have the sort of constitution that is capable of withstanding the demands and incursions of others (humans as well as spirits). As we have seen, people are distinguished using notions from 'Him dunia according to whether they are resistant or vul¬ nerable, assertive or suggestible. Both Tumbu and Mohedja have complex and long-standing relations with the spirits that possess them. Both have undergone a series of cures and have become curers in their own right, but Mohedja, because she is malemy (sensitive, soft), cannot prac¬ tise extraction. It might be argued that the categories are socially imposed, that Mohedja is malemy simply because she is a woman or that Tumbu does not wish his wife to practice. To address this will require more knowledge about the couple than I can present here (see Chapter 11), but it is definitely not a sufficient explanation. One of the clearest and most independent ways in which the distinction between being mahery and malemy is manifest is the length and depth of trance experiences. Tumbu usually begins to slip spontaneously out of trance after about half an hour; during the night of a spirit possession cure, he will go in and out of trance and spend most of the time as himself. Moreover, he generally retains a degree of consciousness when he is in trance, able to observe and listen to his spirit without being able to exert his own agency or stop his spirits from saying the things they do. Mohedja, by contrast, enters much deeper trance, retains no memory or consciousness of the experience, and can stay in trance for many hours at a time. Most men are mahery and most women malemy, yet there are certainly

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women who perform as extractors. One of Tumbu's students performed for a brief period a number of years ago, but since then has restricted her practice exclusively to close family members. In 1985 another woman was one of the three extractors practising in Lombeni and probably the most enthusiastic. The situation is further complicated by the fact that in order to establish a curer's capacity to withstand attack, one also has to take into account the relative toughness of the spirits that possess them and that they use to drive off the sorcery-bringing interlopers. The Extraction Itself: Experience and Sincerity The central element in the cure of sorcery is the extraction of the sairy, the small packet containing dirt, nails, and broken glass. Early in 1976 Tumbu gave me a further explanation of the extraction, the version that comes closest, I believe, to what he himself understood about the process at the time. Two weeks earlier we had both been present when a sairy was ex¬ tracted from Mohedja's rice plot. She had been ill and the crop was suffering from the depredations of rats and birds. Following custom, Tumbu invited one of his former apprentices to perform the extraction. This man, Izudin Amana of D was a mwalim dunia. His primary skills lay in reading cosmological and medical texts. He and Tumbu had ex¬ changed certain knowledge; Izudin had enabled Tumbu to make copies of various texts for amulets and, in turn, had studied extraction with Tumbu in order to round out his own practice. But unfortunately, the results left something to be desired. As the three of us stood in the rice field and Izudin began reciting, I happened to glance down and saw a sairy in his hand. When I looked up, Tumbu's eyes met mine. He knew that I had seen the sairy, I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Neither of us said anything as Izudin proceeded through the stages of the extraction. Tumbu did not accuse Izudin of cheating and the ritual proceeded as usual. I had been waiting a long time for the right opportunity to pursue the matter of the sairy with Tumbu and now I decided to be patient a little longer. It was far more interesting to see what he would do than to make an accusation of trickery (an act that mars Evans-Pritchard's ac¬ count of similar processes among the Azande). Moreover, trickery did not seem a satisfactory explanation for what I observed on this occasion or for sairy extraction in general. Some days later I mentioned to Tumbu that I wanted to observe his

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next sorcery treatment. On 3 January we went early in the morning to do a cure. On our return, I asked a couple of questions, which he an¬ swered. We were eating breakfast together at the time, leftovers of rice with cooked manioc greens. I said that I had another question and for him please not to be angry. I said that I believed in the success of the sairy extraction, that I had seen people being cured, but that I did not believe he had told me all there was to know concerning the method of extracting. I asked whether it was not true that the extractors already had the sairy in their hands and mentioned that I had seen something in Izudin's hand the other day, though I never had in his. Tumbu replied graciously and seriously. He said that although it was not usual, since I had come so far to learn things, he would tell me the truth. He knew that I had been planning to ask the question for some time now and that I had seen the sairy the other day. He said that he too had been waiting to tell me the truth until I was ready for it. He had never been convinced that I believed in extraction and had wanted to wait until he was certain I had some respect for him and his methods. On what other basis could I be able to appreciate what he was about to tell me now? I was very impressed and recorded, 'He really is a very astute man.' He also warned me several times that what he was about to say was absolutely secret and that I must not tell anyone. I wrote, 'This will create an ethical dilemma should I ever wish to publish something on sorcery.' I will pass over the questions of concrete procedure, which are relevant only to the practitioners themselves, and turn to the more abstract por¬ tions of Tumbu's ensuing discussion. I would also urge discretion upon readers from or in Mayotte concerning what I record here and I want to emphasize that I believe very strongly in the sincerity of the sorcery extractors whom I have known. Nowhere do I - nor would I - claim that extraction by a reputable curer is a fraudulent act. Why then are matters of procedure secret? I will give Tumbu's explanation shortly. But the extractor's procedures are not, strictly speaking secret; rather, they are a form of professional knowledge that lies most properly with members of the profession and it is only members of the profession who have the right to pass them on and then only to new practitioners. Tumbu exer¬ cised his judgment concerning when I was 'ready' to know the facts. The basis for his judgment was grounded in our relationship. I do not share such a relationship with the majority of my readers that I could ever make such a judgment. This points, once again, to a difference between objectified, impersonal, written knowledge that can exist and

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circulate in a relatively neutral space, and the kind of personalized and embodied knowledge of which experts like Tumbu make use. Repro¬ duction of such knowledge can only take place within a face-to-face social relationship. Writing 'objectively' raises ethical issues of a different order. Tumbu began by explaining the nature of sorcery and the client's condition. The sorcerer has put the victim under the influence of a spirit (shetwan). This spirit 'envelops the victim like a cloak,' but is invisible. Once a person has been told by a diviner that he or she suffers from sorcery, then the sairy must be extracted because it is only in seeing the sairy that the client can know with certainty that the harm has been removed from his or her body (or house, etc.). Unless the client fully believes that the sorcery has been removed, then it has not been. The spirit leaves the minute the client says to him or herself, 'The sorcery is gone.' The sairy gives concrete expression to the act of removal or release in order to make it clearer and more certain for the client. It seems to me, then, that Tumbu has a theory of symbolic efficacy. Yet for Tumbu the sairy symbolizes something quite real. The only people who have full knowledge of the mechanism of ex¬ traction are the fundis who perform it, and they have to be people pos¬ sessed by spirits. Hence they are people who have experienced the reality of spirits and their power over their lives. Any manipulation of the sairy on the part of the curer has to be understood from the perspective of someone who accepts the authenticity of spirits and the suffering they can cause and who has had this vaHdated in personal experience. Tumbu continued that there are some people who say they don't believe in sairys, but they can never be sure, and they never really acquire a full and authoritative alternate explanation to that propounded by the fundis in public. But the fundis themselves are quite certain about the efficacy of their technique. As Tumbu pointed out, even the extractor fundis suffer from sorcery, and even for them extraction of the sairy is a critical and necessary component of their own cure. A fundi who is troubled by sorcery will generally call upon a colleague to extract it. It is politeness to do so, especially to call upon one's own former appren¬ tices. Once one has been told by a diviner that one suffers from sorcery, one must have the sairy extracted. A fundi like Tumbu believes defini¬ tively (knows) that sorcery is practised and that one can be harmed by the presence of a spirit sent by a sorcerer; and even fundis need that moment of certainty and acceptance instantiated by the appearance of the sairy in order to be cured. The sorcery's removal is signified for

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them, albeit consciously, by the appearance of the sairy. Tumbu went on to describe other significant aspects of the extraction process, which, with some ambivalence, I omit here. He then remarked that even his apprentices did not know everything he was telling me. When I said that 1 was surprised to hear this, his response brought up an interesting aspect of the teacher-student relationship. Tumbu said there were a lot of things he has not taught his apprentices. He would teach them to Hasan if he asked, but he has not. Hasan is very sure of himself and once he learned a little, he thought he knew it all and immediately went out and started practising. Tumbu feels that it is not his role to instruct someone who is not wise or humble enough to admit there might be things he does not yet know. In other words, the ap¬ prentice has the responsibility of deciding when to terminate his in¬ struction and must live with the consequences. (Implicitly, Tumbu was also describing the course of my own instruction and of course his remarks raise the issue of all he has yet to teach me because I have not discovered what to ask.) While aspects of Tumbu's argument and practice may be viewed as elaborate forms of rationalization, the fact that a curer needs to reinforce his views need not be taken to mean either that he does not take himself seriously or that extraction is not an effective treatment. To the contrary, these practices are indications of the sincerity of the curer and they also serve to underline something about the knowledge at issue. Tumbu himself experiences the effects and hence the value of his knowledge. It is clear that he knows that something real is going on, that the harmful spirit sent by the sorcerer is being removed, and that the sairy is critical in this process. He knows the cure works because it works on him. He was cured of sorcery before he learned the techniques of extraction and it is important to him that he has been cured since. Tumbu says he has recognized the moment of extraction because his whole body has begun to tremble with the force of his concentration. Extraction as Performance In suggesting that Tumbu has a theory of symbolic efficacy, I am argu¬ ing that his understanding of what takes place is not all that far from the understanding prevalent in anthropology. Although my main con¬ cern in this book is with the curers rather than the cures, it may be appropriate to make a brief digression towards my own analysis of what happens during an extraction.

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We have seen that the sorcery extraction ritual is simple in its outline. It is a performance in which from the client's perspective the various elements - the divination, the Islamic recitation, the uncooking and unwinding, the swadaka - surround and reinforce the central elements, namely the emergence of the sairy and the opening and viewing of its contents. The performance is designed to convince clients that a change has been produced in their condition, but in addition there are elements that, unbeknownst to the clients, serve to persuade the practitioners themselves. The performance has a dramatic structure, a leisurely build¬ up to the sudden climax, often painful, of the extraction, and the denouement of examining the contents of the sairy. The final scenes of struggle between the spirit harnessed by the sorcerer and the extractor's spirit are played offstage, in the absence of the clients themselves. The extraction itself is an extraordinary procedure, requiring intense concentration on the curer's part, and, if his timing is good, intensely experienced by the client as well. It is clear that the idea of passage through the skin, that is, directly between the body and the world has a powerful symbolic resonance. This is evident in the repetition of this motif in so many healing traditions throughout the world, whether it takes place by means of incising the skin, sucking, cupping, or less concretely. It is also evident in the commonly reported attraction for non-Western peoples of injections. Villagers in Mayotte regularly seek injections of vitamins or antibiotics when they are feeling poorly, and many of them are certain that injected medicine is stronger than that which is ingested orally. The movement directly in or out of the body is often represented by the object that is believed to make the passage. In Mayotte, this is the sairy. In addition to providing in its composition a concrete symbol, a concentrated objectification of the sorcery itself, the sairy locates the re¬ moval of the sorcery in time and space. The sairy provides a clear dis¬ tinction between the before and after state; its retrieval, cutting open, display, and disposal vividly indexing for clients the transformation of an embodied condition, the termination of their affliction, and the fate of the spirit who has caused it. The matter-of-fact manner in which Tumbu tosses down the sairy indicates the normality of the new state of affairs, while inspection of the sairy's rotting contents concretely estab¬ lishes the substance of what has been overcome, as well as the ordinary state of affairs, the absence of danger, that now prevails. The persuasive aspects of aesthetically accomplished ritual perfor¬ mances have been noted by many observers.® But using the language of

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ritual analysis borrowed from speech act theory, we can say that the extraction is not only persuasive (perlocutionary), but illocutionary as well. Sorcery extraction is a conventional act that when performed ac¬ cording to the stipulated rules produces the social state of removal, of 'cure,' analogous to the transformation from being single to being mar¬ ried produced in the performance of a wedding. Whether initially in¬ wardly convinced or not, client and curer are forced to accede to public acts of transformation. When the clients and their supporters observe and acknowledge the sairy and its contents and when they carefully throw them out, they are confirming their acceptance of what has oc¬ curred. These acts of acceptance are repeated as they hand over the swadaka and monetary gift to the practitioner. The curer too signifies his acceptance of the diagnosis and its resolution by discovering the sairy, accepting the fee and the swadaka, and then by passing a bad night. These are all social acts with social effects. Sorcery extraction - like sorcery itself - is an act that is committed. If the diagnosis of sorcery has committed the client to the condition of bearing it, so the extraction, confirmed by the production of the sairy, commits the client to being free of sorcery. There is a good deal of informal pressure for the participants to conform to expectation and to live up to the socially established new state of affairs, hence to adjust their behaviour accordingly. Moreover, such public acts are likely to entrain personal, psychological, and even physiological, consequences. In an analysis of the therapeutic effects of 'placebo' medicine, which draws on the work of Austin (1965) and Rappaport (1979), as 1 have here, Paul Antze (n.d.) focuses upon the performative dimension, arguing that the cure is a kind of contract. In accepting treatment, clients accept the authority of the healer as well as the healer's theories and methods, and morally commit themselves to getting well.^ In sum, extraction has to do with a symbolic and somatopsychic ma¬ nipulation, but is none the less real for that. As other writers have remarked, a good healer is a good performer. Healers must be able to encourage their clients to have hope and to convince them that they have powerful means and are wielding them to their utmost. LeviStrauss made the important point that the most convincing healers are the ones who believe in themselves. But all this is not simply a rhetorical or psychological matter; healers must be able to carry off the performative acts with which they have been entrusted. They must be not merely charismatic individuals but legitimate ones. The cure for sorcery is nei¬ ther charlatanry, nor 'mystical,' nor 'spiritual.' The cure is based on the

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clients reaching certainty that any harmful influence sent by a sorcerer that was recently within their bodies has been removed. It is something that might best be described as the construction of acceptance that one has been cleansed. The sairy is the chief prop of the conventional perfor¬ mance through which acceptance is produced, the focus around which it can be socially enacted. Of course, to explain how extraction works in general is not to claim that it is effective in every specific case, but it is to shift the way in which one addresses failures as well as successes. A major point of Austin's analysis is that performative acts cannot be judged as 'true' or 'false.' Instead, individual applications are evaluated according to whether they meet the conventional requirements by which they are to be carried out. To the degree that a procedure like sorcery extraction is conventionally accepted, it is a logical misunderstanding on the part of the outside observer to question its truth. Of course, the larger question raised here is whether and to what degree extraction is recognized as a conventional, legitimate procedure. This takes us to the competition and conflicts among the disciplines. For most people in Mayotte extrac¬ tion is a legitimate procedure. In this case, assuming the performance has been carried out correctly, it is the client and not the fundi who bears responsibility for his subsequent condition. I asked about a concrete case, concerning a friend of mine who had had a series of sairys extracted by Tumbu for the same complaint. Tumbu explained this was not due to lack of acceptance on the client's part that the extraction was adequately performed (and indeed, were this the case why would he have kept returning for more extractions?), but rather that each time the sairy was removed, the sorcerer or sorcerers sent another spirit to reattack him. The client himself told me he was being victimized by a small number of people who did not wish him to prosper in Lombeni. Like many men who marry uxorilocally, he felt vulnerable in his new location. He explained that Tumbu could not tell him who was practising the sorcery against him because Tumbu knew he would go beat them up. I think that if an astute fundi like Tumbu initially suspected sufficient lack of trust on the part of a cHent, he would either refer the chent to another curer or attempt to persuade him of his authority as an extractor by entering trance. When people lack faith, it is likely to be because they do not accept a given fundi rather than because they reject the pro¬ cess itself as illegitimate. (Full-blown sceptics like Saidu do not seem to be affected by sorcery, possibly because they do their own divination.)

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Withdrawal of acceptance on the part of a client once he or she has under¬ gone treatment is unlikely. Even sceptics are not prepared to challenge directly the practice of clients like the man who returned for repeated extractions. One sceptic explained to me why he would not tell this man not to be sad, that no one was committing sorcery against him; since the client already believed himself to be a victim, he would merely come to suspect that the sceptic himself was one of the perpetrators. Despite all this, it is possible that even someone who accepts the reality of the sairy and who initially respects the healer may not accept that a specific extraction has worked. In that case the client will not have been cured and will seek treatment elsewhere. But this is due simply to a poor performance on the part of a particular extractor, one that is either aesthetically unsatisfying, or more likely, that is invalid in performative terms, an infelicitous misfire in Austin's vocabulary, in which the procedures have been carried out either incorrectly or incom¬ pletely.^® In 1985 Mohedja described a case like this from her youth. Mohedja explains one has to be careful of con artists who claim to be fundis when they aren't in order to acquire money. People who are sick enough may be willing to try them, and so get taken advantage of. Over thirty years ago, before Tumbu knew how to extract sairy, Mohedja's mother was sick. A woman came from D and said the problem was sorcery. She returned that everung with medicine. But while she was resting, Mohedja's mother observed the woman make up a little packet and put it in the mortar. The woman asked Mohedja's mother to sit on the mortar. The woman seemed [note the qualifier] to become possessed, then she told Mohedja's mother to stand up, and pulled the packet out of the mortar as though it were a sairy she had extracted. Mohedja's mother asked her the price. The woman said 30 francs, which was a good deal at the time. Mohedja's mother replied that she had been sick and didn't have that kind of money. The woman replied that she couldn't wait, and that Mohedja's mother ought to give a first instalment of 15 francs. Mohedja's mother said that she didn't even have that much. Mohedja wanted to go fetch the money, but her mother gave her a look to let her know not to. After the woman had left empty-handed, Mohedja's mother told her that she'd seen the woman fix the stuff, that there had been no real sairy at all. Tumbu was sent to bring in another fundi who extracted the sairy and gave her medi¬ cine and she got well.

In other words, a good fundi is someone who creates a convincing performance, one that does not violate any of the felicity conventions.

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In Mohedja's account, a misfire challenges the legitimacy of the particu¬ lar performance and performer, but not of the conventional act itself. Yet note that there is no direct confrontation with the unsuccessful nor any overt denouncement. Mohedja's mother's form of disapproval is simply to avoid payment. After Mohedja told me the story, I mentioned to her what I had seen ten years earlier and, somewhat to my surprise, she told me that Tumbu had given her a complete account long since. Whether they thought that particular extraction had been effective or what they thought of Izudin I did not learn, but in that case it was certainly in their interest to retain friendly relations. Moreover, the situ¬ ation was complicated by the fact that Izudin had learned extraction from Tumbu.

Conviction and Good Faith On the evening of 3 January 1976 Tumbu returned earlier than expected from his fields, saying that he had spent the whole day worrying about what he had told me in the morning. He recalled that what we had discussed were very serious matters that I must never reveal to anyone. Very few people know everything about sairy and when a fundi passes along the knowledge to his apprentice, he accompanies it with a fatiha that if the student spreads the story, he will become crazy. It is all right if I tell the story back home in North America, but not in such a fashion that the information returns to Mayotte. To the extent that I have repro¬ duced some of this knowledge here, or even revealed that there is more to extraction than what the extractor tells his clients, I herewith pass on the

responsibility and impose the sanction upon anyone who reads this. Tumbu recalled that when his own fundi taught him about extraction, he took him miles out into the country and made absolutely certain they were completely alone. Tumbu brought along raw eggs and per¬ fume to give to the fundi’s spirit. Fundis are very careful about whom they pass their knowledge on to. Tumbu only agreed to teach Hasan after he had come around day after day for months pleading that he needed to know how to extract sairys in order to make his living as a curer. Tumbu finally took pity on him (and also could no longer tolerate being pestered). Hasan paid him and gave at least one chicken. Tumbu thought that Hasan had not yet passed on the information to anyone (and indeed, as a person trying to make a living as a professional curer, it would clearly be against his interests to do so), nor has the other man from Lombeni who knows how to extract ever taught anyone.

296

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Tumbu emphasized how important the knowledge is. If it becomes public, then people will not be able to become well. Tumbu pointed out that it is only fundis like himself, i.e., those who have this knowledge, who can cure sorcery, and he thinks that the success of the cure is predicated on the restricted nature of the knowledge. This implies a somewhat elitist view; either that an informed client would still lack understanding, or that for a fully knowledgeable fundi to undergo ex¬ traction is an act, or leap of faith, a struggle, and hence a profound achievement. Although I did not knowingly challenge him, Tumbu felt the need to continue to try and convince me of the value and efficacy of his work. He continued (on this and subsequent occasions) to stress the importance of extraction. He gave me some examples of his more spectacular cures and the difference they had made in the lives of his clients. In particular he provided a long and detailed account of a successful cure concerning a client who had originally arrived on his doorstep desperate with pain and worry and who left his care some months later virtually completely well. The point here was not simply Tumbu's own skill but the social importance and legitimacy of his profession and the need for members to keep up their standards and hence their exclusivity. Tumbu's account of this case also revealed highly personal information about a prominent fellow villager; for better or worse, I was ever more deeply in Tumbu's confidence. Like a good teacher, Tumbu chose to reveal his secrets only when he saw I had sufficient background to appreciate them. And I was excited by his disclosures and able to ap¬ preciate them in a manner that I would not have been earlier. However, he continued to feel the need to prove himself to me, perhaps because I tactlessly kept on asking questions. Tumbu also noted clearly the differences between sairy in the ground (that is, of the house floor, courtyard, or field) and in the body. In the former case the sorcerer really does make and plant the sairy, he says (compare the sceptical couple above) as well as contract the spirit. In the latter case the sorcerer need only do the latter. Yet in the former case the extractor does not attempt to find the sairy placed by the sor¬ cerer; he merely pulls up another sairy and this is sufficient. The client receives the impression that these are one and the same, while for the fundi there is a principle of balance at work; the extracted sairy balances out the one the sorcerer has originally placed or the spirit he has con¬ tracted. Similarly, if the sorcerer has offered a chicken so, in return, must the client.

Removing Sorcery

297

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his disclosures is the way in which Tumbu demonstrates - to himself as much as to us - his good faith. Sorcery is considered a real problem in Mayotte and the extraction of the sairy provides the instrumental means for solving it. Tumbu is a convincing and legitimate curer because he continues to convince and legitimate himself. He does so by continuing to demonstrate his accep¬ tance of the terms of extraction. His struggles with the spirits in his sleep repeatedly confirm the success and sincerity of his practice. He hires other curers to extract from members of his family. He does not set a fee or expect an excessive payment. These things are not done merely to maintain a front of respectability, and certainly not in order to deceive his clients; on the contrary, most of them (especially those I cannot describe here) are private matters about which the public is ignorant. If Tumbu convinces himself of the value of extraction, he also believes sincerely that conviction on the part of his clients is the key factor in ensuring their recovery. Tumbu argues that efficacy is not based on objective knowledge of the source of the sairy but on the subjective ex¬ perience of the extraction. Whatever the client may believe about the source of the sairy, the cure will work as long as the curer is able to perform effectively enough not to raise any particular doubts in the client's mind about the legitimacy of his performance. Tumbu says that should a client glimpse a sairy before the extraction has been completed, this will raise doubts in the client's mind {rohu) and the extraction can¬ not work. Conversely, whatever the client's initial doubts or knowledge, if he doesn't see the sairy before the completion of the extraction, the cure will work.” What counts is not what you think you know, but what you see and feel and accept. Once the sairy has been extracted, Tumbu always makes sure that the client and any family members who are present examine its contents (usually they are drawn to it of their own curiosity) and that they throw it out themselves. Tumbu's appreciation of the symbolic dimension of illness and healing is not unique to him. Other people in Mayotte have expressed similar points of view to me concerning the role of conviction. For example, a teenaged girl in town told me that if a Muslim eats pork, his skin will break out. She added that this only happens to those who know in their heart beforehand that they are going to be sick; to those who s’en fou, (don't care) nothing happens. One man with no particular interest in curing argued that if you don't believe that a particular fundi will be able to cure you, then he won't. Now that people have stopped believing in

298

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

their own medicine and started accepting European medicine, the local curers are no longer effective, he said. Likewise, if someone did not believe in European medicine, it would not be able to cure them either. A young woman recounted the story of how a man not known for his curing ability once extracted a sairy when in trance. 'And the person got well!' she added with surprise. Her friend remarked, 'Well, what do you expect if the client accepted him?' Similarly, a woman told me how her uncle as a joke pretended he was in trance with a patros. He went up to an elderly man suffering with a swollen leg and, taking a snail shell, pretended to remove it from the man's leg. People knew it was a joke, but the old man got well. He was cured, she said, because he was ravuravu (pleased, happy, satisfied). One man explained that the reason Europeans don't have spirits is because they don't fully believe in them; therefore, he concluded, the spirits cannot have the same effect on them. An older well-informed citizen claimed to reject sorcery; there is just illness and health in this world, he said, and all illness, like health, comes from God. When a person is visibly sick, everyone accepts the illness as God-given. He made the astute observation that the diagnosis of sorcery is only applied when the person's condition is unclear, that is, when the person is certain he is sick, but observers are not. If you accept sorcery, then you must have the sairy extracted in order to get well; if you do not accept it, you can just ignore the diagnosis. Sorcery, then, is simply a matter of acceptance, but acceptance is not a simple matter: it must be acted on when it is present.’^ Likewise, as the humorous enactment of extraction makes clear, the shift in emotion generated by the performance is rec¬ ognized to be critical. If many people are uncertain what to say about sorcery when asked in the abstract, most follow the typical procedure when it is diagnosed for them or their close kin. And doubts are put aside by a good perfor¬ mance on the part of the extractor. Indeed, it is the performance Tumbu has perfected. Seemingly casual and matter-of-fact, he marshals the symbols and authority of 'Him fakihi, 'Him dunia, herbal remedies, and if necessary, his own spirits. He distributes various tasks to the participants, drawing them into the proceedings while distracting them from his own actions, and quickly and effectively gets the job done. There were many people in Lombeni who disliked or were envious of Tumbu and many who were ready to tell me so, but none of them ever accused him of charlatanry or a poor performance. That Tumbu really does remove sairy has been a major point of this

Removing Sorcery

299

chapter. As a practice, the sorcery cure forms a closed, self-validating system: you are sick, diagnosed, cured, and you feel better. But there has been a second major point: as a theory there are a good many levels of understanding and also openings by which people can rethink things in light of various domains of experience. The curer works with good faith, yet ultimately the views of the curer and the sophisticated sceptic are not so far apart. I would like to conclude with Tumbu's reflections on a case a decade later in which the client refused to concur with his interpretation. I have argued that Tumbu constructs his interpretation jointly with his clients, but there are times at which he and his clients simply do not agree. In October 1985 an elderly man with a bad squint in his eye that made him unable to read the sermon in his village mosque requested Tumbu's services. He said his problem was caused by sorcery sent by a former lover of his wife, whereas his wife's patros spirit claimed the sorcery was sent by someone who wished to take over his role as reader of the sermon. Tumbu replied that since the man had sponsored the spirit's ceremony [an event that Tumbu himself had managed], it was highly unlikely that the spirit should deceive him now [cf. Chapter 10 concerning the construction of a spirit's authority]. Tumbu asked the man to bring his wife so that he could hear the spirit's opinion for himself. The couple returned a few days later and Tumbu heard and concurred with the spirit's opinion that the client's fellow villagers simply did not want him reading the sermon. He extracted a sairy and warned the man to stay out of his village mosque for fear of reattack. One reason that Tumbu insisted on this interpretation was that he realized that the client would be unhappy until he gave up his wish to recite the sermon. He owed this knowledge to Mohedja. She had spent the day chatting with the wife and that night reported to Tumbu what she had learned, namely that the village was united in its opposition to his reciting the sermon. They were tired of having to listen to a man, whom they classified as a stranger [mugyen], who claimed to know more about Islam than they did. They had even approached the cadi [Islamic judge located in town, never utilized by residents of Lombeni] in order to have him removed from office. When the client had Tumbu alone, he again asked him to find out from the wife whether she knew who in particular had performed the sorcery. In other words, commented Tumbu, the man still did not accept that the perpetrator was not one of her lovers. Not wanting to initiate a quarrel between them, Tumbu said nothing further to the wife. But he remarked to me that the man was unlikely to get well so long as he was sceptical about the cause of his misfortune.

300

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

In other words, it appears that the extraction of the sorcery was sec¬ ondary to the conviction it represented and ought ideally to have con¬ firmed. Moreover, Tumbu was aware that health is related to a realistic appraisal of one's social situation, a point that emerged in many of his cases. Once again, it is apparent that Tumbu's social and psychological appreciation is shrewd and his view of therapeutic efficacy supple. Tumbu expanded on the psychological dimension of the cure a little later. He argued that in order for the client to get well quickly, he has to have a shock of realization upon seeing the sairy. If he has the experi¬ ence of being liberated from the sorcery and expresses this by exclaiming sharply, the illness will quickly disappear. A person who does not see the sairy for himself will be slow to heal. However, Tumbu also distin¬ guishes what happens in the realm of the client's perception from the change produced by the extractor's action. In fact, he says, the spirit is removed by the utterance of the dua; hence the cause of the sorcery is eliminated whatever the client's experience. There are thus two chains of causality in the sorcery cure, one referring to what we might call the objective removal of the sorcery and the other to the subjective liberation. The first is necessary to remove the cause of the illness, but not sufficient to remove the symptoms; the second is equally necessary. Tumbu ex¬ plicitly attributes slow recovery on the part of the person who has not been moved by the extraction to the fact that they do not yet believe that they are free of sorcery. Paka rohu nazy kuamin (she or he must be¬ lieve in order to get well). Tumbu's procedure operates along both chains. Another interesting aspect of this discussion is the emphasis on the role of the dua. It is as though Tumbu has shifted to an increasingly Islamic understanding (or rationalization) of his practice. As he explains it now, the sorcery cure is essentially Islamic, the utterance of the ap¬ propriate dua. Even when the extractor is in trance, the curing spirit achieves its effects by sacred recitation. Thus the spirit's means of sor¬ cery removal is essentially identical to that of human curers, although Tumbu adds that the curing spirits may help to scare away the sorcerycausing ones if they are bigger or stronger. All the rest is designed to persuade the client and speed her recovery. The sorcery-causing spirit is like a wind, hovering over the ill person, pressing on the painful spot. The ill person feels the spirit's heat. As the fundi recites, the spirit begins to back off. Tumbu can tell this is hap¬ pening by looking into the client's eyes. As long as the client is held by the spirit, his or her eyes are glazed or unfocused; as the spirit backs off.

Removing Sorcery

301

the eyes clear up. When you see this, you pull your hand away from the client's body. Then the sairy will become visible in the pile of ash, leaves, and water. Its presence confirms for the client the ejection of the sorcerycausing spirit and the onset of a new state of health. If the eyes don't clear up, Tumbu knows the case is too difficult for him. But instead of saying that he's unable to treat the condition, which would both make him ashamed and cause the client to lose hope, Tumbu says he's not mwafaka, compatible with the particular case, or else he tries to resolve the illness in some other way. Tumbu was very cheerful and straightforward with me on this occa¬ sion, but he emphasized, as he had a decade earlier, the importance of restricting full knowledge of the extraction process to a limited number of experts dedicated to removing sorcery. As he said, 'In Mayotte ex¬ traction is the main counterforce to 'Him [vudy mandrubaka 'Him maore atu\.' Recall that the literal meaning of 'Him is knowledge, but it is used here without qualification to mean sorcery. People on the street may talk, but no one knows for certain how the extractors do it. On learning how to extract, one swears on the Qur'an that one's mouth should be destroyed if one gives away the knowledge. I have not revealed it here, but I have shown that Tumbu's model of what he does is distinct from the model he provides clients. And, although the models differ not so much in kind as in complexity and nuance, I believe one should be discreet about the distinction.

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Index

Accountability: and character, 216; and human judgment, 129-33; narratives of, 380-92, 398 Acts of commitment. See Commitment

medical, 15-18, 33; of knowledge, 8-15, 410n.l2 Antoun, Richard, 11, 38, 39, 409nn.l, 3, 414n.l7, 421n.5 Antze, Paul, 332

Aesthetics, 153-5

Arabic, See Language

Agency: and culture, 394-5; and

Astrology. See Cosmology

death, 228; and indeterminancy,

Astuti, Rita, 41 On.7

392; and possession, 312-13,

Athman Zaidani, 120,148

318-20, 322-3, 332-3, 334-7; and

Attribution of death, following the

sorcery, 262; linked to wider forces, 390; of experts, 189,190. See also Commitment Agriculture. See Cultivation

invocation of a dua, 128-32 Austin, J.L., 262, 292, 294, 319-20, 403, 416n.2, 419n.7, 427n.9, 428nn.9,10,11

Ahern, Emily, 142 Ali Addinan, 169-70

Badri. See Dua

Allibert, Claude, 41, 413n.8, 414n.21

Bakar Diva, 89-90,156-9

Amulets, 108,142,196; Comoran

Bakhtin, M.M., 434n.ll

419n.l0; performative aspects, 319;

Bare, J.F., 52

and sorcery, 238, 243; made by

Barth, Frederik, 411n.l9

Tumbu, 268, 351, 352

Basso, Keith, 41 In. 13

Anderson, Benedict, 37, 412n.5

Bathing, in ocean by trumbas, 367

Andriantsuly, 42, 49, 413n.l0. See also

Becker, Alton, 429n.4

'Ndramahavakarivo

Belief: contrasted to knowledge, 4,

Antalaotra, 36, 41-3, 413n.ll

227; local view of role in cure,

Antambu, 386-7, 389-90, 396, 399

297-8, 300, specificity of, 282

Anthropology: Marxist, 39^0,

Berger, Peter, 8-9, 429n.2

Index

454 Bernstein, Richard, 396, 404, 411n.l8, 434nn.ll, 12,13 Blanchy, Sophie, 412n.3, 414n.21, 415n.2, 419n.l0, 425n.l6 Bloch, Maurice, 142, 203, 248, 309,

cosmology, 207-8, 212-13, 233-6; fundis of 235-6; and spirit possession 234-5. See also Smoke inhalation Clients: dreams by, 275, 339-40;

414n.21, 416n.3, 417n.l7, 420n.ll,

judging outcome, 349; relativity of

424n.6, 433n.4, 434n.l6

category, 411n.l4; resolving

Boddy, Janice, 19, 334, 361

inconsistencies, 282; role in

Books: cosmological, 203-5, 207; Islamic, 139-41 Bottomore, T., 53 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 411n.l3 Breslar, Jon, 25, 248, 412nn.3, 7,

therapeutic encounter, 269, 292, 294-5, 298-300, 343, 348, 358. See also individual names; Remuneration Clifford, James, 72, 411n.l6

413nn.8,15, 414n.24, 415n.2,

Cognition, 8,13, 410n.5, 433n.l0

418n.l, 422n.l0, 433n.4

Comaroff, Jean, 55, 410nn.l0,11

Brown, Judith K., 200 Brown, Michael F., 142, 427n.8 Bruner, Edwards, 41 In. 13

Comaroff, John, and Simon Roberts, 411n.l5 Combs-Schilling, Elaine, 423n.22 Commitment, acts of, 132,141-2,166,

Cadi, 421n.3

262, 292-5, 298, 397, 403. See also

Calendar, 124; cosmological aspects,

Accountability; Agency; Speech

424nn.4, 5, 6; losing count, 424n.9. See also New Year Carstens, Peter, 29 Causality: and death; 380-92, 396-7; lack of unified system, 398; notions of, 17, 209, 432n.l; and the reper¬

Act Theory Community, 80-2; moral 'corporateness, 165-7; offices, 1479,154; rituals of, 119-21,124-6,180 Compatability, of curer and client. See Efficacy

toire, 271-2, 274, 397. See also

Competence, dramas of, 146-9

Death

Comoros: history of, 33-4, 36, 412n.7;

Character: as conscious disposition, 216-19, 229; of mwalims, 221, 255;

independence 46-7; 412n.2, 413n.9. See also History, Mayotte

and possession, 313-15, 355-6; as

Conception, 229

temperament, 57, 210, 215. See also

Confidentiality. See Ethics

Gender; Nyora; Rohu

Constellations, 205-6

Childbirth and infancy, customs surrounding, 55-9, 213-14, 229, 232, 423n.l9

Coombe, Rosemary, 33 Cosmologers: access to, 212; attitudes towards, 213, 221-2, 225, 232-3,

Chodorow, Nancy, 335, 432n.l0

241, 248-9, 256-7; authority, 208,

Circumcision, 115,123-4, 235,

222, 231; conduct, 223; consulted re

425n.l9; and badri, 234; and

stolen bracelet, 388; evaluations of.

Index

455

225, 231; feuds among, 201; in

incommensurability within, 399-

error, 223; indispensability, 212-14,

403; and power, 53; as received

224-6, 236; interventions by, 218;

knowledge, 392; and relativism,

literacy, 222; material interests,

404; as repertoire, 394-5. See also

224, 425n.l5; and record keeping,

Incommensurability; Disciplines;

213; relations with apprentices,

Traditions

198-200, 202-3, 207-8, 220-1,

Culture history, 415n.3

424n.3; relations with clients, 225;

Curing: as a contract, 292, order of

responsibility, 213; in the village,

procedures, 272-3. See also

92-3, 96, 201-2; women, 200. See

Performance; Sorcery extractions;

also Cosmology; Divination;

Tumbu

Gabriel; Juma Abudu; Mussa Malidi Cosmology: amorality of, 195-6; beliefs about, 198, 241-2; chal¬ lenged by other disciplines, 227-33, 360-1; history of, 50-2, 227,

Dady Accua, 94, 345 Dady Nabuko, 78, 89,156 Dady Zalia: accused of sorcery, 263^; in practice, 362-3, 365-7, 369, 371-3

414n21, 424n.l, 425n.l6; and Islam,

Damir, B.A., 412n.7

227-30, 396-7; medicines in, 204-5;

Dance, See Maulida, Sufi dances

and power, 213, 219-22, 224, 227;

Dancing in graveyards. See Grave

reproduction of, 197-201; and rites

dancing

of passage, 57,196, 207-8, 212^,

Daniel, Valentine, 434n.ll

225, 229-30, 232, 234-6; and spirits,

Dauda, 223-4, 238, 263

204, 230-3, 241, 243, 360-1; texts

Death: cause of, 209, 261-2, 273, 382-

and textual use of, 12,196-9, 203-

92, 432n.2, 433n.3; commemoration

5; view of knowledge, 5-7. See also

of 114,116; corpse washing 158;

Cosmologers; Divination; Disci¬

and incommensurability, 396;

plines; Juma Abudu; Mussa

knowledge of 228-9; likened to the

Malidi; Nyora

had], 116; significance in Islam,

Culler, Jonathan, 379, 393

228-9, 433n.4; and sorcery images,

Cultivation: cash crops, 46, 82-3, 385;

247-8

fields, 74, 83,122; rice harvest, 382,

Decary, Raymond, 203, 426n.7

407; subsistence 44, 82; sugar

Dialogue, in possession, 355. See also

plantations, 42-6, 252. See also

Culture, as acts of conversation;

Economy Culture: as acts of conversation, 12, 218-19, 253, 379, 393, 395, 400-5,

Fieldwork Diffusionism, 37-8 Disciplines: compared, 32, 52,195,

434n.ll; as disciplines, 393;

207, 219-20, 394; complementarity,

diversity within, 31, 33, 36-7, 40,

236, 375, 394, 397; conversations

67, 253; and the imaginary, 324;

among, 393, 401; hierarchy 133,

Index

456 135,189,191; as structures, 68, 395,

in, 108,110-12,118,132; and

433n.7. See also Cosmology; Islam;

intervillage relations, 119-21;

Spirit possession; Textual

irrevocability, 130-1, 418n.20; and

knowledge

kin groups, 114-19; kuitimia, 108,

Dispute mediation, 168-9,175-8,

116-19, 234; mandeving, 114-16, 417n.7; as performance, 25; to

422n.8 Divination: alternate means of, 210-

protect, 123, 238; shijabu, 56,108,

11, 231-3; constraints upon, 205,

113-14,123-5,142,152, 214, 230,

209, 347-8; contrasted with

235, 271, 276, 277, 284, 344,

scheduling, 213; cosmological, 196,

417n.l6; spirits and, 106-7,111-12;

205, 209-12; for Mussa's daughter,

as vehicles of moral action, 132,

202; and paranoia, 260-1; and

397. See also Maulida; Swala

story construction, 209; and

Dumont, Louis, 15

theories of sorcery, 427n.7; uses of

Durkheim, Emile, 309

209-12. See also Cosmology,

Dwyer, Kevin, 41 In. 16

Dreams, Nyora, Tumbu Divine justice, 127-33, 239-40. See also Death, Duas, God's will

East Africa, 11,12, 34, 36, 37, 41, 45, 49-52,146,153, 205, 249-51, 310, 393, 420n.l4, 426nn.7, 8

Doppelt, Gerald, 434n.l3 Douglas, Mary, 10,17, 79, 389, 426n.l

Economy: 46-7, 75-6,125-6; acquisition of capital, 412n.4;

Dreams: associated with Sufi performances, 153^; attack by

commoditization, 96-7, 407; and

dead mother, 175-7, 423n.l6; of

experts, 95-9,173,175; reduction

grandmother, 416n.6; interpreted,

of regional sphere, 205;

275-6, 340; by Islamic fundis, 168;

revitalization of, 47-8, 407; units

Mohedja's, 233, 354-5; role in

of production, 80-1, 83, 385-6.

possession, 306, 311, 330, 355; Safy

See also Cultivation; Eishing

on, 285-6; as source of plant knowledge, 346; Tumbu's, 260, 285-6, 339-42, 356-7, 359

Efficacy, of curer (mioafaka), 89, 210, 223, 301, 344-5, 349, 351, 360 Egalitarianism, 46, 49, 81,114-16,

Drucker-Brown, Susan, 423n.l6 Duas: badri, 108,123-7,139, 234, 270, 277, 417n.l6; circulation of, 417n.9;

164,169, 372, 380, 413n.l5 Ego boundaries. See Emotional intimacy

to commit or counter sorcery, 281-

Eickelman, Dale, 11, 39, 72, 412n.l,

2, 343, 426n.3; contexts for, 106-10,

414n.l6, 418n.3, 421n.2, 422n.9,

114,128; to discover a culprit, 127,

423n.22

263, 388-9,

mnA9; fatiha,

114,115,

121-3,128-31, 264, 295, 388-90, 416n.6, 417n.l4; to harm or retal¬ iate, 121-3, 239, 264; intermediaries

El-Tom, A. Osman, 419n.l0 El-Zein, Abdul Hamid, 39,190, 420n.l4 Embodiment: in cosmology, 208;

Index

457

Islamic comportment as, 152,165-

grave dancing, 249, 252-3; living

6; of Islamic texts, 142,149,151-5,

conditions, 77-8; and narrative

191; and objectification, 307-9,

construction, 390-1; with Tumbu

319-20, 356-7, 394, 397, 428n.l;

and Mohedja, 104-5, 287-90, 295-

possession as, 306, 366, 361. See

6, 339

also Knowledge Emotional intimacy, 365, 368, 371-4, 432n.l0

First exit. See Childbirth and infancy Firth, Raymond, 411n.l3 Fischer, Michael, 11, 421 n.5

Erasures. See Singa

Fishing, 73-5, 85

Ethics, 347-54, 431 n.3

Flax, Jane, 404

Ethnopsychology, 218-19, 425n.l4

Foucault, Michel, 410n.ll, 433n.7

Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 17, 28, 209,

Fortes, Meyer, 317

287, 380-3, 390, 392, 410n.ll,

Freud, Sigmund, 309, 434n.l7

430n.l7, 432n.l, 434n.l5

Fundis. See Cosmologers; Experts;

Evil eye {dzitso), 268, 280, 359-60, 427n.2 Exoticism, 13-14 Experts: economic basis, 95-8; and life projects, 98-9; local category

Islamic experts; Sorcery curers; Spirit mediums; and under individual names Fundi ny mraba, 87, 207, 338 Funerals, 229, 433n.4

and types, 84-7, 90-6; model¬ building of, 17-18, 27, 301;

Gabriel, story of the angel and the

questions to ask about, 16;

cosmologer, 3, 6,19-20, 30,195,

relations among, 86-7,146,171;

222, 228-9, 337, 394, 425n.l7

relations with apprentices, 85-6;

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 20, 398, 403,

reputation, 86-7; as Schutzian

405, 411n.l8, 423n.l6, 433n.9,

type, 18, 69-71. See also Cosmo-

434n.ll

logers; Islamic experts; Sorcery

Gaffney, Patrick, 421 n.5

curers; Spirit mediums

Geertz, Clifford, 10,11,121, 380, 383,

Extraction. See Sorcery extraction

384, 402,403, 410n.6, 435n.20 Gellner, Ernst, 87,136,137,169,190-

Fanony, Fulgence, 49,153 Fatiha. See Dua

1, 419n.9, 423n.21 Gender: and ceremonial participation,

Fatima Halidy, 89,156-9,182, 379

116, 417n.8; and character, 216-17,

Feeley-Harnik, Gillian, 52, 413n.l0

275-6, 286-7; and cosmology, 200;

Fees. See Remuneration

in cure-client relationships, 350-1;

Feierman, Steven, 18

and distribution of knowledge and

Fieldwork: author's, 20-30, 78,150-1;

practice, 73-7, 84-7, 96, 367; and

and cosmology, 196-7, 201-8;

ego boundaries, 335; of extractors,

dialogical aspects, 20, 27-8, 268-70,

285-6, 355-6; and Islam, 62-3, 91,

411nn.l6,18, 412nn.20, 21; and

107,132,145,153,156-9,163,165,

Index

458 335, 321-2; politics of, 360-1; and

Hermeneutics, 19, 20, 27, 30,135, 398

possession, 62-3, 321-2, 334-5,

Hierarchy. See Stratification

407-8; and sorcerers, 246-9;

History: 34, 40-52; possession as, 333;

transformations in trance, 360, 369. See also Marriage; Women

and practice, 55, 61-5 Holmberg, David, 410n.6

Gevrey, A. 50, 51, 412n.7

Holquist, Michael, 434n.ll

Giddens, Anthony, 41 In. 13

Horoscope. See Nyora

Giles, Linda, 51, 310

Horton, Robin, 425n.l4

Gilmore, David, 432n.l0

Hosts. See Spirit mediums

Gilsenan, Michael, 11, 39,146,153,

Human Spirits, 432n.l3

155,162, 414n.l6, 419n.ll, 421n.l Glide, Leonard, 41 On. 11 God: intervention by, 6, 228; and

Huntington, Richard, and Peter Metcalf, 433n.4 Hussein, 120,147-9, 417n.l2

knowledge, 66,161; will of, 261, 273, 381-92, 396, 432-3nn.2, 3. See also Divine justice Good faith. See Sincerity Goody, Jack, 31, 203, 410n.6, 412n.6, 420n.ll,429n.5 Granary, story of, 380-2, 385-6, 3902, 396, 400, 403, 432n.l Grandmother. See Dady Accua; Dady Nabuko; Dady Zalia; Halima Ali's grandmother Gratification, in possession, 432n.l2

Identity: 'ethnic,' 37, 45, 54; Islamic, 39, 54; and knowledge, 83-4; local, 37; village, 72, 82 'Him dunia, defined, 32. See also Cosmology; Textual knowledge 'Him fakihi, defined, 32, 409n.3. See also Islam; Textual knowledge 'Him ny lulu, defined, 32. See also Spirit possession Illness: causes of, 271-2; diagnosis of, 341; possession as, 320, 332

Grave dancing, 198,245-56,426nn.7,8

Imam, 110, 421 n.3, 422n.l2, 423n.l8

Greenson, Ralph, 373-4

Incommensurability, 8-9,12, 20, 54,

Griaule, Marcel, 41 In. 16

133,187, 218, 228, 392, 395-405,

Gueunier, Noel, 37, 49,153,154,185,

434n.l2

412n.3, 420n.l5, 424n.8

Individuals: and achievement, 83; individuation through knowledge,

Halima Ali, trumba possession, 59-62, 64, 327-9, 362-72, 374 Halima Ali's grandmother, 60-4, 223-4, 327, 361, 415n.26

156; various perspectives of, 38, 62, 70-1. See also Character Intimacy. See Emotional intimacy Islam: and afterlife, 251; antiquity of

Hamisy, 86,147-9

in Mayotte, 41, 48; changes in,

Hasan Mena, 97-9, 283, 290, 295,

414n.l7, 418n.3; contrasted to

342-3, 348, 359, 413n.3

possession, 367; conversion to, 46,

Hefner, Robert, 410n.6

49-50, 53; depth of feeling about,

Hegemony, 48, 53, 67,189-91

24,104,155,158-9; diversity

Index

459

within, 39, 50,188-92; local

Tumbu, 342; at wife's spirit

perceptions of, 160,163-4, 420n.l6;

ceremony, 363-4, 370-1

and morality, 7, 65-6,133,161, 178-9; response to French

Kapferer, Bruce, 427n.8

hegemony, 48, 407; and rites of

Kasimu Juma, 341-2, 356-7, 360, 375

passage, 56-7,134, 419n.8; social

Keesing, Roger, 410n.6

embeddedness, 104,112-27,132;

Kehoe, Alice, and Dody Giletti, 334

view of knowledge, 4-6,11,12,

Kelly, Raymond, 86, 430n.l9

409n.l, 2, 3, 410n.4, 420n.l2; village

Kibushy: speakers of, 35-7; writing

experts in, 90-2, 95-6; and village identity, 82. See also Death; Divine

in, 22 Kinship: 80-3, 264-5; fictive, 267,

justice; Duas; God, Islamic experts;

269-70; and locality, 417n.l7; and

Morality; Recitation; Saidu Bwana;

morality, 130, 264; and possession,

Swala; Textual knowledge; Yusufi

324-37, 365, 372, 423n.20, 430nn.l5,

Bwana Islamic experts: authority, 151, 154, 162-70,174,178,184,187-92, 21920; early lives, 144-5; economic

16,17; and production, 382, 385-6; and remuneration, 348; and ritual, 114-19,126-7, 416n.6. See also Joking relations. Marriage

concerns, 173,175; legitimation,

Knappert, Jan, 417n.9

182-5; as mediators, 168,175-9,

Knowledge: attitudes towards, 14,

264; styles of practice, 172-5,179;

25-6, 237; author's usage, 8; con¬

viewed by others, 133,145-6,187-

trasted to belief, 4; as discourse,

8, 422nn.7, 8; vulnerability, 147,

9-10; distribution, 68; as economic

187-9. See also Saidu Bwana;

resource, 95-8; embodied, 5-6,

Yusufi Bwana

151-5,178-9, 307-8, 319, 410n.l0;

Izudin Amana, 287, 295, 343, 351

exchange of, 85; fragmentation of, 391; heterogeneity of, 11,14, 34,

Jackson, Michael, 121, 398, 424n.2

379, 411n.l5; medico-religious, 32,

James, Wendy, 410n.6

88, 341; objectified, 4-5,10-11, 307,

Joking relations, 78-80, 245, 365,

394; as phronesis, 179; political

432n.9

economy of, 95,135; production

Jorgensen, Dan, 411n.l9

and reproduction, 40,159; as rela¬

Juma Abudu: and apprentices, 199,

tionship, 375; and social organ¬

202, 203, 207-8, 222; on conduct,

ization, 68, 70-1, 83-4; theoretical

223; on local medicine, 88; in

import, 10,16, 40, 53,135, 412n.5;

practice, 202, 233, 424n.9;

and village division of labour,

reputation, 92, 200, 211, 222; social

61-2, 71-2; Western, 32. See also

situation, 201; studying Islam, 408;

Cosmology, Islam, Spirit possess¬

textual and herbal resources, 204; viewed by clients, 226; viewed by

ion, Textual knowledge Kopy toff, Igor, 17

Index

460 Kuhn, Thomas, 434nn.l2,13

McLeod, Malcolm, 209

Kuitimia. See Duas

Madagascar, 11,12, 34, 37, 73,153,

Kus, Susan, 41

158,185, 205, 310. See also Sakalava Madi Bun Sultwan, trumba spirit, 60-1

Lahadj, 122-3,127-8

Malagasy. See Madagascar

Lambek, Michael, 7,19,49, 51, 54, 79,

Makua, 37

80, 81,112, 155, 234, 248, 305, 308,

Malidi Vita, 380-2, 383-7, 390, 392

310, 321-3, 334, 346, 359, 365, 394,

Manamy. See Visions

405, 414n.24, 415n.25, 418n.l,

Mandeving. See Duas

422n.l0, 425n.l9, 426n.4, 429n.8,

Man-on-the-street. See Person-on-the-

430nn.l5, 20, 433n.4 Language: Arabic, 22, 37, 86,138,

path Maouana Madi, Sultan, 42,168

140-1,143,162,164,166,197-8,

Marriage, 33, 80, 83,175-7, 211, 213,

210, 222, 241, 418-19n.6, 426n.8;

223-4, 233, 359, 423n.l3,426n.4;

Bantu, 36, 45, 250, 426n.8; French,

medicines to strengthen or weak¬

36, 37; Kibushy, 2, 24, 26, 36, 72,

en, 257-9, 350; and residence, 77,

132,140,141,143; Shimaore, 36;

80; virgin, 423n.l3; and work as

objectification of, 37, 400; nature

experts, 359

of, 400-1, 405, 429n.4, 434n.l4;

Martin, B.C., 153

translations between, 143

Martin, Jean, 36, 40-6, 49, 51,

Leach, Edmund, 9,15, 319, 410n.6

412nn.7, 9,11,13, 415n.4, 420n.l4

Lee, Richard, 412n.l

Marx, Karl, 399, 434n.l7

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 10,17,18, 87,

Maulidas: to commemorate a death,

266, 292, 309, 342, 355, 400, 401,

114; knowledge of, 138-9,145,

418n.2, 425n.l3, 426n.5, 427n.8,

157-9; linked to Sufi dances, 152-3,

434n.l6

420n.l4; sponsored by trumbas, 61;

Lewis, LM., 12, 39, 50, 320-1, 334, 411n.l7

sung during demonstration, 47, 414n.l6; village/wndis 147-9;

Lienhardt, Godfrey, 384, 429n.7

village performances, 86,119-21,

Lienhardt, Peter, 179

147-9

Lindstrom, Lamont, 410n.6

Mayotte: history, 40-52, 413nn.7, 8;

Lombeni villages: described, 73-84,

location 33, 35; physical properties,

408; relations between, 119-21,

33; political status, 34; population,

417nn.ll, 13. See also Community

34, 36-7, 407,412n.3, 413n.ll,

Luck, in curing, 342, 387 Luckmann, Thomas, 8-9, 429n.2

415nn.3, 4 Meaning: control over, 393;

Lutz, Catherine, 425n.l4

illocutionary, 141-3, 292; in texts,

Lyotard, J.-F. 182, 399

418nn.2, 6 Medicine: fahkabuka, 283, 353;

McKellin, William, 307, 410n.5

humoral, 56-7; liquid Qur'anic,

Index

461

108,142, 351, 359; local, 88-90,158,

with her spirits, 232-3, 318-19,

174, 278-9; mtrambunu, 185; owned

354—5, 358, 369-70; relations with

by spirits, 358, 375; rights to, 89-

Musy, 361-2, 365-6, 371; relations

90, 347, 366; for sadness, 361-2; in

with other mediums, 371; relations

sorcery, 257, 259-60; and taboos,

with Tumbu, 286, 295, 299, 354-60,

316-17; used by cosmologers,

431n.6; reticence, 357, 431n.5; skill,

204-5; used by spirit mediums,

371^; on sorcery, 271-2; sources

346-7, 431 n.2

of knowledge, 355-6, on trance

Meigs, Anna, 429n.9

experience; 314-15; and Vola, 329;

Melanesia, 41 In. 19

vulnerability, 286, 355-6. See also

Memory: of oppression, 252-3; in

Mze Bunu

trance, 314-15 Merad, Ali, 414n.l6 Merrill, William, 410n.6

Moore, Sally Falk, 390, 403, 411n.l3, 433n.6, 435n.l9 Morality: and career, 98-9; centrality

Messick, Brinkley, 190, 418n.5

to ethnomedicine, 15; and character,

Michalon, Thierry, 47, 414n.l5

216; and collective reciprocity, 74;

Middleton, John, 393

established by illocutionary acts,

Midwives, 425n.20

141-2; and knowledge, 7,160; and

Mitchell, Timothy, 11,143

narrative coherence, 390-2; and

Mobility, 73^, 431 n.5

practice, 179,189, 308, 320, 334,

Mohedja Salim: acting as a male, 360,

375-6; and sorcery, 237-40, 262,

369; authority, 356; on becoming a

264; upheld hy fundis, 162,165-7,

fundi, 357-8; career, 96-7, 357-8; on

169-70. See also Ethics; Phronesis

character, 218-19, 315; compassion,

Mosques: Friday service, 165,179-80;

376; confidence, 360, 376; curing

politics of knowledge surround¬

Halima, 362-71; depth of trance,

ing, 146-7,174, 299; sermon in,

286, 314-15; devout Muslim, 374;

165-7,171,173,181,183-4, 244,

dreams, 233, 340, 354—5, 360; ex¬

421nn.4, 5, 6. See also Duas; Imam;

perimental attitude, 59; on extrac¬

Swala

tion, 274, 280, 282, 286, 294-5,

Mouvement Mahorais, 46-7

355-6; fieldwork with, 104-5; on

Mussa Malidi: as apprentice, 201-2,

gaining a spirit, 312-13; gender

207; on gender and character, 216-

politics, 360-1; knowledge of

17; lessons from, 203-8; in practice,

cosmology, 360; knowledge of

202-3; on sorcery and grave

plants, 347; as medium and curer,

dancing, 244, 254-6, 426n.8; textual

93-4, 355-61; moral judgment, 376; new spirit, 408; patros in practice, 359-60; pilgrimage to Tsaratany,

knowledge, 207, 222 Musy Matwar, 60, 94, 357, 361, 3658, 371-2, 415n.26

106; possessed by trumba, 357;

Mwaka. See New Year

reciting duas, 360; relationships

Mwalim dunia. See Cosmologers

Index

462 Mwanesha, 388, 390 Myerhoff, Barbara, 433n.5 Mystification, 429n.l0 Mze Bunu {patros spirit), 343, 355-6, 358-60

Oppression, in colonial plantations, 252-3 Ortner, Sherry, 55, 71,116, 384, 400, 411n.l3 Ottino, Paul, 423n.l7

Mze Jabiry (.patros spirit), 345, 352-3 Parry, Jonathan, 248 Names, supplied by mwalims, 214

Patros spirits. See Spirits

Narrative, 380-6, 388-92, 396

Peirce, C.S., 434n.ll

'Ndramanavakarivu, trumba spirit,

Pepper, Stephen, 410n.8

51, 61, 63, 94, 361, 415. See also Andriantsuly

Performance, extraction as, 291-5, 297-8. See also Speech act theory

Newitt, Malyn, 412n.7

Personhood, 394. See also Character

New^ Year (Mwaka), 113,124-6, 214,

Person-on-the-path: and cosmology,

417nn.l5,16, 418n.l8, 424n.9 Ngubane, Harriet, 19 Nyora: adjustments to, 212-14, 221-2; attributions, 217, 224, 425n.ll; in

197, 223-4; Schutzian type, 18, 69-71,103 Phronesis, 179, 308, 423n.l6. See also Morality

becoming a curer, 346, 358,

Pilgrimage, 140,168

425n.l0; centrality to cosmology,

Placebo, 280

195-6, 212, 228; constellations and

Planets, 424n.4

planets, 203-6, 208, 424n.4;

Plants: empirical knowledge of, 347;

defined, 57, 424n.8; in divination,

used by mediums, 346-7, 431 n.2.

210; and possession, 315; records

See also Medicine

kept, 196, 213; revealed in dream,

Pledge (nadara), 339-40, 416n.5

275-6; and rohu, 397; Saidu's view

Poewe, Karla, 429n.5

of, 183, 227-30; in scheduling, 207-

Politics: French domination, 47;

8, 212-14; as temperament, 215-19;

interisland, 46-8,169-70; Islamic,

and vulnerability, 285-7. See also

190-2, 423n.22; and the village, 82

Character; Cosmology; Divination; Rohu; Time

Power: centrality in ethnomedicine, 15; of cosmologers, 222; of extractors, 258; of the French state,

Oaths, 122-3, 295

47-8, 55; and the imposition of

Obeyesekere, Gananath, 10,156, 260,

narrative, 398-9; of Islamic experts,

373, 398, 429n.2 Objectification, defined, 428n.l; See also Embodiment, and objectification

168-70; and knowledge, 7, 53; and possession, 335; unequal distri¬ bution of 39-40 Practice: alternate forms of, 5-6; as

Okazaki, Akira, 429n.7

context for understanding

Olivier de Sardan, J.-P., 13-14, 415n.l

knowledge, 14,16-18, 53-4; 253,

Index

255-6; and history, 55, 61-5; of mediums, 338-9, 355, 375-6; and

463 of, 292; Tumbu on, 348-9, 369 Resistance: in anthropology, 39;

self-interest, 394; and structure, 68,

anticolonial, 420n.l4; to Comorian

71, 410n.l3; temporal quality, 379.

government, 47; to hospitalization,

See also Phronesis

58-9; to Islamic experts, 189-90; to

Prayer. See Duas, Swala

mwalims, 222; to plantation con¬

Psychosis, 387

ditions 45, 252-3; and possession,

Purity: of sermon reciters, 166-7; and

335; to textual knowledge, by

taboos, 429n.l2

spirits, 230-3; women's, 361; to writing, 244, 281-2

Qur'anic school, 21-3, 91-2; adult lessons, 145-6,171-2; beyond the village, 144-5,157; declining interest in, 416n.6; embodied aspects, 152; importance of, 85,

Ricoeur, Paul, 136, 309, 429n.2, 434n.l7 Rohu, 187, 216, 235, 297, 314-15, 397, 425n.l2. See also Character; Nyora Rorty, Richard, 8-9, 396, 390, 399,

160; and learning Sufi dances, 153;

429n.4, 434n.l4

teachers commemorated, 114,116

Rosaldo, Renato, 33 Rosen, Lawrence, 11,165

Ranger, Terence, 37, 412n.5 Ranginalu. See taboos Rappaport, Roy. 136,142,143,166,

Rosenthal, Franz, 4, 409nn.l, 2, 3, 410n.4, 420n.l2 Ruel, Malcolm, 4

262, 292, 403, 416n.2, 429n.l Readers of this text, responsibility placed on, 295, 301

Sacrifice. See Swadaka Safy Bourahim, 88-9, 94, 97, 344, 408;

Reading, 138-43,198-9

challenging cosmology, 232; on

Reciprocity, 116-21, 417n.l3; and

extraction, 285-6; on sorcery

knowledge, 164. See also Shungu exchange Recitation, 24,141-3,156, 418n.5; in sorcery extraction, 283, 291, 300 Remuneration: of circumciser, 236; of

medicines, 259-60 Said, Edward, 303 Said, Mussa, 425n.l6 Saidu Bwana: character, 171-2, 425n.l8; cited, 377; curing sorcery,

cosmologers, 198, 202, 212, 214,

281, 427n.5; family, 170-1; on

254; and death of client, 274; of

Friday prayer, 181-5,188, 408; as

fundis in general, 95-8; of Islamic

imam, 422n.l2, 423n.l8; on Islamic

fundis, 145,171-2; for learning

knowledge; leading fundi, 90; on

extraction, 295; of mediums, 361;

other disciplines, 183,185-8, 211,

to Mohedja, 358, 360, 369-71; to

227-30, 281, 293, 425n.l8; practice,

Musy, 361, 366; for sorcery, 255-6;

171-2,174,188,190; on rites of

for sorcery extraction, 273, 276-7,

passage, 56

285, 294; therapeutic significance

Sairy: application, 242-3; loci, 271-2;

Index

464 meaning of, 289-91, 293, 296;

Sorcery: and death, 247, 261-2;

opened, 275, 276, 278. See also

defined, 238-40, 262, 426n.l; and

Sorcery extractions; Tumbu

embodied and objectified

Sakalava, 41-3, 45, 50-3, 61, 63, 65, 310, 321, 323

knowledge, 394; as explanation, 383, 389; images of 245-9, 252, 354;

Salima, 267-70, 342

intrinsic to knowledge and

Salmond, Anne, 410n.8,434n.l7

practice, 237, 240-1, 244, 301;

Sandia, 349-55, 431 n.4

nature of affliction, 271-2;

Scepticism: Levi-Strauss on, 18;

prevalence, 237-8, 256-7, 426n.2;

regarding cosmology, 232; re¬

prophylaxis, 238, 368; related to

garding sorcery extraction, 280-1,

other causes, 271-2; responsibility

293-5, 299, 343, 428n.l2; Saidu's,

for, 262; role of spirits, 273;

245, 281, 293

techniques, 241-4, 251, 255, 266;

Schafer, Roy, 307, 337

vulnerability to, 217, 285. See also

Schieffelin, Edward, 116

Sorcery accusations; Sorcery

Schooling, Western, 36, 47-8, 95-6,

curers; Sorcery extractions; Tumbu

145, 407,415n.27, 416n.6. See also Qur'anic school Schutz, Alfred, 15,18, 69-71,103, 197, 395, 433n.l0 Secrecy: in cosmology, 198; and

Sorcery accusations and cases: and adultery, 239^0, 255, 299; ambiguity of, 257-9, 262; and collapsed granary, 380-2; hamlet of Bunara, 126; and marriages,

grave dancing, 249, 253, 256; and

257-9, 352-3; messiness of, 263-5;

professionalism, 98, 288, 295-6, 350

and moral discourse, 264; Mussa,

Seleman, 249-54

217; responses to, 262-5; Salima

Sermon; See Mosque

Miradj, 270; Sandia, 349-50, 353-4;

Sexual harassment, 350-1

by a sister's son, 130; Sula and

Sharifs, 414n.l9; tomb of, 49

Lahadj, 122-3; towards mwalims,

Shehu Ahmad, 168-9,175,184

222; unfounded, 263. See also

Shepherd, Gill, 43, 44, 45

Sorcery; Sorcery curers; Sorcery

Shetwan: Seleman on, 251-2; Tumbu

extractions; Tumbu

on, 280

Sorcery curers: character, 260-1;

Shijabu. See Dua

competence judged, 273; diversity

Shungu exchange, 81, 83,115, 234

among, 260; exclusivity of knowl¬

Siatta, 90, 94

edge, 295-6, 301; in Lombeni, 94,

Sincerity: of extractors, 280, 287-90,

287, 342-3; offsetting cosmologers,

292, 297-301; of mediums, 355

338-9; as performers, 292-5, 297-8;

Singa, 108,142, 351, 359, 419n.l0

professional constraints, 263, 268,

Slavery, 42^, 253

431 n.3; and spirit mediumship,

Smoke inhalation, 234, 425n.l9

241, 244, 266-7, 283, 427n.l;

Solway, Jacqueline, 347,410n.l0,412n.l

strength of, 286-7. See also Safy,

Index

Sorcery extractions; Tumbu Sorcery extraction: author's under¬

465 Spirit possession: ambivalence towards, 65, 312, 374; avoided, 157;

standing of, 288-95; certainty in,

code of, 308-12; contrasted with

289; evaluation of, 293-5, 428nn.l0,

textual knowledge, 306-7, 336, 375;

11,12; invalid, 294; Islamic view

and cosmology, 204-5, 230-3, 360-

of, 281-2; from man repeatedly at¬

1; as a discipline, 306; experiences

tacked, 293; from man with squint;

of, 286, 312-16, experts in

from man with swollen leg, 275-7;

Lombeni, 93-4; and the family,

mock, 278-9, 298; from Mohedja's

324-32, 333-9; and gender, 334-5;

mother, 294; from Mohedja's rice

history of, 51-2; initial stage of,

plot, 287; from Salima Miradj, 267-

272-3, 322-3; and Islam, 321-2,

70; from teenager with swollen

367; as form of knowing, 307-9,

testicle, 278-9; from truck driver,

335; as moral action, 332-7; and

351-4; from Tumbu's uncle, 277;

morality, 308, 321, 334, 430n.20,

from woman with swollen leg,

432n.l3; playful side of, 430n.20;

274-5; from woman's field, 15-16.

prevalence of, 321, 375, 430n.l3;

See also Sorcery curers; Tumbu

previous work on, 305, 320-2, 334,

Speech act theory, 142, 292, 319-20,

337; production and reproduction,

403, 416n.2, 419n.7, 427-8nn.9,10,

323-4, 333^, 336; reality of, 333^;

11

shared, 372; and subjectivity, 335-

Spirit mediums: agency, 312-13, 3223, 334-8, 345, 358, 360,429n.3;

6, 355; taming of, 314; by whom, 322, 332-4; Yusufi Bwana and,

authority, 373, 394; and the clinic,

186-7. See also Bakar Diva; Dis¬

362; as curers, 311, 332, 338-9, 352-

ciplines; Halima; Mohedja; Spirit

3; diagnosing, 339^2; dialogical

mediums; Spirits; Zainaba

aspects, 355; legitimation, 305-6;

Spirits: diversity among, 63;

313; 318; 324; 333-4; polyvocality,

kakanoru, 358, 408; lulu ny maulida,

373-4; and psychoanalysis, 373-4;

61; patros, 51, 64, 93-4, 203, 266-7,

rationalizing success and failure,

310-11, 339^0, 346, 352, 358, 360,

342, 344-5; relationships among

362-72, 414n.222,427n.l; trumba,

mediums, 357, 361; relationships

51-2, 55, 59-61, 63-6, 93, 310-1,

between spirits, 325, 329, 372;

316, 339^0, 354, 357, 415n.3,

relationships with other people,

432n.7. See also Halima; Mohedja;

311, 321-33, 365, 373-4; relation¬

Mze Bunu; Mze Jabiry; Spirit

ships with own spirits, 299, 311,

mediums; Spirit possession

316-17, 336, 349, 358-9, 369-70,

Stoller, Paul, 412n.20

373, 375-6; role shifting, 372-3;

Stratification: compared to other

succession, 312, 324-32, 430nn.l6, 18. See also Mohedja; Musy; Spirit possession; Spirits; Tumbu

islands, 41, 46, 413n.9; historical, 43^, 48-9, 413nn.l2,15 Subjectivity, in possession, 355

Index

466 Sufi dances: annual performances,

one-upmanship with, 147,158;

114,169-70; central organization,

pleasures of, 143,155;

168; daira and mulidi, 150,152-5; in

reproduction of, 5,136-40,144-7,

Madagascar, 185; popularity, 49.

159; significance of, 134,141-3,

See also Maulida

155,160-1; used in spells, 170.

Sufi orders, 153-5, 420nn.l4,15

See also Cosmology; Duas; Islam;

Sula,122-3,127-8

Knowledge; Qur'anic school;

Swadaka; blood, 125; in cosmology,

Recitation

204, 212, 214-16; and evil-eye, 268; in extraction, 273, 275, 284-5, 292, 340, 345, 427n.7; by means of

Time, 214-15. See also Calendar, New Year, Nyora Traditions: articulating, 32, 40, 52-4,

verse, 156; as remuneration, 273,

58-9, 62, 227; and populations,

348; in the various disciplines, 57,

415n.3; Redfieldian view of, 38-9;

108-9 Swahili. See East Africa Swala (prayer): daily, 110, 420n.l3;

submerged, 253 Trance. See Spirit mediums; Spirit possession

Friday, 179-85,188. See also Duas;

Transference, 373^, 432n.l2

Mosque

Trawick, Margaret, 101

Swartz, Marc, 422n.7

Trimingham, J. Spencer, 155, 420n.l4

Taboos: associated with Sultanate,

Tsaratany, Islamic pilgrimage site,

Trumba spirits. See Spirits 168; as embodied knowledge, 309,

60-2,106,110-11

316-20; overturned by

Tswana, 209, 410n.l0, 411n.l5

Muhammad, 227-8; and

Tumbu: agency of spirits, 258, 267,

possession, 306, 310, 316-20;

345, 348-9, 352, 358; on

ranginalu, 57-9, 401, violations of,

apprentices, 283, 287, 290, 295, 343;

429n.l2

career, 96-7,105; causing pain,

Tambiah, Stanley, 142, 410n.6, 416n.2, 419n.6, 427n.8

276, 278; clients for sorcery, 257-9; on clinic, 278, 349, 353; on clients'

Teaching, styles of, 172,174,182

beliefs, 279-80, 297, 299-300;

Temperament. See Character

compassion, 350, 352-3, 376;

Textual knowledge: access to, 136-7,

complexity of cases, 353-4;

144-6,419n.ll; authority of, 135,

confidence, 289, 301, 343, 355, 376;

141-3,174,182-5,188-92, 391;

and cosmology, 341, 345, 374-5;

contrasted with personal knowl¬

depth of trance, 286, 314; diagnosis

edge, 388-9; dominance of and

and divination by, 269, 279, 280,

resistance towards, 19; familiarity

300-1, 339-4, 345, 375, 431n.l;

with, 138-40,163-4, 207; increas¬

diplomacy, 257, 277; dreams, 260,

ing literacy in, 49, 51,191; Islam

274, 340-1, 346; eclecticism, 282-4,

and cosmology compared, 198-9;

298; on efficacy, 344-5, 351; ethics.

Index

273, 295, 297, 301, 347-54; exchanges with colleagues, 287; on

467 cosmologers, 198, 204, 206, 208, 243 Voice: plurality in society, 379-80; in

experience of trance, 313-14;

possession, 306, 313, 323-4, 332,

explaining extraction, 271, 278-90,

335-7

295-7, 300-1; fieldwork with, 104-

Vola: fertility problems, 223-4; at

5, 271; gentleness, 278; insight, 280,

Halima's rombu, 364, 366-7, 369-

300; Islamic knowledge, 139, 343;

70; possession, 327-9, 374

Islamic practice, 112,160-1, 282-3, 300, 374, 420n.l7; judgment, 257-9,

Wachterhauser, Brice, 411n.l8

273, 288-9, 293, 296, 299-300, 376;

Weber, Max, 423n.21, 433n.8

as medium and curer, 93-4,112,

Well-informed citizens: in Islam, 137,

269, 342-358, 408; models of, 266-

139,181,197; Schutzian type, 18,

7, 289, 301; on Mohedja's knowl¬

69-71, 41 In. 14. See also Fatima

edge, 355-6; on plant medicines,

Halidy

346-7; practising extraction, 274-9,

Werbner, Pnina, 419n.7

299, 351-2; relations with clients,

White, Leslie, 410n.9

269-70, 278; relations with

Wilmsen, Edwin, 412n.l

Mohedja, 354-5, 359-60; on remun¬

Wilson, Monica, 247

eration, 348-9; retiring, 357, 408;

Wilson, Peter J., 334

risk-taking, 350; on sceptics, 280-2,

Witherspoon, Gary, 4

289, 343^; self-reflection, 342-4,

Women: as autonomous actors, 81,

355; skill, 282, 298; on sorcery pre¬

83; defloration, 423n.l3, 425n.l9;

valence, 237-8, 256; specificity of

and household finances, 431 n.6;

each case, 279; on spirits as fundis,

in male roles, 360, 369; mobility,

346; struggles against evil spirits,

431n.5; political role, 46-7; as

278, 285-6, 297, 355-7; as student,

possession curers, 93-4; reticence

341, 343, 356, 375; temperament,

to cure, 357; and sexuality, 79-80;

286, 355; treating Salima, 267-8;

415n.4, 416n.6, See also Gender;

treating Sandia, 349-54; validation

Marriage

of authority, 289-90, 296, 343. See

Wright, Henry T., 41, 48

also Mze Jabiry

Writing: Islamic, 142-3; in Kibushy,

Turner, David, 37, 80

140; social implications, 412n.6;

Turner, Victor, 214, 260-1, 319,

and sorcery, 243-4

411n.l3, 426n.l, 427n.8, 429n.l Young, Allan, 411n.l5 Van Gennep, Arnold, 214

Yusufi Bwana: character, 172-5;

Verin, Pierre, 41, 47, 54, 65, 414n.21

cited, 377; on divination, 210;

Vidal, J.-M., 407, 414n.l8, 423n.l7

emigration, 408; family, 170-1; on

Visions: Islamic, 159; linked to

Friday prayer, 181-5,189; on kinds

circumcisions, 205; sought by

of knowledge, 424n.l; on the

468 kuitimia, 117; leading fundi, 90; openness to other disciplines, 1858, 423n.l9; practice, 172-9,190, 421 n.6; on sources of illness, 423n.2 Zafy Bakar, 90-2,156-8, 408

Index Zaina, 175-8, 423nn.l3,16 Zainaba, 55-9, 316 Zanzibar, 52, 204-5. See also East Africa Zara, 387-9, 392

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