The Law of the Lifegivers: The Domestication of Desire 9789057024221

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The Law of the Lifegivers

The Law of the Lifegivers THE

D OME S TI C AT I ON

OF

DESIRE

Rene Devisch and Claude Brodeur

First published 1999 by Harwood academic publishers This edition published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-9-057-02422-1 (hbk) Cover plate:

M bwoolu cult statuary, of Chief N-tulumba (photograph by R. Devisch, N-tulumba village, July 1974)

FOR

CLEMENCE

AND

MARIA

TABLE OF C O N T E N T S

Photographs by Rene Devisch

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction

xiii

Maps

xxi

Part One

ITINERARY AND METHODS

Chapter 1

From anthropology to psychoanalysis

3

R. Devisch Chapter 2

From psychoanalysis to anthropology

21

C. Brodeur Exchange and confrontation

44

Letter 1 from C. Brodeur

Part Two

TH E YAKA: PRINCIPAL FIGURES

Introduction The Yaka

49

R. Devisch Chapter 1

Sorcery and fetish

57

R. Devisch The sorcerer

89

Letter 2 from C. Brodeur Chapter 2

Divination: The birth of uterine discourse

93

R. Devisch The diviner

117

Letters 3 and 4 from C. Brodeur

TH E LAW OF THE L IF E G IV E R S

VII

TA BL E OF C O N T E N T S

Chapter 3

The therapist: Healing the affects by remodeling the body

125

R. Devisch The therapist

154

Letter 5 from C. Brodeur Chapter 4

The paramount chief: The introduction of the order of ethical law

167

f t Devisch The chief

195

Letter 6 from C. Brodeur Chapter 5

Death and the dialectic of limits

203

f t Devisch Life and death

22 2

Letter 7 from C. Brodeur Chapter 6

Four figures of the Yaka unconscious

229

f t Devisch A brief synthesis

229

Letter 8 from C. Brodeur Body and discourse

231

Letter 1 from f t Devisch

Part Three

IN TERSECTIO N S

245

C. Brodeur and f t Devisch

v i ii

References

25 7

Index

263

TH E LAW OF TH E L IF E G IV E R S

P H O T O G R A P H S BY RENE D E V I S C H

Plate 1

Khosi cult figurine Owner: M r Ibaanda, Malaatu village (March 1974)

Plate 2

Binwaanunu , ritual weapons for defence and attack Owner: Kha Ntiki, Yibeengala village (September 1974)

Plate 3 -4

95

Mediumnic diviner Tseembu, and consultant Yiheeti village (May 1991)

Plate 6

96

Mediumnic diviner N-luma Kinshasa-Masina (May 1990)

Plate 7

72

Mediumnic diviner Lusuungu Yibeengala village (July 1974)

Plate 5

55

96

Ndzaamba ngoombu bag of the diviner, containing the pieces of cloth ( yiteendi) which have been in contact with the client’s body Owner: Maa Kyuulu, Luka Suburb of Kinshasa (September 1990)

Plate 8

106

Enthronement of diviner Kyuulu Yikwaati village, N-saka chiefdom (September 1991)

Plate 9

M bwoolu cult statuary Owner: Chief Phaani, N-tulumba village (July 1974)

Plate 10

143

Khita healer Kha N-noongu Kinshasa-Masina (September 1990)

Plate 11

106

146

Chief Bundzidi, in his sacred enclosure of paramountcy

(ndzo malala), sitting on a leopard skin in Yibwaati village (September 1974) Plate 12

186

Subregional chief, Taanda N-noongu, during investiture, Yitaanda village (November 1973)

194

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ix

PREFACE

Claude Brodeur was professor at the Universite de Montreal for many years. Having trained as both philosopher and psychoanalyst, he has worked for some time with Henri Collomb at the psychiatric hospital of Fann, Dakar, as well as practising psychoanalysis in Paris and Montreal. He has carried out a considerable amount of research, both psychoanalytical and anthropolo­ gical, on the family and on small communities in the city of Montreal and villages of Quebec. Rene Devisch, trained in philosophy and in anthropology, has had extended anthropological experience with the Yaka, both in their rural region in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly called Zaire) and in the capital Kinshasa. His career has led him to carry out or supervise research, if more briefly, in several other African countries including Tunisia, southern Ethiopia, (Druze communities in) northern Israel, southwest Kenya, northwest Nambia, southeast Nigeria, northern Ghana, and central and northwest Tanzania. Affiliated for the past ten years to the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis he has acquired some experience of psychoanalysis. He is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences. This book mainly addresses the situation of the rural Yaka. Information regarding life in several poverty-stricken suburbs of Kinshasa refers, how­ ever, to a situation before the overthrow of the Mobutu government in May 1997 by the AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo), and therefore before the new government had had a chance to have an impact on civic culture. Rene Devisch’s research was carried out in the Africa Research Centre, Department of Anthropology, at the Catholic University of Leuven (Lou­ vain), Belgium. It has been supported by the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders, the European Commission DG XII B4 STD 2 -3 , and the HarryFrank Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Large parts of the book were drafted in 1 9 9 1 -9 2 , while Devisch was enjoying a fellowship-in-residence at NIAS (the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, at Wassenaar). There, Professor Bruce Kapferer and Dr Saskia Kersenboom gener­ ously shared with him their inspiring views on self-generative practice, synesthetic ritual action, and the poetics of performance. We moreover acknowledge the valuable cooperation, in Kinshasa, of the IMNC (Institute

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XI

PR EFACE

of the National Museums of Congo), as well as CERDAS (Centre for the Coordination of Research and Documentation in Social Science for SouthSaharan Africa). The touchstone of the authors’ analysis in this work is the shock of a pro­ found awareness that a people’s culture, including its unconscious dimen­ sions, is what both deeply links and differentiates human beings. Each author poses certain questions related to his presuppositional analytical grid. Their dialogue answers the question, what are the possibilities and limitations for a meeting between psychoanalysis and anthropology which, despite their sometimes insular language, share many motives for a joint venture? This book testifies to the wary rapprochement between these two fields and their discourses, often distant from yet drawn near each other by intersecting gazes. We cordially thank Ann West for the English translation of Chapter 2 Part Two, and Peter Crossman for the remainder.

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INTRODUCTION

A M E E T IN G

Several years ago a dozen scholars of different nationalities— a number of whom had backgrounds in both anthropology and psychoanalysis— gathered in Martinique. We spent a whole week together in Fort-de-France discussing potential points of reconciliation between the disciplines of anthropology and psychoanalysis. We met under the sign of the hummingbird (the name of the house of our venue), that miniature bird that spends its time sipping the nectar of the most splendidly coloured and sweet-smelling flowers. . . as did our febrile, inquisitive minds. Since this passionate experience, rich and promising, the two authors of this book have met twice yearly with the aim of pursuing the reflections, now well on its way, on this same question. Our common reflection has always been based on the writings and analyses of Rene Devisch on the various func­ tions making up Yaka society, namely those of sorcerer, diviner, healer, chief, but also of the particular understanding of this culture with regard to the major life events and the dominant horizons of existence: birth and death, socialisation and boundaries. In fact, Rene Devisch was in the habit of sending Claude Brodeur one or another of his primarily ethnographic texts in the hope of eliciting a psychoanalytical interpretation by way of response or reaction in the form of a friendly but critical letter. There was no question of applying the usual psychoanalytical categories, such as the symbolism of the oral, anal, or oedipal genital phases, to anthropological data. The ana­ lysis that developed of the unconscious discourse drew its inspiration from both structural linguistics, as analytical method, and a psychoanalytical semi­ ology, following Lacan, for the definition of the Symbolic in Yaka rites and practices. This method echoes that more classic approach, dealing with the mediative function of the Symbolic, separating the Imaginary material from the Real, and opening up the imaginarized material of primal and collective fantasy towards the order of language and social code. This exchange turned out to be a veritable confrontation between two devoted scholars whose terms of reference derived from very different approaches. Rene Devisch insisted on saving the authenticity of his ethno­ graphic data. Claude Brodeur proposed, rather, to reconfigure the data with the aid of a model drawing on the primary signification of Yaka discourses at all levels, including the most corporal and even the unconscious. This constant tension constituted the most remarkable and interesting aspect of our meetings and dialogue. It was necessary in order to clearly

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IN T R O D U C T IO N

articulate various connections between psychoanalysis and anthropology which, far from being superficial as some might believe, are capable of giving rise to fundamental and effective bridges between the two disciplines while at the same time respecting the divergent principles and practice of each. We would now like to offer our readers the fruit of this long, sometimes painful, passionate and even violent, labour. We invite all to share in our ex­ perience in a personal way. Some will certainly reject one approach in favour of the other; others will sift through the layered texture of our thoughts in order to create a composition more to their liking. We hope in any case that many will follow our initiative and engage in this process of tense, dialogical interrogation. Its path may be full of obstacles, but it promises a relative syn­ thesis between a particular psychoanalytical theory and an exploration, ever new and rich, of an anthropological field. Psychoanalysis will profit through an experimentation outside its primary field of study, the unconscious. Anthropology stands to gain in submitting its material to a foreign, yet in many ways proximate, model. Both disciplines will be better off for having opened their eyes to a new scientific adventure. I N T E R S E C T I N G T H E M E S A N D V IE W S

Ritual objects trace patterns of energies and symbols onto the various fields and orders of life, autonomous yet overlapping at the same time. These ener­ gies and symbols are the subjects of the chapters which follow. The figurines create an intermediary field between Yaka culture, anthropological analysis, and psychoanalytical scrutiny, allowing one to penetrate and decipher, from multiple perspectives, the interplay of the unconscious, corporal habits, and discourse; despite their diversity, these three phenomena display a remark­ able degree of commonality. In fact, Yaka cult figurines depict a resonance between the physical, social and cosmic bodies: they mediate between the uterine Ancestor-founder of the cult on the one hand, and the cults’ clients on the other. In the first part of the book, the two authors trace their intellectual hori­ zons— symbolic, praxiological and psychoanalytical— that served to guide their examination of the many fields and modes comprising the imbrication of energies and symbols at the bodily, imaginary and discourse levels. O f the second part, Chapters 2 , 3 ,4 and 5 were inspired by previous studies by Rene Devisch (1981, 1986, 1988, 1990a, 1991c, 1993b), but the analysis is now carried considerably further. Sorcery— the subject of Chapter 1— is derived from the unconscious imagin­ ary order, viewed as a stock of resources, floating forces or energies charged with sensations of the body, imagos and vital signs of all sorts below the

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IN T R O D U C T IO N

sphere of mediative discourse. To the extent that it derives from the imagin­ ary order, at least of the utopian type, sorcery does not express the articula­ tion between pleasure and displeasure, life and death, hate and love (that is, between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ mother, in the Kleinian sense) over against a third pole, that is over against fundamental collective choices in the face of the communal law ethics. Sorcery most freely explores the many virtualities of breaking down or disuniting taken-for-granted divisions such as internal and external, self and other, human and animal, life-giving and life-taking acts. Classificatory terms and conventional rules of discourse are ignored or violated; sorcery rules out any coherent pattern of boundaries and divisions proper to the symbolic order of a given cultural community. The utopian sorcerer appears to delve into the collective imaginary register and play on affects of the body and sensations in the most disordered and fancy fashion: he (or she) deploys an unbounded libidinal id below the level of any social order founded on the laws of filiation, political authority or a communal ethic. The collective imaginary material situates the sorcerer in a sphere unrel­ ated to the conventional categories of space and time. The sorcerer is the prototypical figure of frenzied wandering and marvelous exploration. It is rumoured that nocturnal happenings of libertine thrill and carnival-like inver­ sion occur at which sorcerers, under the spell of the rhythm of drums and dance, give themselves over to licentious exploits. At such occult meetings, to a certain extent participants unbind the universe of forces proper to the unconscious and allow themselves an occasion to live out the sorcerous ima­ ginary register in a flood of unbridled energy. But sorcery can also become morbid or even murderous by deploying imagos of attack and death: my hypothesis is that a vulnerable person can be led to give himself over to depleting and death by overly exposing himself to the death wishes of certain relatives. The victim is thus exposed to a current of imagos that is criss­ crossed with life and death forces, with energies of dual signification. Such ‘suicidal’ victimisation or self-destruction under the spell of sorcery is usually prevented through group control and the use of fetishes. The fetish serves at the same time as a means of aggression and of protection, the latter in the guise of a counter-attack. It provides a certain depiction of the imaginary order by attaching a meaning to dually-charged forces. The fetish could be considered as implying the energy of impulses represented by a sculpture or purse of ritual ingredients. This is not a denotative representation but a prop for some inner, imaginary reality that is able to bear imagos and uncon­ scious agency, at once morbid and life-seeking, invested with the group’s desire. Fetishes placed at the centre of the village, in front of a cult house or near a hunting shrine are established as collective and impersonal judges of

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IN T R O D U C T IO N

acts or relations within the group where these escape the order of a chiefs authority or communal law ethics. The diviner— the subject of Chapter 2— and sorcerer are related yet antag­ onistic personages. The trance-possession of the diviner (who may be male or female) demonstrates how he draws his divinatory ability from the forces of the imaginary register and from the libidinal body. In Yaka culture the trance-possession is modeled on the blending of extreme liminal experiences such as death agony, parturition, and orgasmic sexual communion. The star­ tling utterances of the diviner in trance, accompanied by rhythmic movements of the pelvis, may realistically be treated as an engendering of meaning. In the trance, the diviner’s cry constitutes a primordial and creative expression of basic psychic energy and emotion; it is the re-enacted memory of the dawn of all life. Trance utterances give voice to a corporal and libidinal reminiscence to the origins of life and of society. The medium or clairvoyant diviner provides access to the symbolic order. The bodily enactment of trance, like the large cowrie shells with their toothed crevices that the diviner wears on his front, and like the slotted drum the clairvoyant employs to rhythm the oracle, they all reveal the point from which the Yaka medium speaks: from a vaginal mouth which offers itself as a matrix. Despite his proximity to the palpable body and passions, the mediumistic oracle is able to interconnect between, on the one hand, the order of the physical body, affects of the body, sensations and dreams and, on the other, the order of language and social code. Somewhat like the psychoanalyst, the diviner opens up the client to the communal law ethics but does not act on its behalf. The diviner stages the primordial act of the conscience, not of morality: he does not bring the client to the point of self-judgement. In offer­ ing a particular reading of the registers of the imaginary, the oracle defines the junction between the imaginary order and the symbolic discourse. The authority of the medium-diviner allows him to provide a discursive frame­ work for examining and evaluating occult digressions of sorcery, beyond the gaze of society, into a world of otherness. Divination establishes a discurs­ ive space, an open and domesticated site subject to communal evaluation, over against the roving habits which overcome the sorcerer. It offers a per­ spective into an ongoing story; it does not offer enhanced eyesight but rather insight through narrative. The medium’s oracle establishes a time and a social place where the sensual pleasure of the sorcerer is confined. It brings the sorcerer back from his wanderings and asocial behaviour to the historic depth of the familial saga and the symbolic order of the group. It does not, however, judge the sorcerer on behalf of communal law ethics for which the oracle stands, nor does it expel the sorcerer to some exotic otherness, which

xvi

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IN TR O D U C T IO N

would shut him out in some mysterious, surrealistic, eroticised world of fantasy. Chapter 3 deals with the healer. His role is to bring about a restoration of the sociocultural order where it has broken down. Healing reveals the extent to which sorcery forces both sorcerer and victim out of themselves, as it were, disconnecting them from the vital web of kinship. Sorcery can be understood here as a sphere of frenetic roving in which an involved indi­ vidual is less agent than acted upon. The healer is, within the village domain, the domestic or socialised counterpart of the hunter-trapper, who roams the undomesticated bush. Healing aims to entrap both the sorcerer’s propensity to rove— or his profligacy and disconnectedness— and the paralysis of the victim, and turn these states against themselves in a self-destructive manner. At the same time, therapy endeavours to capture the forces and meanings at play in order to contain and reintegrate them into the known, domesticated, and now revitalised, social space. The various forms of Yaka healing essen­ tially develop within fifteen important traditions, also known as cults, which themselves have evolved from a mix of Bantu cults of affliction (Janzen 1992). Each of these cults is concerned with a relatively specific syndrome described by a humoral logic and accompanied by a primarily spatial image of the body giving particular attention to its boundaries and orifices, that is to orificial transactions. Besides their marked interest in the body and their use of a wide range of corporal techniques, Yaka healing cults deploy and manipulate the imaginary register and, of course, a whole complex of group dynamics. They are carried out in a setting where the playful and the serious, licentiousness and norm, intermingle. Healing cults privilege the libidinal and desire under the medi­ ation of values, rather than conceptualisation or reflection. Desire is mo­ bilised by rhythm, gesture and dance, the various objects that belong to the ritual house, prayers, massages and many other activities. We thus find brought together functions, attributes and transitional fields of the libidinous and subjective genre to which are attached social logics and ethical intersub­ jectivity. Indeed, therapies derive their inspiration and vigour from the potent, energetic and untamed universe of the imaginary order that Yaka culture re­ legates to the sphere of collective fantasies regarding night, forest, rivers, water spirits, agony, orgasm, gestation, parturition, the symbiosis of mother and infant, and trance-possession. One can draw forces from these undomes­ ticated sources of energy which constitute the specific Yaka idiom denoting the unconscious, or rather the imaginary register. The healer therefore strives to mould the collective imaginary realm into a symbolic order and channel it into controllable actions, primarily by further articulating the

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IN TR O D U CT IO N

boundary between life and death, between pleasure and displeasure. In order to better manipulate this register, he projects a temporal order— that of the ancestor and genealogical descent— onto the common ritual space. Here the ancestral origins and the group coexist in the context of a ritual stage: the an­ cestor and the spirits are present, and the foundational institutions of the society as well as the genealogical roots of the patient are all inscribed on the ritual scene and scenario. The ethic implied by the diviner’s know­ ledge of the cause of states of affliction derives primarily from the uterine order. The enthronement of the regional chief, analysed in Chapter 4, institutes his role of assuring deliberation, containment, order and stability for his peo­ ple. The chief is the paternal model of the communal law ethics governing public life, a predominately male world. The political dimension is opposed to the sorcerer’s world of wild roving and frenetic enchantment: it relegates the sorcerer to the sphere of insanity and deviance. When seen in the light of law and order personifed by the chief, the sorcerer appears as a personage of perverse alterity, an other which disturbs and upsets the social universe. The sorcerer is stigmatised by deviance and horror; he embodies unforeseeable, antisocial otherness. In sum, the political chief is the model person and the sorcerer is his negative alter-ego; together, the two figures portray the bounds of normality. Although each of these figures— sorcerer, hunter, diviner, healer and chief—is implicitly linked to the domestication of the world and the estab­ lishing of order in the group, none of them displays the characteristics of a

homo faber nor raises the issue of the pragmatic aims of human practices or of the life of things (which was, for example, the central question in Euro­ pean philosophy from the Renaissance onwards). Death and funerary rites, treated in Chapter 5 raise the issue of boundaries. The demise of a relative drags the kin relations into the space of death and dissolution, for those who have intimately shared in the life of the deceased are profoundly affected. Funerary rites remobilise the separating capacity of the boundaries of the body and the home of the bereaved, at the same time instituting a cultic space of remembrance in honour of the dead. Just as they serve to separate the living and the dead, the mortuary, cemetery and the ancestor cult also constitute liminoid spaces of contact. Under the guidance of the Ancestor and the uterine source of life, networks are established in which energies and signs are exchanged between descendants and ascendants. These networks surpass physical death, and constitute the very foundation of the group which continues to re-create itself and dynamically to root itself in a given territory that is shared with other groups. No inhabited space is

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IN T R O D U C T IO N

without its ancestral shrine. The village domain itself is a concrete expression of a transgenerational link and of a social and cultural project anchored in the Founder-Ancestor and in the uterine source of life that makes the earth, its products and its inhabitants fruitful. Part Three of this book briefly describes the dialogical confrontation between a psychoanalytical and an anthropological analysis of the same eth­ nographic data.

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X IX

Map 1:

Kwaango Land and the Location of the Koongo, Luunda, Ndembu, and Yaka

Map 2:

Field work in the Yitanda and Yibwaati Localities in Northern Kwaango Land

Part One TINERARY AND METHODS

Chapter 1 FROM A N T H R O P O L O G Y TO P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S R E N E D E V IS C H

IT IN E R A R Y

For over twenty-five years, my work has focused on the application to anthropological data, successively or simultaneously, of the paradigms of Levi-Straussian structuralism, French phenomenology (in line with MerleauPonty), and Bourdieu’s post-structuralist praxiology (Devisch 1993a: 3 3 52). Concern for several particular groups has consistently marked my career: the rural and urban Yaka population of Congo; mental patients in Tunisia; M oroccan, Turkish and Flemish epigastric patients in Belgium’s main urban centers; and incest victims in Flanders. Over the years, my research has addressed several major themes: the relation between culture, body symbolism and the experience of misfortune and suffering, psychic symbolism and symptom formation (Devisch 1985, 1989, 1990b, 1991a,b); the study of culture-specific forms of etiology, healing, and the management of misfortune and violence (De Boeck and Devisch 1994, Devisch 1991c, 1993a, 1995); and the intersubjectivity of subject and researcher in the con­ text of health research (1993a). My approach to the latter theme has com­ prised a philosophical and anthropological quest motivated by a bid to overcome ethnocentricity and civilisational ascendancy in the production of scientific discourse. My research has led me to a number of practical under­ takings including research in culture-sensitive psychiatric reform in Tunis (Devisch and Vervaeck 1985); the creation of a self-help group in Brussels for immigrant Turkish women suffering from epileptic-like fits (Devisch and Gailly 1985); the symbolic-anthropological training of family physicians (at the Department of Family Medicine, University of Antwerp) in communica­ tion and therapeutic skills for work with incest and chronic epigastric patients (Devisch 1991b); and a small Freudian psychoanalytic practice. My long and intimate experience of Congo has permitted me to share the frustrations and despair of the Kinois— as the inhabitants of Kinshasa, the capital city, like to call themselves— in the face of violent political upheaval and social mutation of the 1990s. I can share with them the regrets that rel­ ative peace and prosperity of former that times was lost, and the deep sense of betrayal at the hands of the present predatory state. My research has inevit­ ably led me to become personally sensitive to the mounting hardships of

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3

FROM A N T H R O P O L O G Y TO P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S

Kinois, in particular the Yaka, whose struggle to survive amidst the misery of Kinshasa’s townships is constantly thwarted by galloping inflation and the disintegration of public services and institutions. I first had the opportunity, from 1965 to 1971, to study philosophy and anthropology in Kinshasa at the university of Lovanium. Since then and until October 1 9 7 4 ,1 lived among the Yaka people at a rural settlement of thirteen villages located in the northern Kwaango region bordering Angola (in the Bandundu province of southwest Congo, some 450 kilometres to the south­ east of Kinshasa). There, at the margins of the national political scene, I was able to personally experience the enthusiasm of nation-building and the abrupt introduction of ‘zairianisation’ involving the nationalisation of foreign-owned properties and enterprise. During my field research, I was able to combine participant observation with long discussions with many Yaka elders whose responsibility it was to carry on and hand down their people’s traditions. By intimately sharing in village life, I was able to learn the lan­ guage and acquire many basic insights into the Yaka at the same time. With time, the mutual confidence built up with the local population allowed me to develop close relations with a number of healers. I was able to repeatedly converse at length with and question— with the aid of a prepared question­ naire— twenty-seven healers individually and maintain regular contact with at least five of them. These relations in turn permitted me to attend a number of diagnostic oracles and closely observe the healing and/or initiatory seclu­ sion of some fifteen patients. I also collected information on Yaka illness careers, illness classifications, and pharmaceutical recipes as well as on the curative powers of local plants and animals. Data I gathered on divination and healing confirm in detail findings made earlier by H. Huber (1956) and Leon De Beir (1975a,b); Father De Beir had observed healing practices in the regional chiefdom of Nnene, comprising the Taanda territory, between 1938 and 1945. Over the last decade, for approximately six weeks each year, I have been working among the Yaka population in Kinshasa inhabiting the destitute sub­ urban shantytowns. My regular visits led to my experiencing the Luddite uprisings of late September 1991, as well as the violent and widespread mil­ itary-led plundering by gangs of youths in January and February 1993, rav­ ages which left me personally shaken. Among the immigrant population of Kinshasa, divinatory and healing protocol tend to become rather less com­ plicated than practice in the rural areas would dictate. Also, in the urban context, many non-Yaka clients approach Yaka diviners for diagnosis of difficulties more often than not related to the cash economy, employment, and formal education. While self-proclaimed healers in town tend to engage

4

THE LAW OF TH E L IF E G IV E R S

FROM A N T H R O P O L O G Y T O P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S

in a trading relationship with their clients, herbalists, more readily than initi­ ated healers, resort to bricolage , that is activities largely made up of concoct­ ing potions aimed to provide the consumerist client with sexual or economic success and social standing. The increasingly desperate situation of the urban Yaka among whom I have been working over the last decade has been impressed on me by the contradictions of an alienating (post)colonial past and by the present disillu­ sion, frustration and outbursts of violence characterising the Kinois’ struggle for survival. My fieldwork carried out in the 1970s in the rural area and since 1986 in Kinshasa has forced upon me an experience beyond that of particip­ ant observation and beyond the neutral stance of the scientist such that I am more and more reluctant to somehow aesthetise the picture like perhaps in my writing on the rural Yaka. Indeed, while living and working with the younger generation in both rural areas and the capital in the period up to 1 9 9 1 ,1 often felt myself caught up in the perverse effects of entrenched colo­ nial European stereotypes of black Africa (Devisch 1993a: 5 -6 ). My identity as an anthropologist from the former metropolis, Belgium, put me in the position of estranged foreigner, of an adversarial other. For those who did not know me, certainly, I was a descendant of the former coloniser and a rep­ resentative of the hegemonic West; the latter image, at least, carried an ambiguous status of both adversary and admired model. This has led me to attempt to disentangle the experience of estranging otherness within the con­ text of a group of persons who have silenced their ancestral origins while assimilating the antinomic or alienating characteristics of the coloniser and taking up the masks of modernity in the specific ideological context of its (post)colonial production and subjection. For them, modernity is imagined to be a world of great power and a superior way of life typified by abund­ ance, luxury and ease. In turn, I personally felt estranged by such fantasmatic conjectures insofar as it appeared that my hosts had themselves imbibed the imaginary invention o f Africa (Mudimbe 1988). Their illusory ideals of modern city life and higher education paralleled a deep feeling of alienation vis-a-vis the originary space from which they had emigrated. The latter com­ prised the village realm, replete with the projections of missionary and colonial, racialized thinking regarding backwardness, paganism and sorcery as being the reverse side of the white, civilised, world. This imaginary inver­ sion has meant that, until recently, many African evolues , as the educated elite were called, perceived the ancestor as a persecutor, preventing the descendants from inhabiting the space of the other (the modern world), instead of being a source of filiation, identity and wholeness as traditionally believed.

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FROM A N T H R O P O L O G Y T O P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S

My recent experience of the violent urban reality in Congo, following on a brief detour through transcultural psychiatry and didactic psychoanalysis, leads me, with the people of Kinshasa, to ask more profound questions about the contradictions and violence of the colonial experience. But how can one address the issue without falling into the facile trap and betrayal of that ever­ present divide between us and them, coloniser and colonised, West and East, North and South, white and black? How can one avoid foreclosing on the repressed? Can anthropology avoid painting an exotic picture of the other or depicting it from the perspective of its failures to bring about technical progress and achieve western modernity? Is not the anthropologist just a symptomatic agent of the modernist project through which the urban culture of the North— more and more dominated by artificial time, machines and capitalist strivings— metabolises its fear of death? Is the anthropologist not driven to express the unconscious collective fantasies of the North in project­ ing an exotic, disfigured, image of the other, and thus repressing and trans­ ferring this fear onto the other, and in particular on black Africa portrayed in its pre-industrial dimension and its explosions of ethnic violence? Does not the anthropologist confidently subscribe to the reformist Enlightenment thought characterised by a set of antithetical oppositions such as modernity/ tradition, universal/particular, science/belief, rational/magical, objectivity/ subjectivism, biomedicine/African medicine, developed/underdeveloped, which, however, overvalues a certain technocracy founded on a rationalist and materialist vision of Man and the World? What exactly is the place of the anthropologist in this asymmetrical clash of civilisations: is he capable of developing a scientific discourse or perspective unbiased by modernist ideo­ logy and the dominant conceptual systems and values of the urban West? Can one escape the universalist claims and programmes of school education and cosmopolitan modernity which devalue heterogeneity or plurality and bestow the devaluing imagery of localism and backwardness on tribal society, rural life, oracy (absence of writing), ancestral religion, cultic healing, chiefly authority based in supernatural power, and the customary order? How can one circumvent the paradoxes and silences of estrangement? How can I avoid seeing the Yaka in mirror-image by way of some seductive game of mutual projection between anthropologist and host group, or by associating me with their opposition to negative alterity as represented by the missionary and an alien urban lifestyle? As an anthropologist, I am not only incapable of uncovering the meaning of this interplay, but I am also left to perceive it in a merely fragmentary manner. Living among the people, however, I have had the opportunity to feel their passion for life, the strength that mobilises them and the genius in their habits. Yet, above all, it is impossible for me to

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penetrate the heart of a culture there where it manifests a certain sovereignty in its creativity. Thus I oppose any superficial perspective of globalisation and sociocultural homogenisation through the increasingly massive propa­ gation of uniform models of consumption and technocracy belonging to the North. The more I have been able to experience very diverse cultures (in Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania and Tunisia), the more I seek an internal approach capable of interpreting the voice of the people concerned and the creative nucleus of its culture, following as much as possible its own particular rationality. M ETH O D S AND

P E R S P E C T IV E S

My experience of the Yaka has continually raised questions for me and inspired new lines of theoretical and thematic reflection, above all concern­ ing ritual practices1. Questions of the following sort have particularly occupied my attention. How can the ritual drama, whether initiatic or thera­ peutic, bring about changes in the body and identity of the participants? How does the rite revitalise the group and its universe, that is, the social and cosmological2 bodies? Who, strictly speaking, is the author of a cure? How does one evaluate the interdependence between the form in which the illness appears, the principal aims of the therapeutic rite, and the patient’s experi­ ence of it? Is it possible to consider the healer as a social mender who— in line with what Victor Turner (1967, 1968) reported on the subject of the Ndembu of northwest Zambia— primarily or even solely aims to reinsert the patient (whether male or female) in his redefined social role within the famil­ ial network and filiation as determined by the lineage? Or, rather, does the healer actually produce something novel, by way of some artistic tinkering, as Claude Levi-Strauss (1958 ch. 10) has suggested? In other words, is the healer some sort of demiurge able to mobilise mechanisms that can even transform the corporal and sensory fields and their affects, setting them in tune with the social order, by way of their cosmological signifiers? Take the more concrete examples of the manner of constructing a seclusion hut to resemble a gestating maternal body, or the way in which the healer manip­ ulates the body and dispositions (the habitus , in the terminology of Bourdieu

1

In a presentation, of a rather encyclopedic nature (Devisch 1 9 8 5 ), dealing with different approaches to symbol and symptom, I offer an indirect perspective of my own intellectual jour­ ney. The extent to which my theoretical evolution is rooted in my experience among the Yaka is demonstrated in the following.

2

By the terms cosmological order or body, I understand the image (the Weltanschauung) that a group has of its inhabited environment and universe, whether in the form of cosmology, religion, morality or spatial management.

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1980) of the initiate in the process of regeneration. Do these gestures actu­ ally imitate or rather bring about a remodeling of the patient’s bodily experi­ ence and sensory faculties, as well as the familial and social fabric? Finally, is therapy liberating? If I continue to focus on the creative vein of rite, it is because of its function of metabolisation in the face of violence, destruction and especially the collapse of public institutions and the crumbling of any permanent collective referent in the context of Kinshasa’s current situation of anomie. Today, more than ever, the misery and incoherence of life in Kinshasa have broken down the postcolonial models of identity for the urban immigrant. The people of Kinshasa find themselves increasingly united around one common issue: extreme poverty and the harsh struggle for survival in a bankrupt nation. The city’s diviners, healers, healing churches, and Christian prayer groups, like also the family councils and grassroots women’s associations, all offer the opportunity for an open, alternative discourse. In an informal and subtle fashion, they are generating a new social ethic. The semiotic analysis of Yaka therapeutic and initiatic rites that I devel­ oped initially followed a structuralist model inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva (Devisch 1984). Later, I attempted to broaden and supplement that approach under the impulse of the phenom ­

enology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the praxiology of Pierre Bourdieu (Devisch 1993a). The multiple accounts with which initiates provided me— regarding their experience of trance-possession, healing, enthronement as chief, a change in familial roles or the world of spirits— raise many questions as to the nature and the source of initiatic or therapeutic efficacy. It now appears to me that the officiants and principal actors in a rite aim at mobilising affects of the body and psychic forces, signs and values— at the corporal, imaginary, social and cosmological levels— bringing them to a state of interaction as if in a process of continuous weaving. I attempt to develop this perspective on the weaving of forces, signs and values from three major angles: the creative ritual practice, the human body and the imaginary order (that unconscious universe of affects of the body and psychic forces expressed through signs and relations). My praxiological focus is on the con­ stitutive process of ritual practice in seeking to elucidate, on the basis of its internal workings, how such therapeutic rites instigate forces of autogenera­ tion and how the patient is involved in the project of recreation, of reinser­ tion— as Yaka culture sees it— in the fabric that englobes the individual, his group and his life-world. I also look at the inverse of this process, how sor­ cery can pervert the weaving process and “entangle or cut off the victim” (ch. 1). In an examination of the therapeutic rites (chapters 3 and 4), I

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describe and decode the components: rhythm, gesture, song, word, corporal technique, object, context, and space-time. I analyse the various modes of infusing energies, and of coherently articulating these components with signs. The question is then to know exactly who it is in the rite that manip­ ulates these different registers, acts and gestures, most of which are of a non­ verbal expressive order, serving as a platform for transformative action. How can the overdetermined articulation of these numerous elements in the therapeutic rite remobilise the corporal functions of the patient, or reposi­ tion the initiate in relation to the principal figures in the familial saga: ances­ tors, parents, siblings, uncles and in-laws? How does the rite deploy corporal and psychic forces or energies? Does it bring about an emotional investment on the part of the participants, uniting them in a common effort towards some therapeutic end? How do such rites revitalise the group and its lifeuniverse?

From m eaning p rod u ction to the play o f fo rces an d energies Ritual creativity appropriates for its action places and occasions that could hardly be called spectacular or theatrical. It materialises from behind the scenes of, and out of step with, everyday activities. It emerges in privileged moments of emotion, decision, crisis and affliction. Following my fieldwork, I devoted myself to trace the efficacy of palaver, divinatory oracle and rite with the aid of linguistic and cognitive theories of both the performative speech act and figures of meaning-production: metonymy and metaphor. Later, as a praxiology of the body became more explicit, I took some distance from the linguistic model and that approach which holds language to be a primary text imposing its structure (syntactic and semantic) on other narrat­ ive or discourse, such as kinship, matrimonial exchange, economic activit­ ies, and rites. Indeed, it is my view that Yaka ritual practices, in particular the rites of affliction, are hardly mediated by speech and denotative repres­ entation and that they are not to be conceptualised in the manner of texts or textually-configured meaning. As a creative and metaphoric act, the rite refers first of all to preconscious corporal inclinations or habitus, rather than to the order of concepts. Speech in the course of a rite is rather rare and when it does occur it is usually in the form of a coded and archaic invocation or conjuration. Ritual activity, in a culture of oracy, does not present itself in the form of a text or scenario exposed to the eye of an author, critical reader, producer, performer or a public. Yaka ritual knows no historical authors nor spectators in the proper sense of those terms. The rite is creative agent and fundamentally auto-implicating. Through drama, the rite brings participants to recreate for themselves a presence in

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the world and an interactive field whose aim is to fill the significative and energetic rupture or void from which they suffer. Yaka rite not only holds free reign to semantic creativity but also articulates and projects identities and relations which either have not previously been present or only exist in obsolete modes. As I am able to gradually uncover the creative capacities of rite, I distance myself from Victor Turner (1 9 7 4 ,1 9 8 2 ) seeing ritual as mere theatrics or dramaturgical expression. Theatric drama offers a discursive form of representation within the theatric space by re-enacting, for a casual public, a world of conventional, or largely shared, emotions, experiences and cultural significations. By contrast, the rite in its very core is creative. Its composition resembles the process of gestation of an individual or commun­ ity at the very center of the initiate’s life-world, like a womb, drawing its latent potencies from the daily life scene. Rite thus enables patients and initi­ ates to renew their kinship bonds and to reshape their mode of being and their relation to the group and world. Rite is propelled by forces or energies arising from the interior of the body, from the emotions and from the ima­ ginary order. Having set off an elan of creativity abounding in metaphor, the ritual phase, strictly speaking, gives way to everyday gestures and the more formal discourse of those responsible for familial affairs. They configure the space-time register of ritual creativity in line with social demands and the contingent needs of the group and its members.

B odily sym bolism Bodily habits, sensations and affects are, like the imaginary order, a major source of interaction between body, group and world. Phenomenologists such as Buytendijk (1964),'M erleau-Ponty (1945, 1964) and Van Den Berg (1959, 1961) have helped me to perceive the mutual belonging of body, meaning and being. Indeed, the instruments of cultural organisation (values, religion and cultural identity modeled after one’s genealogy or gender iden­ tity) maintain their grip on interpersonal behaviour— between siblings or between children and parents, maternal uncles or grandparents, for ex­ ample— precisely by means of bodily functions and habits. The body both exposes itself to and manipulates the influence of the group and its culture at the level of its biological instruments of organisation, that is, skin, senses, and any activities involving the orifices and bodily movements. Culture inscribes its marks in the body of the individual through the processes of name-giving and the child’s familial apprenticeship in the orificial functions: eating, excretion, hygiene, sexual reproduction, and also hearing, smelling, seeing and speaking. Further, culture attaches particular value to the bound­ aries of the body through bodily etiquette and lifestyle, as can be noted, for

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example, in bodily care, circumcision, decoration, tattooing, dress, control of impulses, table and bedroom manners, rules of modesty, and fashioning of anatomy and aesthetic models by ritual practices, etiquette or prevailing taste. The body is also marked by lineage-belonging and descent, by way of pro­ cedures which include giving the newborn the name of a lineage forebear (whilst transmitting the first article of clothing to the baby); the particular dialect spoken within the family; food taboos; typical emotional expres­ sions; and certain postures or techniques of clothing and modeling the suck­ ling’s body. Other cultural factors are certainly at work in sensations, perception and expectations, and in emotive reactions as well. They further determine even symptoms which are to some extent inherited or prefigured by the familial context: one thinks of, for example, the mechanism of descent or filiation as it operates through the forename bequeathed by the agnatic or uterine ancestor on the descendant, or of the encouragement of some particu­ lar behaviour because it evokes the memory of an ancestor. Symbolic debts and other familial projects or unconscious fantasies can be transmitted in this way, thus determining the professional choice, gestural patterns, corporal bearing, a decision to emigrate or a predestined affliction of a member of the group. Inversely, Yaka mourning rites (ch. 5) disinvest the corpse of all socio­ political tokens and any hereditary marks that might be transmitted (the lin­ eage name or regalia, for example) or, on the other hand, those that might have a negative influence on the descendants (one thinks of any curses the deceased could have pronounced, or of any of his inimical traits). Paradoxically, the more I learn of the culture of oracy (without writing), the more I become interested in that which precedes, accompanies or sur­ passes representational communication through the spoken word. During my stay in Kwaango, I sensed (without at that time being able to formulate it more theoretically) the great extent to which, in this culture of oracy, the body offered a privileged space for the depiction and modeling of lived experience. Here the body gives itself as source, stage and actor com­ bined, of numerous multisensory experiences and significations. In such a culture, speech derives as much from the order of pleasure as it does from creative improvisation (bricolage, in the Levi-Straussian sense of the term) with the materials at hand. Familial patriarchs themselves describe the art of the palaver by stating, at the beginning of an assembly: “We are here to pro­ duce things (that is, a new social reality) with words” (thunaha muyidika maambu\ cf. N ’soko 1997), whether that be to punish some misdemeanour, to resolve a land dispute, or to establish the succession of a lineage or chieftancy. Concretely speaking, in order to legislate on some offence or power

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dispute, the palaver takes place at the centre of the inhabited space and can last many hours. It weaves, as it were, a cloth of superabundant metaphors. The public rhythms progress with choruses of key passages and the clapping of hands. The patriarch who throws out a metaphor embellishes it either with a melody or refrain that is taken up by the crowd, or with a short story presented in the form of a brief drama. The theatrical staging and the evoc­ ative effect of the intertwined metaphors enable the palaver to establish a space-time related to that of dream traversed by desire. Dramatising the issue at stake enables the group to circumvent certain taboos and openly address important, otherwise sensitive, questions, and to modify or reconfigure cul­ tural significations, such as the norms governing relations between members of the group. A brief example follows. A begins with the metaphor: “When the crocodile emerges from the water it goes to lie on the island.” B continues with: “Ah, the stretched-out crocodile exposes its withered penis.” C responds: “The common man finds shelter against the sun and the rain in the forest.” The metaphors relating to crocodile, rain and sun denote how the aggressive strength of the male— whether family head, priest or regional or dynastic chief— is domesticated and confined by the order of the village. Metaphors evoke both a primordial order and a political field exempt from manipulation. In the course of a palaver, each metaphor may reoccur three or four times. Each time the response amplifies the meaning of the whole procedure, thus enabling the weaving, as it were, of various figures from the same threads. To bring the palaver to an end is equivalent to “cutting the issue” (-zeenga n-kanu 3) in the manner that one lifts the raffia cloth from the loom. In a culture of oracy, formal and symbolic speech, just as in the symbolic act, performs or makes something. Like ritual, palaver between patriarchs or among family, while channeling affects of the body and energies of the collective imaginary order, leads to the production of a metaphoricallydimensioned meaning rather than to a discursive text or to argumentative interpretation. To speak with authority or in the context of palaver or rite has its own finality, whereas in a culture of writing, speech consists of recounting an experience in an instrumental and reflective fashion, that is, in the manner of writing: text narrates an experience or point of view modeled on the available representational, if not literary, configurations. As Yaka cul­ ture has no writing, no mirrors, nor photographic or audiovisual records, discourse here is less oriented to representation or to cognitive discourse.

3

The hyphen replaces the prefix ku-, wu- of the infinitives which are indicated in the text without their prefix.

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In contrast to cultures of the written word, oracy does not lead to repres­ entational conceptualisation, that is, to the insertion of a project, intention or scenario of an objective, representational, nature between the lived ex­ perience and speech. Moreover, it is the mode of speech— who speaks to whom, when, in what way, in which order— rather than the objective informative content which is important and, if necessary, is subject to sanc­ tion. Instead of simply comprising an exchange of information, the word weaves a field of life. An ill-placed, offensive, overly excited or choleric utterance is in fact a symptom of derangement. On the other hand, palaver and rite deploy metaphoric figurations in order to reconstitute or enlarge the fabric of sensations, images, and common aspirations and values. In a culture of oracy, the spoken word is less fixed to its denotation and without doubt more evocative than its written counterpart: it spontaneously surrounds itself with gestures and condensed drama capable of eliciting other dimen­ sions of meaning. In familial palaver, living speech lends itself to brief forays into the imaginary realm and dream. In the Yaka imaginary order, this is the place of the forest and the spirits. Palaver provides opportunities to relive a surprise, a chance meeting, a game, an ambition, a sorrow, the loss of an object, a disappointing hunt. In metaphor, speech is charged with bodily affects and evokes fields of psychic energy and cosmic marvel. Men rarely resort to referential conceptual speech while they are busy at their wicker­ work, constructing huts, or when retelling the exploits of the hunt. During such encounters, the word and dramatic play recreate an event, an interac­ tion and circumstances such as the element of surprise, all the while assuring the listener’s active involvement. Cultic therapies allow only a limited place for speech, whether discursive or argumentative. The patient is reluctant to verbalise his or her experience in representational or conceptual terms. For his part, the healer is unable to explain to an anthropologist what he has done in a session not more than a fortnight after the event, in the absence of the interactional and initiatic context of the rite. It was often necessary to return to the site, reproduce a similar ambiance and redo certain gestures before the healer was able to provide any valid details. Neither narration nor representation are predominant in therapy, but the intertwining of bodily practice, meaning, psychic energy and the imaginary order, that is, the ‘interanimation’ between body, group and world. The notion of identity among the Yaka suggests a structure of knots, a woven fabric. The personal­ ity develops along the interior/exterior axis and at the level of the loci of interiorisation and vital energy such as hearing, speech and heart. The skin plays a particularly important role in any form of auto-perception. The body is always a participant, and emotion and meaning are experienced as much

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on behalf of others as they are for oneself, and, as always, within a concrete relation with one’s life-world. Just as the culture of oracy is not based on script, the living practices of palaver and rite cannot be said to ‘stage’ events or intentionally create a dra­ matic presentation for an audience of onlookers. Nor does a culture of oracy tend to represent events in a linear development in the fashion of writing. It rarely attempts to explain events in terms of temporal succession or of an evolutionary historicity. Like ritual, the palaver may be said to be self-gener­ ative; participants are involved in an endeavour of re-creation, not as indi­ vidual agents, but as co-actors in the process of weaving that fabric which binds the body, the group and the world together. Rite and palaver articulate a straddling of cyclical time with the one of the founding events responsible for the society and its culture, a foundational instance of origination beyond the history of the group. Mourning rites have inspired an hypothesis o f the three bodies (physical, social, cosmic) in resonance that I have been able to apply to other fields of Yaka society and culture. The human body is the source and stage of symbolisation and interanimation. The body is in effect a microcosm where the world, the group and corporal experience together develop a certain conson­ ance or reverberation (or, on the contrary, dissonance) between the phys­ ical, social (the group) and the cosmic (the life-world) bodies. Much of my attention has been focused on the channels through which the culture acts on the corporal experience of illness. The body and the imaginary order— rather than text or discourse— constitute a primary source of ritual creativity and the stage of symbolisation. Bodily orifices, for example, are the loci of giving and receiving or linking and delinking between parent and child, man and woman, or inside and outside, much in the way of doors or other open­ ings, both internal or external, of a house. For a Yaka individual, the center of gravity is situated at the level of the skin due to its capacities of sensorial and sexual contact and therefore of interfacing or exchanging with others and the world. To simplify things, let us say that the ritual domain functions as a matrix, like the maternal womb, of the social and cultural order in a process of per­ petual regeneration. Correspondingly, the older men may be compared to the eye and the mouth of this sociocultural order, that is, as the authoritarian watching over and gaining clairvoyant insights into the group insofar as they monopolise authoritative speech and govern the community and its lifespace from the centre of the village. By daytime, the male patriarchs exercise this authority through the exchange of palm wine or other products of the hunt or labour, palaver, jurisdiction and political rites.

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The initiatic rite— the rite par excellence — is much inspired by the circum­ vention of this gerontocratic discourse. Just as the individual or collective imaginary order is an important source of rite, the latter traces it in the spacetime of origins which escapes the order of normative, patriarchal or diurnal discourse occurring at the centre of the village. And yet the rite is a con­ densed realisation of the foundations and fundamental activities of life. The rite re-enacts the origins, the arrival of the first people, the invention of fire and cooking, the establishment of rules of commensality and marriage, descent and hierarchy. Like rite, the foundations of this social and cultural order are not first enunciated in myth. The fundamental inspiration and final reference of Yaka rite derives rather from the order of the body and the mother, that is, from the interplay and exchange between the body and the imaginary order. Rite articulates itself in the margins of the established soci­ ety and in an intermediary, uterine and androgynous, space-time. In the Yaka context, the initiatic hut is a matrix, and seclusion follows androgynous selfgeneration, and involves a fetal condition, that is, a gestation or brooding process. Initiatic healing is organised at the boundaries of established society, usually at some distance from daily life. Such rites somehow re-enact the birth of the initiate into physical and social life. The rite reconfigures or remodels in the initiate’s body his different capacities for contact, envelop­ ment and sensorial exchange. It guides the individual back to the point of emergence of primary processes and re-weaves the vital bonds between mother and child, brother and sister, parent and child, and in particular between maternal uncle and his sister’s offspring. Initiation envelopes the patient in a feminine, uterine and maternal universe while simultaneously staging a concentric and cyclic space-time. The whole of this process is of an order of innovative interanimation prior to any discourse. Nor is the rite prefigured by any text or founding discourse which— in the fashion of Christian liturgy— would impose on rite its own language struc­ ture governing kinship and rules of economic and marital exchange. My thesis is, in fact, that in the culture of oracy (like of the rural Yaka, who have no writing), ritual practices are not primarily mediated by speech or founda­ tional text. Their rites therefore differ from Christian patriarchal discourse and ritual, for example, in that the latter aim to commemorate or actualise the deeds of Christ. In contrast, Yaka rites are not constituted on the basis of any script or printed text, such as the bible: they do not comprise the linear structure and static representation of alphabetic writing or narrative. As a creative, multidimensional and metaphoric practice, the Yaka performing rite primordially derives from preconscious corporal dispositions and im­ agery rather than from a representational or conceptual order. Speech is

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rarely heard in the course of ritual, and where it does occur it is most likely an invocation or a deeply encoded conjuration. In sum, the performing rite appears to me as a powerful modality of cel­ ebration and exploration of the human condition, most notably regarding man’s relation to reproduction, birth, sexual maturation, to his finitude in ill­ ness and death, or to his very transcendence of human limits through descent, work and creativity. The rite explores and reaffirms the funda­ mental elements of life such as exchange, hierarchisation, the sphere of mean­ ing and the order of Law. It mobilises forces that are very much at the level of the unconscious, namely affects, sensations and feelings embedded in passion and the body. One observes ritual creativity emerge in everyday gestures, the conviviality of sharing palm wine or the divinatory oracle just as in healing. These creative capacities have their contrasting, deviant, forms in sorcery. Rite and symbol (see the Greek term sum bolon : the putting together of the halves of a pledge token) is a mobilisation of unusual connections, charged with bodily affect or passion and meaning, between different orders of real­ ity. The principal source of Yaka rite is the human body which grows, repro­ duces and recycles it beyond death, in sum the maternal body. This is the body in child-birth, the sacrificial body, the body in the agony of death and in the process of rebirth, or rather in the process of surpassing or reproducing it through child-birth. Here we have the paradigm par excellence of the Yaka homeopathic understanding of rite which is the cornerstone of the ritual edi­ fice: spilled blood regenerates the blood of the living. In other words, when aggression or destruction is turned against itself, it can be made to recreate order.

C ulture an d the im aginary ord er My interest in the creativity and the multidimensional character of ritual practices, such as those which inspire the initiate’s mode of being and the inter subjectivity of his or her group, have led me to a certain appreciation of psychoanalysis. The elements that have most drawn me to its analytical approach are the metaphor and the discovery of a resonance between the corporal, social and cosmological fields. Indeed, in the course of initiatic seclusion, which may last several months, the patient is assimilated to the fetal condition, the state of gestation. In the process, the initiate deconstructs and recombines certain configurations of meaning, both social and interior, and thereby is able to refashion his interrelational network, affects of the body and imaginary order, in sum his or her lived body. Such a scenario, in fact, leads the initiate to pass through a sort of mutation. Thus, a psychoana­ lytic approach could join the anthropological quest in an analysis of the

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scenario and the course taken by the initiate. The combined approach focuses on the transformative capacity that the rite exercises on the participants’ social and cultural mode of being. Strictly speaking, the analysis does not concern itself with representations or facts, but with practices, bearers of signs and forces, which place people in relation to one another. The Yaka themselves view the process as one of weaving the body in interaction with the group and the world. Both anthropologist and psychoanalyst are there­ fore interested in the operation of symbolisation which contributes to fash­ ioning a new mode of being for the patient, rendering him capable of a more lucid reinsertion in the group and remodeling his presence in the world. An anthropological approach thus develops like a hermeneutic of the elabora­ tion over the course of the ritual drama. It seeks to elucidate, from inside the rite, the structure of ritual process which takes charge of both the impulses brought to expression in the course of the rite and those objects which are socially offered for libidinal investment. Seen from this angle, the anthropo­ logical perspective is closely related to a psychoanalytic approach. Psychoanalytic theory, however, poses serious problems at the interpret­ ative level. In contrast to the Freudian theory which views the maternal as something one must lose, Yaka cults aim rather to rehabilitate the maternal as a source and envelope capable both of unifying and differentiating. Drawn as it is from a patriarchal framework, Freudian psychoanalysis revolves around order, separation, deprivation or shortage and restoration. It focuses on conflict, persecution or bonds that need to be renewed or undone. Yaka thera­ peutic cults encourage the initiate to re-enact origins, to recreate an envel­ oping matrix which takes on an immediacy through sensorial exchange and the deployment of maternal signs of the imaginary order. The physical body, like its double or its exterior envelope, the seclusion hut, provide an uterus­ like environment where diverse forms of contact and sensation are re-elaborated. From the perspective of the initiatic rites, the body is a site upon which messages and events are inscribed that somehow penetrate the enveloping matrix in an attempt to produce a metamorphosis in the patient. The inter­ connecting fields of bodily affects, impulses, the imaginary order and emo­ tions are not conceptualised as directed and permeated with motives and interior resources, as in the Freudian approach; rather, body and emotion are stamped with inscriptions, liaisons charged with bodily affects and mean­ ing, and signs which mold the energies, are being provided from the outer world by sociocultural institutions and practices. My perspective certainly has its due limits. It stands to reason that the choice of a specific approach necessarily inhibits exploration of all dimen­ sions of ritual, and at the same time limits the number of aspects dealt with.

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Even if I sought to position myself within the sphere of the ritual actors, or more precisely on the inside of the ritual process, my method would not per­ mit me to define and describe the conscious life of the participants, their emotions or experiences as mediated by the rite. Nor does it allow me to identify the movements of desire that may lie behind the attribution of mean­ ing within the rite. In my search for the underlying logic of healing, my mind is taken up with the subjective accounts of various participants and the con­ tingent interaction required by the concrete context; but it is not possible for me to report all of this data. My attention is drawn, rather, to the elaboration of ritual practices and their multiple levels and fields, each of which imposes a particular, socially approved, form on desire. Although I attempt to account for the way in which ritual procedures are subject to semantic and syntactic determinants, as an anthropologist I refrain from viewing the prac­ tices to be studied as locked into a system of ideological production or rela­ tions of power. Further, I am aware that as an anthropologist, I am inclined to work primarily with those who do not exercise a power of social control of any scale. Two factors in particular have led me to raise some fundamental questions about the conditions of a psychoanalytic anthropology and about violence. There was, first, the rude shock of the 1991 popular uprisings in Kinshasa, of which I myself was a victim, and, second, my involvement over the last eight years in the field of psychoanalysis, including didactic analysis, seminars and limited psychoanalytic practice. Will we Westerners one day be capable of undoing ourselves of the cultural ascendancy and ethnocentrist assumptions underlying modernist discourse and science ideology? Will we be capable of approaching peoples of other cultures without producing a countertransfer­ ence (and here I think especially of the Congolese people once colonised by the Belgian nation to which I belong)? Although recognising the culturespecific coding (rural in origin and becoming more and more confused for the urban immigrant), is the psychoanalytic anthropologist able to put a finger on the conflict and denial due to the very modernist civilisational discourse which shapes and moralises their psychic functioning? How can one concep­ tualise, within the psychoanalytic perspective, a recalcitrance and a violence of a metaphysical order which, in annihilating almost all possibilities for authentic symbolisation and subjecthood, persecute the subject (in the proc­ esses of so-called modernisation and acculturation) until he or she is psycho­ logically destroyed? Instead of locking Yaka culture into an ethnological or ethnopsychological science that speaks ‘o f’ people, perhaps one should attempt to participate in it and thereby be enabled to unveil the subjects’ con­ flicts and blockages, in the manner of the psychoanalyst? Such conflicts

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FRO M A N T H R O P O L O G Y T O P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S

might be expected to lead people to other forms of resolution, whether into regression at the risk of becoming completely cut off from globalising modernity, or into taking a step forward towards something new and adopt­ ing different paths of adjustment within the group and in relation to the outer world.

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Chapter 2 FROM P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S TO A N T H R O P O L O G Y CLAUDE

BRODEUR

In this chapter, my aim is to offer an account of a personal evolution which, beginning with my experience in psychoanalysis, has given me a profound interest in anthropology. In the course of my scientific career, my practice and research have gradually directed my attention to the question of a collect­ ive unconscious. The analysis of a village outlined here demonstrates the methodology behind my bridging psychoanalysis and anthropology. Thus my proposition for a psycho-analytic anthropology. ITINERARY

When I need to explain my vocation as philosopher and psychoanalyst, I often recount the following:

When I was five years old, my sister and I used to play at mystery. We wrapped ourselves in the sheets, invented a dream and then told it to the other. It was a mar­ velous experience. This is only one among many anecdotes that I could tell and it does not deserve the weight of a founding event. But it does perhaps reveal my early desire to penetrate the mystery of the existence of people and things. I had long forgotten these moments of childhood enjoyment when, at the age of twenty, I took up studies in philosophy. It was quite common at the time to read Mediaeval authors and particularly Thomas Aquinas. I quickly became a ‘man of the Middle Ages’, as I sometimes say. My penchant for grand archi­ tectural constructions dates from this period: the men of this youthful era either built towering cathedrals or grandiose theological and philosophical systems. Recognising this intellectual proclivity in me, my colleagues often took me to be too rational and reproached me for putting reason before the heart or life. This is partly true. My mother often said to me when I was young and worried her with my numerous questions, “Claude, don’t think so much.” This is how, out of contradiction, I became a philosopher. Nevertheless, I undertook, from my very first moments of doing philosophy, a relentless study of Thomistic theory in the effort to introduce, in this highly theoretical universe of the essences, a new element in the composition of being. I postu­ lated an existential energy of infinite potentialities as the very principle of all

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FROM P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S TO A N T H R O P O L O G Y

being and becoming. The world of essences could then be understood to be animated by this initial and founding principle of being which penetrated it throughout. I had dared to suggest a radical revolution in Thomistic thought. Where essence was primordial, I placed existence as the source of all determinations of being. The heart of life thus recovered its primordial rapport with all forms of being. I elaborated this first intellectual adventure in my doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Its title, ambitious and naive, betrayed my youth­ ful genius: The itinerary o f the human spirit in the meeting with love at the

heart o f being (Brodeur 1959). I was not yet thirty years old. Later, once I began my psychoanalytic training, I forgot all my philosoph­ ical reflections for a time. I was solely interested in that sort of discourse which emerged, with a marked strangeness, from an unconscious that seemed to have so much to say. A new conviction took shape in my thought and an intellectual turning point had arrived. The Aristotelian and Thomist categories conveniently help us to conceive of the things of which the universe is comprised, but they represent no more than operational categories. Insofar as our knowledge of humankind in par­ ticular is concerned, they can only furnish an instrumental model. Human discourse— and especially that of the unconscious— does open up, it seemed to me, to more direct and adequate insight in the nature of humankind. Preparation of another doctoral dissertation, this time in psychology, gave me the opportunity to take up scientific research once again and to direct my thinking toward a new orientation. Man was no longer a substance com­ posed of a body and a soul for me. He became the subject of a discourse: it is, after all, through the mediation of discourse that the human subject is con­ scious of his own existence and makes him known to the other. At that moment, for reasons both personal and scientific, I embarked on a grand venture of intellectual tinkering. On the one hand, I did not want to com­ pletely abandon my philosophical research. Moreover, with Freud and authors of the 1960s, I had entered into a universe of thought totally differ­ ent than what I had known until then. Working with such disparate ideas, I was compelled to compose a new theory that would necessarily be both lo­ gical and personal at the same time. Tinkering was something I had learned when I was still young. One day, when I was about ten, my father gave me a film projector as a gift. Several films came with the machine but unfortunately these films were subtitled in English. As I could not understand them I decided that, instead of having them translated, I would write my own stories and cut up and rearrange pieces of the films accordingly. Thus, I knew from an early age how to make

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FROM P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S T O A N T H R O P O L O G Y

something new by using different materials, and how to create my own scenario, a personal theory, by reworking foreign images and concepts.

Phase 1 Even if I was from this point on to focus primarily on decoding and under­ standing the discourse of the unconscious, I took the time to retrieve a philo­ sophical conceptualisation that I reworked and inscribed in the framework of Freudian metapsychology. While exegeting one of Freud’s works, I redis­ covered, without forcing either the meaning or categories of psychoanalysis, the notions of existence and essence. Is not the psychoanalytic category regarding the impulses of the id, a category, in a different scientific register, analogous to that of existence in philosophy? In both cases we have an ener­ getic principle responsible for generating the essential determinants of being as of any formative identification of the ego. While existence corresponds to Freud’s notion regarding the impulses of the id, the essence of Thomistic philosophy corresponds to the ego. Indeed, what we have in each case is a principle of determination of the subject by means of various infantile identi­ fications for the ego, and by means of the form of being insofar as essence is concerned. One might respond that I have dragged Freud into philosophy, something which he vigorously opposed, or that I am conjuring up a philosophy that has long been outdated by the advancements of modern times. Perhaps this is so, but I believe that one must sometimes know how to do violence to the thoughts we have in order to push them to the extreme limit of their internal logic (Brodeur 1969a).

Phase 2 For my part, the last phase was an essential, though secondary, step in my itinerary. At the time, of course, I consciously desired not to let my philo­ sophical interests slip into oblivion. But I was first and foremost anxious to identify and comprehend the diverse significations of the discourse of the unconscious. At the very beginning of my psychoanalytic training a colleague told me, “Read the Interpretation o f dreams^ the rest is not important.” Even now, I believe he was right. Freud’s most essential discovery is that of the dis­ course of the unconscious, to which we gain access primarily through oniric production, the dream. This is the royal road. Like all the psychoanalysts of the first generation, I was initially interested in the symbolic composition of the unconscious: in a genetic order, the symbolism of birth and then the oral, anal and genital symbolic levels. I very quickly discovered, however, a fundamental structure in unconscious

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discourse. This was possible not only because I then worked in a scientific context dominated by the perspectives of Jacques Lacan and Claude LeviStrauss, but also because I rediscovered in this structure the basic formula of Aristotelian logic, that of enunciation. I have retold several times how a psychotic patient taught me how one comes out of psychosis and becomes the subject of one’s own discourse by placing one, as a living conscious, between life and death. After a lengthy period of working on his unconscious fantasies, this patient recounted to me a very brief but schematic dream: “An electric train passes from a point of departure to a point of arrival. From this point of arrival, a bright light returns to the point of departure following an electric wire.” In this dream one may easily distinguish three positions of the impulses’ energies: the point of departure, which extends toward a trajectory that is itself undefined; a point of arrival, which imposes a term or limit to the energies of the point of departure; and finally, the electric wire whose function is to link the impuls­ ive energy, from one end to the other and in both directions. As I noted above, I had already recognised the components of enunciation, as Aristotle identifies them, in this structure of the discourse of the unconscious. Every enunciation is indeed composed of a subject, who is gifted at birth with in­ finite possibilities; an attribute, which limits the subject to only one of these possibilities; and the verb ‘to be,’ which institutes a relation of existence between the subject and the attribute. At that time, I began to employ a new analytic method, structuralism, in my research on the discourse of the unconscious. Invented by Ferdinand de Saussure in the field of linguistics, this method had been taken up by Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, and by Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis. This permitted me to sketch what I considered to be the founding semantic struc­ ture of unconscious human thought. In the first step of my efforts to formalise these concepts, I identified this structure with an expression taken from psychoanalysis: “Id is [by] nonbeing (Qa est n’etant p a s ) ” The id appears here as a pure state of impulse; this ‘non-being’ is the ego which comes about through the representation of the non-id, that is through retrieving subjectivity by setting a limit to the impulses. In a second step, I proposed instead a mathematical expression of this statement: [+ - ]. The [+] sign depicts the discursive element bearing an infinite character; the [-] sign is its contrary, or limit; the [