Reluctant Muslims: embodied hegemony and moral resistance in a Giriama spirit possession complex

Abstract

This account of a form of spirit possession widely experienced among Giriama people of coastal Kenya challenges prevailing theories of possession as resistance. Giriama are routinely possessed by Muslim spirits which hold their bodies hostage, afflicting them with illness and vomiting until they agree to abandon their customary practices and embrace Islam. Those possessed apparently somatize a hegemonic system of oppressive meanings according to which Giriama ethnicity is essentially different from, and polluting to, Islam. Yet the same individuals who embody hegemony in this way may reflect upon their possession experience by articulating a defiant ideology of resistance against both the possessing spirit and the Muslim ethnic groups that the spirit represents. These observations thus highlight the complexity of the relationship between hegemony and the individual; they also provide a reminder that the idiom of possession does not necessarily articulate with power structures in a predictable and straightforward fashion.

A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia

“…Stanley Tambiah suggests that, in contrast to practice, which refers to invariant and formal elements of rituals, an instantiation of practice – that is, the actual performance of a ritual – is open to uncertainties, variations, and mistakes of enactment (: 115, 136). There are descriptions of faltered ritual routines (Husken ), inefficient magical acts (Luhrmann : 129‐53), failed prophecies (Festinger, Riecken & Schachter ; Kravel‐Tovi : 254), inconclusive healing séances (Lewis ), reluctance to publicly authenticate rituals (Chao ; McIntosh ; Wolf ), and failure of images to index the invisible reality (Suhr ). Semantic failure to generate meaning has been explored in ethnographies of Christianity (Engelke & Tomlinson ).…”

Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds

“…In some contexts, Muslims may seamlessly inhabit such multiple forms of self; in others, these different aspects of selfhood might stand in relations of conflict with one another McIntosh 2004;Schielke 2009aSchielke , b, 2010. Many recent works have challenged the simplistic use of the term 'being Muslim' to explain the relationship of Muslims to Islam; they have documented, rather, how Muslims inhabit and create multiple forms of personhood during the course of their everyday lives.…”

“…The moral is no less present, but this work emphasises ambivalence of everyday experience, its incoherence, and failure to live up to the ideal, where boundaries between different ways of being Muslim are not clearly defined Simon 2009). Other anthropologists have explored how Muslims negotiate conceptions of selfhood, often in situations of conflict or crisis, through experiences of spirit possession (Masquelier 2001;McIntosh 2004), encounters with Muslim 'saints' in dreams or at their tombs (Edgar 2006;, or through the experience of illness and suffering (MacPhee 2003). A prominent example is Katherine Ewing's psychoanalytically inspired discussion of the way Pakistani Muslims negotiate between multiple Islamic and non-Islamic discourses.…”

Baptismal Essentialisms

“…These phrases treat an ethnicity (Giriama) and a religion (Islam) as a contrastive pair, and in so doing presume a correspondence between particular ethnicities and particular religions. Accordingly, while some Giriama in the Malindi area convert to Islam, such transitions are sometimes regarded by other Giriama as a betrayal of their ethnicity, as a futile effort to be accepted into the Swahili community, or both (McIntosh 2004).…”