Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Ritual

Dance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:06:39 +0000

Girls dancing at the Celebrating Sanctuary Festival on London's South Bank in 2008. The festival celebrates the cultural diversty that migrants bring to the UK. Picture by Gary Knight.

Panas Karampampas

Durham University

Initially published 2 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25dance

Abstract:

Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are enacted and negotiated. This entry explores dance as both a localised embodied practice and as a globally circulating phenomenon. It begins by questioning universal definitions of dance before outlining key contributions from dance anthropology and ethno-choreology, specifically their focus on embodiment, research methods, and the limits of representation. Subsequent sections consider dance in relation to politics, and the impact of digital media in fostering global hybrid forms of dance. The final section examines staged performances and the role of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has further institutionalised dance by recognising it as a ‘living heritage’. Together, these sections illustrate that dance operates simultaneously as practice, symbol, and political artefact—what might be called its ‘multiple existences’—and explores why understanding these layers is essential across disciplines. As a dynamic and fluid practice, dance remains a vital subject of anthropological inquiry, revealing complex interactions between tradition, innovation, and socio-political power.

Introduction

Defining dance in anthropology is a challenge, since it does not always exist as a clear-cut category as such for the people we study. Speaking of ‘dance’ therefore risks profoundly misinterpreting the activities we try to analyse and the social contexts where they occur. For example, for the sixteenth century Mixtec people of Jamiltepec, in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, no single term for ‘dance’ existed. Instead, the word yaa simultaneously referred to dance, games, and music, which were always performed together and not experienced as distinct or separate (Stanford 1966, 103). Likewise, in classical Greece, the term ‘ὄρχησις’ referred to the inseparable triad of music, song, and bodily movement—much as in many contemporary Greek folk dance practices. Again, ‘dance’ did not exist here as a meaningful stand-alone concept (Zografou 2003). The same point applies for the all-night yamɨn siria ceremony of Papua New Guinea’s Ambonwari people. Held in people’s private houses on celebratory occasions, it combines song and dance with storytelling and bodily decoration, elements that are closely connected to the natural environment and the spirit world. Yamɨn siria is not just a dance, but a holistic ritual that reflects an entire cosmology, reproduces the cultural memory of participants and their ancestors, provides young people with a chance to flirt, and can serve as an opportunity to settle old disputes (Telban 2017). In Arabic, several terms that describe movement and rhythmic expression also do not correspond precisely to the English notion of ‘dance’. Raqs (رَقص) broadly denotes Arabic dancing—often referred to colloquially as ‘belly dance’; dabke (دبكة) designates collective line dancing that embodies social cohesion; and samāʿ (سماع) refers to musical listening and rhythmic bodily movement within Sufi ritual (Rowe 2010, 11–3).

All that said, conceptual clarity can be useful so long as it speaks to the perspectives of the people we study. A fairly encompassing definition of dance considers it to be a practice composed of purposeful, often intentionally rhythmical, and socially patterned sequences of nonverbal body movement (Hanna 1979, 316). This movement is generally considered distinct from ordinary motor activities. It involves time, space, and effort, relies on both individual choice and social learning, and possesses inherent and aesthetic value. Specific criteria tend to determine what is appropriate in each context and what may distinguish the competency of dance practitioners as perceived by their society. Finally, such movement should be recognised as dance by its practitioners and—if an audience is present—by the audience members of the practitioner’s social group.

Understood in these terms, dance can be a powerful social instrument. Often much more than mere entertainment or artistic expression, it physically manifests identity, tradition, and a sense of belonging, while also reflecting and contesting social norms (Desmond 1997a; Kealiinohomoku 1970). Various academic disciplines, from psychology to performance studies, have explored dance from multiple angles, analysing its aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. They have shown that politicians and media often harness dance as a symbol of national identity, and sometimes as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Anthropology brings a unique focus to the study of dance’s social implications and cultural contexts (Buckland 1999), in part because it tends to delve deeper into the meanings and power relations embedded in dance practices (Spencer 1985).

From the early twentieth century onward, dance has attracted the interest of influential anthropologists, including Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1928), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Franz Boas (1927), Margaret Mead (1928) and Gregory Bateson (Mead and Bateson 1952). For these early writers, the documentation and analysis of Indigenous people’s dance was integral to understanding their social structures. As part of ritual, dance was primarily seen as contributing to social cohesion, essential for maintaining social bonds. Evans-Pritchard, for example, argued that that the gbere buda or ‘beer dance’ of the twentieth century Azande people, in what are now the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, allowed for moderate, discreet, and therefore harmless kinds of flirting and sexual play. Thereby, Evans-Pritchard argued, the dance protected the institutions of Azande marriage and the family (1928, 458). Early anthropological studies also emphasised the importance of dance for transmitting cultural knowledge. For example, according to Mead, dance interrupted the otherwise rigorous subordination of Samoan children during the early twentieth century to the social hierarchy they grew up in. Dance allowed them greater degrees of attention and freedom than they were habitually used to. It equally permitted the expression and cultivation of children’s individuality in ‘a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibitionism’ as Mead put it (1928, 118).

Early anthropological studies were equally fascinated by the ways in which ritual dance reflects and shapes people’s spiritual lives, serving as a powerful medium through which people express their cosmologies and influence spirits. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the Kwakiutl of North America used dance to attract life-giving spirits, to tame them, and to receive gifts of supernatural powers from them. As part of the ritual known as the ‘winter ceremonial’, Kwakiutl families came together and danced wearing masks that emulated and personated different spirits, tracing their family histories back to mythical times and supernatural events (Boas and Hunt 1897).

For many Indigenous peoples, ritual dance has remained central until today, as it remains part of ceremonies marking life events, seasonal transitions, and collective identity. The nomadic Wodaabe of West Africa, for example, engage in a series of dance and performance rituals throughout the year, one of which, called the yaake, comprises a beauty contest in which women chose the most beautiful male performer. The young men stand in a long line, facing the sunset, and dance by moving especially their feet and spinal column. Accentuated movements of the face highlight the whiteness of their eyes and teeth, all while being overlooked by Wodaabe women. It has been argued that in this case this dance not only expresses male pride or allows the men and women to flirt, but that it also distinguishes the Wodaabe from the more sedentary Fulani people who live in the same region. It renders the Wodaabe recognisably ‘exotic’ to the people of Niger, and to Westerners who are only superficially aware of their life circumstances. By internalising and cultivating their reputation of being ‘exotic’, Wodaabe dancing contributes to a sense of ‘cultural archaism’, which is but one of several elements of their collective survival strategies (Bovin in Hughes-Freeland & Crain 1998).

Anthropology’s early focus on the ritual contexts of dance laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with dance, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. During this time, the subfield of dance anthropology (or the ‘anthropology of dance’ as it was called in the US) emerged, establishing a dialogue between dance studies and anthropology (Kurath 1960; Kealiinohomoku 1970). As part of a new comprehensive approach to dance, anthropologists and dance scholars synthesised methodologies and theoretical approaches, and began to study dance as a social phenomenon everywhere. They drew on examples from large and small-scale populations, as well as ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ groups.

In this way, they challenged prevailing Eurocentric views, which had, for example, considered ballet as the pinnacle of dance forms and as distinct from folk or ethnic dances. A ground-breaking study viewed ballet through the same anthropological lens as any other dance tradition (Kealiinohomoku 1970). It questioned the perception of ballet as a universal standard against which other dance forms were to be measured. The study recognised that ballet was conventionally celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and technical precision, having evolved from court entertainment to a professionalised art form: an ethnic dance of the West, rooted in the court cultures of Renaissance Italy and France. Political power, social hierarchies, and the spread of European colonialism had all shaped what ballet was and needed to be accounted for as ballet continues to express and reinforce the values and aesthetics of its cultural origins.

Examining ballet as an ethnic dance opened the door to a more egalitarian approach to dance studies overall, which values all dance traditions equally and appreciates their cultural significance (Kealiinohomoku 1970). Such studies and approaches suggested a more inclusive understanding of dance that recognises it in all its forms as ultimately culturally and ethnically rooted, whilst also arguing for the value of often-marginalised non-European dance traditions. Importantly, these authors called for more first-hand observation and participation in dance as part of fieldwork (Kurath 1960). Furthermore, discussions emerged that focused on how dance traditions change over time through incorporating elements from different trends that migrants carried into diverse new contexts. In line with the cultural relativism that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists began to show that dance is often hybridised, constantly changing and blurring boundaries of traditions that had previously been considered fixed. For example, Latin American tango emerged from the fusion of African rhythms, European couple dances, and local criollo musical forms, later becoming reinterpreted through global circulation (Savigliano 1995, 10–5).

Anthropology of dance and ethno-choreology

The anthropology of dance has a close relative, called ‘ethno-choreology’ (sometimes called ‘dance ethnology’). While these fields of study often overlap, they have different starting points, methods, and theories (Kaeppler 1991, 13). Dance anthropology has a tendency to be more ‘interested in socially constructed movement systems, the activities that generate them, how and by whom they are judged, and how they can assist in understanding society’ (Kaeppler 2000, 120). A prime example is the ethnography on lakalaka performances, which are danced and sung throughout the islands of the Tonga archipelago in the South Pacific. Performed at royal weddings, royal birthday celebrations, and coronation ceremonies since the late nineteenth century, the lakalaka is not merely a form of aesthetic expression but also serves to enact and legitimise social hierarchy and political authority. It involves singing poetry which, together with choreographed movements, elevates the monarch and chiefs, linking royal and chiefly power within the broader Tongan cosmology (Kaeppler 2006, 40–1). These performances illustrate the social origins of movement systems, and their role for the broader organisation of society, as they help negotiate rank, genealogy, and political power. Rather than analysing the choreography in isolation, dance anthropology situates it within the Tongan system of social stratification, showing how dance both reflects and reinforces societal structures (Kaeppler 1993). In contrast, ethno-choreologists often focus more closely on dance content, while the cultural context serves primarily to illuminate the dance itself (Grau 1993, 21). For example, Andriy Nahachewsky (2011) examines the movement vocabulary, structural patterns, and stylistic variants of Ukrainian folk dances, drawing on ethnographic context chiefly to clarify regional distinctions and historical layering.

Dance anthropology and ethno-choreology also sometimes differ in how they think about the dancers’ bodies. Dance anthropology has come to question the idea of a natural or archetypal dancer’s body, foregrounding instead the body’s culturally and socially constructed aspects (Grau 1993, 21). Ethno-choreologists, on the other hand, tend to consider the dancer’s body more as a given; an instrument moving in time and space that is largely separate from the dancer’s mind or sociocultural ideas about it. This makes ethno-choreology particularly interesting for dancers and choreographers who are constantly attempting to improve upon existing forms of dance, as well as for folklorists, interested in the preservation of existing cultural practices.

In short, dance anthropologists are ‘not simply to understand dance in its cultural context, but rather to understand society through analysing movement systems’ (Grau 1993, 21), while ethno-choreologists study the dance itself and its changes over time with its cultural context more in the background (Kaeppler 1991, 16–7). Despite these differences, the fields have increasingly converged over time, particularly since the 1990s when both embraced a more holistic view of dance. Both disciplines now recognise that dance is not just interesting as a physical movement but also that it matters as a cultural text that can convey complex meanings and serve various social functions (Rakočević 2020). This shared perspective has led to greater interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling folklorists and cultural critics to employ similar methodologies and theories with the goal of exploring the multifaceted nature of dance.

A relatively recent study of folk dance in Romania, for example, demonstrates the value of combining dance anthropological and ethno-choreological approaches (Giurchescu 2001). Anca Giurchescu examines 45 years of cultural policy in socialist Romania to show how traditional dance, such as in the century-old Romanian Căluș ritual, has changed in connection to its socio-political context. Over time, Romanian traditional dance has turned from a ritual that shapes the daily lives of participants to a more restricted and staged form of folklore, mostly organised and watched rather than practiced. While it continues to be danced on important social events, such as weddings or family gatherings, it is now mostly passively consumed. As a form of folklore, traditional dance always runs the risk of being used for political ends, as in late-stage Romanian Communism, when song and dance were employed to conceal the country’s socio-political contradictions, obscuring diversity while highlighting a singular national narrative. According to the author, studying dance requires examining the philosophical, ideological, socio-political, economic, and cultural systems of a given society, as well as the internal structure of the dance itself. Only through this holistic approach can dance, its social context, and its practice be illuminated simultaneously (Giurchescu 2001, 109).

Dance as elusive and embodied practice

The ephemeral and elusive nature of dance renders participant observation particularly difficult. Dance only fully exists in the moment of performance, making it hard to capture and document. Its transience arises from several factors. Movement notation systems, while developed in order to record dance, are complex and require demanding training. Moreover, describing sound and movement (as well as speech and song in some cases) all at once can often be challenging. Simply filming dance and focusing on its visual aspects does not capture the whole experience as it ignores too many other sensorial dimensions of dance. Dancer’s experiences are deeply kinaesthetic (i.e. relating to their bodily awareness), combining the visual, tactile, and auditory (Bull 1997, 269). Such embodied experience is hard to put into words, so dancers’ verbal accounts of their practices often differ from their actual behaviour. All these issues raise the problem that dance experiences may be sensible to the performers without also being intelligible for others (Bull 1997, 269).

These methodological difficulties raise an ever-prevalent question for ethnographic researchers of dance: Should the ethnographer have practiced or be trained in dance, or is this not a requirement for a deep understanding of it? The people we study may think that dancing is essential if one wants to truly understand it. Members of professional dance companies, for example, have been shown to hold that experience in ballet is an asset to make sense of it (Wulff 1998). In fact, classical dancers are frequently of the opinion that ‘you have to do it in order to understand what it’s like’ (Wulff 1998, 8). Given that dance is a mostly non-verbal activity that requires a high degree of precision and proficiency, having some embodied experience of it allows for insights which are challenging to acquire by other means (Wulff 1998, 10-1). Thus, dance ethnographies often achieve a remarkable level of understanding by relying on the fieldworker's body as a means to attain cultural knowledge. The researcher's immersion in sonic events and movement—their awareness of and participation in sound and dance—induces bodily responses that render fieldwork as a profoundly visceral experience. Thereby, important questions can be raised and put into perspective, such as what the role of tacit knowledge in dance may be, how feelings of unity and community are created and altered by dance, or how dancers conceive of pain and endurance (c.f. Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017, 3, 10-2).

Physical participation in dance also shows how ‘movement combines felt bodily experience and the culturally based organisation of that experience into cognitive patterns’ (Sklar 2001, 4). It teaches us that ‘ways of moving are ways of thinking’ (Sklar 2001, 4). For example, for young members of the Greek goth scene in Athens in 2010, dance was an important part of their lives. Goth clubs and goth nights allowed them to link their daily style and ways of living, which often emphasised the fleeting nature of life and the futility of human striving, to dance. Several of them thus danced in ways that involved irony, self-irony, and sarcasm. On the dance floor they recited the lyrics of songs that expressed their disappointment with humanity, expressed anger at their own illness and mortality through stomping movements, or mocked traditional Greek dances in a refutation of Greek national values (Karampampas 2017).

Even when the researcher does not have prior dance experience, it is possible to learn dance in the field, as has been done for other somatic ethnographies that focused on boxing (Wacquant 2004) or Aikido (Kohn 2001). Particularly interesting are the times that the researcher will have to dance with their interlocutors. These moments allow the researcher to demonstrate whether and how they have embodied local dances and how precisely they understand the local movement idioms (Pateraki and Karampampas 2014, 156).

The deeply embodied nature of dance also highlights its role in shaping and experiencing gender, sexuality, and identity (Cowan 1990, Foster 1996). Dance practices often reflect and reinforce gender roles and expectations, but they can also provide spaces for exploring and contesting these norms (Allen 2022, 3–7 and 140–50). For example, Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (2004) has studied a group of middle-class women who form an all-female ‘company of friends’ (parea) near a Greek provincial town that the author calls ‘Kallipolis’. Once initiated to their ‘company’, the women spend time with and support one another, and they engage in same-sex relationships. One way in which they perform gender is through dance, notably the belly-dance tsifteteli, associated with femininity and desire, and the powerful, masculine dance called zeimbekiko. Dance and flirtation enable the women to create intimate relationships, which may be interpreted by people outside of their group as merely playful heterosexual friendships (Kirtsoglou 2004). Dancing thus allows them to negotiate, reveal, and conceal their identities, challenging and reconfiguring the meanings attached to their bodies within their specific cultural context.

The embodied nature of dance also lends itself to exploring how cultural and political meanings are represented, felt, and lived through the body. White competitive Latin dancers may use a fake tan to represent Latinness in the context of the predominantly white dancing culture and sport. In another context, practitioners of Javanese court dances are held to embody an element of national identity that is actively passed on to younger generations and made visible in performances for tourists (Kringelbach & Skinner 2012, 11). Thus, dance frequently turns out to be a site of negotiation where dancers can both conform to and resist social norms (Cowan 1990; Fraleigh 2004). It has, for example, been argued that the bodies of classical ballet dancers can be read as affirming a Western marginalisation of women’s bodies in general. According to sociologist Janet Wolff, ballet dancers preserve a ‘classical body’, emphasising boyish petiteness, clear lines, weightlessness and ethereal presence, ideals that stand in clear tension with most real feminine corporeality (Wolff 1997, 95). This tension is also revealed in roles for women, who in classical dance often depict ‘a strangely disembodied female’ (Wolff 1997, 95).

Deeply embodied activity, such as dance, also lends itself to the expression and transmission of embodied collective memory. Thus, dance is frequently part of spirit possessions among the Songhay people of Nigeria and Mali. The Songhay pantheon is divided into six spirit families, each of which represents a specific historical period. Some stand in for Muslim clerics, commemorating the fifteenth century institutionalisation of Islam in the area, while others are Hausa spirits that entered the Songhay pantheon in the early twentieth century as part of a large migration of Hausa-speaking people to Songhay territory. Spirit possession, which involves dance, thus partially enacts Songhay history, including the ravages of nature, such as when the choreography involved in a possession recounts the movement of spirits ‘from water to heaven and back to Earth’ (Stoller 1994, 642).

In sum, dance is not simply a sequence of movements but is also an embodied system of cultural meanings and knowledge. The meanings of dance are not always explicit, and may be tacit, intuitive, and difficult to articulate verbally. Researchers need to be aware that their own cultural background and experiences may shape their interpretations of dance. It is important for them to be reflexive, considering their own positionality and biases, and it is frequently an asset if, as part of dance research, they dance themselves.

Politics, resistance, and dancing beyond borders

Beyond its artistic or cultural expression, dance is a potent form of political discourse and resistance. The intricate relationship between dance and politics has been extensively analysed, revealing how dance movements and performances can reflect, contest, and sometimes transform political realities (Shay 2002).

Dance frequently intersects with political power in the realm of national identity and statecraft. Dances are often promoted and institutionalised through state-sponsored performances, festivals, and education programs. They may serve to foster national unity, constitute emblematic representations of a nation’s cultural heritage that justifies national sovereignty, or simply project power both internally and on the international stage (Reed 1998). For example, in constructing and legitimising national identity in the modern Greek state, officially established in 1832, ancient Greek statues and monuments were used to associate the state with ancient Greek glory. In this process, folk traditions such as dances and songs were used to bridge the substantive gap between ancient and modern Greek identity, including serving as official ‘proofs’ of the ‘cultural continuity’ between the two (Karampampas 2021, 655). Until today, the so-called ‘Greek traditional dances’ are part of the country’s primary and secondary education curriculum, aiming to demonstrate the coherence of Greek populations by teaching a selection of dances that is meant to represent all the country’s regions (Karampampas 2021, 655). Importantly, this curriculum has excluded dances from the unrecognised Slavic-speaking Greek minority, marginalising some kinds of dance as it foregrounds others (Pateraki 2024; see also Manos 2003 on the minority politics of dance). In addition, some previously Greek dances are today danced beyond national borders and may be called ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’, due to the shared past of these countries during the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, ‘Greek dances’ to music that shares melodies with that of the Cappadocia region of what is now Turkey are performed as far as in the city of Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi where the Muslim minority of Hui people (回族) dances them (personal observation).

In addition to creating national identity, Jane Cowan (1990) provides us with an example of how dance can stand in for European modernity. As part of studying dance in the Northern Greek town of Sohos in the early 1980s, Cowan noticed that formal ‘evening-dances’ (horoesperidha) were regularly organised on the weekends by local civic associations such as political parties or business associations. Rather than celebrating kinship, belonging, or church affiliation, these dance events were meant to promote civic solidarity and the common good, while also fostering the wealth, reputation, and political standing of the associations that sponsored them (Cowan 1990, 134–70). To achieve these goals, the usual opportunities for competitive male dance and folklore were foreclosed, and European symbols and practices were adopted instead, including dancing ‘European dances’ like the waltz, the foxtrot, and the tango, and wearing modern apparel rather than traditional clothing. These evening-dances linked the civic associations to the West, which had long politically and culturally dominated Greece, and stood in for modernity.

National and international understandings of dance can often greatly influence one another. As mentioned above, tango, for example, originally developed in the late nineteenth century around the Río de la Plata that separates Argentina and Uruguay. It fused African rhythms, recreated by former slaves, with music of Spanish descendants born in the Americas (criollos), and with European influences brought by mostly Spanish and Italian migrants. As such, it can be seen as a dance of exiles (Savigliano 1995, xiv). However, tango soon developed into a system of seemingly ‘exotic’ Argentinian identity, considered wild, untamed, and passionate by the colonial and imperial powers of Argentina and Uruguay. As part of a global ‘political economy of passion’ that included tango records, handbooks, films, and fashion, foreigners appropriated the dance throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, London, and New York, and all the way to Japan. Tango underwent an even more widespread revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that it also became Argentina’s national dance can only be made sense of when considering the interplay between Europe’s former Latin American colonies and ongoing Western imperialism. Western countries were eager to consume exoticised forms of dance that ultimately legitimated their own perceived superiority. Once consumed abroad, the exoticised dance could be re-appropriated by national elites as an appropriate marker of national identity (Savigliano 1995, 138).

However, dance can also serve as a site of resistance against colonial or oppressive regimes, providing a means through which marginalised communities assert their own identity and sovereignty. The Irish dance revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, was closely tied to broader nationalist movements seeking to affirm Irish identity in the face of British rule (O’Connor 2013; Wulff 2007). The Gaelic League and other cultural organisations promoted step dancing and céilí dancing as emblematic expressions of an authentically Irish way of life, in contrast to what they saw as British cultural dominance. Standardised competitions, codified techniques, and public performances all became tools for mobilising dance as a marker of national unity and cultural distinctiveness.

Similarly, dance has played a key role in the expression of Palestinian national identity, serving as a form of cultural resistance against European colonial imperialism as well as Israeli occupation and Islamic reform movements (Rowe 2010). Nicholas Rowe, who lived in Ramallah between 2000 and 2008 and worked with local dance groups in refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, raises the question of whether dance can be represented without highlighting the extreme political circumstances in which it takes place. He shows that Palestinian dance productions become impossible as choreographers and their family members are killed, curfews and roadblocks make movement impossible, and dance venues are vandalised and destroyed (Rowe 2010, 189). Yet even under these difficult circumstances, dance may continue, not least to express individual and collective trauma (Rowe 2010). In a similar vein, the resurgence of Indigenous dances in the Americas is not only a revival of cultural practices but also a statement of resistance against colonial erasure and a declaration of sovereignty (Prichard 2022).

Of course, the political affordances of dance go beyond traditional party or state politics. An example of this is the critical role that dance plays in creating a queer Latino/a public in the United States. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the US Latino/a population quickly gained public visibility, dance (along with other forms of performance) was crucial to enable queer Latinos/as to equally claim spaces that allowed them to live publicly. Their increase in social rights was partially enabled by queer Latino/a cultural production, which had in the 1990s permeated the mainstream American queer culture in the form of Latin rhythms and choreographies (Rivera-Servera 2012, 15). Queer Latino/as’ ability to dance eloquently to Latin rhythms helped shift the power dynamics of the dance floor of the clubs they frequented. Their dance skills can thus be understood as ‘choreographies of resistance’—as embodied practices through which minoritarian subjects claim space in social and cultural realms, such as the dance floor (Rivera-Servera 2012, 43). Studying queer Latino/a identity through dance raises the question of whether Latinidad should be thought of as a programmatic political identity in the first place, or rather ‘as a performative modality’ that establishes Latino/a cultural practice (Rivera-Servera 2012, 20).

Importantly, the role of dance in enabling oppressions or resistence is not always clear cut. Thus, dance has been a form of resistance for the Italian mafia, in mafia-patronised religious celebrations of southern Italy. These celebrations include dances on the towns’ main squares, in which prominent members of the mafia dance with local politicians and both parties engage in a symbolic fight with imaginary knives and sticks (Pipyrou 2016, 175–8). These dances imply mutual political recognition, but they also enable members of the mafia to challenge regional state hegemony. They come with ambiguous real-life consequences, as local politicians may participate as they are trying to gain local votes, while members of the mafia do the same to gain recognition and status.

The fact that dance constitutes a form of ‘embodied resistance’ distinguishes it from other forms of political activism. Dance allows individuals and communities to express dissent and critique socio-political conditions in a way that words alone cannot (Fraleigh 2004). For instance, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the gumboot dance, which includes groups of performers stomping and tapping on their rubber boots, evolved as a form of resistance among mine workers. It was a covert way to communicate and to express grievances under the guise of entertainment (Welsh-Asante 1993). Similar roots entangled with a complex and contested history can also be found in capoeira, a hybrid between a dance, a martial art, and a game. It was likely developed in Africa by enslaved people who sought to practise self-defence under the guise of dance before being transported to Brazil. Evidence shows that it has been practised in Brazil since at least 1900 by the male African-Brazilian urban underclass. For some time, the government criminalised capoeira, and practitioners were persecuted until it was legalised in 1937. After 1975, it spread to the US and Europe, and soon after to the rest of the world (Delamont and Stephens 2008, 58). Thus, what began as a form of ‘embodied resistance’ became a global practice that celebrates the hybridisation of Portuguese and African-Brazilian music, dance, and bravery. On 26 November 2014, UNESCO recognised capoeira as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The global spread of dance forms via media and migration has further complicated the dance-politics nexus, introducing issues of cultural appropriation, global inequality, and transnational identities. Street dance styles like breakdancing have been adopted by young persons across the world. This may come as a way of expressing resistance against societal norms and injustices (Koutsougera 2023; Marsh and Campbell 2020). At the same time, the global popularity of dances raises questions about cultural ownership, authenticity, and the commercialisation of cultural expressions (Ana 2017). Cuban rumba, for example, has been strategically packaged for international tourism, where performers are expected to embody ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban identity in ways that cater to visitor expectations; yet rumberos themselves often receive minimal benefits from this commodification, and many view the state-driven ‘heritagization’ of rumba with ambivalence (Ana 2017, 163–7, 173–6, 181–3).

The global spread of dance forms also raises questions regarding their hybridisation, which is often presented as a result of globalisation (Duffy 2005). Hybrid dances emerge when elements from different dance traditions combine to create new forms, reflecting the complex interactions and exchanges facilitated by global flows of people and media. One example is the Tribal Fusion dance, in which North African and Arabic dance (colloquially known as ‘belly dance’) practitioners blend modern electronica and other various styles in creative and largely unbound ways. Dancers in this style thereby mostly do not reference the modern Middle East. As a result, their dance style may be derided by purists as derivative and degenerate compared to seemingly more ‘authentic’ forms of belly dance. At the same time, the freedom of Tribal Fusion enables the dancers to eschew accusations of cultural appropriation and to bring their very own styles to the transnational dance scene, drawing on movements from tango, flamenco, jazz, and modern dance, among others (Scheelar 2013; Sellers-Young 2016).

The digital age has further accelerated the global spread and transformation of dance practices. Social media platforms and video-sharing sites enable the rapid dissemination of dance videos, influencing global dance trends and fostering a sense of global community among dancers and enthusiasts. This has also allowed new dance styles to be created, such as industrial dance, a highly stylised goth-style dance with a well-defined repertoire of movements that is practised in similar ways in different goth scenes around the world. Its creation and development, however, took place almost entirely online. Goth YouTubers from different parts of the world began uploading videos of themselves dancing to industrial music, often inspired by cyber and rave aesthetics. These videos sparked discussion in the comment sections and across online forums, where users debated what counted as industrial dance. Through these public exchanges—offering feedback, critique, and praise—a shared set of movements and aesthetics gradually emerged. Over time, these digital interactions informally established and defined industrial dance, both morphologically and conceptually, without the need for a central authority or institutional framing (Karampampas 2016, 139–46).

A compelling example of rapid global circulation in digital times is Japanese Butoh, developed in the second half of the twentieth century and marked by grotesque imagery, playful experimentation, and slow, hyper-controlled motion. Since the 1980s, Butoh groups have emerged around the world, with many non-Japanese practitioners becoming recognised artists and teachers who establish their own schools and often develop approaches that diverge from the original lineages (Calamoneri 2008, 36–7; Candelario 2019, 245–52; van Hensbergen 2019, 276–84). The global and increasingly digital dissemination of Butoh enables unprecedented participation and innovation, while also raising questions about authorship, ownership, and the ethics of cross-cultural transmission (Garnica 2019, 325–36).

Dance as intangible cultural heritage

Dancing, particularly when it is staged, can often be read as a performance of folklore, i.e. of a traditional custom that links to the beliefs or values of a specific group. It can thus stand in tight connection with broader cultural narratives, identities, and histories. This ‘second existence’ of dance, beyond its initial performance context, matters when dance is reinterpreted, adapted, or incorporated into new spatial, temporal, or cultural settings. Keeping the folkloristic aspects of dance in mind allows anthropologists to explore the dynamic processes through which traditions are transmitted, transformed, and reimagined in response to changing cultural landscapes (Nahachewsky 2001). The second existence of dance may have a parallel life with the ‘first’, i.e. with the folk-dance performances which continue to take place in their initial social context. At other times, the initial social context may have changed, or there may be discontinuity in the transmission of knowledge, and in some cases, the second existence of dance replaces the first. The second existence of dance also encompasses how dance traditions are taught, learned, and practised beyond their original contexts. Dance workshops, festivals, and educational programs serve as important spaces for the transmission and adaptation of dance traditions, contributing to the ongoing evolution of dance forms and the formation of transnational dance communities (Karampampas 2021, 660–1; Sklar 2001).

The staging of dance can thus be seen as a site of cultural production where meanings are negotiated between performers and audiences. When dances are staged, they are often adapted or recontextualised to fit new settings, engaging with audiences unfamiliar with the original cultural context. Staging can thus be seen as a form of cultural translation, where the inherent meanings and aesthetics of a dance are interpreted and potentially transformed (Shay 2016). Moreover, the folkloristic aspects of dance on stage raise questions about its authenticity and about the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Debates about authenticity highlight the tension between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the need for artistic innovation and cultural exchange (Bendix 1997; Theodossopoulos 2013).

For example, in 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) aimed, among other things, to rethink what folklore, now referred to as ‘intangible heritage’, may be. It inaugurated the important shift from trying to record and preserve disappearing traditions to promoting their ongoing transmission. This was to be achieved by supporting both practitioners and the conditions necessary for their practices to continue (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014, 53). While this marks a shift from older folkloristic approaches, the Convention still relies on established methods like listing, mapping, and recording (Kuutma 2012; Tauschek 2011). Notions of authenticity thus persist—albeit in redefined terms—and continue to shape public perceptions of cultural value (Bendix 2018, 6; Bortolotto 2020).

Transforming a tradition into ICH involves a process of ‘heritagisation’. This process can be deeply self-referential, as constructing heritage can itself be part of the cultural and social processes that end up constituting heritage (Smith 2006, 13). For example, when a community prepares a dance for inclusion in an ICH inventory—by defining what counts as ‘authentic’, formalising choreography, or crafting heritage narratives—these acts of preparation reshape the tradition and feed back into how it is understood. At the same time, the dance itself becomes a policy object, especially when viewed through the lens of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where safeguarding frameworks transform lived practices into administratively managed ‘heritage’ (Smith 2006, 13; Tauschek 2011). ICH may therefore be seen not merely as preserved tradition, but as a metacultural production (Tauschek 2011), a policy-oriented reimagining of tradition focused on safeguarding, transmission, and empowerment. Following this logic, ICH could be seen as a third existence (Karampampas forthcoming) of dance: no longer just a performance or culturally relevant social activity, but a policy artefact focused on cultural continuity. Through this lens, dance is framed not as a static, authentic relic, but as a living tradition that carries community values, identities, and histories. This third existence resists overly static and folkloristic views of dance and opens new directions for anthropological inquiry.

Conclusion

The study of dance offers profound insights into the human condition. It allows us to understand and rethink social dynamics and structures, as well as individual and collective identities. Dance is not merely an art form but is also a rich cultural practice that informs and is informed by the contexts in which it occurs. Its analysis reveals the many, often highly nuanced ways in which communities express themselves, negotiate social norms, and maintain traditions, making it an endlessly fascinating subject for future study. As societies continue to change, the relevance of studying dance remains undiminished. It offers a unique vantage point from which to observe the ongoing interplay between tradition and innovation, providing a mirror in which we can view the continuous reshaping of identities in response to global influences and local practices.

The ephemeral nature of dance, with its ability to adapt and morph into new forms while retaining links to the past, makes it an ideal subject for exploring broader questions of continuity and change in contemporary societies. At the same time, the rise of the internet and the turbocharged hybridisation of dance make it more exciting than ever. As a form of embodied, non-verbal communication that transcends social and linguistic barriers, dance is likely to remain crucial to understand the human condition in an increasingly interconnected world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. I am especially grateful to the editors, Hanna Nieber and Felix Stein, whose exceptional patience and valuable suggestions have shaped this entry and supported its successful completion.

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Note on contributor

Panas Karampampas, PhD (St Andrews) is a Social Anthropologist at Durham University. He currently works on Intangible Cultural Heritage policies, bureaucracy, and global governance. His doctoral research focussed on the goth scene, digital anthropology, dance, cosmopolitanism, peripherality, and globalisation. He serves as an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2025–2027).

panas.karampampas@easaonline.org / ORCID: 0000-0001-8712-9445

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Affect

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:28:00 +0000

Detail of "The fallen Angel" (1847) by Alex Andre Cabanel, depicting the devil after being expelled from heaven. Picture by Wikipedia.

Daniel White Andrea De Antoni

University of Cambridge, Kyoto University

Initially published 26 Feb 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25affect

Abstract:

Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although registered through biological and bodily sensation, affects are also culturally conditioned and can, in turn, strongly influence sociocultural dynamics. Anthropologists have long explored the varieties of emotional experience across cultures, from the analysis of different patterns of emotional behaviour in the early twentieth century to the linguistic comparison of different emotional expressions through the 1970s and 80s. Since around the 1990s, however, anthropologists began to shift their focus to the diverse ways that emotions also involve less linguistically determined but nevertheless socially conditioned bodily experiences they called ‘affect’. This entry documents early psychological and philosophical genealogies of affect; the relation of affect to anthropological studies of emotion; critiques of and counterpoints to the affect concept; and enduring themes in ethnographic studies of affect.

Introduction

An uneasy tingling of your skin when you pass through an unknown patch of forest; a sigh of comforting relief when you taste a familiar home-cooked dish after months away; the joyous energy of singing along with friends—word-for-word—the lyrics of a hit song; the high-intensity movements of a shamanic ritual; the low-intensity stillness of meditation; a dampness in the spleen; a longing in the heart; an ache. Many experiences are sensed but are not easily identified with a familiar emotion word like ‘fear’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘joy’, ‘transcendence’, ‘equanimity’, ‘worry’, ‘heartache’, or even ‘pain’. Moreover, feelings can often be surprising, arising at unexpected moments and carrying with them little indication of their origin or cause.

Although anthropologists have long been interested in these types of felt experiences, they have traditionally focused more explicitly on the public expression and symbolic display of feeling, which they called ‘emotion’. Since the 1990s, however, anthropologists in partnership with many others in allied social science and humanities disciplines began to explicitly emphasise the value of describing feelings that were sensed within and between bodies but did not always take linguistic or conceptual form. They called these ‘affect’.

Affect refers to a variety of bodily experiences, sensations, or simply perceived shifts in atmospheric intensities that, although conditioned through sociocultural environments, may not take form through culture-specific conventions and meanings. Despite their conceptual ambiguity, affects can feel sensorially distinct. They can feel strong, sharp, or subdued. Alternatively, they can also not feel like much at all, seemingly falling outside a person’s conscious perceptions. As an analytical concept, affect offers new ways to investigate what anthropologists have in the past variously referred to as ‘collective effervescence’, ‘sentiment’, ‘emotion’, ‘feelings’, ‘sensations’, and ‘the senses’. The broad semantic spectrum of these terms suggests not only that emotional experiences are diverse but so too are the conditions that shape them. The adoption of affect as a key conceptual tool was driven in part by a desire to address dimensions of experiences that eluded clearly circumscribed cultural frameworks and linguistic structures of meaning.

Affect theory brings together perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and several other fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and literature to explore the bodily and relational aspects of feeling. The following sections outline the development of the affect concept in anthropological theory. The first section traces influential genealogical roots for affect found within psychology and philosophy. The second highlights the relation between affect and earlier anthropological work on emotion. Section three evaluates critiques of and counterpoints to affect, given that the term is highly contested and debated within the emerging field of affect theory. The fourth section features distinctive features of the affect concept, and the conclusion considers enduring themes of affect studies, including implications for ethnographic method and disciplinary critique.

Psychological and philosophical forerunners to affect

Literature on affect in anthropology can be theoretical, abstract, and contested (see introductions to affect such as De Antoni 2019; Liljeström 2016; Rutherford 2016; White 2017). Therefore, it is helpful to outline key theoretical discussions in the past, which have traditionally emphasised Western traditions and that inform contemporary anthropological debates on affect. Two genealogies of this concept are particularly prominent, one psychological and the other philosophical. Each contributes distinct but complementary perspectives to shed light on how affect operates as an embodied and relational phenomenon. A common theme of this literature is a concern with how to relate somatic, or bodily, aspects of emotional processes (the ‘affective’) with its symbolic, conceptual, and representational components (the ‘emotional’).

Early psychological debates on affect adopted the worldview of Western science, which understood emotional energies as grounded in bodies and inherited through processes of evolution. As part of a natural continuum that humans share with non-human animals, according to Charles Darwin, emotional capacities could be identified through expressional behaviours, such as tendencies to bear one’s teeth when angry (Darwin [1872] 2018). This evolutionary view remained apparent in an early debate on the definition of emotion, which centred around a famous anecdote that questioned, for instance, whether fear is a condition that triggers one to run upon encountering a bear in the woods or is rather the post-hoc ascription of fear to an aroused body. Psychologist William James’ (1884) idea is that the ‘subjective experience [of sensations like] fear or disgust is the result of a process that unfolds after the alerting change in core affect’ (Beatty 2019, 202). In other words, although the common view sees emotion as a sensation that comes after one is ‘afraid’ (one sees a bear, becomes afraid, and runs away), James argued the reverse: that one is ‘afraid’ because of the physical experience of bodily sensations (one sees a bear, runs away, and finds oneself afraid).

These early debates on emotion became even more contested with the arrival of Freudian theory and the globalisation of discourses on instincts, Id, and the unconscious (W. Anderson, Jenson, and Keller 2011). With the spread of Freud’s idea that one’s psyche could be split between conscious and subconscious elements, scholars began to more commonly distinguish between feelings as containing both emotionally conscious and affectively un- or non-conscious components. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1962a; 1962b) expanded on these ideas, proposing a taxonomy of core affective instincts, such as interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, or anger-rage. His work posited that while these states are universally shared, their expressions vary across cultural contexts. Early innovative essays in critical theory that began using the word ‘affect’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995a; 1995b) revisited Tomkins’ theories, paving the way for a culturally oriented affect theory. For affect theorists today, this psychological lineage has inspired a set of questions focused on whether affect is universal or culturally distinct, to what degree it is grounded in bodies, minds, or both, and whether affect emerges before, simultaneously with, or after a conscious recognition of an experience of emotion.

Western philosophers also demonstrated an early interest in the relation between the somatic and ideological components of emotion. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza ([1677] 1994) defined affect (or what he called affectus) as the capacity to ‘affect and be affected’, a common phrase that many anthropologists would later cite. Spinoza described affect as ‘affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ ([1677] 1994, 70, emphasis added). Spinoza’s view was that affect (bodily capacities) and emotion (‘the ideas of these affections’) are two dimensions of an inseparable single process, an argument which reflects his opposition to the mind-body dualism of his time.

Spinoza continues to inspire contemporary affect theorists who highlight the enduring open-ended, processual, and mutable qualities of the affective body as it exists in relation to different social and material environments. His ideas were rekindled in the widely read materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and popularised most prominently by the philosopher Brian Massumi (1995; 2002). From Massumi’s point of view, affect indicates pre-conscious modulations of ‘intensity’ moving through and between bodies (Massumi 1995; 2002). Emotion, on the other hand, is ‘qualified intensity’, its conceptual ‘capture’ in meaning, or the ‘socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’ (Massumi 1995, 88). From this perspective, affect could be understood as a kind of physiological flux of sensation that is registered in bodies and travels between them; emotion, on the other hand, is the conceptualisation of that sensation in a culturally shared and often linguistically coded meaning.

Within contemporary debates on affect, the philosophical idea that ‘arrangements’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner 2017) of humans and non-human objects shape and are shaped by affect prior to affect’s capture in meaning became a popular and highly contested idea. Many contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences cite this particular philosophical genealogy of affect as influential, even if they are also critical of it (Ahmed 2004b; Berlant 2011; Berlant and Stewart 2019; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Seigworth and Pedwell 2023). For example, some scholars argue that the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ identify qualitatively distinct experiences that follow ‘different logics’ and ‘pertain to different orders’ (Massumi 2002, 27). Other scholars see emotion and affect as existing along a continuum (Ngai 2005). Still others have proposed that the perception of an ‘affect-emotion gap’ is itself the product of particular discursive knowledge regimes, and varies based on different cultural, political, and socioeconomic applications of affect and emotion as technical terms (White 2017; 2022).

As a result of these debates, affect became a helpful conceptual lens through which ethnographers could focus attention on nuanced felt experiences that could exceed or precede cognition and language. It also provided a more fine-grained way to approach the contagious involvement and coordination of bodies that can be witnessed during rituals, political rallies, festivals, or in stadiums. In this regard, affect offered anthropologists more diverse and detailed perspectives on classic sociological theories of sentiment, such as Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim [1912] 2008), which conveys a homogenisation of affects into one single group experience.

For example, ethnographic research on contemporary militarism in Pakistan demonstrates how the state can mobilise affect to sustain its authority over other political groups in society (Rashid 2020). Through a study of mourning rituals orchestrated by military personnel, anthropologists have shown how the military transforms grief into a resource for national solidarity. Ritual activities like public commemorations of martyred soldiers and state-sponsored funerals create ‘affective subjects’ who embody both personal loss and collective loyalty. Such examples show how affect operates not only as a homogenous collective force that can emerge through large-scale rituals but also as a constellation of complex feelings that can be specifically cultivated by certain social groups and selectively fostered or resisted by others.

Anthropologies of emotion

Anthropological work on affect builds closely on anthropological studies of emotions. These studies looked primarily to non-Western case studies of emotional experiences to examine how emotions varied from one context to another, providing evidence that challenged universal perspectives assumed by early research. Prominent works on this theme from the early twentieth century approached emotion as a marker of cultural difference. These works were influenced by psychological approaches and were later categorised under the label ‘culture and personality studies’. Representative studies depicted cultures as comparable through their dominant ‘patterns’ of dispositions, attitudes, beliefs, and personalities that make up a specific cultural entity (Benedict [1934] 2005). One influential study of the Japanese by Ruth Benedict, for example, juxtaposed individualistic ‘Americans’ motivated by emotional matrices of guilt and free expression with a more group-oriented ‘Japanese’, who were portrayed as motivated by shame, interdependence, and an obligation to different in-groups (Benedict [1946] 1974). In the case of interpersonal transgression, for example, ‘instead of accusing a man of being unjust, as an American would’, says Benedict, Japanese ‘specify the circle of behavior he has not lived up to’, and pointing to the particular ‘province’ or ‘code’ that was violated (195). Therefore, in cases of socially perceived bad behaviour, an American ‘may suffer from guilt’, whereas for ‘the Japanese’ ‘a failure to follow their explicit signposts of good behavior…is a shame’ (223–4).

In the 1970s and 80s, anthropologists reformulated these ideas of cultural difference imagined through constructs of emotion-based patterns and personality types, critiquing them as too rigid, culture-bound, and resistant to change. Instead, they focused on analysing emotional differences that could be observed through linguistic discourses and ‘emotional lexicons’ (Frevert et al. 2014). These anthropologists of emotion focused on cultural differences primarily by scrutinising emotion words in the languages of those they studied that did not neatly translate into English. This method offered insights into a broad human spectrum of emotional experiences existing both across and within different cultural groups.

For example, in a prominent 1980s study of the Ifaluk in Micronesia, based on fieldwork carried out in the late 1970s, anthropologists highlighted local words such as fago (loneliness/sadness) and song (justified anger) to build a critique of the ‘unnatural’ gendered division between reason and emotion in Western cultures (Lutz 1982; 1988). Other anthropologists working among the Pintupi of Australia examined emotions such as rarru (anger), which arose from threats to ‘shared identity or kinship’ (walytja) with others. These studies suggested that emotions emerge as semiotic—or meaning-making—practices rooted ‘in social life and its relationship to other signs’ (Myers 1988, 607). Among the Ilongot in the northern Philippines, strong feelings like liget resembled sentiments of anger and grief but did not have exact equivalents in Anglophone cultures, and appeared highly nuanced, complex, and variable (M. Rosaldo 1980, 1983, 143; R. Rosaldo 1989, 3; Spiegel 2017). These works demonstrated that emotions go beyond discrete bio-psychological categories and are embedded in social processes of language, meaning-making, and ethics (Lutz 1982; 1988; 2017).

Despite their innovative and nuanced approaches to emotion, some anthropologists perceived limits in what they saw as an increasingly outdated and culture-bound model of comparison. These critiques came in the wake of globalising processes that rendered the cultural boundaries of emotional words less distinct. Additionally, a theoretical turn in the 1980s emphasised a reflexive analysis of the Western literary conventions of anthropological writing, and challenged an ‘us-them’ model of culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). In light of their focus on culturally specific language and public symbols, previous studies of emotion were also criticised for overlooking aspects of bodily intensity that could exceed and confound language, potentially impacting bodies beyond conscious reflection.

These critiques grew throughout the 2000s, extending to disciplines beyond anthropology, and resulted in a theoretical shift away from the discursive dynamics of emotion toward sensations that did not neatly map onto emotional lexicons. Some scholars referred to this shift as the ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2007). Authors associated with this ‘turn’ sought to address more explicitly what language-centred analyses in the 1980s and 90s had partly and implicitly left out. Thus, affect theory provided alternatives to certain critiques made of the anthropology of emotion. Yet, it also became the target of new critiques, which argued that affect approaches overlook aspects of sociality in favour of describing bodily sensations, physiology, and abstract energetic processes of cultural dynamics.

Critiques of affect and counterpoints

With the rise of theoretical literature on affect, the term became increasingly targeted for critique and reformulation. For example, some critics took issue with an idea of affect as a field of ‘direct feeling’ that is supposedly distinct from the ‘conscious recognition’ of emotion (Ahmed 2004b, 39). They worried this approach risked universalising affect as a natural phenomenon disconnected from the socio-political forces that shape it. Related critiques argued that such a distinction even resembles a form of biological essentialism and reductionism, in which affect is treated as autonomous from ideology (e.g., Leys 2011, 2017).

Despite these on-going critiques of affect theory, some early studies of emotional and affective processes had specifically sought to show how social dynamics could shape physiological processes that were usually identified as purely biological or psychological phenomena. For instance, while a sensation such as pain may be commonly seen as an objective measure of a body’s biological response to a harmful stimulus, it can also be understood as operating through implicit value judgements of gender, ethnicity, and racial difference that ‘code’ pain in ways that register differently in the surfaces of skin. A study of an Australian government report on testimony of the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children from their families in Australia, for example, shows how historical narratives and contemporary legal practices can result in different effects upon the surfaces of bodies. While the report includes Aboriginal testimonies that read painfully to Indigenous communities, its suggestion that white Australians should acknowledge ‘national shame’ but not necessarily feel ‘personal guilt’ could be read as producing different affective results for readers with different skin colours: ‘Indigenous Australians tell their personal stories, but white readers are allowed to disappear from this history, having no part in what was done’ (Ahmed 2004a, 34–5). From this point of view, pain emerges as an immediate sensation, shaped through histories that read and feel differently for different people. Such studies show that ‘sensations are mediated, however immediately they seem to impress upon us’ (Ahmed 2004a, 30).

Although some studies like the above had directly addressed how bodily sensations could surface through social categories, other scholars still worried that broader trends in affect theory ignored how gender (Boler and Zembylas 2016; Thien 2005), ethnicity (Ramos-Zayas 2011), and racialisation (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015) shape and socialise affect. In adopting this perspective, affect theorists were entering territory covered by scholars of feminism, ethnic studies, and critical race theory. Some called for ‘critical examinations of “whiteness”’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 654) and sought to point out explicit examples from historical studies and queer theory that analyse the affective dimensions of racial dynamics. For example, historical studies of Latin American and Caribbean migrants in the United States have shown how certain depressive states were described by predominantly white mental health professionals through culture-bound taxonomies, such as familismo, fatalismo, or the ‘Puerto Rican syndrome’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Muñoz 2006). Certain painful feelings tied to migration experiences, surfacing as uncontrollable screaming, trembling, or aggression in young women, were labelled as ‘abnormal’ and characterised through ethnic categorisations (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660). Conversely, as other historical studies have shown, the perception of schizophrenia changed significantly in the 1960s from being seen as a ‘harmless’ condition primarily affecting white people to being viewed as a dangerous disorder characterised by anger and linked with the civil rights and Black Power movements (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Metzl 2009). These studies show how institutional practices and ways of talking about race can condition negative affective states through racial frames.

Other critics argued that many affect studies ignored the role of history and place in conditioning affective responses, and offered compelling ethnographic examples as counterpoints. For instance, in a study on the ‘affective geographies’ of post-war Cyprus, after a 1974 partition of the island’s residents into a distinct northern Turkish-Cypriot and southern Greek-Cypriot territory, residents told stories of the melancholic feelings they encountered within ruined landscapes. Turkish Cypriots living in the abandoned homes of Greek Cypriots in the north faced an ‘atmosphere’ that ‘discharged a feeling of the uncanny, a strange feeling’ that was derived for some ‘out of a sense of impropriety, haunting, or an act of violation’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 11). Such studies raise the question of whether the feelings encountered in these landscapes are subjective, coming from the individual’s perception of a historically storied space, or the material environment itself, filled with abandoned objects and unkempt fields. Ethnographic evidence suggests that ‘neither the ruin…nor the people who live around it are affective on their own […] but both produce and transmit affect relationally’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 14). Detailed ethnographic studies of these socio-historical qualities of environments and space can help anthropologists unpack the multilayered impacts that some geographers have called ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2009).

Still other critics worried that philosophical oriented theorists of affect too heavily emphasise a ‘gap’ between the ‘signifying order’ and ‘affective order’; that is, between that which can be articulated and that which escapes linguistic expression (Martin 2013, S155; Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Navaro 2017; Navaro-Yashin 2009). They wondered whether such a distinction was needed between emotion and affect at all. To this question, some of today’s affect theorists respond that neither early formative philosophical works on affect nor much of the affect literature that followed it subscribed to as hard of a break between affect and emotion as was characterised in some critiques of affect. As noted by Massumi in his popular work on affect, ‘The approach suggested here does not accept any categorical separation between the social and the presocial, between culture and some kind of “raw” nature or experience… The field of emergence is not presocial. It is open-endedly social’ (Massumi 2002, 9). Choosing to avoid this debate altogether, some scholars have advocated using the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably (see Lutz 2017) or argued for ‘modal’ approaches that posit affect and emotion on a continuum, ‘whereby affects acquire the semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely denature into affects’ (Ngai 2005, 27).

Anthropologists of ‘embodiment’ have also contributed to discussions of how emotional and affective practices can exist along a continuum. These scholars argue that a focus on embodiment helps situate affect not as distinct from meaning-making processes, suggestive of body-mind dichotomies, but as something through which ‘dualities such as subject and object or meaning and the material world (evoking mind/body) can be collapsed’ (McDonald 2018, 187; also see Csordas 1990; 1993). For example, studies of exorcism rituals in Italy show how feelings and affects situated in embodied practices like prayer and touch constitute the basis for the experiential emergence of spiritual entities such as the devil. These felt experiences of the possessed person and the participants in exorcisms, in turn, contribute to the reality and the ‘capturing’ of particular entities into historicised, cultural structures of meaning—namely one demon or angel rather than another (De Antoni 2022). This ethnographically grounded approach to bodily feelings showcases what a focus on affect can offer anthropology.

Finally, some critics raised a methodological concern about philosophical descriptions of affect as an ‘escape’ from ‘perception’ (Massumi 2002, 36) or, in other words, as something that was difficult to articulate or ‘capture’ in language (see also Stodulka et al., 2019). For some ethnographers accustomed to describing their interlocutors through narratives, thinking of affect as that which always escapes its articulation has led to practical and methodological frustrations. It has also invited evocative experimental forms of writing about affect, such as works on everyday American life that attempt to capture the somatic contours of daily routines and ‘ordinary affects’ in poetic language that does not correspond to common analytical concepts (Stewart 2007, 1; also see Berlant and Stewart 2019). Many anthropological works on affect can be both highly theoretical and/or poetic in their approaches, and thus offer powerful insights through virtuosity in prose. At the same time, they can appear to some as overly abstracted from ethnographic contexts (Beatty 2019, 210–6). Thus, writing against the aforementioned critiques, many recent ethnographies analyse affect as situated in historical and cultural contexts (Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016; Muehlebach 2011; Muñoz 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2009; 2012; Newell 2018; Ngai 2005). Such works emphasise the simultaneously material, historical, social, somatic, and semiotic aspects of affect, and how these components relationally feed back into one another through dynamic ‘affective-discursive loops’ (Wetherell 2012, 7).

Indeed, some recent studies of affect have addressed the challenging question of how socio-material arrangements take on a force that is felt before it is conceived by revisiting classic arguments in social theory, such as in the popular discussion around mana (Mazzarella 2017a). Mana is a concept found throughout Polynesia that refers to a transhuman ‘force or efficacy’ that was ascribed to certain people or places that expressed palpable power and ‘vital energetics’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1). Sociologist Émile Durkheim described mana as ‘at once a physical force and a moral power’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1), resembling contemporary anthropologists’ interest in the relation between the emotional-conceptual and affective-somatic aspects of social processes. Such innovate reinterpretations of social theory show that what anthropologists today call ‘affect’ can be used to shed light on classic anthropological debates, resulting in a series of productive connections between anthropological studies of affect, emotions, mana, collective effervescence, and the ‘senses’ (Howes 2005; Pink 2009).

Advancing distinctive contributions of affect

Despite the many critiques of affect, including constructive suggestions to consider the overlapping territory between affect and emotion, there remain strong arguments for maintaining the distinctiveness of the term. For example, given that human acts of sensing or ‘feeling with the world’ (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017) incorporate complex, fluid dimensions of both somatic and semiotic phenomenon, the word ‘affect’ can help disambiguate multiple processes. It can help anthropologists discern somatic processes that seem to function in part outside or below discourse more discretely, catalogue them more comprehensively, and add to ethnographic descriptions’ clarity, granularity, and sensitivity. This can sometimes require the modulation of the ethnographer’s own senses, which broadens previous conceptions of what makes for good ethnographic training.

For example, a case study of the French perfume industry demonstrates how affective capacities can develop through pedagogies of training, sensory exercises, and objects like an odour kit (Teil 1998). An odour kit is ‘made of a series of sharply distinct pure fragrances arranged in such a way that one can go from sharpest to the smallest contrasts. To register those contrasts one needs to be trained’ (Latour 2004, 207). In so doing, a perfumer, or an ethnographer studying perfume, must learn to ‘have a nose’ that allows one to inhabit a (richly differentiated odoriferous) world’ (207). New bodily capacities develop alongside encounters with objects that also operate affectively on the body. The result is that one develops a new, more discrete sensory capacity that at the same time unveils a more sensory-rich world particular to the modern French perfume industry.

Affect as a conceptual tool can also point to the experience of feelings that, while conditioned by cultural contexts, often misalign with or even challenge established cultural values. It can also help anthropologists articulate what happens in spaces of intimacy, whether of private homes or of selves, that do not fit—or fit only in queer relation—with established social values. In the Sindh Province of Pakistan, fakirs (meaning ‘beggars’ in Urdu and, in some cases, ‘transgenders’ in Sindhi) refer to persons who voluntarily take up poverty as a practice of ascetic devotion to Islamic saints, often motivated by ‘prophetic dreams and personal callings’ (Kasmani 2022, 8). Through devotional practices and mystical encounters with saints, some fakirs describe experiences of closeness and intimacy with saints that serve both as compelling testimonies of desirable affect for other ascetics and morally troubling stories for religious and political authorities. Thus, affects of ‘private feelings’ and ‘intimate relations with saints carry ramifications for broader regimes and critiques of power’ (10).

Another helpful approach to affect is a reflexive one, which subjects conceptualisations of affect, such as ‘the affect-emotion gap’ described above, to ethnographic observation. When doing so, it becomes clear how anthropologists’ practices of theorising affect can resemble those of their interlocutors. In national branding campaigns in Japan, for example, anthropologists noted how something like an ‘affect-emotion gap’ was also conceptualised by bureaucrats and national cultural policy makers. These officials observed an affective excitement among global consumers of pop-culture commodities produced in Japan and sought to convert it into an emotionally charged affinity for Japan itself. For example, through government-funded events promoting cultures of manga, to which many readers are attracted for its minor and counter-cultural themes, officials attempted to mainstream manga as a national cultural property of Japan. In this way, an increasingly global cultural commodity could be transformed into a potential national resource of soft power (Galbraith 2019; Leheny 2018; White 2022).

A similar process of gapping or splitting emotional processes can be observed within the global technological world of modelling affection, preference, and taste. For example, computer scientists at academic labs and corporate offices in the US who build taste recommendation algorithms for social media feeds presume that an affective appeal for a certain music style can be coded into numbers (Seaver 2022). Such a perspective splits a feeling of affection into the affective dimensions of personal experience and the emotional dimensions of ‘preference’ that can be computed. Similarly, engineers and computer scientists operating in the field of ‘affective computing’ (Picard 1997) at prominent labs at MIT and Cambridge rely on models that understand ‘affect’ as physiological changes in the body and ‘emotion’ as something codable in a machine system and translatable to humans interpreting those systems. Adapting work on affective computing to East Asian contexts, some robot engineers in Japan have experimented with building ‘affective engines’ into emotionally intelligent technologies, which could theoretically discern the affective states of people by reading the signal of an emotion, such as ‘happiness’, through the facial-expression recognition of a smile (see Fujita and Kitano 1998; White and Katsuno 2021; 2023). These examples illustrate how many specialists in the hard sciences are currently operationalising their own theories of affect to much greater impact than anthropologists. In fieldwork within rapidly changing technological worlds, the term ‘affect’ can therefore help anthropologists track significant transformations in the meanings, applications, and experiences of both human and more-than-human emotion.

Conclusions

As the above theoretical debates and ethnographic examples illustrate, studies of affect are diverse and contested. Nevertheless, enduring themes remain. Three are prominent. The first is the proposition that affect can point to feelings experienced beyond language or cognition—although not necessarily unaffected by them. Affect is indeed something more than just meaning. Rather, affect holds promise to add dimensionality to meaning, showing that meaning incorporates dynamic aspects of exchange between bodily experience and signification (Slaby and Röttger-Rössler 2018; Newell 2018; and Mazzarella 2009; 2017b). Affect points to somatic worlds in a way that is shared among others and consequentially entangled with semiotic concepts and conditioning. Bringing affect and semiotics together in this way can offer ‘improved understanding of both as the intertwined core of sociality itself’ (Newell 2018, 2).

A second enduring theme of affect is relationality. Although human bodies can be understood as individual sense-making and sense-registering entities, they are far from being merely an individuated product of established discourse. Rather, bodies can function as nodes that register, exchange, mediate, reciprocate, co-participate, and change in relation with other bodies or simply bodily parts—human or otherwise, living or inanimate (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Bennett 2010). This relationality of affect points directly to affect’s political dimensions and power dynamics, which incorporate aspects of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and several other theoretical concepts commonly used in socio-cultural anthropology (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016).

Third, although affects may be distinguished by their uneasy alignment with conventional cultural categories, this by no means implies that affects are socially unconditioned. This point suggests that studies of affect hold potential to not only enrich previous anthropological studies of emotion but also to expand anthropologists’ understanding of the ‘culture’ concept on which the discipline still heavily depends. Through its ability to point anthropologists to the dynamic relation between public symbols and private feeling, the affect lens can unearth experiential dimensions of culture that have not been fully explored until recently.

Finally, beyond these enduring themes, affect may hold the greatest potential not in its theory-heavy analytics, which can draw disproportionately from the Western and philosophical traditions outlined above, but rather in its ethnographic applications in fieldwork. A growing collection of richly detailed ethnographies of religious practices, digital media, and human-nature interactions—many of non-Western contexts—show that affective practices exist in diverse and dynamic forms that don’t accommodate easily to established analytical theorising. For example, the deep cultivation of balanced states of feeling through Buddhist meditation in Thailand (Cook 2010); the pursuit of ‘queer companionship’ between Islamic saints and ascetics (Kasmani 2022); the mediation of the paranormal in Chile (Espírito Santo 2023); or the making of intimate and sometimes indifferent relationships with non-human others such as palms (Chao 2022), orangutans (Chua 2018; Parreñas 2012, 2018), mushrooms (Tsing 2021), and microbes (Benezra 2023): these innovative studies of affective themes diversify anthropology’s traditional understandings of culture; expand who speaks for and feels ethnographic knowledge; and offer reflexive resources for productively undoing and remaking the affective modes through which anthropological work is undertaken.

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Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. Los Angeles: SAGE.

White, Daniel. 2017. “Affect: An introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 32: 175–80.

———. 2022. Administering affect: Pop-culture Japan and the politics of anxiety. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

White, Daniel, and Hirofumi Katsuno. 2021. “Toward an affective sense of life: Artificial intelligence, animacy, and amusement at a robot pet memorial service in Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 36: 222–51.

———. 2023. “Modelling emotion, perfecting heart: Disassembling technologies of affect with an android bodhisattva in Japan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29: 103–23.

Note on contributors

Daniel White is a research affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His research examines emotion, politics, and emerging media technologies, with a geographic concentration on Japan and the Asia-Pacific. His recent book is Administering affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the politics of anxiety (2022, Stanford).

Daniel White, Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Level 1, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 1SB, United Kingdom. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-2866-6587

Andrea De Antoni is associate professor in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University and Research Coordinator of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Kyoto. He specializes in anthropology of religion, experiences with spirits, spiritual healing in contemporary Japan and Italy, the anthropology of the body, affect, and emotions. He has published extensively about these topics in English and Japanese.

Andrea De Antoni, Associate Professor, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Yoshida Nihonmatsu-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6480-0790

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Agency

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:46:42 +0000

Picture by John Fahy

Julia Vorhölter

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 12 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24agency

Abstract:

In anthropology, agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their lifeworlds and how they act within, or even resist, powerful structures. The concept entered anthropological debates in the 1980s and was initially closely connected to practice theory, an approach which sought to understand how individuals actively create society while at the same time are being shaped by it. Consequently, many of the early debates on agency revolved around questions of self-determination, creativity, and resistance. Anthropologists studied, for instance, how people, especially those in seemingly powerless positions, managed to pursue their own projects and to subvert—if subtly—colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, or other forms of domination. However, anthropologists have always been wary of reducing agency to liberal—or ‘western’—notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Instead, a plethora of ethnographic case studies demonstrate how meanings of agency, including who can exercise it and how it is valued, vary across social, cultural, or historical contexts. In more recent times, anthropologists have also drawn attention to networked, relational, and more-than-human forms of agency such as the agency of spirits, ‘nature’, art, or things. This entry provides an overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency, noting that most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions, our actions, and their effects on the world is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests.

Introduction

At least since the 1990s, agency has been a prominent and much-discussed concept in anthropology (e.g. Ahearn 2001; Duranti 1990; Ortner 1984, 1997, 2001). Emerging out of practice theory, agency was frequently imagined as a positive capacity to act within, and even to resist, potentially oppressive structures. When people had agency, they could explain and instigate personal, social, and environmental change. When non-human actors had agency, they affected and transformed the environment, societies, or other bodies. In more recent times, anthropologists have become less enthusiastic about the concept for various reasons. Human agency is increasingly regarded as overly destructive and potentially problematic rather than something to be celebrated (see Latour 2014). At the same time there is an increasing realisation that human agency is rather limited, and there is a widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of climate change, pandemics, and war. Responding to these shifts in scholarly debates and the world we live in, anthropologists have begun exploring new—distributed, more-than-human, and relational—forms of agency, or even radical alternatives to hegemonic understandings of agency. These include 'patiency' (Mazzarella 2021, see also Schnepel 2009), 'non-mastery' (Taussig 2020), 'waiting' (Hage 2009), or different forms of passivity such as silence (Hofmeyr 2009). Such alternative concepts question the imperative to act or ‘do something’ in order to change the world or ourselves. Instead, they attend to other forms of becoming. In Lutheran theology, for instance, the passive receiving of God’s grace is seen as the foundation for any human agency. More broadly, receiving (e.g. a gift or a declaration of love) may not be wholly passive. It can be conceptualised as a form of passivity by which the giver’s action turns the other into a receiver with all the obligations that come with this role (Robbins 2020).

This entry provides an introductory overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency. Drawing on both classic and more recent ethnographic texts, it discusses the complex relationship between agency, intention, and effect in fields as varied as politics, technology, language, and the body. The main aim is to show how the concept has been used and contested in anthropology and how different understandings of agency are tied to different theoretical positions. More generally, it illustrates the varied ways in which anthropologists have tried to conceptualise the dynamics between agent and world, between creativity and stasis, between responsibility and fate, and between power and resistance.

At the heart of debates on agency is the question of social change. Why and how do societies change despite their fairly stable and powerful structures, which are based on class, gender, belief, etc. and which are constantly reinforced through socialisation, daily routines, and rituals? Is there such a thing as free will, or are the choices we make always determined by the social and cultural contexts we live in? Long before agency became a fashionable concept in anthropology, philosophers and sociologists debated this so-called ‘structure-agency’ problem. Some social theorists, like Max Weber, posited that unlike animals who act out of instinct, humans are capable of conscious, rational decision-making. Others, like Émile Durkheim, cautioned that choices made by individuals are always shaped by social and cultural structures—or, in Durkheim’s terms—by a collective consciousness or conscience collective (Rapport and Overing 2007, 3-5). Later theorists agreed that both the reproduction and the transformation of societies happens through a dynamic interplay between determining structures and individual intentional actions. However, they disagreed as to whether structures or actions were more important (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1966, Parsons 1951, Bourdieu 1977). One of the most influential theories, based on the idea that agency and structure are part of an inseparable duality, was developed by sociologist Anthony Giddens. His ‘structuration theory’ is based on the premise that

society is the outcome of the consciously applied skills of human agents.[…] While not made by any single person, society is created and recreated afresh, if not ex nihilo, by the participants in every social encounter. The production of society is a skilled performance, sustained and “made to happen” by human beings’ (Giddens 1993, 25).

In anthropology, agency and related research foci emerged comparatively late and only started to gain more traction in the 1980s. In its beginnings, agency was closely associated with ‘practice theory’—an approach that ‘seeks to explain the relationships that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we may call “the system” on the other’ (Ortner 1984, 184; see also Bourdieu 1977, Sahlins, 1981). Practice theory itself emerged out of a dissatisfaction with previous anthropological theories which were either insufficiently interested in questions of history and societal transformation or did not pay much attention to the actions and intentions of individuals.

To put it crudely, up to the 1980s most anthropologists had studied culture(s) or societies as relatively stable, homogenous, and somewhat ‘objective’ entities (for a more nuanced discussion, see Ortner 1984). Their focus was clearly on the collective and not on the individuals of which it was made up. Some influential theories such as structural functionalism, supported by anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, explained social institutions largely as a result of their usefulness for society at large. French structuralism, made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss, focused on a universal grammar underlying all cultures, while symbolic anthropology, famously developed by Clifford Geertz, understood culture as a set of shared public symbols and meanings. These different, dominant approaches to the study of society were largely ahistorical and were not explicitly concerned with questions of social change. Other approaches were, but assumed ‘that human action and historical process are almost entirely structurally or systemically determined’, and not in any central way driven by ‘real people doing real things’ (Ortner 1984, 144). This charge was levelled against evolutionism and later cultural ecology which saw societies as ‘quasi-organisms’ that evolved through technological and environmental adaptation. It was also made against Victor Turner’s ritual theory, which sought to explain how social integration and solidarity were achieved and maintained despite inherent conflict. Marxism, which viewed society as made up of opposing social forces or ‘modes of production’, was also held to be overly deterministic.

The turn to concepts such as agency, then, signalled a move away from a focus on abstract forces and processes to concrete, often individual, actors and their particular motivations, intentions, and experiences of social life. Questions about agency, including who may or may not ‘have’ agency in a given setting, are therefore closely entangled with questions about personhood and self. They foreground human creativity, aspiration, and desire, as well as power and ethics. Discussions, definitions, and theories of agency, as the following sections show, vary according to whether an agent is conceptualised as a rational and independent human individual, a subject (i.e. someone who is to some extent determined by social forces or discourses and studied as a member of a particular subject position, for instance, as a woman or as a peasant), or a non-human actant. According to Sheryl Ortner (2001), one can also differentiate between approaches that analyse ‘the agency of intentions’, i.e. how individuals or collectives design, carry out, and give meaning to their life projects, and those that focus on ‘agency as power’, i.e. how individuals or collectives perform or resist domination and oppression.

In everyday parlance, fuelled by widespread neoliberal doctrines of self-responsibilisation, the notion of agency often evokes the image of a human actor whose intentional actions should produce the intended effects (Gershon 2011). This ‘voluntarist’ notion of agency, i.e. the idea that we are the masters of our own fate and responsible for the outcomes of our actions, has far-reaching implications. It affects, for instance, how contemporary healthcare, welfare, or justice systems are set up in many countries around the world and how people imagine politics more generally. Anthropologists, however, have always emphasised that what people understand by agency, or how they believe they can act in and upon the world, greatly varies across cultural and historical contexts. As the next section shows, they have also cautioned against simply equating agency with human self-determination (e.g. Keane 2003, 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992).

Cultural constructions of agency

Anthropologists have tended to emphasise that the meanings of agency differ substantially between different social, cultural, or historical contexts. Such differences in meaning can have an immediate effect on how and by whom agency can be exercised and how it is valued. For example, if people believe that God, or spirits, or dead ancestors, are powerful agents, this will affect not only how people explain their world, but fundamentally shape many aspects of social life itself. One influential way of defining agency is therefore that it is ‘the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act' (Ahearn 2001, 112).

Anthropological studies have often focused on encounters between people with different conceptions of agency, often in highly unequal positions of power, such as in colonial, missionary, or interethnic contexts (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, Ortner 2001, Keane 2007, or High 2010). In an ethnography of mountaineering in Nepal, Ortner (1997), for example, details how international mountain climbers, known as sahbs, can impose their terms and conditions on the Sherpas they employ as climbing assistants. That is because the international mountain climbers hold a privileged social position and greater economic power. However, Ortner convincingly shows that the Sherpa are not only dominated by the mountaineers, but draw on local constructions of agency to give meaning to their actions and to recurring tragic events, like a death during an expedition. They consider the relations between powerful remote gods, ordinary humans, and harmful demons to make sense of their situation. Ortner claims that over time, Sherpas’ assertions regarding why deaths occur and how they might be prevented, have led to small, but important, changes in mountaineering practices. In her words,

Sherpa religion constructs cultural notions of power and agency and […] their construction of power and agency allows them to manage lamas, gods, sahbs, and deep personal grief in ways that are (for many) effective’ (Ortner 1997, 158).

Although the meanings people attach to agency in different contexts shape the way people can and do act, beliefs about agency are not always in line with how people try to exert influence on the world. Furthermore, even though there are hegemonic understandings of agency, most people rely on a plurality of models to explain human action and behaviour. For instance, while one can certainly find a strong discourse emphasising self-reliance, self-responsibility, and personal autonomy in the US, this discourse is usually deployed strategically. It is foregrounded when politicians argue for cutting down on welfare costs or when the National Rifle Association lobbies against tighter gun controls, but deemphasised in other situations. In the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, for example, US Americans who publicly commented on the shooting almost never assigned unfettered responsibility to the two shooters. Instead they blamed the parents, the school, gun culture, media, or mental health for what happened (Strauss 2007). This shows that while voluntarist understandings of agency are widespread and are often uncontested in the United States, there are some contexts, including situations of great social anxiety, in which people draw on alternative cultural models of agency to explain actions and events (Strauss 2007, 822).

As the examples in this section show, agency is to a certain extent culturally constructed—it is shaped by religious beliefs, political and media discourses, but also by what it means to be a person in a given social context. Conceptions of agency will almost certainly vary depending on whether a person is imagined as an individually crafted self or a highly influential and malleable entity, maybe even an interdependent ‘dividual’ who ‘contain(s) a generalized sociality within’ (Strathern 1988, 13). However, even in very specific cultural, linguistic, or historical contexts, meanings of agency and related ideas such as creativity, freedom, and intention are usually plural and dynamic, and they change over time. The latter point, and the related question of how social/cultural reproduction and transformation occur, is a central concern in debates on agency and language.

Agency and language

Contemporary understandings of agency have been influenced by linguistics, notably by speech act theory. The latter proposes that language does not only describe the world, but that it can in fact change it (see Austin 1962 and Searle 1979). When a priest says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’, he does not simply describe what he is doing. Instead, he performs an action with very tangible effects. As John Austin, one of speech act theory’s most influential proponents, put it, ‘When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., “I do,” I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1962, 6). Following these lines of thinking, most linguistic anthropologists see language as a form of social action, as something that is continually made and remade by its speakers, and as something that, to a certain extent, constructs and creates social reality (Ahearn 2001, 110–1). The interconnections between language and agency have been debated in relationship to different issues. This section focusses mainly on three: the role of intention, the role of linguistic forms like grammar, and the role of discourse. All three issues are related to the larger question regarding how language is reproduced, how it is transformed and, by implication, how it allows for and how it constrains agency.

How to conceptualise the relationship between agency, intention, and effect is a key concern in any debate on agency. The voluntarist notion of agency, as discussed above, assumes a straightforward relationship between the three: if people want to change aspects of their lives, such as their body, their economic situation, or their health, they can do it. They can intend to do it, engage in the necessary activities, and will likely achieve the desired effects. Other theoretical approaches, however, like actor-network theory (Latour 2005, see below), almost take intention completely out of the equation: they argue that agency is always networked and relational and therefore that things can have agency without having intention. Linguistic anthropologists have engaged with the longstanding debate on intention (Anscombe 2000) perhaps more thoroughly than other sub-disciplines. They have critiqued the proposition of philosopher John Searle (1983) that one can speak of human action only if its effects (i.e. ‘what occurs’, as Searle put it) matches the intention and that therefore unintended happenings, like falling down a flight of stairs, do not strictly speaking count as action (Duranti 2015). Intention, like agency, is socially/culturally embedded: what we want or choose to do, such as the clothes we wear or the food we eat, for example, is strongly influenced by social conventions. More than that, however, linguistic anthropologists have also debated the extent to which different societies assign importance to the intention behind a statement or whether they focus more on the actual consequences of action. In Samoan political and legislative fora, known as fono, for instance, the participants place emphasis on what a specific type of person in a given social role should do, or has promised, rather than speculating about an individual’s intentions or motivations behind their actions or statements. People in specific political or status-based positions, for example, are expected to provide food or gifts irrespective of their current circumstances or desires. And unlike in some cultural contexts, in which reflections about one’s own or others’ thoughts and feelings are common, fono members usually avoid trying to find individual-speciﬁc psychological explanations in cases where people fail to live up to their duties or promises (Duranti 2015, 67).

How people can do things with words depends not only on cultural contexts, but also on what and how different languages allow one to speak. Language is one of the most fundamental structures people operate in, frequently constraining and enabling us unconsciously. Often, we only notice how constraining language can be when we want to describe something for which there are no words, when we translate from a different language, or when the rules of speaking change, like when new pathways for more gender-sensitive language are introduced to societies. In these contexts, we do not speak or write automatically, but we carefully reflect before we incorporate the new rules. Different languages allow for different ways of assigning and marking agents and subjects, with far-reaching implications for how agency is understood and how it can be described and encoded. In English, for instance, one can avoid assigning agency by using the passive form. For instance, rather than saying ‘Peter verbally attacked Wendy’, someone who might not want to cast blame on Peter could simply say ‘Wendy was attacked in the discussion’. Different languages have different ways of encoding agency through their grammatical structure—for instance through rules regarding how a subject or object in a sentence are marked and related to each other. In the English sentence ‘the boy broke the window’, there is no visible difference between the subject/agent (‘the boy’) and the object (‘the window’). In Samoan, by contrast, the agent (i.e. the boy) would be marked by a specific proposition (‘e’) whereas the object (i.e. window) would be unmarked (for a more extensive discussion, see Duranti 2004). Linguistic anthropologists have also paid attention to how class, gender, race, or ethnicity shape how language is uttered and received (Ahearn 2001, 120–4).

Language and how it constructs, or even creates, social ‘reality’ is also a big concern in post-structuralist theories. The latter tend to assume that there is no objective truth and that what we consider ‘reality’ is created through discourses which are shaped by power dynamics and in which meanings are thus inherently unstable (Foucault 1977, 1978). Discourse-oriented approaches frequently lack an explicit theory of agency or concrete agents. Rather, they focus on subjects, and subject-positions that individuals are born into, and which mark their roles and identities in society. Discourses are powerful, but they are not ‘owned’ by anyone and thus also cannot be changed at will. After all, one individual can rarely have a profound influence on how their language is spoken. While individual intentions are recognised, post-structuralist theories, especially those inspired by French social theorist Michel Foucault, focus on the often unintended effects of social practices and the ways individuals cannot escape the subjugating effects of power (Ahearn 2001, 116–7, Ortner 1997, 137–8). For example, our position as political subjects or citizens is created via the descriptive and bureaucratic practices of nation-states. They register us at birth and decide whether we should receive passports and social security numbers. Foucault was attuned to such processes of ‘subjectivation’, showing how they exert power over us in subtle ways. Some post-structuralists, perhaps most prominently Judith Butler (1990, 2010), have tried to extend Foucault’s thinking on subjectivation to include a more refined theory of how social change occurs. Butler starts from the assumption that individuals are born into particular—sexed, gendered, or racialised—subject positions; in other words, the body is always already represented. However, the categories used to represent the body, sex for instance, are not naturally given, but discursively constructed and enacted through language. By giving a child a male name based on their genital markers, people ‘make’ the child’s body male, according to Butler. Because bodily markers like sex or skin colour that are chosen to distinguish bodies are to some extent arbitrary, they need to be upheld through constant repetition—or performance. For example, men and women are trained to sit, walk, eat, speak, and think in ways that re-affirm their gender. This makes bodily subjectivation vulnerable and tenuous, because the stability of norms depends on their constant enactment. There is always the possibility that these enactments can fail, leaving room for norms to change or ‘become undone’ (Butler 2004).

In sum, one can learn a lot about agency by looking at language. Language is one of the most fundamental structures that humans are faced with in almost every social situation. While we have control over the words we decide to speak, we are bound by existing vocabulary, grammatical structures, and often embodied conventions of speaking, which—while dynamic and ever-evolving—do not change at any one speaker’s individual will.

Agency as resistance: The feminist dilemma

The turn to agency in anthropology and other disciplines was in part related to social movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The anti-war, anti-colonial, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements showed that society could change drastically and rapidly. This was also made clear by the late twentieth century social upheavals in Europe which culminated in the end of the Soviet Union. As a result of observing or participating in popular protests which were aimed at, and sometimes succeeded in, radically transforming society, academics became interested in developing a more nuanced understanding of transformative social action (Ahearn 2001, 110).

In some of the earlier subaltern and feminist anthropological work, agency tended to be implicitly or explicitly equated with resistance. This ‘romance of resistance’ (Abu-Lughod 1990) however, created several problems, which became most apparent in feminist anthropology. On the one hand, feminist ethnographies rested on the assumption that women across the world were being dominated by patriarchal structures and forms of power. On the other hand, feminist anthropologists felt compelled not to portray women as (mere) victims, but as agents who pushed back against male domination—even if this resistance was subtle or ineffective (for an ‘anthropological classic’ on subtle, everyday forms of resistance see Scott 1985). Bringing these two goals together proved particularly challenging in situations where women pursued projects which did not challenge, or even supported, patriarchal values and orders (Ahearn 2001, 115-6).

In her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood (2005, 2006) grapples with this problem at various levels. As a Pakistan-born scholar, post-colonial thinker, and feminist intellectual, she tries to complexify and challenge key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject. The women she studied, while entering into religious spaces and engaging with theological texts which had hitherto been almost exclusively the purview of men, were deeply committed to Islamic principles that enabled, or even prescribed, their subordination as women. In Mahmood’s words, ‘the very idioms that women use to assert their presence in previously male-defined spheres are also those that secure their subordination’ (2006, 182). The women’s piety movement actively tried to push for moral reforms, advocating, for instance, that women should be veiled and that they should ‘cultivate shyness’ as ways of enacting the norm of female modesty. As such, their propositions were not in line with conventional liberal feminist understandings of emancipation and resistance. Yet the Egyptian women studied by Mahmood were acting as moral and political agents and were committed to particular forms of self-realisation. They stood at odds with

a particular notion of human agency in feminist scholarship (that) sharply limits our ability to understand and interrogate the lives of women whose sense of self, projects and aspirations have been shaped by non-liberal traditions’ (Mahmood 2006, 179).

Understanding agency in Egypt’s piety movement meant taking particular historical and cultural contexts into account in which such agency emerges and can be enacted (cf. Lovell 2003). Therefore, ‘agentive capacity’ must be analytically separated from the notion of ‘autonomous will’. Agency may take the form of resisting or challenging norms, but it is also entailed in acts that sustain and reinforce them (Mahmood 2006, 186).

More recent debates have equally moved beyond simplistic conflations of agency with resistance. In fact, the notion of resistance itself has been challenged and complexified. Alternative concepts—such as refusal (Simpson 2014, see also McGranahan 2016, Weiss 2016) or fugitivity (Campt 2014)—come with their very own theories and understandings of agency and what it means in particular contexts and constellations of power. The North American First Nation Kahnawà:ke Mohawk people, for instance, refuse the very terms and paradigms on which the US and Canadian states recognise their existence as people. Rather than actively resisting or trying to change the persisting settler colonial regime, they outright refuse citizenship, voting rights, tax paying, or any other logics (‘games’) dictated by a colonial state. Recognising the insurmountable power asymmetries, and ‘in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people […] to having their land taken, their lives controlled, and their stories told for them’ (Simpson 2016, 327f.), the Mohawk build and assert their very own histories, territory, and political order outside of state-governmental control. Their agency thereby far surpasses mere resistance to the state.

Distributed agency: Beyond intention, mastery and humans

As noted above, in many contemporary societies, under capitalism, and certainly also in world politics, agency is almost inevitably tied to the idea of an autonomous self. Most persons are held to be capable of making choices and entitled to rights and self-identification. This is particularly evident in current debates on gender, where individuals call for the right to negotiate whether they want to be identified as man, woman, trans, or otherwise, rather than passively accepting social ascriptions based on sex markers (Garrison 2018; Commissioner for Human Rights 2009). People also increasingly want to choose to change their body in the hope of finding ‘a more suitable and fitting gendered space and belonging’ (Sanders et al. 2023, 1064). Ideas of an autonomous self also underly other aspects of identity politics such as the so-called ‘war on fat’ (Greenhalgh 2015). Both sides—those people who ‘fat-shame’ others and blame them for making unhealthy life-choices and those ‘body positive supporters’ who argue for everyone’s right to choose their own body and, importantly, how it should be perceived—use strongly voluntarist arguments (Rose Spratt 2023).^[1]Thereby, both sides largely ignore the socio-economic and political aspects that shape people’s bodies (e.g. the food industry, advertising, or poverty and inequality) as well as the bodily and biosocial factors which contribute to, or result from, obesity (e.g. metabolic processes, food addiction, illness). Voluntarists care little about factors that go beyond an individual’s personal choice. However, research on people who undergo bariatric surgery, for example, complicates the distinction between active and passive subjects and instead shows the complex, networked forms of agency that are involved in signifying and treating obesity. While surgery may partially relieve patients of the difficult task of losing weight by simply changing their eating or exercising behaviour, the changed body calls for, and enables, new forms of self-care which are necessary for maintaining weight loss (Vogel 2018).

Especially in many so-called Western countries, the ideas that everyone is the master of their own fate and identity, and that humans control nature and their own bodies, are widespread and can be traced back to the philosophy of René Descartes. Cartesian thinking, and Enlightenment thought more generally, replaced the idea that God was in charge of life on Earth with beliefs in science, rationality, and human mastery (Latour 2014, Mazzarella 2021, Taussig 2020). However, this is not a straightforward genealogy: Marxist or psychoanalytic perspectives, for instance, offer radically different perspectives on self-control and the ability to make ‘conscious’ or rational choices. Furthermore, current discourses on identity and self-management are closely linked to much more recent neoliberal theories, policies, and ideologies (Gershon 2011). While it appears that people today have extended their control over fundamental matters of life—and even death (Kaufman 2006, Solomon 2022, 147–73) —anthropologists have found more complex ways to conceptualise agency in such contexts. They think of it as relational, distributed, or more-than-human. Ideas of relational and non-human agency have long existed in many parts of the world and have informed past and present systems of knowledge, including African philosophy and psychology (Okeja 2015, Adjei 2019), animism (Chen 2012), and Indigenous epistemologies (TallBear 2011). Now these notions are being ‘rediscovered’ in many current ethnographies (see below).

Early anthropological theories of relational, ‘distributed’, or networked agency draw heavily on the science of control and communication known as cybernetics, which claims that individual, society, and ecosystem are all part of one supreme system—what anthropologist Gregory Bateson (2000) referred to as ‘Mind’. This systemic and distributed Mind is very different from the notion of an individual mind, self, or consciousness, in that it has the capacity to produce information and respond to it in a self-corrective way. The idea of distributed agency was developed in contrast to occidental epistemology and its inherent fallacies of purposive thinking, rationalism, and control, deemed to be a threat to the networked nature of Mind and to the cybernetic system itself. Bateson’s (2000) ideas have recently experienced a great revival and have been taken up by anthropologists and others, particularly in debates on whether we live in a time of man-made planetary change known as the Anthropocene (e.g. Hylland Eriksen 2023). The climate, for instance, can be considered a form of thought or ‘thinking system’ which profoundly shapes ecosystems and social orders (Knox 2020).

Another influential early anthropological theory on relational or ‘mediated’ agency and networked ‘intentionalities’ focused on the agency of art and proposed that art objects have the capacity to exert power over viewers or users (Gell 1992, 1998). Art objects, according to Alfred Gell’s theory, are about ‘doing’ more than they are about meaning, communication, or aesthetics. Embedded in networks of social relations, they have the power to influence and effect change in the world. Art, for instance, can enchant the viewer, affect them emotionally, and thereby implicate them in larger networks of social relations. The agency of art works especially through abduction, i.e. a type of non-deductive inference. Based on their encounter with a particular material object, viewers or users make assumptions about the intention of its producers. Thereby, the object creates and mediates social relations and forms of agency (Gell 1992, 1998 drawing on linguist Charles Peirce).

The most prominent ‘theory’ on networked agency to date, however, is actor-network theory (ANT) which in anthropology is mostly associated with the writings of Bruno Latour (1999a, 1999b, 2005). ANT pays attention to the agency of both human and non-human actors and complicates the distinction between active and passive subjects. Its central premise is that everything exists relationally, and that non-human beings, objects, and ideas are just as important in creating particular social situations as humans. Latour gives the example of a man and a gun who both become changed through their encounter. He writes,

You are different with the gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you (1999b, 179–80).

Latour thus tries to complexify the idea that it is either ‘guns’ or ‘people’ who kill, when in fact actions like killing someone always involve a plurality of agents. Agency, in this sense, is thus not necessarily intentional; it is a source of action and effect whereby the material and the discursive are closely intertwined and the ‘responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants’ (Latour 1999b, 180). This has implications for our understandings of human autonomy. As Latour puts it,

To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects – or rather quasi-subjects – that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized (2014, 5).

Notions of relational, networked, or distributed agency have been taken up in many different fields of anthropological study (for a good overview see Enfield and Kockelman 2017). Some draw explicitly on Bateson, Gell, or Latour, while others build on more recent concepts such as ‘entanglement’ (Barad 2007), ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010) or ‘non-mastery’ (Taussig 2020) which emphasise that humans are inseparably entangled with, rather than being in control of, powerful non-human life and material worlds. Especially in the fields of new materialism, environmental and multispecies anthropology, recent ethnographies explore almost endless forms of non-human agency. These include the agency of waves (Helmreich 2023), algorithms (Siles 2023), robots (Aronsson and Flynn 2021), oil plants (Chao 2022), dogs (Haraway 2007), or spirits (Blanes and Santo 2013) which in various ways haunt, inform, affect, engage, or transform local and global lifeworlds (for a critique of these ‘posthumanist’ theories of agency, see Hornborg 2019).

A good ‘everyday’ example to which one can apply ideas of networked agency and non-mastery is sleep (see e.g. Vorhölter 2023). Sleep poses curious challenges for human agency, as it cannot be easily controlled. Everybody does it all the time, and yet no one can really produce it at will. Once it has ‘chosen to arrive’, sleep is unstoppable. But often, people desperately wait for it—and it doesn’t come. Attaining sleep is a strange mix of acting and non-acting, a form of active surrender—but one that cannot always be willingly achieved. Sleep has a paradoxical relationship to intention: the more one actively tries to sleep, the less possible it becomes. Contemporary sleep science reveals the complex interplay of various bodily, cerebral, and social processes that constitute sleep (see e.g. Stickgold and Walker 2009). While some of these can be consciously controlled (like the decision to lie down or close one’s eyes), others cannot. They simply happen, like changes in brain waves, body temperature, or muscle tone. Intermediary agents, like alcohol or sleeping pills, can assist in the process, but they too depend on other, less controllable, agents such as hormones and neurotransmitters to achieve sleep. In sleep, then, agency seems to be truly distributed. It is the achievement of a complex metabolism with no ‘subject’ in control.

While sleep is a very personal example, the desire people have to control it and the powerlessness they experience when control fails, is emblematic of larger political processes. In particular, the challenges raised by the Anthropocene call for radically new ways of thinking about agency—which recognise the active role of nonhumans, including the Earth, and which complexify the agency-intention-effect triad—as Latour (2014) powerfully argued.

Conclusion: Beyond agency

As this entry shows, agency has been extensively discussed in anthropology over the last four decades. Interest in the concept peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was taken up in theories and fields as varied as post-structuralism, actor-network theory, and linguistic anthropology. Despite anthropologists’ attempts to promote a nuanced understanding of agency and what it implies in different social, historical, and theoretical contexts, agency is still most commonly associated with liberal notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Due to this narrow, but dominant, understanding of the term, many anthropologists have criticised the usefulness of the concept and have proposed alternative terms or concepts which draw attention to specific forms of social action. This is not just a theoretical move, but also a critique of the contemporary moment where ‘agency is imagined as the human capacity without which ethical life, understood as the capacity to do this or to do that, would be impossible’ (Mazzarella 2021, 7). According to this ‘ethics of agency’, the ideal citizen strives for action and self-determination. By contrast, various forms of subtle action and inaction which allow oneself to be acted upon by others, such as waiting, pausing, staying silent, giving in, or yielding, are often perceived as shameful, cowardly, or even as failure.

While William Mazzarella and others have proposed concepts like ‘patiency’ or passivity to imagine possible other, i.e. non-agentic, ways of being in the world, it is highly unlikely that these will replace agency and related questions and debates in anthropology anytime soon. More and more debates in anthropology are moving away from individual and power/resistance-centred notions of agency towards relational and distributed understandings of the term. Rather than being centrally concerned with questions of self, structure, intention, or control, such conceptualisations are much more tied up with concepts like the ‘biosocial’, the ‘post-human’, and the ‘affective’. Whether in the field of politics, body-mind, or ecology, most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions and actions, and their effects on the world, is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests. One major impact of the ongoing theoretical debates, then, has been to change our empirical gaze and encourage us to read agency differently as we analyse social phenomena across an ever-growing range of ethnographic contexts.

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Note on contributor

Julia Vorhölter is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She has previously conducted fieldwork in Uganda on topics including perceptions of socio-cultural change, humanitarian interventions, gender and generational relations, and psychotherapy. Her current research focuses on experiences, assessments, and treatments of (disordered) sleep in Germany.

[1] Mull, Amanda. 2018. “Body positivity is a scam: How a movement intended to lift up women really just limits their acceptable emotions. Again.” Vox, June 5. https://www.vox.com/2018/6/5/17236212/body-positivity-scam-dove-campaign-ad

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Dreams

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:17:37 +0000

Scene from a 2018 mural depicting dream creatures and the women who paint them, by Guatemalen artist María Elena Curruchiche. Picture by UN Women/Ryan Brown

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24dreams

Abstract:

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached—if not always formally recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, social relationships, psychological landscapes, and cultural worlds of those who experience them. This entry examines three prominent themes in the anthropological study of dreams as experience and dreaming as process. The first section considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of selfhood and identity. The second section considers dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section considers dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining in particular dreams’ morality and function as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion considers the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis in light of the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological approach of ‘participant-observation’.

Introduction

There is perhaps no activity more private, individual, or interior than dreaming. Dreams tend to occur as involuntary, sporadic events during slumber, encompassing visual images, cognitive activity, and a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. They are often remembered and recounted in scattered fragments or fleeting impressions rather than coherent or structured events. Their significance can seem glaringly evident, or thoroughly opaque. Some we deem meaningful, others trivial. Some dreams we are happy to share, others we would rather not reveal. Dreams, as such, sit somewhere at the interstices of the experienced and narrated, real and imagined, meaningful and meaningless, conscious and subconscious, and disclosed and concealed. Yet despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their nebulous nature, dreams have often been approached—if not always recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, relationships, affects, and environments of those who experience them.^[1]

Dreams were long considered the primary terrain of psychoanalytic theory, which centres the role of unconscious mental processes in shaping human behavioural and mental states. Anthropological approaches have shed vital light on the socially and historically shaped ways that different communities understand the origins, causes, contents, contexts, and meanings of dreams, both as individual psychic experiences and as culturally situated practices, and in ways that do not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions (Lohmann 2007). The earliest reference to dreams within anthropology can be traced to the late nineteenth century scholar Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who argued that dreaming, as a universally experienced state of reality-transcending and altered consciousness, enabled the emergence of human mythologies, cosmological frameworks, and religious beliefs worldwide. For Tylor, dreams in many non-modern societies were held to put people in touch with objectively existing souls or ghosts, while modern societies understood souls and ghosts to be the result of psychology and biology ([1871] 1920). His theories reflected a broader understanding among Victorian anthropologists that belief in the reality of dreams characterised earlier stages in the development of human society, within a three-part evolution of culture from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’.

Early twentieth century dreaming studies, conducted primarily in non-Western settings and often tied to psychiatric interventions, tended to focus on the collection, classification, and comparison of similarities and differences in dream contents, or what was known as ‘dream data reports’ (e.g. Lincoln 1935).^[2]However, post-war scholars in psychological anthropology, and particularly those affiliated with the US-borne ‘Culture and Personality School’—an influential current concerned with how psychological and cultural forces shape human experience—were critical of the abstraction of dreams from their specific lived and interpretive contexts. They posited that dreams should instead be approached as expressions of collectively shaped personality traits and emotive dispositions shared by particular social groups (e.g. Eggan 1952).

It was primarily in the late 1980s and early 1990s that dreams came to figure more prominently as objects of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural comparison in their own right within the work of social anthropologists, some of whom bring their social scientific analyses into conversation with neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (e.g. Nordin 2011; Laughlin 2011). Sometimes referred to as the ‘new anthropology of dreaming’ (Tedlock 1991), albeit not thoroughly systematised or integrated, this current recognises dreams as communicative events and legitimate modes of interpreting, inhabiting, and effecting change in the world. It draws attention to dreams as both interiorly experienced and culturally contextual social facts, often requiring multi-disciplinary analysis and attention to local psychodynamics. It also considers dreaming as a fruitful way to conduct research. Dreams can help build relations between field interlocutors and fieldworkers as dreamers themselves, allowing them to connect across different sociocultural worlds.^[3]

Drawing on ethnographic examples from diverse regions, this entry considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of self, personhood, and identity. It then approaches dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section examines dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining dreams’ functions as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion assesses the opportunities and challenges entailed in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis, particularly given their often-opaque nature and the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological method of ‘participant-observation’.

Self, identity, and psyche

Dreams play a central role within anthropological investigations into constructions of the self, identity, and psyche across individuals, collectives, and cultures, or what is referred to alternately as the field of ‘ethnopsychology’ (White 2012) or ‘cultural psychodynamics’ (Mageo 2015). Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in rehabilitating dreams as objects of legitimate scholarly inquiry and therapeutic intervention in the West and had a profound influence on early anthropologies of dreaming. Its influence manifests, for instance, in analyses of dreams as the disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes and as expressions of trauma, anxiety, and guilt. It also surfaces in the distinction identified by researchers between dreams’ manifest or conscious content and their latent or subconscious content, and an attention to the multiple symbolic valences of recurring dream motifs or patterns.

Exemplary of this approach is an ethnographic study conducted in the 1980s that centred on the dreams of Jovenil, a recently bereaved father among the Kagwahiv people of the Brazilian Amazon (Kracke 1981). In these dreams, Jovenil witnesses the engorged penis of a man that is snapped off as punishment for the man having slept with his own sister. Jovenil also dreams of suffering the wrath of his wife for inadvertently hunting and killing a monkey and of overturning a canoe that drowns his son, Alonzo. These events, according to anthropologist Waud Kracke, manifest Jovenil’s curiosity in the large penis of a fellow villager he beheld as a child and for which he was later castigated by his mother, resulting in sexual trauma. They also show his repressed guilt for engaging in taboo incestuous relations with a parallel cousin earlier in life, and the blame he places upon himself for the consequent death of his children as a form of punishment. In a society that prescribes that the dead must be forgotten and all memories of them eradicated, it was through the subconscious experience of dreams that Jovenil was able to work through the emotional process of mourning the loss of his children, facing his guilty conscience, and acknowledge his complicity in the tragedy.

If the example above centres on a single individuals’ multiple dreams, other early studies of an ethnopsychological bent took as their primary data a wider array of subjects and dreams to identify basic personality traits and worldviews that are shared by particular social groups, or what was then called ‘culture patterns’ (Eggan 1952, 478). For instance, ‘dream charts’ were deployed to analyse the manifest content of 334 dreams collected from men and women aged 6 to 75 years in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico (Foster 1973). Recurring symbols within these dreams, and particularly among men, include a threatening environment, impotence and loneliness, fear of embarrassment, and unpredictable futures. These repeated motifs point to anxiety over what people will say, or of being found out, as central dimensions of Tzintzuntzan cultural and gendered norms. They suggest that Tzintzuntzan people’s adherence to principles of good behaviour in waking life is driven less by their sense of guilt than by their conformity to what anthropologist George Foster calls a ‘shame culture’. Importantly, dreams’ manifest content directs attention not only to the basic tenets of ‘shame culture’ as a shared disposition among Tzintzuntzan people, but also to the disharmony or tensions that exist between this cultural ideal on the one hand, and the repression of desires that sustaining this ideal demands (Eggan 1952, 478).

More recent ethnopsychological scholarship has distanced itself from Freudian and Culture and Personality approaches to studying dreams. It recognised that such approaches risked being ethnocentric, i.e. that they often misinterpreted dreams because they stuck too closely to the cultural understandings of the analysts. Previous approaches had also assumed that cultures were largely static and that insights from one culture were widely generalisable. Working against these assumptions, contemporary ethnopsychological studies consider how cultural transformation, including processes of globalisation, colonisation, and modernisation, reconfigures the ability of individuals and collectives to reorganise their sense of self. They study, for example, how dreams that reflect back to the dreamer how their organisation of self relates to them, their body, and other beings and entities in the world (so-called ‘selfscape dreams’) relate to people’s interpretive frameworks (Hollan 2004). While such dreams may be universal in their basic orienting functions, their content varies within and across both cultures and individuals, conjuring cultural contexts that are more-than-local in their scope, sites, and subjects (e.g. Lattas 1993; Hollan 2005).

In American Samoa, for example, the dreams of young students, and their own reflections on these dreams’ significance, express their efforts to situate their selves in the context of imposed cultural shifts over a century of Christian conversion and Americanisation (Mageo 2004). In one such dream, a female Samoan’s muteness, compounded with her inability or refusal to speak either English or Samoan and her appearance as a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old, point to communication problems, existential confusions, and forms of cultural resistance linked to Samoan girls’ shifting sexuality and gender roles. They reflect enduring traditional hierarchies on the one hand and notions of social equality and racial categories introduced by colonialism on the other. In another dream, the violent silencing and injury suffered by a male dreamer’s girlfriend embodies the challenge of reconciling the customary authority of higher-status Samoan males with the values of romantic engagement, care, and sincerity introduced by Christian missionaries, and American soldiers in WWI. In both instances, dreams and their interpretation by dreamers themselves come to constitute experiences that are creative rather than purely passive, conscious rather than purely unconscious, and generative rather than purely reflective. It is through these experiences that Samoans engage emotionally and discursively in the effects and affects of socio-cultural change and attendant forms of meaning-making.

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

The sociocultural dimensions of dreams accrue particular prominence when dream ritualisation, communication, and interpretation form part of an established local knowledge system. Such insider or local knowledge systems offer valuable insights into how dream experiences are defined, classified, and valued across different communities as significant or mundane, empowering or perilous, or pragmatic or supernatural. They showcase how and when dreams should be communicated to others, or not, and who has the authority to elucidate their meanings. They also shed light on the diverse functions and causes of dreams, including as momentary and revelatory journeys deep into parts of the self or beyond (Mittermaier 2015; Groark 2009); as products of the intentions of the dreamer or unsolicited visitations by outside entities (George 1995; Heneise 2017); as pathways to or predicaments of past and future events (Stewart 2017; Basso 1987); as deliberately induced expressions of creative imagination or unwilled forms of external control (Herdt and Stephen 1989; Chao 2022); as guides to behaviour or reflections thereof (Ingold 2013; Pandya 2004); as experiences of diagnostic, therapeutic, anxiogenic, or punitive valences (Devereux 2023; Traphagan 2003); as expressions of resilience or rupture in the face of change (Graham 1995; Glaskin 2005); and as continuous extensions of, or radical breaks from, waking thoughts (Kracke 1981; Rubenstein 2012).

Ethnographic studies of dreams among the Yolmo of north-central Nepal illustrate the value of attending to local understandings of dreams’ sociocultural significance as categories of experience and modes of practice (Desjarlais 1991). According to one study, conducted in the late 1980s, dreams do not exist for Yolmo as a unitary entity, but rather in three distinctive forms—auspicious, inauspicious, and seemingly insignificant—that manifest in particular dream events. While villagers can articulate these basic distinctions, it is primarily Buddhist spiritual leaders and priests, such as lamas and shamans, who have the authority and expertise to determine what particular dreams signify and to heal those who experience them. They do so by drawing on a ‘dictionary of dream symbols’ (Desjarlais 1991, 215) that identifies and indexes a wide, complex, yet finite range of dream images and meanings that are collectively recognised but also vary in significance depending on the dreamer in question.

In contrast to the notion of dreams as reflective of the individual’s self, psyche, and past, many Yolmo believe that dreams predict events that will impact those around the dreamer in the course of their future waking life. For instance, a tree falling in one person’s dream indicates that one of their close relatives will imminently die (Desjarlais 1991, 216). Another key facet of Yolmo dream knowledge systems pertains to the sustained enculturation in editing, remembering, communicating, and thus in some ways creating dream stories that begin in the early stages of life. Throughout this process, Yolmo not only come to terms with the distresses expressed in their dreams, but also actively ‘make their dreams mean what they want them to mean’ (Desjarlais 1991, 221). What this study offers is an approach to dreams anchored first and foremost in the knowledge systems of dreamers themselves—one that uncovers dreams’ divinatory functions as well as their positioning with local structures of expertise, processes of skill acquisition, and understandings of meaning-making as a concomitantly symbolic and strategic endeavour.

Other ethnographic accounts attend the embodied and ritualised dimensions and protocols of dreams and dream-sharing as collective—rather than individuated—practices that serve to guide everyday social activities. One such case centres on dreaming among the Ongee people of Little Andaman Island and its role in determining communal hunting and gathering practices in daily life (Pandya 2004). Within these dreams, shared sensations of smells help to inform conscious and practical decisions by Ongee groups around what plants or animals should be sought out in the forest, where, and when.^[4]This olfactory dimension stems from the Ongee perception of dreams as moments where individuals’ internal bodies (enteeah) collect the smells left behind or imprinted upon their external bodies (mateeah) in waking life, in a process known as dane korale, which translates literally as ‘a spider making its web’ and is also the Ongee term for ‘dreaming’ (Pandya 2004, 143).

Ongee practice a ritualised form of dream-sharing by participating in lengthy and highly stylised discussions and singing before falling asleep on concentric and mutually facing platforms, in which they describe what they did in the day and what they dreamt of the previous night. Olfactory references identified across different individuals’ dreams, such as the smell of ripe jackfruit, bring these individuals to form groups and look for jackfruit in the forest together. The discovery of ripe jackfruit validates the dreams shared, producing what Ongee call ‘dream success’ (eneyemaga-tegebe) (Pandya 2004, 140). The collective, rather than individuated, nature of dream images and smells thus works hand in hand with Ongee’s collective interpretation of these dreams’ meanings and their implications for shared daily activities. While Ongee have since experienced a transition from circular open campgrounds to private enclosed quarters, and from forest-based subsistence to plantation labour, this ritualised, sensory, and collective ethos persists. People no longer dream or discuss the familiar scents of plants and animals. Instead, their collective dream-sharing rituals speak to experiences of, and guidance found in, the novel smells of plantation foremen and buzzing helicopters.

If symbolism and sensoriality play an important role within some cultural understandings of dreaming, other anthropological approaches invite a more radical appraisal of the primacy of acts and processes of interpretation. They focus less on the instances and categories of imagery and meaning and more on the activities involved in determining and consolidating dreams’ social significance. One example of this are the new dreams of ‘being eaten by oil palm’ (dimakan sawit) experienced by the Marind people of West Papua, Indonesia (Chao 2022, 183–200), wherein sleeping individuals become violently possessed by an introduced cash crop that is rapidly taking over their lands and forests in waking life. These dreams act as cultural critiques of the plantation as a newly established mode of economic production in the region, and they resonate with the new sensory experiences of Ongee community members.

Rather than focusing their discourses on the contents or events of these dreams, or attributing a therapeutic or cathartic value to dream experiences, Marind affirm it is primarily through the oral transmission of dream narratives to and with others that collective healing takes place. For instance, knowledge of kith and kin who have recently been ‘eaten by oil palm’ brings people to travel the landscape to their encounter. Shared dream experiences prompt villagers who are in conflictual relations over land rights to reconcile with one another, or enable starcrossed lovers whose marriage is proscribed by customary law to sustain a different kind of intimate relationship through dream story-telling. In contrast to traditional dreams, whose significance was arbitrated by medicine-men (messav) (Chao 2022, 188–9), new dreams of being eaten by oil palm are open to each and everyone’s interpretation, creating an egalitarian ethos that in turn allows for the participation of women, children, youth, and elders across rural and urban divides. What dream experiences mean, in other words, matters less than what dream sharing does as an exercise in mutual trust-building and as an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability to the attritive forces of plantation capitalism across waking and sleeping worlds.

Another example of how dream interpretation processes come to produce meaning, identity, and consciousness derives from studies of ‘dreamwork groups’ in the United Kingdom (Edgar 1999). These are groups in which six to twelve people share and interpret their dreams in a structured manner. Studying these groups showed that the ways in which dreams are discussed, embellished, and censored depend heavily on social and interactional group dynamics, such as their members’ degree of mutual familiarity, friendship, and shared values.

These dynamics produce dream interpretations that, over the course of conversations initiated by the dreamer but primarily shaped by the group’s questions, suggestions, reservations, and encouragements, become vastly different from the originally recounted experience of the dream and also mutate when dreamwork groups’ composition changes over time. It is through this situated and collective ‘cultural reworking’ of dreams (Edgar 1999, 39), involving the consciousness of both the dreamer and group, that new kinds of mental and affective connectedness are generated and the grounds for individual self-realisation actualised.

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

A third prevalent motif in the anthropology of dreaming pertains to its relationship to religiosity and the transcendent, notably as a source of cosmological knowledge, divination, and power across time. In some contexts, dream experiences and their revelations are intrinsically connected to spiritual understandings of consciousness, cognition, and salvation (e.g. Young 1999). In other contexts, dreams are seen as tied to prophetic figures and events in the past that in turn motivate religious and political movements in the present (e.g. Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2011). Religious authority can be premised on the ability of select individuals to travel in time in the pursuit of sacred knowledge or to access extra-human powers and entities including spirits, gods, ancestors, and the deceased (e.g. Alatas 2019). Dreams may act as informal yet powerful ‘technologies of governmentality’ that self-regulate individuals’ conscience and conduct in everyday life (Eves 2011). They may also constitute sources of ‘liturgical novelty’ when creatively and contextually interpreted and acted upon by recognised experts (McGee 2012). While revelatory dreams may come to chosen humans through the agency of more-than-human beings, they can also be intentionally sought out and cultivated by human dreamers, including in the form of volitional or lucid dreaming, and through rituals, prayer, and trance- or vision-inducing substances, notably hallucinogenic plants (e.g. Hurd and Bulkeley 2014; Brown 1985).

One example of the cosmological and temporal dimensions of dreams is found among the Bardi Aboriginal people of the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia (Glaskin 2005). As with many Indigenous Australian Peoples, the Bardi identify the creative period in the past during which ancestral beings gave shape to the world (or ‘Country’), as ‘the Dreaming’. Local terms for this period include buwarra, which translates as ‘dream’. While ‘ordinary’ dreams are experienced by ‘ordinary people’, particular individuals in the community, known as jarlngungurr (Glaskin 2005, 303), can communicate with ancestral figures, as well as the spirit beings and the deceased from the Dreaming. They do so through dreams that are initiated by these other-than-human beings and through which knowledges are revealed to the human dreamer. While these knowledges have existed since time immemorial, they inform contemporary ritual and ceremonial life in novel ways, including in the form of new songs, dances, designs, and more, pointing to the integration of tradition and innovation, and past and present, in both the dream form and its real-world ramifications. It is also through the knowledges acquired through dreams from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased that jarlngungurr are able to perform healing, divination, shape-shifting, and time-travel. Dreams thereby help the Bardi anticipate future calamities, notably where respect for Country has been violated and must be remedied or redressed.

As the example above demonstrates, dreams and their authority in producing truths play an important role in enabling the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge across times and generations. In other contexts, dreams have played a seminal part in encouraging societal transformation, notably in the form of religious enculturation and spiritual self-reinvention. This is the case among the Asabano of highland Papua New Guinea, for whom dreams (aluma) have always acted as portals to the dead, forest beings, or place spirits, and as experiential evidence through which people describe, explain, and rationalise their religious beliefs (Lohmann 2000). When Baptist missionaries sought to convert them in the late 1970s, many Asabano continued to practice their customary religion. It was only following a series of prophetic dreams experienced by villagers, in which they encountered God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, angels, apocalyptic deluges, and the fires of Hell, that Christian beliefs were truly absorbed and internalised. Christian figures that appear in villagers’ dreams to this day testify to these beings’ reality and power and remind people of the behaviours they must sustain in order to secure an afterlife in paradise, whereas traditional and familiar dream-entities like evil nature spirits and cannibal witches are now interpreted as minions of Satan. As such, while the ability of dreams to convey information has not changed for Asabano, the kinds of information being received, and associated dictates of moral conduct, have significantly transformed, with dreams playing an important—potentially even determinant—role in enhancing villagers’ receptivity to the precepts of introduced Christianity.

Dreams, as such, can be instrumental in validating, inspiring, and sustaining belief among members of religious communities. Their evocative valences can also be harnessed beyond the scope of those individuals who adhere to particular religious groups, as illustrated by Amira Mittermaier’s (2015) reflective account of dream-stories among Egyptian adherents to the mystic body of Islamic religious practice known as Sufism. During her fieldwork, Mittermaier was granted permission by her interlocutor, ‘Umar, to consult and select accounts from the Book of Visions, containing the records of dreams and waking visions of followers of Shaykh Qusi, a renowned inheritor and transmitter of the prophet Muhammad’s teachings. This permission, she later found out, itself stemmed from an order that had come to ‘Umar by way of a dream. However, while Mittermaier originally chose dream-visions for her research with the aim of achieving a representative sample from diverse sources and encompassing diverse themes, ‘Umar replaced these selections with a collection of accounts that, to Mittermaier’s initial disappointment, were all relatively similar in content. What drove ‘Umar’s choices was not the pursuit of neutrality or representationality, but rather the effectiveness of these particular dreams in achieving the key aims of Sufi dream-visions—namely, to communicate the shaykh’s aura, to create a sense of awe, and to buttress the shaykh’s spiritual authority. Just as anthropologists selectively deploy ethnographic examples to convince and draw in their readers, so too Sufis approach dream-stories as invitations to their audiences that enable them to communicate and connect with the Prophet, his descendants, and the dead. Dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of the inaccessible, invisible, and unknown, and to be moved both spiritually and imaginatively. And just as prophetic dreams in Sufi communities are at once highly valued and contested, so too decisions around which dreams to include and exclude in Mittermaier’s ethnographic account were never neutral, but shaped as much by anthropological considerations as by the evocative use of dreams as examples by Sufis themselves.

Conclusions

Dreams are universal as experiences yet specific in their contents, interpretations, and performances. As such, they constitute powerful resources for engaging with long-standing questions around the construction of, and relationship between, self and society, mind and body, and continuity and change, and the meaningful slippages that arise across the realms of the known and speculated, lived and narrated, practical and spiritual, and agentive and reflective. Dreams express cultural creativity, social conflict, potentialities for self-exploratory, self-transcendence or hazardous vulnerabilities. They alternately reflect, resolve, or reinforce individual and collective anxieties and desires, as people move in and across different worlds, knowledges, and relations.

Importantly, attending to dreams anthropologically challenges the notion of a single ‘reality’ and its correlative relationship to the ‘imagination’ as the ‘broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception and conceptualizations of the real’ (Mittermaier 2011, 3). Instead, it invites us to think of dreams as a form of ‘emergent reality’ (Tedlock 1987b, 4)—or as ‘real in a different way’, as Vincent Crapanzano’s Moroccan informant, Tuhami, says when speaking about his nightly visitations by a she-demon (1980, 15). Dreams are multiply meaningful precisely in light of their inherent ambiguity and in-betweenness, or what Jeannette Mageo calls their ‘mimetic incompleteness’ (2004, 151). They also draw attention to the political, affective, and social force of the imagination as a culturally molded yet never entirely graspable or intelligible dimension of human existence (Stephen 1995; Stevenson 2014). And just as not all dreams bear the same hermeneutic weight or consensual meaning for those who experience them, so too it is critical to consider whose dream interpretations are foregrounded within anthropological accounts across insider-outsider and subjective-objective divides.

Since its inception, the anthropology of dreaming has continued to develop in new and exciting directions. It is no longer confined to particular ‘culture complexes’ or world-regions. Instead, comparative studies of dreams across Global North and South divides push against the romanticisation or essentialisation of non-Western dream cultures (Domhoff 1990). These studies identify recurring motifs in the dreams of American and Japanese citizens (Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago 1958), the role of conflict in the dreams of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children (Levine 1991), and the manifest content of dreams experienced by US-based college women of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American heritage (Kane 1994).^[5]

Alongside a burgeoning of multi-disciplinary approaches that combine anthropological methods and theories with cutting-edge findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, some scholars are practicing ‘studying up’ by examining how Western-trained psychotherapists understand their own dream experiences alongside their relationship to both their patients and their profession (Dombeck 1991). Other researchers practice ‘studying in’ by harnessing auto-ethnographic methods to consider how dream-related knowledge systems learned in the field come to bear new meanings in light of their own personal, physical, and psychological traumas back home (Richman 2000). The role of animals as participants in and producers of dreams (Hallowell 1960) has seen renewed attention in emerging multispecies approaches that consider, for instance, dogs’ dreams as expressions of more-than-human perspectival agency (Kohn 2007) or the haunting apparition in dreams of wrongfully killed cows as expressions of more-than-human retributive justice (Govindrajan 2022).

At the same time, dreams continue to pose certain challenges to the classical methods of anthropology. ‘Dream-narratives’ are always fragmentary and often socially or individually motivated accounts of ‘dream-experiences’ (Kirtsoglou 2010) that themselves cannot be empirically verified and lie beyond the reach of participant-observation. The personal nature of dreams, as well as their at-times spiritual, sacred, or supernatural dimensions, can make them a sensitive topic of discussion, often requiring a strong level of rapport between the researcher and her interlocutors. Taking dreams seriously as objects of analysis is also not devoid of risk for anthropologists themselves, whose professionalism and objectivity may consequently come under question—notably when it comes to writing and imparting their own dream experiences (George 1995, 17–8).

And yet, attending to dreams can also open meaningful spaces for conversations around the different yet interconnected worlds of researchers and their informants. Participating in dream-experiences and sharing dream-narratives can drive intersubjective dynamics of fieldwork, and create mutual trust, critical self-reflection, and openness to ambiguity.^[6]As a form of affective and discursive ‘involvement in the cosmology of the Other’ (Sprenger 2010, 61), delving into dreams—both one’s own and others’—can push back on the ‘anthropological taboo against going native’ (Ewing 1994, 574) and attendant assumptions around the nature of cultural belief versus empirical reality (Luhrmann 1989; Favret-Saada 1980). Rather than dismissing dreams as fictive constructs or ethnographic objects alone, it is perhaps in anthropologists’ willingness to become vulnerable to dreams’ intersubjective thrust that dreams’ agentive force as ‘wild possibilities’ (George 1995, 17) might relationally and imaginatively gain ground and grow.

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Note on contributor

Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022, Duke University Press).

[1] On the significance of dreams and dreaming in Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times, see Pick and Roper (2004); Parman (1991). On the role of dreams in medieval world religions, including in Europe, early Asia, and Latin America, see Shulman and Stroumsa (1999); Bulkeley (2008).

[2] These studies found echo in later approaches that were concerned with identifying constant and recurring motifs underlying diverse myths across different cultural settings (e.g. Kuper 1979).

[3] For state-of-the-field syntheses of the anthropology of dreaming, see Laughlin (2011); Lohmann (2019); the edited volumes by Tedlock (1987a); Bulkeley (2001); Mageo (2003); Mageo and Sheriff (2021); and the special issues edited by Stewart (2004) and Heijnen and Edgar (2010). For region-specific anthologies of dreaming, see Lohmann (2003) on the West Pacific; Jȩdrej and Shaw (1992) on Africa; Bulkeley (1994) on the West; Price-Williams and Degarrod (1989) on South America.

[4] On the function of dreams as techniques for solving everyday practical matters, including in the contexts of hunting, curing, craftsmanship, and artistic production, see Brightman 2002; Rushforth 1992.

[5] On anthropologies of dreaming in the Global North, see Hollan 2005; Newsom 2021; Heijnen 2010; Sheriff 2017.

[6] On dreams as an intersubjective research method in the field, see Chao 2023; Lambek 2018.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Resilience

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 17:20:11 +0000

Person during a 2009 flood in Vietnam. Photo: Rob

Kathrin Eitel

University of Zurich

Initially published 31 Mar 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23resilience

Abstract:

'Resilience’ is becoming a new policy buzzword. The term describes the ability to recover from expected and unexpected situations, stresses, or threats in order to sustain, thrive, and to move on. As a concept and as an approach, it guides people’s adaptation, persistence, and response strategies to sustainably cope with challenges of all kinds, such as pandemics, political oppression, or extreme weather events related to climate change. This entry highlights anthropological insights into and theoretical antecedents of resilience. Anthropologists have studied resilience in highly diverse contexts, ranging from cybernetics and systems theory, to the study of disaster, human psychology, science and technology studies, and multispecies research. The notion of resilience keeps being expanded and remains diverse. Theoretically, anthropologists have foregrounded the importance of viewing resilience as a practice and as being situated. They also emphasise the complexity of interactions and processes involved in coping with adversities and they often foreground a relational rather than an individualistic understanding of resilience. Importantly, resilience always includes more-than-human actors such as plants, animals, and technologies. How exactly people are able to become resilient is often determined by structural inequalities, (post-)colonisation and prevailing understandings of how the world ought to be. Anthropological research on resilience is much needed in times of adversity, as technological fixes to planetary threats are insufficient to ensure future wellbeing.

Introduction

Today, the term ‘resilience’ is on everyone's lips. As a policy strategy, it aims to ‘prepare’ communities, cities, regions, and even entire nations to cope with threats such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics. As a new development buzzword, resilience has slowly replaced the long-cherished term of ‘sustainability’ that had taken over the world of politics and academia in previous decades. But what sorts of ideas are associated with resilience? How is the concept used and what have anthropologists found out when studying it? Looking at the literature, one learns that theories of resilience have been developed in very different research traditions, from ecology to psychology, economics, development studies, international relations, and climate policy. It is mostly through work in climate policy that resilience has become known beyond academic discourse since the 1990s (Wakefield, Grove and Chandler 2020). As a practical and situated feature of sociocultural life, resilience has also gained interest in anthropological research. That said, it has not replaced the adjacent concept of ‘adaptation’, which is an antecedent of resilience and has remained at the centre of much anthropological study. The genealogy presented in this entry blends together thoughts, concepts, and personal experiences related to resilience. It traces one path of the development of the concept, without, however, claiming that it is ‘the only’ path of its genesis.

At its most basic, resilience describes the ability to recover quickly from unexpected shocks and crises through, for example, adaptation, resistance, or robustness. One can think of it both as a process and an action, deriving partly from the Latin word resilire (re–salire) which means to recoil, to leap back.^{^[1]} Resilire, thus, describes the action of rebounding or swinging back to a stable status quo of existence. The underlying idea of responding to outside influence via ‘feedback’ harkens back to early cybernetics, a field of research that studied ‘control and communication’ of complex systems, be they biological, ecological, technological, or social (Wiener [1961] 2019). In the field of ecology, the concept of resilience developed prominently in the 1970s. The Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling (1973) hallmarked resilience as bound to environmental change. He emphasised the inherent capacities of ecological systems to absorb change, that is, to remain in their original state of functioning despite unexpected threats (Gunderson, Allen and Holling 2010). The concept of ‘social-ecological resilience’ then understands complex systems as adaptive, persistent, or transformable to their environment. That means that resilience includes adaptability, given that entities are expected to ‘bounce back’, as well as transformability, when they ‘bounce forward’ to create a ‘fundamentally new social-ecological system’ (Folke 2006, 262; Gibson-Graham et al. 2016).

Outside of academia, resilience is especially well known as a policy term that seeks to address the impacts of climate change globally. This is true for resilience programmes of the United Nations Human Settlement Programme, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and of governments and development organisations around the world. Resilience as a policy tool and concept has been often criticised for being overly technocratic and ultimately detached from the socio-cultural specificities of peoples’ lives. That said, there have also been resilience interventions in the realm of disaster management and post-conflict settings that paint a less negative picture. Resilience-oriented policies have helped foster the integration of situated knowledge and complex situations into governance and have provided an opportunity to govern complexity locally (Chandler and Reid 2019; Chandler 2018; Chandler 2014a). An example of ‘best practice’ here is the policy endeavours of international organisations such as the Stockholm Environment Institute^{^[2]} that explicitly aim to integrate local knowledge into resilience strategies. The concept can thus make governance more responsive to people’s needs, as it foregrounds adaptation and learning from past interventions. It may even serve an ‘affirmative biopolitics of adaptation’ (Grove 2014, 198) that goes beyond programmes that only superficially help the vulnerable or that even perpetuate neoliberalism and social insecurity.

However, as ways of fostering resilience come often in the form of non-participatory policy interventions, technological fixes, and ‘authoritative examinations’ (Eriksen 2021), they risk being based on forms of knowledge and visions of the world that are tacitly imbued with deep-rooted power hierarchies and social inequalities. Resilience-oriented policies can thus have their roots in (post-)colonial thought and practice. They often enough maintain prevailing views from countries of the Global North, and they tend to postulate resilience as inherently positive (e.g. Ferguson [1994] 2009; Escobar 1995; Bollig 2014), thus risking perpetuating existing inequalities (e.g. Oliver-Smith 2017; Barrios 2016; Hastrup 2009a). This raises the question of who actually gets to participate in the definition, management, and governance of resilience. Given that even in governance theory and practice neither the concept nor its application are unified, the aim to foster communities’ capacity to deal with disaster risks often opposes divergent worldviews and ways to realise them (Schuller 2016; Barrios 2017a; Faas 2016).

For example, resilience-based policies presuppose knowledge of the nature of disasters and the likelihood of future shocks. They perpetuate claims of knowing how to ‘best’ to deal with disasters that are used to exercise power over communities, countries, and regions by framing them as insecure and unable to tackle adversities in their own ways (e.g. Evans and Reid 2014; Eitel 2022b). Given that resilience policies usually adhere to the Sustainable Development Goals, they often foster the well-known and long-entrenched hegemony of existing power systems. They seem to shift responsibilities to subjects ‘equally’, but in fact disregard their structural oppression and exploitation. Critiques of resilience policies—similar to those of ‘sustainability’— note that the regulation of the subject via resilience policies does not come only from the top down (from government to citizens), but that climate responsibilities are distributed in many different ways, for example along aid initiatives or global movements (e.g. Eitel 2022a). Resilience-based policies may also enable the production of a suffering ‘other’, putting responsibility on the shoulders of those who are not the main producers of climate disasters, for example (cf. Todd 2014).

While anthropological interest in resilience as a policy or an analytic concept is relatively recent, the discipline has long been concerned with the question of human adaptation as a driver of social change (e.g. Barth 1967; Ervin 2015). How societies adapt to their environment, and whether they are thereby capable of dealing with adversity, has been a focus of anthropological research for a long time. Social adaptation theories can thus be seen as the antecedent of today’s thinking around resilience. At the same time, adaptation is today understood as an essential feature of resilience.

In anthropology, resilience has developed through three research streams since the 1950s: first, cybernetics created the basis upon which complex systems, be they technical, ecological, social, or psychological, were understood. Cybernetics argued that it was important to think of a circular relationship between units and their ‘outer’ disturbances. Secondly, research on resilience has drawn from the interdisciplinary study of disasters, which scrutinises human responses to ‘catastrophic’ events, from research on psychological responses to shocks, and from Indigenous and local practices of resilience. Lastly, as anthropology begins to study the relations between humans and other species, it illustrates that we must pay greater attention to how human and non-human forms of agency intersect.

This history of anthropological research on resilience shows that we may need to widen our scope when it comes to studying the ‘subjects’ of resilience. Studies of urban resilience that focus on the strategies of entire cities to cope with climate shocks run side-by-side with research on multispecies resilience and studies of small-scale and rural communities. Simultaneously, the field of resilience remains interdisciplinary, drawing mainly on ecology (e.g. Folke 2016); human geography (e.g. Coaffee and Lee 2016; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013; Sakakibara 2017); and international relations (e.g. Chandler 2014a; 2014b; Chandler and Reid 2019). Although the focus of this entry lies with the achievements of anthropological scholarship, these are frequently subject to interdisciplinary influence and contemporary discourse. Ethnographic research, which relies on participant observation, is particularly well placed to uncover situated knowledge and practices of resilience in different times and places. The situated nature of resilience is not just determined by social groups but also derives from specific social and historical contexts and an interplay of human and non-human actors (cf. Haraway 1988).

It is worth mentioning that the study of resilience is more than a theoretical exercise. It is part of ‘bringing about [a] transformative epoch via [anthropology’s] unique capacity to identify, track, describe, interpret, and communicate the human predicament’ (Crate 2011, 188). Studying resilience does not just show that different biologically-, socially-, and culturally-informed practices of adapting and responding to disturbances exist. It also tries to ensure that future social change occurs as a result of a reflective and decolonised way of collaborating across different lifeworlds. In doing so, it systematically takes power asymmetries and their roots into account.

Cybernetic studies of adaptation

Resilience as a concept was strongly influenced by cybernetic thinking, which views the world as a set of interlocking systems that are responsive, adaptive, and related to their environments. Cybernetics, which began to develop in the 1950s as a precursor of systems theory, saw itself as an interdisciplinary effort to capture the complexity of the world through a single ‘metalanguage’. Its goal was to create a universal canon of terms and concepts throughout all academic disciplines, aiming to support greater dialogue between them. Cybernetics thus studied technological, ecological, psychological and social systems by using the same terms. Realised as the research field of control and communication theory, cybernetics emphasised the importance of ‘feedback mechanisms’ (Wiener [1961] 2019, 18). Feedback ensures that any complex system maintains itself by adapting to its environment. ‘Systems’ were understood to comprise a diversity of ‘elements’, or components, which together enacted a functional unit that could either be ‘simple’ and predictable or ‘complex’ and thus self-organised and unpredictable. Systems were always held to stay in equilibrium, despite ’outer’ disturbances. What was astonishingly new and compelling about cybernetics were its attempts to understand such mechanisms of technological, environmental, psychological, and human organisation as non-linear and as being important beyond the individual.

Cybernetics included people from all disciplines, especially from physics, mathematics, biology, medicine, sociology, psychology, and economics as well as anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Roy Rappaport. Cybernetically-informed anthropological theories of adaptation differed from older adaptation theories rooted in the social Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, whose evolutionary conception declared societies successful—in the sense of survival—when they practised the best rational management of resources. Here, adaptation was often considered to be a form of advancement on an evolutionary ladder (e.g. Herzfeld 2006) and the development of cultural practices, such as subsistence activities and rituals, was interpreted as a response to the environment. Cybernetics, on the other hand, focuses on relations between culture and environment as self-regulating and self-maintaining complex systems. In this regard, cybernetics-informed anthropologists were more interested in the ways that systemic adaptation takes place, through acts of communication, under changing environmental conditions. They were less interested in evolutionary hierarchies or single adaptation processes.

Cybernetic thinking was criticised early on for failing to capture ‘social reality [which] could never be simulated in all its complexity’ (Rodin et al. 1978, 747) and for being too focused on adaptation and ‘elements’ rather than flesh and blood humans (Geertz [1963] 2000). Yet, many anthropologists were intrigued by the thought of social phenomena as systems, regulated by circular interactions. An awkward example from these times, which also exemplified cybernetics’ mathematical and mechanical underpinnings, was the example of a thermostat that regulates itself according to its surroundings. The term ‘system’ derives from Greek systēma, meaning a whole composed of several different members or parts (Liddell and Scott 1940). This fit quite well with the predominant understanding of cultures during the mid-twentieth century, which were deemed to be relatively isolated entities. Margaret Mead’s and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics-related work had a tremendous influence on communication science, psychology, and subsequent research on psychological trauma (e.g., Wesley-Esquimax 2007, 2009; Kim et al. 2019). For example, Bateson showed how people suffering from schizophrenia were confronted by the dilemma of a double bind—a phenomenon in which people receive conflicting and paradoxical messages or signals and do not know how to respond to them.

During the sixties, a student of Bateson called Ray A. Rappaport was the first to conduct an encompassing field study of adaptation mechanisms among the Tsembaga Maring, an Indigenous subgroup of Maring-speakers living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Rappaport held that cultures were instrumental for the satisfaction of people’s needs, be it through religious, economic, or kinship practices. He therefore argued that Tsembaga rituals were not merely expressive, but helped regulate the group’s population and their relation to the environment (Rappaport 1968, 1971). His argument was backed by the fact that the Tsembaga engaged in the regular ritualistic slaughter of large parts of their pig populations to offer them to the spirits of their ancestors. Such pig sacrifice was associated with the absence of war and with overcoming illness and injury. It was also regulated by ecological factors such as the availability of pig fodder and the given number of pigs. Ecological factors, Rappaport argued, were thus driving ritual activity, which in turn governed peace, war, and human populations.

Consequently, cultures could be seen as systems that self-regulate and adapt to ecological stresses via long-term ritual cycles. In this way, rituals actively reduced the number of possibilities for the system (culture), by limiting the number of fights between different Maring-speaking groups, while ensuring the distribution of surplus pig meat (1971, 60; 1968). In this context, Rappaport defined adaptation as a process ‘by which organisms or groups of organisms, through responsive changes in their own states, structures, or compositions, maintain homeostasis in and among themselves’ (1971, 60). Adaptation took place through ‘enormously complex sets of interlocking feedback loops’ (Rappaport 1971, 75, footnote 9). Yet, ritualistic homeostasis (or balance) was absent in increasingly technological societies and feedback loops were eventually in need of being accurately recognised, monitored, or redirected in order to avoid maladaptation. This is not unusual, as a system is always embedded in its wider socio-ecological context, which can either promote or constrain effective coping (Torry 1979).

Rappaport’s work raised the question of how exactly adaptation to the environment became part and parcel of people’s culture (Steward 1972, 328). Julian Steward demonstrated that cultural change is not just dependent on adaptation practices that emerge, for example, through ritual activity, but also on knowledge and technologies that social groups acquire over time. Thus, Steward, who is also known as the founder of the field of ‘cultural ecology’, argued that arid climates and a need for irrigation tended to lead to increased social stratification and, eventually to the development of the state. Environmental adaptation, according to Steward, ultimately resulted in stable ‘core features’ of different cultures. What Rappaport and Stewart share with much early anthropological work on adaptation is the argument that humans adapted to ecological adversities in highly complex and recursive ways, ultimately to ensure the survival of the community as a whole. Second, cybernetically-informed theories of adaptation focused on how people maintain or reverse states of equilibrium that give different cultures their unique ‘core’ characteristics.

Eventually, the early cybernetics-informed adaptation studies were mainly criticised for assuming a stable state of equilibrium to which complex systems automatically bounce back after environmental disturbances. Holling (1973), for example, pointed out that socio-ecological stability is rather dynamic as it maintains the different properties of systems that enable survival. These properties, including stability, variability, persistence, or resistance, may change in different ways and times to maintain other properties. One such property that is of special interest is resilience, a ‘measure of persistence’ and the ‘ability to absorb change and disturbance’ (Holling 1973, 14). Interestingly, resilience can be very high because of the instability of an overall system. For example, the budworm, i.e. a common pest on all kinds of crops, was so persistent in Canada because its population was able to dissolve into smaller parts during disturbances, before re-building in even more adaptive ways than previously. Contrary to Rappaport, who saw homeostatic stability as a desired aim of adaptation after disturbances, Holling understood stability and resilience as distinct from each other and adaptation as one part of resilience. Anthropological insights that communities tend to change dynamically over time further contradicted the assumption of a prior state of stability to which communities are thought to leap back after an environmental shock. The obvious pitfall in considering the ‘adaptive capacities’ of communities is thus to assume from the start that their change serves a certain purpose.

Cybernetics scholarship was also criticised for perceiving cultures as systems that automatically remove marginalised groups from history. Indeed, analysts themselves may contribute to such processes as ‘the actual consequences of their own politics of representation’ (Blaser 2009, 881). Cybernetics often seemed one-dimensional and apolitical because it represented the interests of only one, usually dominant, group and did not take cultural diversity sufficiently into account (e.g. Mandler 2009; Fabian [1983] 2002). Its endeavour to work with a metalanguage and the idea of ‘mechanisms’ that could be found everywhere eventually failed as its findings were hard to generalise. Comparing the organisation and communication of ants with that of Indigenous communities or mechanical-electrical system, for example, meant radically reducing the complexity of humans, non-human life forms, and objects under study. Mathematical models that were frequently used to measure and analyse situations could neither sufficiently illustrate nor anticipate how environmental and social processes interacted (Vayda and McCay 1975).

On the upside, cybernetics was one of the first truly interdisciplinary research fields, pre-figuring contemporary game theory, new materialism, systems theory, and much psychological and cognitive work (e.g., Maturana and Varela 1987). However, its failures may be why cybernetically-informed anthropological studies have been largely neglected, even though they contributed significantly to the further development of environmental and ecological anthropology (Hagner, Hörl and Pias 2008). Its approaches to adaptation and resilience assumed a relatively stark dichotomy between systems and their environment, as was common in much of the twentieth century, and one of its main controversies lay in whether nature or culture determined socio-cultural behaviour. As anthropologists learned that cultures were less and less ‘closed entities’ (if ever they had been), they shifted their focus from the question of ‘how’ adaptation works in a scheme of sequential cultural development toward the question of ‘to/for what’ and ‘for whom’ it works. Such questions were investigated in great depth in the interdisciplinary research field of disaster studies that began to develop in particular during the 1970s.

Resilience and disaster studies

Contemporary work on resilience is greatly inspired by the interdisciplinary research on disasters. Here disasters, risks, and catastrophes tend to be understood as part of larger social and historical processes that reveal certain groups to be more vulnerable than others (e.g. Faas 2016). The anthropologist Roberto E. Barrios, for example, defines catastrophes as

the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity (2017b, 151).

In this sense, disasters are not isolated events but socio-material phenomena that result from larger and longer processes such as the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, neoliberalism, or (post-)colonialism (e.g. Barrios 2016; Oliver-Smith 2016, 2017; Schuller and Button 2020; Hsu, Howitt and Miller 2015). Anthropological research on disaster response thus focuses on how vulnerability is produced in the first place, and how this vulnerability interacts with disaster risk reduction, response, recovery, and relief (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman [1999] 2020; Hoffman 2017). It has shown that top-down resilience measures can reify a moral canon that defines what and who is worthy to be considered to survive in the Anthropocene. During post-earthquake reconstruction in Haiti, for instance, the NGO-run humanitarian aid system was based on a (post-)colonial politics of vulnerability that portrays people and entire nations as victims in order to legitimise a ‘lack of resilience’ that requires action (Schuller 2016, see also Evans and Reid 2014).

Resilience and vulnerability thus often work together, as vulnerability refers to ‘the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard’ (Wisner et al. 2004, 11). When China's Sichuan province was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2008, for example, government recovery plans for the Qiang Indigenous community helped perpetuate their political subordination, turning people into ‘passive gift recipients’ (Zhang 2016, 92). The management of disasters by government agencies and recovery experts can thus reinforce vulnerabilities and even create new ones. Moreover, as US government neglect in the recovery of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina has shown, communities also need to adapt emotionally to catastrophes and recovery programmes. Feelings are critical to people's experiences of both disaster and recovery, but are all too often left out of planned recovery and post-disaster programs (Barrios 2015, 4), which thereby, again, risks increasing vulnerability.

Neoliberalism plays an important role in co-constructing vulnerability through disaster management. Environmental managers and government actors in a climate vulnerable coastal area in Maryland, for example, considered inhabitants of the Deal Island Peninsula communities to be ‘liabilities’ rather than people maintaining livelihoods in their historic homeland (Johnson et al. 2017; Johnson 2016). As a result of ‘disaster capitalism’, in which environmental crises are used to serve the interests of capital (Faas 2018, 32; Klein 2007), these ‘liabilities’ are subject to programmes that promote entrepreneurship as successful disaster response (Faas 2018). The production of capitalist subjects in the form of entrepreneurs, or ‘petit capitalists’, exposes the limits of much contemporary institutional thinking, which remains unable to go beyond neoliberal disaster response. Capitalist subjects are here produced along with disaster capitalism through an initiation into business management that is intended to contribute to regional recovery. Ultimately, dominant interests provoke visions of the future and ambitions that appear to be local but are imbued with the goals of the neoliberal state. Resilience policies can thus reinforce and perpetuate the vulnerability of groups whilst simultaneously maintaining the very same capitalist dynamics that are responsible for anthropogenic climate change and socio-ecological disasters (cf. Wakefield, Grove and Chandler 2020)

Studying the concrete impacts that resilience policies have on particular sites draws attention to the questions: ‘When is resilience achieved for whom?’ and ‘To what extent is it achieved?’ Ethnographic studies have answered these questions by providing insights into lived experiences, strategies, and narratives that circulate ‘on the ground’ and are used, changed, and adapted in relation to environmental changes that require a response (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2006, 69; Ingold 2011). Analysing local responses offers fruitful and complementary perspectives to prevailing normative and development-informed visions of resilience (e.g., Rival 2009; Hastrup 2009b; Vium 2009). In the Pacific, for example, people’s political resistance has been shown to be a form of resilience as well as a way of contesting state-led resilience strategies (Dousset and Nayral 2019). Ethnographic research in two East African communities has further identified response diversity as a key driver of resilience. The Ngisonyoka, nomadic herders in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, for example, respond to social and environmental threats through a variety of mechanisms, including group mobility, livestock diversification, and the creation of broad social networks. This variety of activities drives response efficacy, allows social groups to persist, and enables them to limit their impact on the environment (Leslie and McCabe 2013, 128). Lived resilience thus seems to require respect for a variety of practices and voices of people living in climate-prone areas (Barrios 2016).

Resilience, therefore, is not static but is rather a result of social learning from previous crises that may become integral to patterns of cultural knowledge. Coping with an individual hazard or disaster, on the other hand, implies short-term decisions in (relatively) new situations. These may or may not be adopted into a cultural canon and manifested in long-term adaptation strategies (Smith 2017; Bennett 1995). Adapting to something or somebody is tangible both in daily practice and in the space in which it is embedded, for example when regions face severe droughts and dwellers alter their practices of wayfinding through these changed landscapes (Vium 2009). Adapting for something or somebody can imply a mode of care for another future, and care for individual or collective well-being today. Let us now turn toward the small field of anthropological research on psychological resilience.

Psychological resilience

How people cope with disasters and crises at a psychological level is a subject of study in interdisciplinary research on psychological resilience, often with roots in Gregory Bateson’s ideas of the mind ([1972] 2000; [1979] 2002), and in development psychology (e.g., Garmezy 1971, 1991). Psychologists deal with resilience as a personal defence mechanism that can be strengthened and enhanced. The relatively small field of the anthropology of psychological resilience evolved^{^[3]}, concentrating on people’s individual life trajectories and on the way communities cultivate resilience as a means to respond more or less successfully to adversities (Wexler 2014, Wexler et al. 2014; Zraly et al. 2011; Obrist and Büchi 2008). These studies often include a focus on political and economic forces of oppression and violence (e.g. Cox 2015; Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010; Zraly and Nyirazinyoye 2010).

Anthropological scholarship has unveiled, moreover, the insight that resilience in daily life is often reliant upon broader collective memories and histories (e.g. Ungar 2008; Foxen 2010; Lewis 2013, 2018, 2019; Kirmayer et al. 2011; Mullings and Wali 2001). For example, comparative work on trauma diagnosis and treatment among survivors of the 2006 July War in Lebanon and that of Syrian refugees post-2011 shows that suffering is more than just an internalised psychic condition. Instead, suffering can be understood as a constantly shifting subject position in a social context like Lebanon, where violence and aid economies continuously change its nature. Here, the local concept sumud, which can be translated as psycho-political steadfastness, patience, and resistance, reflects the social contingency of suffering and resilience, as sumud is subject to constant politically-inflected re-interpretation. Indeed, sumud can be interpreted as both a form of psychological resilience and ‘a postcolonial tool of resistance, a political movement and an everyday embodied practice’ (Moghnieh 2021, 6). In Afghanistan, resilience is also collectively enacted, and in this case bound to values of living an honourable life. Cultural values such as kinship and family honour are essential to maintain ‘a sense of order, hope, and meaning to life’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 442; Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010). Anthropological studies have thus shown that resilience, tied to wellbeing and health, is undergirded by processes that are far-reaching, harking back to long-gone periods of oppression, such as colonialism, whilst also taking current power structures into account.

In this way, resilience can even be grounded in toxic entanglements between people and chronic economic and political instability. Residents of Mexico City’s working class neighbourhood Colonia Periférico, for example, have been shown to be particularly resilient and maintain power as they decide what ‘outer’ disturbance gets ‘inside’ the body and the mind (Roberts 2017). They may decide to consume sugary and highly processed sodas, some of them traffic drugs and consume marijuana and a glue solvent called activo, and all of them live with the stench of the neighbourhood’s air pollution. Health workers consider the local consumption of toxic substances to signal the absence of resilience. To them, resilience is grounded in the impermeability of the body. Yet, Elizabeth Roberts (2017) provides an alternative interpretation, showing that people's toxic entanglements with their environment provides them with moments of social pleasure and care whilst keeping health workers and the police at bay. The neighbourhood’s reliance on toxic consumption may thus be the source of its resilience.

The link between trauma and resilience has been of particular interest to anthropologists. The study of people in post-apartheid Cape Town and in Brazilian favelas has shown that people are capable of much higher degrees of resilience than citizens of the affluent parts of the Global North may imagine (Scheper-Hughes 2008). People are capable of resisting even chronic ‘states of emergency’ and the resulting traumas through survival strategies that include developing values such as strength, toughness, asceticism, stoicism, and even the postponement of motherly love until children are likely to survive (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 25). Our psychological response to too much death and loss may be that of ‘patient resignation’, subduing both outrage and deep sorrow over human tragedy. In this way, human frailty is compounded by a ‘possibly even bio-evolutionarily derived, certainly historically situated, and culturally elaborated capacity for resilience’ (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52). It seems that those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and who live through constant crises and terror may normalise suffering as part of building resilience (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52).

Laying a cornerstone for an understanding of resilience as a feature of daily life based on cultural values and long histories of suffering, many ethnographic studies shifted the attention toward structural inequalities that determine who ‘is required to survive and even thrive’ (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 37) in times of catastrophic events. The idea that resilience is manifold is also demonstrated by a recent study of cancer patients in Soweto, South Africa. The study focuses on ‘idioms of resilience’, understood as the ‘means of experiencing and expressing positive adaptation and well-being in the midst of adversity’ (Kim et al. 2019, 1). It reveals that idioms of resilience in crisis-ridden Soweto may result in different forms of acceptance (or ukwamukela in isiZulu). Such acceptance allows people to shift their attention away from their own problems to focus on family, neighbours, and religious life (Kim et al. 2019).

In many of the examples above, resilience is more than a result of historical contingencies. It needs to be understood as a capacity to continue life (Wesley-Esquimaux 2007, 2009). In studying First Nations people in the Americas, the First Nation woman Cynthia Wesley-Equimaux notes that colonisation, discrimination, and marginalisation resulted in the ‘intergenerational transmission of historic trauma’ (Wesley-Esquimaux and Smolewski 2004, iii). These traumatic recollections entered people’s collective memory and were enacted through cultural symbols, rituals, and habits, for example through stories about terror. Eventually, the traumatic experiences became culturally embedded, resulting in repressed feelings of emptiness, depression, and numbness, which in turn led to a gradual dissolution of people’s collective identity. First Nation women in particular struggle with these negative, intergenerational experiences as they still strive to do good for their families and communities.

Local knowledge that reflects social realities and historical contingencies provide a more positive angle of viewing resilience as empowerment. Rather than resilience, Wesley-Equimaux (2009, 26) calls for an emphasis on resiliency, meaning to ‘rebound from challenges one encounters in daily life’. Resiliency refers here to a form of flexibility that enables the reframing of trauma and life narratives by situating them in sociocultural contexts so as to make them ‘re-readable’. Emphasising the positive forces of the term, resiliency avoids seeing people only as ‘suffering subjects’ and as related to deficits but rather as potentially empowering. This approach chimes with what the Māori scholar Mason Durie (2006, 8) claims to be a form of ‘Indigenous resilience’, that is, ‘a reflection of an innate determination by Indigenous peoples to succeed’. His take on resilience provides a viewpoint that does not depict Indigenous people as suffering ‘others’ or negating their historic disadvantages, but that ‘allows the Indigenous challenge to be reconfigured as a search for success rather than an explanation of failure’ (2006, 8). Here and in Wesley-Equimaux’s example, resilience and resiliency have positive connotations, focusing on success, strengths, and empowerment that enable social transformations toward healthier and better futures.

In sum, anthropological research has shown that the ordinariness of suffering cannot be adequately understood without taking into account associated cognitive processes, collective experiences, and traumatic embodiments (cf. Kim et al. 2019). Studying resilience can foreground suffering, but it may also illustrate how humans create ‘well-being rather than survival, salutogenesis rather than pathology, and the promotion of human dignity rather than mere alleviation of human misery’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 438). Because psychological resilience is a necessary precondition for groups to cope well with disturbances, stresses, and violent contingencies such as trauma, it fruitfully ties in with other forms of resilience research (cf. Bollig 2014). However, looking at human responses and adaptation processes is only one way to understand how people and communities respond to threats. A more removed anthropological approach to resilience, which sees communities neither moving ‘back’ nor ‘forward’ to a state of stability, focuses on how prevailing normative notions of resilience themselves are brought about and circulate (e.g. Rose and Lentzos 2017).

More-than-human resilience

The divide between nature and culture played a crucial role in the development of early anthropological theories of adaptation. Cybernetic thinking about enclosed elements and systems that were held to be distinct from their outer environments frequently opposed cultures to outside nature. Yet, recent scholarship has demonstrated that the environment is also produced, shaped, and enacted by culture (e.g., Scoones 1999; Ingold 1990; Escobar 1999). Culture and the environment always reproduce each other, for example when biotechnology enables the creation of ‘new’ versions of nature that in turn impact sociocultural processes (Scoones 1999). Given that authors such as Bruno Latour (1993) and Donna J. Haraway (1987) have established that nature and culture are always intertwined as ‘naturecultures’, anthropology has had to rethink the notion of resilience by asking for whom nature exists (Haraway 1987) and through which worldviews it is enacted (Blaser 2013; Jensen 2015).

By focusing on the production of knowledge and technology, the interdisciplinary research field of science and technology studies (STS) questions, for example, how knowledge about flood resilience results from the interplay of many kinds of human and non-human actors, such as mangroves and satellite images. This connectedness of actors across boundaries of nature and culture means that multispecies studies of resilience have become more important. Ethnographic research now focuses on humans as much as animals, plants, and technologies and their interferences with each other to understand how resilience is enacted (e.g., Chao 2022; Willerslev 2009). The indigenous Yanyuwa of Northern Australia, for example, remain resilient in the face of postcolonial and other forms of violence by building a myriad of relationships. They ‘keep company’ with the land, with non-human species, and with their ancestors to deal with adversity (Kearney 2022). They create resilience by practising ‘a multidimensional art of relating’, despite postcolonial and on-going violence. The Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska are also able to survive in a difficult environment marked by climate change through resiliency that is grounded in deep knowledge about entities and species on land, in water, and in the sky (Sakakibara 2020). They have developed an intimate, spiritual, and intense relationship with bowhead whales, mythical creatures that have a decisive impact on their social lives. Storytelling, dancing, drumming, and political engagement linked to the whales all help the Iñupiat foster notions of reciprocity and respect and respond to climate change in a constructive manner (see also Herman 2016).

Focusing on ontologies is particularly fruitful when studying resilience, whether these are culturally specific and relational, as in the Yanyuwa and the Iñupiat examples above, or more practical in nature (Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Jensen 2021). The practical ontologies of floods, for instance, uncovers different worldviews by different actors at stake in flood protection: policy actors may perceive flood protection as an opportunity to form urban space and implement technological mega-projects; fish may identify it as a danger given that submerging the sediment that causes floods reduces their living space; while dwellers of the affected region may consider it as a mundane situation, and nothing to get stressed about.

STS-inspired anthropological scholarship has illuminated that technologies based on a ‘modern’ ontology marked by a belief in progress and the human domination of nature play a significant role in how resilience is imagined and implemented. This ontology lies at the heart of technological fixes as the single solution to combat climate change. In south-west Bangladesh, for example, climate-smart houses are meant to protect inhabitants against cyclones and flooding while supporting an efficient use of water and energy (Cons 2018). While such techno-fixes turn out to be inherently exclusionary for most of the population, they tend to gain praise in policy circles around the world. In this instance, resilience policies produce new patterns of exploitation and expropriation by holding locals in climate-insecure places (Cons 2021).

Conceiving of resilience as a more-than-human endeavour, and paying close attention to spatially and temporally wide-ranging relationships, enables researchers to see the concept in a new light, without thereby losing sight of important existing inequalities and discriminations along the lines of class and ethnic groups. At the same time, anthropological scholarship demonstrates ‘alternative’ ways of dealing with crises that are either based on long-established relationships to the environment, histories of oppression and suffering, or on approved methods for coping with crises. The question of whether a community ‘possesses’ or ‘obtains the capacity’ for resilience often gives way to deciphering multiple existing modes of resiliency. Given that the impacts of climate change, even if not locally caused, are unfolding locally, more-than-human resilience must be also considered in relation to land, heritage, and experiences of oppression and discrimination.

Conclusion

Contemporary resilience research is rooted in the fields of cybernetics, disaster studies, and psychology as well as in STS and multispecies research. Anthropologists understand resilience primarily relationally as a practice and as historically and culturally situated. Much ethnographic work on resilience shows that it is dynamic in character and multiple in form, as well as being shaped by constantly shifting socio-material circumstances and multiple power constellations.

Studies of resilience based on anthropological research have provided significant insights for understanding socio-ecological phenomena and human-environment relationships. They show that people’s everyday coping practices can transform into adaptive strategies developed in relation to highly specific environmental situations. They also foreground the diversity of thoughts, worldviews, rituals, relations, and practical skills required by communities to deal with hazards, creeping environmental change, and psychological disasters. Ethnographic studies of lived resilience tend to challenge prevailing notions of how to deal with adversities by including alternative, situated definitions to the vocabulary of anthropogenic disaster. Examining lived resilience should be as much the focus of future study as examining prevailing knowledge formations that emerge through resilience policies or prevention and recovery programs.

Anthropology’s critical stance vis-à-vis state- and market-friendly resilience policies and programs stems from the insight that local resilience practices emerge as much in reaction to shocks and ‘slow disasters’, as they do in response to political and socioeconomic interventions along hegemonic and postcolonial lines. Everyday resilience reveals systematic subjugation and discrimination, for example through disaster aid programs that perpetuate vulnerability. It points to imposed politics of vulnerability, disaster capitalism, and invisible violence that run along demarcation lines of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. In this way, everyday resilience frequently includes and creates more-than-human lifeworlds that span across multiple timeframes, spaces, and sociocultural areas.

One question for future research may then be not what resilience is, but when and how it is socioculturally produced. To what does it refer—as a way of dealing with historical legacies, current adversities, and future uncertainties–and for what is it used? Is resilience built to deal with unexpected shocks (e.g., earthquakes), expected situations (e.g., droughts or floods), or also potential futures (e.g., hurricanes or pandemics)? Is resilience capable of coping with perfectly unexpected disasters that might ‘break in’? These are questions that need to be further explored, accompanied by an interest in practices of care and relationality that benefit not only human beings but also their companion species and wider environments. Anthropology shows that resilience is not inherently grounded in deficits and suffering but that it also illustrates an astounding degree of agency and creativity that humans and nonhumans who strive to remain resilient display in the process. As such, the study of resilience has the potential to unpack multiple forms of responses to adversity. Something we can all learn from.

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Note on contributor

Kathrin Eitel is a cultural anthropologist and feminist STS scholar whose ethnographic research is pivoting around environmental disasters such as the exuberant occurrence of synthetic waste in urban Cambodia and the recurrences of floods in lower Vietnam. She is interested in situated resilience practices and the impact of worldviews that circulate along deeply rooted infrastructures of power, materialising in development policies and technological fixes. Eitel is the author of Recycling infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, waste, and urban life in Phnom Penh (2022, Routledge).

Kathrin Eitel, Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Email: kathrin.eitel@posteo.de, Website: www.kathrineitel.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-8200-9495.

[1] Oxford English Dictionary. 2022. “resilience, n.”. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163619?redirectedFrom=resilience.

^{^[2]} Stockholm Environment Institute. “About.” https://www.sei.org/about-sei/

^{^[3]} For an extensive overview, see Panter-Brick (2014).

Silence

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:22:35 +0000

Photo: VidaXL

Ana Dragojlovic Annemarie Samuels

University of Melbourne, Leiden University

Initially published 27 Feb 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23silence

Abstract:

Silence is a common occurrence in everyday social interactions, yet anthropological research, like most research in the social sciences and humanities, has mostly focused on what people say and do. Over the last couple of decades, however, there has been an increased attention to how the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the invisible shape social, political, and subjective worlds. In particular, anthropologists have theorised silence as more than just the opposite of speech. They have started to think of silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Anthropological rethinking of silence and voice has been particularly prominent in feminist traditions, in the study of care, and in decolonial scholarship that often studies silence as refusal and resistance. Attending to histories of silence and silencing has a potential to provide insights into different forms of structural oppression under which individual and collective strategies of survival might be falsely interpreted as mere compliance. Silence has also been important in research on ritual activity, where it is a prerequisite for communicating with ancestors, spirits, ghosts, and other apparitions. Here, silence can co-create a sense of hauntings as a response to repressed past and present forms of violence and harm. By attending closely to the unspoken and unspeakable aspects of language and art, anthropologists increasingly find new ways to include silences in their research and modes of representation. In these and other ways, the study of silence can greatly enrich our understanding of the social world.

Introduction

Like most research in the social sciences and humanities, anthropological research often focuses on what people say and do. Much less obvious are the unsaid, unspeakable, or invisible, and how these silences shape social, political, and subjective worlds. Nonetheless, explicit ethnographic attention to and theorisation of silence has been growing over the last decades, strongly influenced by feminist and decolonial scholarship and advances in narrative analysis—i.e. in the study of how stories, storytelling, and their silences and absences shape everyday life. Attention to silence has moreover been incited by anthropology’s reflexive turn, which since the 1980s has caused scholars to increasingly reflect on their own role in the production of knowledge and their decisions about what to write about and what to leave unspoken. Ruth Behar was one of the authors who developed experimental, self-reflective, and collaborative forms of writing that criticised prevalent silences about gendered and racialised dynamics in mainstream anthropology (Behar 1996, Behar and Gordon 1995).

A key tenet of anthropological work on silence is that it is often a presence in social life, rather than a mere absence of sound and voice. It can be a culturally specific form of experience (Basso 1970; Hastrup 1990). As a social, affective, and sensorial presence, silence can even become a moral and an active relational force. It enables or limits people’s ability to relate to each other in particular ways. When, for example, marginalisation and stigma loom, silence can be a vital strategy to create liveable lifeworlds. The non-disclosure of information can be crucial for people living with HIV, for instance, as in the face of severe discrimination their secrecy may allow them to keep leading their lives as much as possible as they did prior to their diagnosis (Black 2015; Moyer 2012; Samuels 2021). Similarly, sex workers may resolutely decide to not speak at all when state and non-state surveillance bodies question them about their past in interviews that, due to anti-trafficking measures, might foreclose their only possible source of income (Dasgupta 2014). People with a cancer diagnosis also sometimes use subtle, yet vital forms of concealment as they navigate imposing social and psychological demands. They may live ‘as if’ there were no diagnosis in order to continue to endure the already precarious conditions of everyday life for as long as possible (Banerjee 2020). Alternatively, silence may protect those who want to ‘elude’ a biomedical diagnosis, as may be the case for some people with symptoms of eating disorders (Shohet 2018).

Silence can also be shelter for those who want to avoid being absorbed into discourses of the state. Israeli youth who evade military service, for example, may not just do so by public refusal. Instead, they may resort to a ‘calculated passivity’ that allows them to altogether stay away from the public discussion on normative Israeli citizenship (Weiss 2016). Silence can also be suffocating, violent, and painful (Aretxaga 1997; Dragojlovic 2011; Warren 1993). At the same time, the silences that enable rhythm and ritual can be crucial ways of dealing with traumatic loss, as they entangle and evoke the entirely unspeakable or unspoken stories of longing that underlie such loss (Weller 2021). What all of these examples show is that silence is not a mere residue or background to supposedly real social action. Instead, it is an affective and relational activity (or the result thereof) that fundamentally shapes social worlds. Studying silence thus offers tremendous potential for critical engagement with people’s histories, the social structures that shape their lives, and with their personal experiences of inequality and exclusion (Dragojlovic 2021).

Within the burgeoning literature on silence, three themes are highlighted in this entry: the opposition of silence and voice; the haunting nature and effect of silence; and the importance of silence for narrative and representation. These topics stand out for their inspiring legacies and promising potential of contemporary anthropology of silence. Other themes in the anthropology of silence are equally important, yet not considered in depth in this entry due to limited space. Noteworthy, for example, is the extensive literature in the anthropology of music and sound studies on the relationship between silence and sound (or noise) (see, for example, Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Robinson 2020; Voegelin 2010). Similarly, modern art has been assessed as having become a pursuit of the ‘aesthetics of silence’, driven to focus on negation, emptiness, and undoing yet continuously finding that the production of such silence itself entails a form of speech (Sontag [1967] 1969).

Silence and voice

Silence has long been theorised in relation to ‘voice’. The two terms are frequently opposed by arguing that voice actively ‘fills’ silence, while silence is a mere absence of voice. Anthropology has problematised this opposition by rethinking silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants, for example, have shown that silent embodied practices can make the Holocaust present in everyday life so as to sustain its memory. This questions a simplistic opposition of silence and voice (see, for example, Kidron 2021). Three domains in which this rethinking of silence and voice is particularly prominent are Western feminist traditions, anthropologies of care, and decolonial approaches to silence as refusal and resistance.

Feminist traditions

The contention between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ has a long and complex history in feminist traditions. Feminist academics, public intellectuals, and activists have continually argued that speech is the foremost means of achieving equality and empowerment (Ahmed 2017). Particularly significant for feminist discussions about ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ has been intersectional feminism, which understands individual identities as combinations of different modes of discrimination and privilege. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), an American civil rights advocate and critical race theorist who developed the term in the context of unjust legal treatment of African American women. US antidiscrimination laws tended to look at gender and race separately, meaning that a person could only be discriminated against based on either gender or race. Consequently, the law did not capture overlapping forms of discrimination that African-American women and other women of colour experienced. Given that these women were left with no adequate justice, Crenshaw developed a theory of intersectionality to show that different axes of inequality, discrimination, and privilege inform individual identities. These axes might be, but are not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, ability, and nationality.

This notion of intersectionality fundamentally influenced feminist discussions on silence. For example, scholars who speak of the ‘racialization of silence’ (Ferrari 2020) challenge the assumption that ‘silence’ is associated with patriarchal domination. This assumption reflects the common experience of white middle class women, who led the second wave feminist movement in Euro-American contexts. However, it also falsely normalises their experience as that of all women. Against it, African American feminists have argued that African American women do in fact have a prominent voice in communal spaces such as church and the home (Lorde 1978; hooks 1989). They thereby highlight that the notions of ‘having a voice’, of ‘breaking the silence’, or of ‘speaking up’ may be insufficient as instruments of liberation. This leads them to call for a more nuanced analysis of multiplicity of silences (Ferrari 2020). We need to be aware that more often than not ‘the “voice,” “speech,” or “languages” of the colonized do not conform to Eurocentered, capitalist, colonial modern criteria’ in which ‘speaking up’ is associated with liberatory movements (Ferrari 2020, 134). Most people are simply not heard or recognised as being able to have a voice in the first place. Their forms of expression are reduced to the modes or voice of the colonised, and their ways of communicating ideas are misrecognised as nonsense. This misrecognition of voice is part of stripping racialised people of their humanity and dignity, to what Frantz Fanon has called ‘a zone of non-being’ ([1952] 2012, xii).

Other feminist scholars have similarly drawn attention to multiplicities, paradoxes, and possibilities of silence. The demand to speak up against oppression tends to place the burden of action on those least empowered. African-American women, or First Nations or gender diverse people are asked to make major interventions into their conditions of oppression. Here the liberatory idea of ‘speaking up’ obscures the labour needed for social change, placing expectations on those that historically have been marginalised (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013). Furthermore, the idea of ‘voice’ as the only way of liberation might in fact overly ‘abstract from the concrete situations and lived experiences of those who inhabit silences’ (Ferrari 2020, 124). Take as an example the memoir of writer and academic Ernesto Martínez, in which he speaks of the childhood sexual assault committed against him by his cousin. Martínez’s immediate response to this act of violence was silence and stillness. Under these circumstances, feminist philosopher Martina Ferrari (2020) argues that his response cannot and should not be understood as compliance to oppression. Martínez remembers his silence not as plain passivity, but rather as an expression of what he calls ‘joto passivity’, that is, ‘the seeming nonresponsiveness of queer Chicanos in the face of violence, which contra (colonial) common sense, was also felt as resistant behaviour’ (124). This silence may have been an act of ‘radical meaning making from which Martínez could envision and bring about radically different gendered practices of resistance’ (Ferrari 2020, 125). For Martínez, ‘speaking up’ as a liberatory solution was not an option under the circumstances in which he lived. Instead, adopting ‘joto passivity’ as an embodied negotiation of appropriate modes of resistance allowed him to navigate his circumstances.

Thus, rather than insisting on a sharp division between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’, feminist scholars have been investigating conditions under which movement between speech and silences occur. They broaden our possibilities for a reconfiguring of the ‘silence’ versus ‘voice’ binary, arguing that both ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ can be part of complex strategies of engaging with structures of power (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013; Ferrari 2020; Dragojlovic 2021). In this vein, contributors to the recent edited volume Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edges of sound (2013) argue that silence may constitute a deeper form of communication than sound: ‘Silence allows us space to breathe. It allows us the freedom of not having to exist constantly in reaction to what is said…’ (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013, 2). Thereby they stress the liberatory possibilities of inhabiting silence—resisting, in Western discourse, ‘speaking up’ as a go-to form of liberatory practice.

Care

Anthropologists studying care have similarly theorised the complexity of silence, moving away from any clear dichotomy between silence and voice. This work often reveals how silence is a response to the moral and social demands of everyday life. For example, in her family-centred ethnography of social relations in post-war and post-socialist Vietnam, Merav Shohet (2021) points out how everyday sacrifices, such as foregoing one’s own wishes and aspirations in order to take care of family members, are socially valued. Yet in order to be valued, those who sacrifice—often women—should not draw attention to their predicaments, bearing their suffering in silence, even though this may be challenging and painful. In these everyday family contexts, muted forms of sacrifice for one another often count as moral care.

In the face of suffering, the effortful work of silence may also help sustain precarious social relations. For some, silence may be the most virtuous—yet incredibly effortful—way of enduring pain and loss (see, for example, Buch Segal 2016; Livingston 2012; Smørholm 2016). Even where narrative utterances like ‘you endure’ help to constitute enduring pain as virtuous, people may remain silent about some experiences simply because they are impossible to put into words (Throop 2010). Silence may also be a respectful response to suffering, as it may honour the privacy of suffering and thereby enable rather than obstruct healing after extreme violence (Jackson 2004). It can be part of muted practices of everyday support, for example when neighbours who know about one another’s economic hardship bring food without commenting on their reasons for doing so (Han 2012). Or, silence may constitute a deliberate effort to steer away from negative thoughts and emotions, as when people in Thailand make an effort to not discuss terminal illness and rather raise more cheerful topics to lighten up the mood of their interlocutors (Aulino 2019; see also Stonington 2020).

These moral and social dimensions of silence need not be seen apart from the sensorial experience of stillness. Indeed, silences can powerfully index the present absence of both voice and sound. People living with dementia in the Netherlands have described that while they could break the unsettling silence of their homes by ‘making some noise’ in the sense of making actual sounds, it is only going out for a walk that really helps them to overcome the vicissitudes of ‘still’ moments that negatively affect their lives (Vermeulen 2020, 200). For them, the sensorial silence that might be broken by making noise is not independent from the silence of solitude, the absence of sociality and care. Or take the ethnographic description of people living and dying in the misery and abandonment of Vita, an asylum for homeless, mentally ill, and dying persons in Porto Alegre, Brazil:

These individuals wandered around in their dusty lots, rolled on the ground, crouched over or under their beds – when there were beds. Each one was alone; most were silent. There was a stillness, a kind of relinquishment that comes with waiting, waiting for the nothingness, a nothingness that is stronger than death. (Biehl 2005, 35)

João Biehl describes this asylum as a ‘zone of social abandonment’, a place where ‘voice can no longer become action’ (2005, 11). Here, the silencing of people’s social and political voice can be sensed in stillness. While sensorial aspects of silence are here part and parcel of adjusting to an unchangeable and dehumanising status quo, it can fulfil other functions. Care as well as socio-political change may come from such experiences of silence. The stillness of Thai meditation practices, for example, shows how the practice of silence as the deliberate absence of speech enables a shift of sensory focus toward non-verbal expression, and thereby changes one’s embodied experience of the world (Cassaniti forthcoming). As Julia Cassaniti argues, by effecting a new embodied attunement to the world and opening up new interpersonal spaces, silence may have powerful personal and intersubjective effects, leading people to change social relations with the world and others.

Refusal and resistance

Feminist and decolonial anthropologists have for a long time been studying multiple forms of silence and secrecy as a kind of refusal and resistance (Visweswaran 1994). Anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran charts multiple and contradictory uses of silence and secrecy as forms of resistance among activist women in Southern India. In her encounter with a woman she calls ‘M’, Visweswaran charts M’s frequent detours into silence, highlighting the importance of anthropological writing about silence, and how anthropologists give meaning to silences they encounter. Visweswaran also makes a reflexive point about ethnographic writing, as she stresses that, ‘the story I give you is not exactly about this woman … it is rather more about how I negotiate and understand the construction of a silence, how I seek to be accountable to it’ (1994, 60). Visweswaran does not only focus on comprehending multiple levels of silence in the contexts she is writing about. Instead, she as an anthropologist takes responsibility and accountability for how her own writing might be implicated in silences of those she is writing about. Anthropological knowledge produced through such careful attention to silences can be considered ‘situational knowledge’ (Visweswaran 1994, 49). This term emphasises the conviction that all knowledge comes from specific positional perspectives (Haraway 1988). In this case, these perspectives are not just shaped by what is said, but also by what people are silent about.

Understanding the origins, nature, and effects of silence is also crucial to make sense of histories of anthropological representations of Indigenous people. For a long time, ‘anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonized’ (Simpson 2007, 67; also 2014). "This framework had characterised much of earlier anthropological work ‘on’ Indigenous people (2007, 67-8), and it accorded with Europe’s imperialist and colonialist projects. Anthropologist Audra Simpson, a citizen of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation, therefore set to study the Mohawks of Kahnawake in Canada and the United States by developing a critical new take on this tradition. Her goal was to pay attention to what mattered to her interlocutors, rather than focusing on how they were ‘different’ to anthropologists. What emerged was an ‘ethnography of refusal’, which focused on the ways in which Kahnawakero:non (i.e. the people of Kahnawake) had refused the authority of the state ‘at almost every turn’ of their history (2007, 73). Simpson’s work demonstrates the methodological and the theoretical productivity of focusing on collaborators’ refusals, in order to acknowledge and embrace what has been marginalised, excluded, and silenced previously. When she tries to address histories of subjugation and dispossession with one interviewee, for example, the person tells her repeatedly that they do not know the answers to her questions. She interprets their silence as a desire not to make a difficult past verbally explicit, given that both she and the interlocutor know what happened and know that each other knows. Silence as refusal of ‘speaking outwardly’ should therefore not be seen as the absence of agency, but as an act of sabotage or ‘an overlooked component of ethico-political thought’ (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017).

Various forms of silence and refusal can be part of reinventing our ways of living and relating (i.e. ‘commoning’) in times of the Anthropocene, as suspending assertions on how the world is, or how it should be, can have productive potential (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017, 364). If we approach the Anthropocene as the outcome of centuries of colonial and neo-colonial capitalist dispossession, silence can constitute an attractive or necessary refusal to participate in the forms of governance that got us into our current situation (including speech-based activism of the contemporary Left).

Haunting silences

Silence and silencing are often associated with experiences of personal or interpersonal violence, and collective experiences of violence and various forms of structural oppression (Dragojlovic 2020). This has been shown by various disciplines, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, including psychoanalysis (Abraham and Torok 1994), philosophy (Derrida 1986; 1993), sociology (Gordon 1997; Cho 2008), gender studies (Rwe and Malhora 2013; Dragojlovic 2018; Ferrari 2020), history (Trouillot 1995), and anthropology (Good 2019; Kwon 2006; Kidron 2009; Argenti and Schramm 2009). For example, the historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has explored the complex relationship between historical violence and silence in the history of Haiti. He argues that the interrelated nature between social memory and official historical narratives always produce a ‘bundle of silences’ (1995: 27). Trouillot’s pioneering work demonstrated that the recording of historical events is not a mere collection of details about events, but a process through which some events are completely or partially silenced, either deliberately or unconsciously. This is particularly important when it comes to silencing resistance to oppression, such as with the Haitian Revolution, which Trouillot demonstrates was one of the most successful and historically relevant slave revolts in history. The importance of silence in the aftermath of historical violence has been studied across different socio-cultural settings. Silence has been transmitted across generations from Holocaust survivors and survivors of Cambodian genocide, to memories of slavery, and the transmission of traumatic loss in Taiwan (Argenti and Schramm 2009). Following the Vietnam War, domestic life in Southern Vietnamese villages was marked by silence in the aftermath of massacres of unarmed civilians. At the same time, villagers kept engaging in intimate—but muted—ritual actions (Kwon 2006). Ghosts, spirits, apparitions, and hauntings have often been associated with silence and silencing as a response to violence (Dragojlovic 2018, 2020).

Work with the children of Holocaust survivors has led scholars to develop a psychoanalytic theory of intergenerational phantoms (Abraham and Torok 1994). Such phantoms are produced by the ignorance of family secrets, falsifications of the truth, and sheer disregard for the past that create conditions for producing hauntings across generations (1994, 169). Building on a Freudian approach to the unconscious, which treats the unconscious as a repository of unacceptable ideas, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argued that family secrets can be wrapped in silences and buried in a metaphorical, psychological ‘crypt’. Such secrets are not only stored within those that directly experienced trauma, but also transmitted across subsequent generations: ‘What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others … the burial of an unspeakable fact … like a stranger within’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 3). Crucially, they argued that such traumatic intergenerational transmissions can be healed once secrets and silences are unpacked and revealed. French philosopher Jacques Derrida brought these psychoanalytic insights to the attention of a wider audience (Davis 2013, 54) and subsequently developed his own theory of ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1993). He coined the influential term ‘spectrality’ to speak of a persistent return of a range of ideas from the cultural and social past in the manner of a ghost. As he put it,

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us (cited in Davis 2013, 53-4).

Influenced by Derrida’s idea that the past is incomplete, sociologist Avery Gordon (2008) argues that hauntings are important sociological phenomena that deserve substantive scholarly attention. Making a direct link between various forms of historical injustice—from slavery to the disappeared in Argentina, and from the recent ‘war on terror’ to torture and deportation—Gordon argues that those who were seemingly forgotten can illuminate the injustices they suffered through the act of haunting. For Gordon (2008, xvi), haunting is an animated state through which unresolved and repressed social violence makes itself known in often unexpected ways, such as through ghostly appearances. In her take on hauntings as social phenomenon, a ghost is not just a person who is missing or dead, but a social figure who is deeply implicated in the social life of the living and is crucial for the continued production of subjectivities and histories (Gordon 2008, x). Gordon’s sociological approach to hauntology has been immensely influential across the humanities and social sciences, in particular for scholars working on histories of epistemic injustice and enforced forgetting. Particularly significant has been a study of the systemic erasure of memory about the yanggongju, Korean women who acted as sex workers for US servicemen during the Korean War, many of whom subsequently became war brides and eventually pioneered Korean migration to the United States (Cho 2008). Grace Cho’s careful analysis reveals how the enforced forgetting of the yanggongju permeates the consciousness of Koreans. They are now ghostly figures that are at the same time present and absent, who ‘[move] in and out of visibility’ (Cho 2008, 14).

Intergenerational experiences of silence under ongoing conditions of structural inequalities can manifest as acts of ‘haunted speakability’ (Dragojlovic 2021). For example, in a performing arts event in the Netherlands that engages families’ complex intergenerational, interracial genealogies, aspirations to make visible past injustices are challenged by the artists’ family’s embeddedness in long histories of structural violence. These histories do not only inform what can be made visible through speech, but also often reproduce the structures of the very inequalities they aspire to dismantle (Dragojlovic 2021). Haunted speakability, then, reflects people’s feeling of urgency to instigate social justice and points to the limitations of speech as a means of achieving equality (Dragojlovic 2021). The idea of haunted speakability urges further questions about recovery and care, not only for those who themselves directly experience violence, but also for those for whom the affective afterlives of violence might resonate intergenerationally, under ongoing conditions of inequality (Dragojlovic 2021). The scholarship on haunting silences further contributes to rethinking and theorising silence as a complex relationship between narrative articulation and unspoken, embodied ways of inhabiting the world.

Narrative and representation

Much like as an awareness of haunting requires attunement to the social world rather than a turn away from it, attending to the unspoken in narrative and discourse warrants a close examination of language. It relies on a careful listening to the stories people do and do not tell; the slightly longer pauses, hesitating beginnings, whispers, rumours, gossip, and embodied narration (see Shohet and Samuels forthcoming). Who tells stories to whom, and whose stories are heard, and by whom? The analysis of women’s testimonies for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has shown that on the surface, women’s narratives speak mostly of violence against men (Ross 2001). Yet, the anthropologist Fiona Ross (2001) contends, if we listen differently, we hear how by telling these stories, women actually also speak about their own experiences. Women tell about physical violence experienced by men from their own vantage point, in passing referring to police harassment of their families, the shattering of kin over geographical distances, the absence of men, and the silence and secrecy in their politically active families. They hint at even more silent experiences of women’s suffering. Similarly, women’s stories of the violence of the Partition of India in 1947 are enveloped in a ‘zone of silence’ (Das 2007). This does not mean that nothing was said about this period, but rather ‘that the words had a frozen-slide quality to them, which showed their burned and numbed relation to life’ (Das 2007, 11). These narratives suffused by silences destabilise the certainty that language may seem to bring. Silence, then, is only at the far end of a continuum of uninterpretability of which speech and narrative are similarly part (Weller 2017).

Close attention to those stories at or beyond the edges of public recognition, moreover, reveals how silences undergird dominant discourses. Experiences hitherto unspoken may still transpire in whispers, gossip, rumour, song, spirit possession, images, a raised eyebrow, or an offhand remark. What is silenced in public discourse may be invoked in what Merav Shohet (2021) calls ‘sideshadowing narratives’: nonlinear and often ambiguous stories told through gossip and in other more private, sometimes whispered, conversations. Unlike the theological unilinearity and normativity of ‘backshadowing’ and ‘foreshadowing’, these narratives embrace indeterminacy and contradiction, invoking possibilities without providing resolution. In her account of a Vietnamese family caring for their comatose grandmother, Shohet shows how all family members take part in the caregiving, keeping up the image of a harmonious family. Yet, on a private occasion, two relatives tell in ‘sideshadowing’ whispers about their grudges against the near-dying matriarch and her husband, resulting from—in their eyes—moral missteps from the past that may now have caused her pitiful condition as a form of karmic retribution (Shohet 2021, 140-56).

Often, it is not only the story told, but also the context, the unspoken range of experiences and structures that surround narratives, that shape the (im)possibilities of articulation. A striking example can be found in the ethnographic study of children living with HIV in Brazil, whose narratives about their illness include the experiences of non-illness. Their silence, nonverbal communication, and multivocal narratives of social worlds shape the children’s stories at least as much as verbal articulation does (Abadía-Barrero 2011). The subjunctive mode of narrative is particularly important here. It allows people to think in multiple ‘what if’ scenarios of the future and the past. It helps them think through multiple possible trajectories of what might happen or might have happened, which they do particularly often at troublesome moments in their lives, such as when struggling with illness (Good and Good 1994). At such moments, the subjunctive mode may similarly allow for not fully thinking through all of these possibilities, sustaining the silent futures or pasts that are barely thinkable, for example because they might include scenarios of death or social exclusion (Samuels 2018, see also Mattingly 2014).

Aesthetic forms and visual practices may also articulate that which resists articulation in language. Images, performances, and works of art can affect people in a way that exceeds discourse. To understand how visual expressions communicate the unspeakable affectively, we need to stop contrasting silence to voice or speech. Voice, speech, silence, and visual expression intersect in different modes of articulation and non-articulation in that visual expressions may speak in ways that words cannot; for example, in the ways people living with HIV invest in healthy appearances and even makeup to distract from gossip (Samuels 2021). Art can tell stories without words. The discursive framing of art, meanwhile, may amount to new forms of silencing, as in the case of Syrian refugee artists who stop with their artistic work to escape from humanitarian projects of ‘refugee art’ that seek to aestheticise experiences of loss and displacement (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy 2021). Such humanitarian projects commission ‘refugee art’ as a commercially attractive genre, while artists feel their placement in a particular category with limited room for selecting their own topic is silencing their artistic creativity. The silence of those refugee artists who decide to withdraw from art for this reason may be seen as a ‘tactic of agentive creativity’ (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy 2021, 15).

The potential violence of verbal representation that Audra Simpson (2007) highlights in her work on refusal always raises dilemmas in anthropological writing, and perhaps particularly in writing about silences. For example, a poignant dilemma for ethnographers analysing life stories concerns the ethics of analysing what people may have chosen to leave unsaid. Addressing this question, Kirin Narayan (2004) proposes the juxtaposition of multiple life stories, as listening to one story may help to recognise the meaningful silences in others. Thereby, ethnographers may find patterns of meaningful silence without necessarily having to interpret all silences of one individual’s narrative. At the same time, Narayan cautions that life stories, including silences, are produced in interpersonal processes of which the anthropologist is a part and that as writers we may also want to leave uninterpreted. Struggling with a similar dilemma, Merav Shohet (forthcoming) argues for combining person-centred ethnography with historical contextualisation, striking a delicate balance between respecting a person’s self-chosen silences and avoiding reiterating historical injustice through continuous omissions. As both Narayan and Shohet show, navigating the tension between respecting silence and critically analysing its socio-historical conditions is an integral part of ethnographic engagement with silence.

Anthropological representations take greater liberties than most social sciences. In trying to reflect the concepts and concerns of the people they study, anthropologists may embrace unknowability and present stories from multiple perspectives, without resolution, realising that it may be impossible to construct a univocal narrative. A powerful example is Sarah Pinto’s writing and rewriting of the narratives about Lata, a young woman treated in the psychiatric unit of a government hospital in northern India (2012, 2014). In her narration of the many stories told by and about Lata, Pinto includes silences, gaps, and contradictions, concluding that there may simply not be one comprehensive and linear narrative of Lata’s illness. Proposing a ‘hermeneutic of missing it’, she argues for ethnographic writing with the multiple unresolved contradictions in layers of stories, creating an understanding that is ‘less illuminating in the strength of its coherence than revealing in the gaps between incompatible ways of telling’ (Pinto 2014, 224).

Like visual art, poetry can communicate the unspoken without discursively putting it in place. Several powerful poems by anthropologists have directly addressed the topic of silence, including Nandini Gunawardena’s ‘Silenced’ (2004), which describes the violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, and Renato Rosaldo’s ‘Silence’ (2014), in which he invokes the moment he receives the news of his wife Michelle Rosaldo’s death, a moment when suddenly all the ordinary sounds of the Philippine village he stays in seem to abruptly come to an end. Many anthropologists illuminate the unspoken affectively by using poetry in representation and articulation, especially where prose falls short of making space for silence. Anthropological engagement with silence therefore encourages the expansion of our ethnographic tool kit, for example by using ‘poetry, disordered speech, embodiment, lamentation, dreams and other elliptical communication’ (Varma 2020, 31). At the same time, it means embracing the limits of knowability and our collaborators’ refusals to be known. Writing with silences, then, may entail multiple ways of staying with gaps, contradictions, and unintelligibility.

Conclusion

Silence is a ubiquitous presence in our social world. Sometimes barely noticeable, sometimes strongly sensed, what silence means and does in subjective and social life is not always easy to discern or interpret. An anthropological approach to silence leaves room for uncertainty, unknowability, and multivocality. At the same time, if offers ways to attend to what silence does, as a form of oppression, a refuge, an act of care or refusal, a haunting ghost or an untold story in the shadow of public discourse. A careful look at silence shows that silence and voice are not necessarily clear opposites, and neither is voice—or sound—necessarily ‘filling’ silence. Practices of ‘giving’ voice may result in other silences. Questioning who and what we see and don’t see, who and what is heard and who and what is unheard, unspoken, or unspeakable is vital to critical work on structural and historical inequalities, and rethinking anthropological practices of research and representation. Even if often opaque, silences demand our attention and analysis as much as speech and sound do. What has been silenced, by whom, and for what reason has much to tell us about social relationships, moral orders, relations of care, and the complex ways through which people navigate structural forms of oppression, endeavouring to make their lives liveable under multiple forms of social inequalities.

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Note on contributors

Ana Dragojlovic is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theory and is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern citizens and post-colonial intimacy (2016, Amsterdam University Press), co-author of Bodies and suffering: Emotions and relations of care (2018, Routledge, with Alex Broom), co-editor of Gender, violence and power in Indonesia across time and space (2020, Routledge, with Kate McGregor and Hannah Loney) and co-editor of a special issue, Tracing silences, in History and Anthropology with Annemarie Samuels.

Ana Dragojlovic, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. ana.dragojlovic@unimelb.edu.au.

Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her current research focuses on narratives and silences of end-of-life care. Her published work focuses on care, disaster, narrative, silence, and HIV/AIDS in Indonesia, and includes the monograph After the tsunami: Disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh (2019, University of Hawaii Press) and a special issue in History and Anthropology called Tracing Silences, co-edited with Ana Dragojlovic.

Annemarie Samuels, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333AK Leiden, The Netherlands. a.samuels@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Haitian Vodou

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:03:32 +0000

Laënnec Hurbon

French National Centre for Scientific Research, and State University of Haiti

Initially published 5 Apr 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22haitianvodou

Abstract:

Haitian Vodou first took shape in the context of slavery. Once the religion of the royal family in Dahomey, in West Africa, it was then transformed by the slaves of the island of Haiti as a way of restoring a sense of identity and as a force of liberation. This explains the highly significant role played by Vodou in the largest ever successful slave revolt in history and in the creation of an independent Haiti. Initially, anthropology, based on an evolutionary perspective, regarded Vodou as the manifestation of a primitive and barbaric culture closely linked to magic and witchcraft, a view compatible with the European colonisation movement. As a result, Vodou was subjected to a number of waves of persecution by the Catholic clergy. However, over the course of the last decades, anthropology has demonstrated that the syncretism seen in Vodou, notably with its repurposing of the worship of Catholic saints, indicates the creation of a new culture that is capable of tolerance. Its pantheon and its rituals can be understood thanks to an anthropology based on theories of language and symbolic function. Anthropology also shows us that Haitian Vodou serves as a means of remembrance and that it forms part of the patrimony of humanity since the nineteenth century.

Introduction

With its worship of spiritual entities or divinities representing the different domains of nature (water, air, fire, etc.) and human activities (for example, sexuality, work, etc.), Vodou was first practiced in the countries of the Gulf of Guinea, namely Dahomey or present-day Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Guinea, and Ghana. In this area, society was, up until the eighteenth century, largely organised around families, lineages, villages, or ethnic groups. Each of these had their own divinities, referred to as Vodoun, which, in the Fon language in Dahomey, represented an invisible force, capable of manifesting itself in the bodies of certain individuals through trance and possession. Tensions and, in certain cases, wars between ethnic groups favoured a certain mingling on a religious level and some divinities successfully transferred from one ethnic group to another. Particularly in Dahomey, during the eighteenth century, these religions became centralised and were consequently placed under the domination of the royal family.

With the advent of the slave trade (that is to say, the trading of African people) and of slavery which began in the first decades of the sixteenth century, and which intensified partly as a result of the establishment of the French West India Company in 1664, millions of Africans would be deported to the Americas, taking their divinities with them. This led to the emergence of religions such as Candoblé in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, and Vodou in Saint-Domingue, the French colony which would become the independent state of Haiti in 1804 and then, in 1821, would be divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Understanding Vodou means first of all focusing on the transformations it underwent as a result of the experiences of Africans originating from many different ethnic groups, who were eager at a very early stage to establish the conditions for their freedom from slavery. Anthropological research will always be haunted, or at the very least intrigued, by the astonishing effort made by the slaves who managed to produce a new religious and cultural system which integrated at one and the same time elements handed down from the various ethnic groups now living together in the same area, those imposed by the institution of slavery, and those handed down from the Amerindians. This intercultural mix of very heterogeneous elements seems to encapsulate the unique nature of Vodou.

Anthropologists often distinguish between two stages in the formation of Vodou in Haiti. The first of these occurred during the period of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the second began with the independence of Haiti in 1804 and has continued up to the present day, taking on new forms in a changing political context. By examining the Vodou pantheon and its rituals, this entry will focus its anthropological investigation on the significance of Vodou divinities on individual and collective life. In spite of the prejudices rooted in an anthropology originally based on the opposition between ‘barbarians’ and ‘civilised’ individuals, Vodou will be turn out to be a source for creating a new culture, a place of memory and part of humanity’s universal heritage.

Slavery and the development of Vodou

The living conditions in which the slave trade and slavery had plunged Africans in the Americas made it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the religious and cultural inheritance of the ethnic groups from which they had originated. Slaves were effectively separated from their families and their lineage and were considered as personal property, and slavery was offered to them, according to most missionaries, as an opportunity to obtain access to the condition of true human beings. Thus, for example, the French Blackfriar Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre was able to assert that ‘their bondage [was] the principle of their happiness’ and that ‘their disgrace [was] the cause of their salvation’ (1666, 35). At that time, Africa was regarded as a continent peopled by savages and barbarians and afflicted by what was then referred to as ‘the curse of Ham’, a legend based on the Biblical story of Canaan and his sons, and in particular Ham who was declared ‘cursed’ and destined for slavery. The same legend attributed black skin to Ham, and would be used, from the seventeenth century onwards, notably in Holland in 1666, as justification for the trade in and enslavement of Africans.

Conversion to Christianity would therefore lead to the gradual cultural assimilation of the African slave. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, anthropology (see Duchet 1971) was dominated by an evolutionary perspective which saw Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, in contrast with Africa which was considered to be at the lowest point of the hierarchy.

The publication of the Code noir (‘Black code’) by French king Louis XIV in 1685 sought to legitimise the practice of slavery after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Enacted in 1598, the latter effectively brought an end to the wars of religion in Europe by establishing civil and religious peace. By revoking the Edict, Louis XIV made it possible to include in the preamble to the Code noir intolerance towards Protestantism and Judaism and an order to baptise and instruct slaves in the Catholic religion. Article 2 of the Code noir stipulates: ‘All the slaves that shall be in our islands shall be baptised and instructed in the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith.’ Article 3 states: ‘We forbid any public exercise of religion other than the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith…’ (Sala-Molins 1987). This was a reference to both Protestant and Jewish religions. But as far as African religious practices were concerned, these were deemed non-existent: the Code noir regards them as supposedly ‘seditious’ practices, and as a result, any gathering of slaves was strictly forbidden.

It is important to emphasise the exceptionally harsh working conditions endured by slaves on plantations and in homesteads. Slavery resulted in an increase in wealth for France in Saint-Domingue, but also for the whole of Europe which, between the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, deported between twelve and fifteen million African slaves for the production of sugar cane, cotton, coffee, indigo, and cocoa (see, for example, the demographic data in Coquery-Vidrovitch and Mesnard 2013, 122). In Saint Domingue, slaves worked from morning until night under the strict supervision of slave masters armed with whips. In theory, masters resorted to a strategy which prevented slaves from finding themselves reunited with other members of the same ethnic group, since it was considered essential to use any possible means to ensure slaves were kept in a situation of total subjugation to the power of their masters. In practical terms, a slave was considered to have neither ancestors nor descendants. This is why certain sociologists speak, with good reason, of ‘social death’ to describe the total depersonalisation masters sought to impose on their slaves (Patterson 1982). These working conditions, similar to those within a concentration camp, would end up driving the slaves to look for ways to restore their lost identity, by weaving a new social fabric which would unite them in the struggle for liberation.

The cult of the dead in the development of Vodou

For the slaves, the cult of the dead was not only a link to African religious and cultural traditions. It also represented the foundation of new practices and perceptions which the slaves would introduce in their own way, as a result of the subjugation imposed on them by the institution of slavery. The cult of the dead was not just an African heritage but was also overlaid with a new significance. If the slave trade is a process of deportation that tore the individual away from his or her family, lineage, and clan, it is only to be expected that when a slave dies, every possible step must be taken in order to enable the restoration of links with the native land. Slave funerals in the colony involved rituals which were designed to re-establish contact between the dead slave and his or her ancestors. Such rituals sought out the divinities responsible for protecting lineage and ethnic groups. The religious and cultural heritage of Africa was gradually restored through this semantic chain, which represented the link between the dead person and his or her ancestors and their divinities. Many commentators and historians point out that the slaves believed they would return to Africa after their death and sometimes those who took their own lives expressed their hope of returning home by doing so.

In addition to burial, two other significant moments in the development of Vodou stand out. Slaves were allocated Sunday evenings as leisure time and these evenings provided them with the opportunity to organise dances, known as calendas. These dances enabled the slaves to revisit some of their African traditions, far from the gaze of the slave masters. The second key moment is what is referred to as marronage (Fouchard [1972] 1988): the process by which slaves fled into remote mountain regions where they were sometimes able to meet up with members of their ethnic groups but, in any case, could organise a life of freedom. Marronage has been the subject of a great many studies and is recognised as the expression of the desire for freedom and, therefore, as an unmistakable expression of protest against the condition of slavery (see for example Fouchard 1962 and Fick 2017).

The plantation masters in Saint-Domingue greatly feared marronage, and imposed severe punishments for it. But they had enormous difficulty finding out what was being plotted in the cultural and religious practices of the slaves, given that the latter demonstrated, for example, a sincere devotion to prayers, mass, and the worship of saints and of the Virgin Mary in churches and were eager to take part in religious processions. Chromolithographs representing the saints decorated the Catholic churches that the slaves were obliged to attend. These images provided the slaves with details that enabled them to keep depictions of African divinities alive. Hence the syncretism which, at first sight, still marks out Haitian Vodou, as it does Brazilian Candomblé and Cuban Santeria.

Vodou and the slave rebellion of 1791

From the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, many religious readers from both Catholic churches and from marronage communities began calling for revolt, drawing on the support of large numbers of slaves. These leaders included Padre Jean who, in 1786, gave his name to a Vodou ritual known as Petro, and Colas Jambes Coupées, a maroon (i.e. a former slave who lived in freedom) who was regarded as a sorcerer and who encouraged slaves to abolish the colony. Of great importance was the famous Makandal who, as early as 1751, had prophesied the death of whites and the end of slavery. Makandal was suspected of being a specialist in recipes for poisons and magic potions and his name remains associated with the witchcraft practices and beliefs called makanda. Arrested and sentenced to be burnt alive, it was said throughout the colony that Makandal managed to escape the flames by transforming himself into a lizard. Recent research refers to a ‘Makandal site’ (Midy 2003) associated with the Haitian Revolution, since it was from the settlement named Normand LeMézy in the north of the country where he operated that the idea of a general slave revolt gradually began to spread. It is important to focus our attention on this key event in the history of Vodou, which will always be linked to the process of the anti-slavery revolution which in turn gave birth to the Haitian nation (see Fick 2014).

On the 14^th of August 1791 near Morne-Rouge, in a place called Bois-Caïman, around 200 slaves, commanders, coachmen, domestic slaves, and representatives of various sugar production workshops gathered for a Vodou ceremony organised under the leadership of Dutty Boukmann, a slave in a plantation in the north-east of the country and a Vodou priest (houngan). According to early accounts, available thanks to the writings of surgeon Antoine Dalmas who was present at the ceremony (1814), the participants sacrificed a pig to African divinities and swore to bring slavery to an end and to launch a general insurrection. They drank the blood of the sacrificed animal and pledged to keep the future rebellion a secret. Also officiating at the ceremony was a woman by the name of Cécile Fatima. Certain historians (Geggus 2002) provide a dramatised version of the ceremony, describing it as taking place during a stormy night. One week later, in the night of the 22^nd to 23^rd of August, the revolt broke out: all the sugar and coffee plantations, along with the workshops of Saint-Domingue, were burnt down over a wide area. Catholics were also involved in this revolution. They include a maroon known as Romaine the Prophetess who declared herself to be the goddaughter of the Virgin Mary from whom she received messages telling her to free 4000 blacks and mulattos from slavery.

The outcome of the rebellion was disastrous for the colony, with many hundreds (perhaps even as many as a thousand) colonisers being killed, and 1,200 coffee plantations and 161 sugar plantations destroyed by fire. The French government estimated the losses at 600 million pounds (Cauna 1987, 212).

Saint-Domingue at this date was a powder keg, with 500,000 slaves—many of whom had escaped and were living as maroons in camps in the mountains. There were also 40,000 emancipated mulattos and blacks and 30,000 whites, the latter divided into ‘poor whites’ (petits blancs: craftsmen, traders/merchants, sailors, and soldiers) and ‘the white elite’ (grands blancs: planters and administrators). The Code noir of 1685 had for decades controlled relationships between these groups on the basis of a strict racial hierarchy which went from whites, through mulattos, to blacks. As soon as news of the French revolution arrived in Saint-Domingue, all social and racial groups were galvanised into action. Nine years after the Haitian Revolution, in 1882, Napoleon attempted to reinstate slavery. His attempts to do so led to a war in Haiti, with 40,000 men sent out from France, that ended with Haiti’s independence. It is highly likely that secret Vodou societies were involved in this war.

Having established the historic roots and the historical importance of Vodou, we now turn our attention to the pantheon of this religion and the rituals associated with it. We shall then examine how anthropology accounts for this system of beliefs and practices.

The Vodou pantheon and its rituals

In Africa (notably in Benin and Nigeria), three types of Vodou can be identified: one associated with family or lineage (hennu-vodu), one with the village (to-vodu), and one with ethnic groups (ado-vodo). The divinities are divided into celestial groups (Mawu-Lisa being responsible for day and night, while Gu is in charge of organising the universe); then in terrestrial groups (wih Agwe or Agbe for the sea and the waters, or Sogbo for the rain) and finally in groups of divinities representing the storm (such as Ogou-Badagri, master of the thunder). In the case of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the African divinities (called lwa, spirit, or mistè) are divided into the rada divinities (representing the Fon and the Yoruba people) and the Congo and Petro divinities (for the Bantu and Creole people, respectively). They represent a transformation of ethnic groups into families of divinities (called nanchon, or nations) and constitute a genuine pantheon. God is recognised as the ‘great master’ (Granmet) who leaves to the lwa, the secondary divinities, the task of dealing with earthly matters. Divinities therefore mediate between humans and their world. They represent an imaginary and symbolic field that serves as the foundation of social relations, and enables the mutual recognition between slaves and their solidarity during revolts.

The value of one lwa in the pantheon is a little like that of a word in a language: its value changes and can only be understood in a relationship of contradiction and of complementarity with the other lwa, and therefore with the entire family of divinities. So, for example, Legba, the ‘leader’ of the lwa, opens the gate separating humans from the world of the lwa. Represented by Saint Peter, he is also the guardian of temples (called ounfor) and of dwellings, and is invoked at the beginning of each Vodou ceremony. Legba is also ‘master of the crossroads’, places that are associated with danger but that are also home to objects known as wanga, which can protect against evil spirits and allow their owners to bewitch others. Amongst the important lwa is also Ogou, represented by Saint James the Great, as a warrior. His favourite colour is red and he is associated with fire, but he stays in contact with water where he is reunited with the lwa Ezili, the flirtatious and sensuous woman represented by the Virgin Mary, who is his mistress. Ogou is also the cousin of Zaka, lwa of agriculture, whose adoptive son is Brave Gédé, spirit of the dead and of cemeteries. Many of these lwa are associated with the Rada subsection of Vodou, but in Congo and Petro subsections of Vodou these spirits can also be present. So, for example, the Lwa rada, known as the twins (or marassas), are reputed to be fearsome (Heusch 2000).

**The Vodou temples (ounfor)**

The lwa are regularly honoured in ounfor, which are the Vodou temples where ceremonies take place. It would appear that ounfor were built all over Haiti after independence in 1804. In charge of the ounfor is an ounfan, who is the owner of the temple. A woman priest can also be the owner of an ounfor and is called a manbo. At the entrance of an ounfor there is often a tree, the calabash, which is the residence of lwa Legba.

The decorations of the ounfor, which consist of images of Catholic saints, might seem misleading as in reality these represent the lwa most often honoured there. Such images are housed in chambers (kay-mistè) in which are placed their favourite foods and their symbolic objects, mostly during ceremonies. The lwa Ezili, who is represented by a flirtatious woman, will, for example, receive a mirror. The ceremonies, which consist of dances and songs in honour of the lwa, take place in a large room called the péristil. In the middle of the péristil, acting as a connecting link between the earthly and the celestial worlds, stands a pillar called the poto-mitan, often decorated with two snakes (Dambala-Wedo and his wife, Ayida Wedo, joined together like fire and water). Divinities from mythical Africa pass through the poto-mitan after an epic journey under the waters of the Atlantic to be reunited with their servants in the temple. Around the poto-mitan stand the oungan or the manbo, the ‘chanterelle queen’ who directs the dances and songs, the initiated or ounsi ready to sing and to dance, and the other participants (pitit kay) who are welcomed as members of the fraternity (see below). Opposite them is an orchestra composed of three drums which are used as sacred instruments and play the tunes associated with the lwa in order to facilitate trances and possession. At the start of each ceremony, geometric patterns (vèvès) representing the lwa are drawn on the floor with coffee or flour, and these help to incite states of trance. Emblems of the lwas are placed on a table resembling an altar: food dishes and various objects such as bottles containing the souls of the dead placed under the protection of the lwa.

The major places of Vodou worship in Haiti include the temples of Souvenance and Soukri, both close to the port-city of Gonaïves. Each year, at Easter and in August, thousands of visitors and practitioners, including the Haitian diaspora, gather there to celebrate. In fact, throughout the year, celebrations marking the patron saints also attract Vodou practitioners who readily transform these into occasions of Vodou pilgrimage. For example, on the 16^th of July, the feast of the Saut d’Eau, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, attracts many tens of thousands of pilgrims to a famous waterfall surrounded by trees believed to house Vodou divinities. Often the pilgrims also attend the local church, and display the same levels of enthusiasm and devotion as at the site of the famous waterfall.

What is the nature of the lwa, and what are their demands? In themselves they are neither good nor bad since their impact on our lives depends on how we follow their rules. Together, the lwa are part of a hierarchical system, and those who take precedence over others need to be honoured more lavishly.

**Honouring the lwa (Vodou rituals)**

How should the lwa be honoured, and what do they represent today in people’s individual and collective lives? An individual generally receives one or two lwa as part of his or her family heritage. These are referred to as the lwa-rasin, or ‘root-lwa’: some Haitian families have, tucked away somewhere out of sight in their room, a small alter called wogatwa on which is placed the image of a saint which is indeed the inherited lwa who they worship on a regular basis. On a collective level, there are fraternities to which individuals belong within an ounfor. People attend or actively participate in ceremonies which follow the Catholic liturgical calendar. On Christmas night, they ask for favours of the lwa; on the 6^th of January, the Feast of Kings is the occasion for a ceremony bringing together a number of families, and on the 1st and 2^nd of November, the festival of the dead gives rise to festivities worthy of a national holiday which take place in cemeteries (Metraux 1958, 216ss). Throughout the year, oungan and manbo are consulted and act as official interpreters for the language of the Vodou divinities in order to guide individuals in their daily lives.

To obtain the favours of the lwa, offerings must be made to them on a regular basis. These can involve pouring water on to the ground (jétédlo) in order to give the lwa a drink, an opening gesture in ceremonies. Animals (poultry, goats, or bulls) are sacrificed in order to provide food for the lwa (manger-lwa). Of course, each ritual must be strictly applied so as to avoid the risk of provoking the anger of the ‘spirits’. A ceremony generally culminates in one or more participants becoming possessed, a phenomenon which, for Vodou practitioners, means taking the form of a lwa, allowing oneself to be possessed by it (a process described as ‘overlapping’ with the lwa), by falling into a trance. At the first signs of such a trance, the Vodou practitioners present prepare to welcome the lwa and offer the objects and symbols associated with that lwa. Such an epiphany of a lwa is sign of a successful ceremony.

Certain Vodou practitioners go further than the traditional relationships they have with the lwa in the context of their family or fraternity. They may have a deeper relationship with a particular lwa. Normally it is the lwa who is believed to select the individual in question. In this way, a ‘mystical marriage’ with a lwa can take place, either as a result of a dream, an illness, an accident, or repeated failures in matters of everyday life. This ceremony takes the form of an ordinary marriage with a blessing of rings in the presence of witnesses. The lwa gives his or her agreement to the marriage through a dream or by taking possession of the mind of a participant. These mystical marriages are a way of transmitting the legacy of lwa since it is thanks to a godfather (or a godmother) who has already experienced an initiation that this transmission can take place, the newly married individual then becoming a godchild. He or she must set aside certain days of the week to make offerings to the lwa and must accept sexual abstinence.

Sometimes certain Vodou practitioners seek to buy lwa whom they have not inherited from an oungan or a boko, in order to acquire additional protection or to cast spells on potential enemies. There are, however, risks associated with this, since a lwa can in return make demands which are difficult to honour.

Initiation is a ritual which takes place after several days (or weeks) of seclusion in an ounfor. The individual who has been chosen by a lwa cannot easily escape that fate. But he or she can choose to become an initiated person (ounsi) which means being able to live the rest of his life with the lwa attached to his head like a permanent protection. The initiation period corresponds in fact to the time needed for the individual to become familiar with the customs of the lwa, the healing leaves and plants, the dishes; in short, all the objects linked to this particular lwa. A solemn ceremony marks the moment when the initiated person emerges, accompanied by their godfather and godmother. When they die, the initiated must undergo a ritual of separation (desounen) from the lwa, to allow him or her to peacefully depart from the world of the living. A long initiation period is also required for a Vodou priest to become an official interpreter of the lwa, a role usually passed down through families. Vodou secret societies can also be included in the context of initiation practises. These societies are part of the West African heritage and are referred to by names such as Chanpwel, Zobop, and Bizango, and they meet only at night. They operate under a strict hierarchy under the command of an oungan who takes the title of emperor. The aim of these societies is to defend Vodou and its temples, and they are often suspected of deploying the powers of witchcraft. As a result, they are regarded with fear. This association with witchcraft is widely used in Protestant preaching to convert Haitians from the lower classes to charismatic Protestantism (Hurbon 2001).

Advances in anthropology

Amongst the issues which have captured the attention of Vodou anthropology are the phenomena of possession, witchcraft, and syncretism. Possession was, until recently, thought to be associated with hysteria or a pathological phenomenon linked to psychiatry. This interpretation was based on the notion that convulsions or the loss of self-control were considered abnormal. It was not until the work undertaken by Claude Lévi-Strauss following Marcel Mauss, and inspired by new research in linguistics in the 1950s, that possession would come to be seen as a form of language. Moments of possession in a Vodou ceremony were seen as perfectly normal by members of the audience. Nobody would be upset by it, since what is normal must be understood according to the roles of the existing cultural system. By following this route of symbolic analysis opened by Lévi-Strauss, an explanation of the relationship of individuals and of society to the Vodou divinities could finally be established (see Hurbon 1972, 1987). During the process of possession, the lwa must recieve special greetings, particular drum rhythms and dance steps which enable he or she to be identified, and symbolic objects, such as a sword in the case of Ogou, the lwa of war. The actions of recognition of divinities in the form of ceremonies and rituals constitute a language, and enable the individual to recognise his or her place in society. By following these rituals, the Haitians affirm their identity, recall their painful and unique history, and acknowledge that they have access to the powers of the lwa to help them deal with the difficulties life holds. For losing the language of the lwa means putting yourself under the control of a dual relationship of self to self and quite simply losing language altogether. The lwa take charge of the individual’s life and place it in a field of meaning by classifying the different domains of social life and of nature in such a way that all events, happy or sad, find a meaning.

At the same time, possession implies a permanent fragility of the body which needs to be protected against the intrusion of bad spirits or of spells cast on the individual in question. Possession is never left to run its own course but must be to some extent coded, controlled, and mastered. Magic and witchcraft are, as a general rule, frowned upon by Vodou practitioners. They represent a negative and dangerous side of Vodou from which individuals should distance themselves as far as possible (Heusch 2000). But, based on the principle that the body of an individual can be penetrated or possessed by spiritual forces (in the form of the lwa or by the ‘spirits’ of the dead), an enemy can inflict on that same individual negative forces capable of causing sickness or even death. Initiation and mystical marriage exist precisely in order to strengthen the protection of Vodou practitioners. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the famous distinction made by the anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1972) between witchcraft and sorcery: witchcraft can be understood as a technique made up of ritual gestures, physical objects, and knowledge or gifts to the service of an individual, whereas sorcery is a power attributed to people supposedly capable of taking possession of an individual’s vital substance against his or her will.

The other important step in the anthropology of Vodou is the one achieved as a result of Roger Bastide’s work on syncretism. This blend of elements of the Catholic religion (prayers, images of saints, enthusiasm for baptism) and of purely African traditions (divinities or spirits dwelling in trees or in the water, and capable of taking over the body through possession) is easily misinterpreted. Indeed Bastide (1967) demonstrates for the first time that the cultural elements observed in Vodou are not simply juxtaposed: he applies the ‘compartmentalization principle’ in order to demonstrate that the black communities formed as a result of slavery easily passed from one religious system to another, without turning it into one single system. This ‘compartmentalization principle’ allows us to understand the capacity to use any one cultural element as a mask or a screen to help preserve an individual’s own African heritage, and at the same time as a way of reinterpreting this heritage on the basis of elements borrowed from the other system, and vice-versa. We are then confronted with a process of cultural creativity in which heterogeneous and hybrid elements can coexist.

Another interesting area of anthropological research focuses on the significance of the masculine and feminine in Vodou religions. Lidwina Meyer (1999) demonstrates that in the texts of Vodou myths, there is a gradual gender difference that exists which moves from masculine to feminine by means of a play of masks and of various roles relating to sexuality. This makes it possible to move away from the traditional opposition between feminine/masculine, mind/body, and self-identity /non-self. This analysis leads us to challenge the inferiorisation of women and the arbitrary place given to man as supposedly ‘universal’. It is indeed striking that few normative discriminations in terms of gender seem to exist in Vodou. Women can be priestesses and can take on all sorts of roles in an ounfor.

Misconception

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Vodou was merely tolerated by the first Haitian state leaders who were reluctant to acknowledge it as a religion at a time when Catholicism was the official religion recognised by the state. The country’s elites were aware of the subversive role Vodou had played during the revolution, and knew that it could potentially reveal the presence of powers parallel to those of the state. Nevertheless, Vodou remained firmly attached to the Catholic Church, functioning almost in osmosis with it. Moreover, since the 1820s, the Haitian government had embarked on various attempts to negotiate with the Vatican for the official recognition of Haitian independence, and it was only in 1860 that a concordat was signed between the Haitian government and the Vatican. From that date onwards, Haiti welcomed missionaries from Brittany to engage in public teaching and establish Catholic parishes throughout the whole country (see Delisle 2003). A new ‘civilising’ vision would be offered to the country by the Catholic clergy, and Vodou was portrayed as a hotbed of magic practices, witchcraft, and cannibalism. These were the prejudices already in circulation with regards to African practices and beliefs. According to the Catholic missionaries, Haiti should rid itself of what was referred to as its ‘African flaws’ represented by Vodou, in order to put itself on the same level as the ‘civilised’ nations. The interpretation of Vodou based on the contrast between the ‘barbarian’ and the ‘civilised’, which has long dominated the country, stems first of all from the perception of the missionaries and administrators of the colonial period, and then that of European visitors in the nineteenth century (like St John 1884).

Take, for example, this extract from a speech made by a French bishop, Francois Marie Kersuzan, in 1896:

This is our chief enemy, the one we must fight ceaselessly against, a fight to the death. Let us look at it face to face, in order to see it in its full horror and to enable us to conquer it successfully. Many people think that Vodou amounts to obscene dances and copious feast. Vodou is true devil worship with its sacrifices and its pontiffs and the dances are only the crude exterior of a hellish interior.

Such misconceptions are consistent with the colonisation movement based on a European project to ‘civilise’, which flourished during the nineteenth century. Anthropology, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century initially supported this project insofar as it ‘ordered the diversity of races and of peoples, and gave them a rank, that is to say a role in history’ (Duchet 1971); in this instance, the role of the ‘savage’. From this perspective, the theory of a supposedly ‘scientific’ racism was formulated at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the immediate aftermath of this urge to ‘civilise’, Vodou would be subjected to two major waves of persecution by the Catholic Church, which had become the official state religion in 1860. In the first of these, in 1896, the church urged the Catholic faithful to explicitly reject Vodou practices and beliefs. Then in 1941, it launched a major national campaign with auto-da-fe, known as the ‘anti-superstition campaign’ (la campagne de ‘rejeté’) which insisted that each parishioner take an oath renouncing Vodou as a renunciation of ‘Satan and all his works’ (see Metraux 1958, 298ss; Ramsey 2011). This campaign was strongly criticised in 1942 by the ethnologist and writer Jacques Roumain, founder of the National Bureau of Haitian Ethnology, dedicated to collecting and protecting sacred objects associated with Vodou and to promoting research on all aspects of Vodou and on the cultural traditions of the country.

The surge of intellectuals: Vodou as a site of memory

The American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 would also provoke a resurgence of the pejorative view of this religion. At the same time, there was a surge in numbers of Haitian intellectuals with, for example, Jean Price-Mars publishing in 1928 a collection of essays titled Ainsi parla l’oncle (translated in 1954 as So spoke the uncle) in which he sought recognition for the African origins of Haitian culture and therefore for Vodou as a religion which Haitians had the right to call their own. Important publications (for example Métraux 1958; Verger 1957) introduced ethnographies of Vodou that acknowledged its role in the restoration of dignity to Africans deported into slavery, and its status as an original cultural creation as a testimony of their identity.

After the explicit attempts at political manipulation of Vodou during the thirty years of the Duvaliers’ dictatorship, Francois Duvalier declared himself to be its defender. Yet he did exploit it by making certain oungan his representatives in the towns and countryside (see Hurbon 1979). Today, the religion continues to suffer the effects of the huge wave of new Pentecostal churches. As a result of their preachings, these churches provoke a resurgence of the idea that witchcraft is very much the prerogative of Vodou. At the same time, Vodou maintains a horizontal position across the various religious systems competing within the country, in the sense that Vodou practitioners see no difficulty in declaring themselves Catholic and in accepting baptism and communion in church. In the same way, whereas the lwa are demonised in Pentecostal Protestantism, this nevertheless shares some beliefs pertaining to dreams and to trances of the holy spirit which are also found in Vodou.

With the process of democratisation that the country experienced after the end of the dictatorship in 1986, a number of Vodou priests were lynched for reputedly actively supporting the dictatorship. Since that time, Vodou has managed to create its own organisation in defence against the vandalism and intolerance of some religious denominations.

At the same time, Vodou seeks to obtain the same privileges as other religions, such as, for example, the right to officially celebrate baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Even today, political leaders still evoke the ‘mystical powers’ of Vodou in their speeches in order to gain legitimacy with the working classes. But, ultimately, the various art forms inspired by Vodou, such as painting, sculpture, music, dance or literature, have enabled it to gain recognition as one of the sites of Haitian individual and collective identity (Consentino 1995). Modern anthropology should set itself the task of exploring these links, and in doing so it will discover that Vodou is a place of memory not only for the Haitian nation but also for humanity at large. It did, after all, witness the struggles endured by the slaves for the recovery and recognition of their human dignity.

Conclusion

Vodou has inspired some important research into its relationship with naive painting, a relationship described by Andre Malraux in 1975 as ‘the most striking experiment in magical painting in our century’. Yet many Haitian artists often choose the route of ‘sophisticated’ painting while at the same time acknowledging the inspiration of Vodou (see the latest work of the art historian Philippe Lerebours [2018] and the sumptuous work of Gerald Alexis [2000]). Vodou should also be inventoried on a scientific basis with reference to its various therapeutic resources for the body and mind thanks to its knowledge of plants and their medicinal value. Several exhibitions of Haitian painting have taken place in France, in Switzerland, and in the United States, but where other cultural categories are concerned, anthropology should see new breakthroughs. Vodou undoubtedly remains a living culture that owes its richness to the integration of various influences, thanks to the scale of the Haitian diaspora (in the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America), which continues to turn to the beliefs and practices of Vodou.

Questions arise as to the role played by Vodou in the Haitian Revolution, the ambivalent attitudes of Haitian governments from independence in 1804 to the present day, and on the secret societies which still exert a powerful influence on the imagination of working-class Haitians. Important research also remains to be undertaken on the sacred objects of Vodou and on the places associated with its resistance to slavery which are now memorial sites: they can improve our understanding of the influence that the Haitian Revolution has had on present-day fights against racism.

Glossary

Boko: name given to Vodou priests (oungan) capable of providing offensive or defensive magic practices

Désounen: a ritual of dispossession conducted on an initiate in order to separate them from the spirit he or she was attached to

Lwa: spirit or secondary divinity

Lwa mèt-tèt: protective spirit received during initiation which ensures a lwa is attached to an individual in order to protect that person until their death

Lwa-rasin: a spirit passed down through the family

Manbo: Vodou priestess

Manje-lwa: ceremony during which dances and offerings (food and animal sacrifices of chicken, beef, or goats) are made in honour of Vodou divinities, under the supervision of an oungan or manbo

Ounfor: Vodou temple

Oungan: Vodou priest

Ounsi: Vodou initiate

Pedji: special room reserved for lwa

Péristil: space where Vodou ceremonies take place

Poto-mitan: pillar in the centre of the péristil through which spirits can travel to the human world

Pwen: supernatural power or protective force

Vèvè: symbolic drawing, referring to a lwa

Wanga: ordinary magic weapon

References

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Bastide, R. 1967. Les Amériques noires. Paris : Payot.

Cauna, J. 1987. Au temps des isles à sucre. Paris : Editions Karthala.

Consentino, D. 1995. Sacred arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles : University of California Los Angeles Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. & E. Mesnard 2013. Etre esclave : Afrique-Amériques, XVe-XIXe siècle. Paris : La Découverte.

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Delisle, Ph.. 2003. Le catholicisme en Haïti au XIXe siècle : le rêve d’une «Bretagne noire». Paris : Karthala.

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Dutertre, J.B. 1666. Histoire des Antilles habitées par les Français, t. 1-III. Paris : Jolly.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1972. Sorcellerie, oracle et magie chez les Azandé. Paris : Gallimard.

Fick, C. 2014. Haïti, naissance d’une nation : La Révolution de Saint-Domingue vue d’en bas (trad. de l’anglais par F. Voltaire). Montréal : Les éditions CIDHICA.

Fouchard, J. 1988 [1972]. Les marrons de la liberté. Port-au-Prince : Editions Henri Deschamps.

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de Heusch, L. 2000. Kongo en Haïti. Dans Le roi de Kongo et les monstres sacrés. Paris : Gallimard.

Hurbon, L. 1979.Culture et dictature en Haïti : l’imaginaire sous contrôle. Paris : Editions L’Harmattan.

——— 1987 [1972]. Dieu dans le vaudou haïtien. Paris : Payot et Port-au-Prince : Éditions Henri Deschamps.

Kersuzan, F.M. 1896. Conférence populaire sur le vaudoux donnée le 02 août 1896. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie H. Amblard.

Justinvil, F. 2020. Sociétés secrètes en Haïti. De l’imaginaire au réel. Port-au-Prince: livre électronique.

Lacan, J. Ecrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Lerebours, M. Ph. 2018. Bref regard sur deux siècles de peinture haïtiennes. Port-au-Prince: Edition de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris : Plon.

Métraux, A. 1958. Le vaudou haïtien. Paris : Éditions Gallimard.

Meyer, L. 1999. Das fingierte Geschlecht. lnszenierungen des Weiblichen und Mannlichen in den kulturellen Texten des Oriha-und Vodun-Kulte am Golf von Benin. Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang.

Midy, F. 2003. «Vers l’indépendance des colonies à esclaves d’Amérique : l’exception haïtienne.» Dans Haïti première république noire (ed.) M. Dorigny, 121-38. Paris : Publication de la société française d’histoire d’outre-mer et association pour l’étude de la colonisation européenne.

Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E. 1958 [1797]. Description topographique, physique…. De la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises.

Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and social death: a comparative study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Price-Mars, J. 1928. Ainsi parla l'oncle. Compiègne : Bibliothèque haïtienne.

Ramsey, K, 2011. Vodou and power in Haiti: the spirits and the law. Chicago: University Press.

Roumain, J. 1942. A propos de la campagne antisuperstitieuse. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie de l’Etat.

Sala-Molins, L. 1987. Le Code noir ou le calvaire de Canaan. Paris : Presses universitaires de France.

St John, S. 1886 [1884]. Haïti ou la république noire. (trad. J. West) Paris : Plon.

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Note on contributor

Laënnec Hurbon obtained a PhD at Sorbonne University and is Research Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is also a professor at the State University of Haiti and specialises in studying the relations between religion, culture and politics in Haiti and the Caribbean. He is the author of various works, including Les mystères du vaudou, published with Gallimard, and Le barbare imaginaire, published with Editions du Cerf.

Note on translation

This text has been translated by Helen Morrison from: Hurbon, L. 2021.Vodou Haïtien. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/21vodouhaitien.

Helen Morrison, BA in Comparative Literature and French and M.Phil on Dadaist littérature, University of East Anglia, is a freelance translator (French to English) and has translated eight books for Polity Press.

Vodou Ayisyen

Felix Stein — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:40:07 +0000

Laënnec Hurbon

Université d’Etat d’Haïti

Initially published 7 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22vodouayisyen

Abstract:

Vodou ayisyen an pran nesans nan kontèks esklavaj la. Yon relijyon fanmi Wa nan peyi Dawome, nan Afrik oksidantal, esklav sou lil Dayiti yo te tranfòme l kòm yon zouti pou yo rekonstui tèt yo ak fos liberasyon an. Konsa, vodou a te jwe yon wòl primodyal nan pi gwo revolisyon eskav yo reyisi nan tout listwa ak nan kreyasyon Ayiti kòm peyi endepandan. Nan komansman, antwopoloji a ki chita sou yon pèspektiv evolisyonis te konsidere vodou a tankou pwodui yon kilti primitif, moun ki pa sivilize, menm bagay ak maji ak sosèlri, lide sa a te tonbe dako ak mouvman kolonizatè ewopeyen yo. Konsa, Vodou a ta pral sibi plizyè vag pèsekisyon anba men klèje legliz katolik la. Poutan, pandan dènye deseni yo, antwopoloji a te montre ke senkretis ki nan vodou a, espesyalman jan yo reanplaye lapriyè sen ki konn fèt nan legliz katolik yo, se siy kreyasyon yon kilti nouvo ki genyen tolerans nan nannan l. Nou rive konprann panteyon (gwoup lwa òganize) ak rityel li gras ak yon antwopoloji ki chita sou ansanm teyori langaj ak wol senbolik li. Antwopoloji a montre nou tou, vodou ayisyen an se yon fason yo konsève memwa, epi li se patrimwàn pou tout Ayisyen e ke tout pèp dwe respekte depi diznevyèm syèk la.

Pou kòmanse

Relijyon ki ap onore antite espirityèl ak divinite ki anndan diferan domèn lanati (dlo, pye bwa, dife, e ak latrye) ak sa moun fè (travay, fanmi ak latrye), tou dabò vodou^[1] a te pratike nan peyi gòf Benen yo, tankou Dawome oubyen aktyél Benen, Nijerya, Togo, Gine ak Gana. Nan rejyon sa a, oganizasyon sosyete a te chita avan dizuityèm syèk la sou fanmi, liyaj, vilaj ak etni. Yo chak te genyen pwòp divinite pa yo ki rele «Vodoun» ki te reprezante nan lang Fon an nan Dawome («Dahomey») yon fòs envisib, ki kapab itilize kò moun pou manifeste lè yon moun gen lwa. Kriz yo, nan kèk ka lagè ant gwout etni yo te pèmèt plizyè pratik nan koze relijyon rankontre, sa ki ta pral fè gen kèk divinite ki soti nan yon etni ale nan yon lot. Se sitou nan Dawome dizuityèm syèk la nou wè relijyon sa yo te konsantre anba men fanmi wa a.

Avèk trèt nwa yo (sa ki vle di komès ki tabli nan vann afriken) ak esklavaj ki komanse devlope depi premye deseni sèzyèm syèk la epi ki te kontinye vale teren, gras ak Compagnie francaise des Indes occidentales ki te kreye nan lane 1664 pou nou site limenm sèlman, plizyè milyon afriken ta pral depote an amerik. Divinite yo ta pral voyaje ansanm ak yo. Se konsa kèk relijyon ta pral parèt, tankou, Kandonble nan peyi Brezil, la Santerya nan peyi Kiba, epi Vodou nan Sendomeng, non koloni fransè ki ta pral vin Ayiti peyi endepandan nan lane 1804, epi ki ta pral divize an Ayiti ak Repiblik dominikèn nan lane 1821.

Pou w konprann vodou a, sa mande pou w panche dabò sou plizyè chanjman li konnen akoz eksperyans afriken yo ki soti nan yon pakèt gwoup etni diferan epi ki ta pral santi byen bonè nesesite pou kreye kondisyon pou yo libere tèt yo nan esklavaj. Rechèch nan antwopoloji yo ta pral manifeste anpil enterè pou gwo efò san parèy esklav yo deplwaye pou yo pwodui yon nouvo sistèm relijye ak kiltirel, ki mete ansanm an menm tan kèk eleman lakay diferan gwoup etni ki melanje sou teren an, sa enstitisyon kap mennen sistèm esklavaj la enpoze yo ak sa amerendyen kite kom eritaj. Se melanj plizyè kilti ak eleman ki pa sanble ditou yo ki bay vodou a orijinalite l.

Antwopològ yo separe fomasyon vodou nan peyi Dayiti a an (2) etap: Youn ki fèt nan peryod esklavaj la pandan disetyèm ak dizuityèm syèk la, yon lot ki komanse avèk endepansans peyi Dayiti nan lane 1804 ki kontinye jouk jounen jodi a ke kontèks politik la bay yon fòm nouvo. Pandan nap prezante pateyon (gwoup lwa òganize) vodou ak rityel li yo, nap mennen kesyon antwopoloji yo nan jan moun yo konprann divinite yo nan lavi pèsonèl yo ak lavi sosyete a. Malgre tout prejije ki tap sikile avèk antwopoloji a ki chita sou primitif ak sivilise, vodou a parèt kreyasyon yon kilti nouvo, yon espas memwa ak yon patrimwàn pou tout ayisyen e ke tout pèp dwe respekte.

Fomasyon vodou a ak esklavaj

Nan kondisyon trèt nwa a ak esklavaj la te lage afriken yo nan koloni a te rann difisil obyen menm enposib pou yo ta reprann eritaj relijye ak kiltirèl gwoup etni kote yo te sòti a. Esklav yo te pèdi kontak ak fanmi yo, liyaj yo, yo te konsidere yo tankou yon byen, epi kèk misyonè te prezante esklavaj la tankou yon opòtinite pou yo vin yon moun tout bon. Pa egzanp, Pè J.B Dutertre te deklare nan sans sa a: «Lavi esklavaj la se yon mwayen pou yo rive nan bonè a» epi «Se malediksyon yo kap fè yo jwenn Sali a» (1666: 35). Yo te prezante Lafrik tankou yon kontinan ki genyen yon bann sovaj ak primitif, epi ki anba sa nou te ka rele «malediksyon Cham», yon lejand ki apiye l sou istwa kanaran ak pitit li yo nan labib. Sa ki rele Cham nan yo te deklare li modi, desten li te fèt pou li vin esklav. Menm lejand sa a te bay Cham koulè nwa, epi se limenm ki ta pral sèvi depi disetyèm syèk la, tankou nan peyi Lawoland nan lane 1666 pou jistfye trèt nwa a ak esklavaj pèp nwa yo.

Konvèsyon esklav afriken yo nan relijyon krisyanis te dwe pèmèt yo ti kras pa vin gen kilti (ranmase kilti ewopeyen yo). Antwopoloji a ki te fenk ap parèt pandan dizuityèm ak diznevyèm syèk la te estriktire selon yon pèspektiv evolisyonis (Duchet, 1971) ki te pretann fè ewopeyen yo pase pou moun ki pi avanse sou latè nan echèl mounite a, pandan afriken yo menm nan pi ba echèl la.

Piblikasyon kod nwa Louis XIV ki te wa nan peyi Lafrans nan epok la te fè nan lane 1685 la te vize rann pratik esklavaj yo korek ak lalwa (legitim), yon ti tan tou kout aprè yo te retire Dekrè Nant (Edit de Nantes) la. Pibliye nan lane 1598, dekrè sa a te mete fen nan lagè relijyon nan Lewòp nan tabli lapè sivil ak lapè nan mitan relijyon yo. Lè yo retire li, Louis XIV te bay posibilite pou yo mete nan kòmansman kòd nwa a entolerans fas ak Pwotestantis ak Jidayis, epi bay lòd pou yo batize ak enstui esklav yo nan relijyon katolik. Atik 2 nan kòd nwa a pale konsa: «Tout esklav ki ap sou zile nou yo, ap batize ak enstui nan relijyon katolik, apostolik ak women». Pandan atik 3 a te deklare:«Nou entèdi pou tout relijyon ki pa katolik egzèse piblikman» (Sala-Molins 1987). La yo te vle pale de relijyon pwotestan ak jwif yo, paske pratik relijyon afriken yo te sanse pa egziste. Kòd nwa a te konsidere yo tankou pratik ki «pouse moun revolte» yon fason pou yo entèdi avèk fòs tou regwoupman esklav.

Li enpotan pou nou siyale kijan kondisyon travay esklav ki nan plantasyon ak lakay kolon yo te difisil anpil. Sistèm esklavajis la se mwayen ki pèmèt Lafrans vin rich nan Sendomeng, men tou tout Lewòp ki depote 12 a 15 milyon afriken anchennen ant sèzyèm e diznevyèm syèk, pou vin plante kann, koton, kafe, digo ak kakao (al gade pa ezganp, chif sou popilasyon yo nan Coquery-Vidrovitch ak Mesnard 2013: 122). Nan sendomeng, esklav yo te travay depi nan maten pou rive nan nwit anba gwo siveyans komandan ak frèt yo. Mèt yo te itilize yon estrateji pou anpeche esklav ki sòti nan menm gwoup etni yo travay ak viv menm kote, paske, pa nenpot mwayen an fòk yo te rete nan eta sèvitid la. An pratik, yon esklav pat genyen ni asandan, ni desandan. Se pou rezon sa a, kèk sosyolog pale de «mò sosyal», kidonk, mèt yo tap chèche retire nan esklav yo tout sa ki fè yo moun (Patterson 1982). Kondisyon travay sa yo, ki sanble tèt koupe ak kondisyon lavi moun ki nan kan konsantrasyon, te pouse esklav yo jwenn plizyè mwayen (estrateji) pou yo rekonstui tèt yo, sa ki vle di, kòde lòt lyen sosyal ki rann yo solidè nan batay pou liberasyon yo.

Seremoni pou mò yo nan fomasyon vodou a

Seremoni pou mò yo, sete yon fason pou esklav yo rete konekte ak tradisyon kiltirel ak relijye Lafrik yo, men tou, fondman nouvo pratik ak reprezantasyon yo te mete sou pye akoz de kondisyon demounizan enstitisyon esklavajis yo te mete yo. Seremoni pou mò yo pat yon senp eritaj Lafrik, li te vin genyen yon nouvo siyifikasyon. Si trèt nwa a sete yon depòtasyon ki rache endividi a nan fanmi l, liyaj ak klan li, yo te dwe atann lè yon esklav mouri, tout bagay ap mete an plas pou pèmèt yo resere lyen ak lakay yo. Lè antèman yon eskav ki mouri nan koloni an, sete okazyon pou fè anpil rityèl nan lide pou remete defen an kontak ak zansèt li yo. Nan yo, se divinite ki bay pwoteksyon nan liyaj ak gwoup etni defen yo yo tap chèche. Tikras pa tikras, yo te jwenn eritaj relijye ak kiltirel Lafrik la nan chèn siyifikasyon koneksyon mò yo ak zansèt yo ak divinite yo reprezante. Plizyè kwonikè ak istoryen siyale ke esklav yo te kwè yo kapab retounen Lafrik lè yo mouri, e sila ki te touye tèt yo yo, te konn fè konnen kèk fwa yo gen espwa pran chimen retou a.

Andeyò de koze entèman defen yo, nou wè de (2) lòt moman enpòtan nan fòmasyon vodou a. Premye moman gen pou wè ak sware dimanch yo te konn bay esklav yo, kòm tan lwazi yo, e sete pou yo okazyon pou yo danse, sa yo te rele (calendas) la. Dans sa yo te pèmèt yo rekonekte ak pratik Lafrik yo lwen je mèt yo. Dezyèm moman an, se sa yo rele mawonaj la (Fouchard 1988 [1972]), sa ki vle di, esklav yo chape poul yo al kache nan yon seri tèt mòn byen lwen, kote kèk fwa yo rejwenn ak kèk manm menm gwoup etni ak yo, antouka, kote yo òganize yon lavi lib. Mawonaj la te fè objè plizyè rechèch e yo rekonèt li kòm yon mwayen pou esklav yo te di yo vle libète yo, ki donk yon mwayen pou yo konteste kondisyon lavi yo kòm esklav (wè pa egzanp Fouchard 1962 ak Fick 2017).

Mèt ki te nan plantasyon nan Sendomeng yo te pè mawonaj la anpil e yo te prevwa gwo pinisyon pou sila ki ta riske fèl yo. Men, yo pat rive gen soupson sou fas kache pratik kiltirel ak relijye esklav yo, paske yo te tèlman manifeste angouman pou priyè, mès ak lapriyè sen ak Lavièj yo e montre yo souvan prese pou yo al patisipe nan posesyon. Imaj sen ki te dekore legliz katolik yo ke yo te fè esklav yo obligasyon pou yo lapriyè yo, te ba yo kèk detay pou kore reprezantasyon divinite Lafrik yo. Se konsa, senkretis la pral rete mak fabrik vodou ayisyen an, tankou «Candomble» brezilyen an ak «Santeria» kiben an.

Vodou ak soulèvman jeneral esklav 1791 yo

Apati segond mwatye dizuityèm syèk la, anpil lidè relijye ki sòti nan legliz katolik ak zòn mawonaj yo lanse mo dòd revolisyon an, epi mennen dèyè yo anpil esklav. Pami lidè sa yo, nou te jwenn, nan lane 1768, «Le Padre Jean» ki te chanje non li an yon rit vodou ki rele «petwo», «Colas Jambes Coupées» ki te pase pou yon sosyè e ki te mobilise esklav yo pou fini ak koze koloni a, e sitou, selèb Makandal ki te pwofetize depi 1751 sou disparisyon blan yo ak fen esklavaj la. Makandal te gen yon renome espesyalis nan resèt pwazon ak maji e non li rete kole ak pratik ak kwayans nan sòsèlri yo rele «makanda». Yo arete l epi kondane l pou yo boule li tou vivan nan lane 1758, Makandal, selon sa ki tap sikile nan koloni an, te rive chape nan flanm dife yo pandan li tounen yon leza. Gen kèk rechèch ki pa fèt lontan ki pale de yon «sit Makandal» (Midy 2003) revolisyon ayisyen an, paske se depi abitasyon yo te rele «Le Normand de Mezy» a, kote li tap opere nan Nò peyi a, lide soulèvman jeneral esklav yo ta kòmanse simaye tikras pa tikras. Fòk nou kanpe sou gwo evènman sa a nan istwa vodou a ki marinen ak pwosesis revolisyon anti-esklavajis la ki kreye nasyon ayisyen nan (wè Fick 2014)

14 dawout 1791, touprè mòn wouj, nan yon lokalite ki rele bwa kayiman, anviwon desan (200) esklav, kòmandè, kochè, esklav domestik, reprezantan divès atelye ki nan abitasyon sik yo elatriye… reyini pou yon seremoni vodou anba lidèchip Dutty Boukman, ki se yon esklav nan yon plantasyon nan nò peyi a ak ougan. Daprè premye temwanyaj nou genyen gras ak sa chirijyen Antoine Dalmas ki konnen seremoni an rapòte (1814), moun ki tap patisipe yo te sakrifye yon kochon pou divinite Lafrik yo epi sèmante pou yo mete bout ak esklavaj la ak òganize yon soulèvman jeneral. Yo te bwè san bèt ki sakifye a epi jire pou yo kenbe soulèvman jeneral ki pral fèt la an sekrè. Gen yon fanm ki rele Cécile Fatima ki te nan mennen seremoni an tou. Kèk istoryen (Geggus 2002), rapòte seremoni an nan yon vèsyon literè, ki ta vle fè kwè sete yon nwit kote loraj pat sispann gwonde. Yon semèn après, nan lannwit 22 pou debouche sou 23 dawout 1791, soulèvman an eklate: Tout plantasyon kann ak kafe, ak atelye sendomeng tap naje nan dife. Gen kèk bagay nan katolik la ki emèje tou nan kontèks revolisyon an. Yon mawon yo te rele «Romaine la Prophétesse» te deklare li se fiyèl Lavyèj Mari ki ta bal mesaj pou libere 4000 nwa ak milat nan esklavaj.

Bilan soulèvman an se yon dezas pou koloni an: yo touye plizyè santèn kolon (petèt menm mil), 1200 izin kafe ak 161 izin sik pèdi anba flanm dife. Gouvènman fransè a te evalye pèt yo a 600 milyon liv (Cauna 1987: 212).

Nan moman sa a sendomeng te yon depo sann, avèk 500000 esklav, ladan yo genyen kal monte yon bann kan mawon nan mòn yo, 40000 afranchi^[2] milat melanje ak nwa, 30000 blan ki divize an «ti blan» (atizan, komèsan, maren ak solda) ak «gran blan» (plantè ak administratè). Kòd nwa 1685 la te tabli depi plizyè deseni rapò ant gwoup sosyal yo apati yon echèl ki chita sou ras moun yo, sòti nan blan, pase pa milat, pou rive nan nwa yo. Depi lè nouvèl revolisyon fransè a rive nan Sendomeng, diferan kategori sosyal ak rasyal yo kòmanse souke kò yo. Nèf lane aprè revolisyon ayisyèn nan, nan lane 1802, Nappoléon te eseye retounen ak esklavaj la. Sitiyasyon sa te mennen nan yon lagè kont 40000 solda Lafrans te voye yo, sa ki ta pral konfime endepandans peyi Dayiti. Li pwobab pou sosyete sekrè vodou yo te jwe yon wòl nan lagè sa a.

Aprè nou fin chita rasin ak enpòtans vodou a nan istwa nou, kounya li bon pou nou panche sou panteyon relijyon sa a ak rityèl li. E nap mande tèt nou, kisa antwopoloji a di sou sistèm kwayans ak pratik sa yo.

Panteyon vodou a ak rityèl li yo

Nou dekouvri nan Lafrik (tankou Benen ak Nigerya) twa tip vodou: Fanmi oubyen liyaj (hennu-vodu), vilaj (to-vodu) ak etni (ako-vodu) (wè deskripsyon tip vodou yo nan Benen nan Desquiron 1990). Divinite yo divize an gwoup ki nan syèl (Mawu-Lisa okipe li de lajounen ak lannwit, Gu bò kote pal ap jere linivè) epi gwoup ki sou tè (Agwe oubyen Agbe se mèt dlo, Sogbo mèt lapli); poun fini gwoup divinite loray yo (tankou Ogou-badagri mèt tonè). Nan ka pa Sendomeng/Ayiti, divinite lafrik yo (ke yo rele lwa, espri oubyen mistè) divize an Rada (ki reprezante Fon ak Yowouba yo), ak divinite Kongo ak Petwo (youn aprè lòt, pou mond Bantou a ak mond kreyòl la). Etni yo vin transfome an yon seri gwoup fanmi divinite (yo rele « Nanchon » oubyen nasyon) e fòme yon kokennchenn panteyon. Yo rekonèt Bondye se (Gran Mèt la) ki bay lwa yo, kòm divinite ki vini aprè li, dyòb yo se jere tout sa ki gen rapò ak latè. Ant moun yo ak mond lan, genyen divinite yo ki jwe yon wòl entèmedyè epi fòme yon sistèm imajinasyon ak senbolik, ki se baz lyen sosyal la, jan esklav yo rekonèt yo youn nan lòt, ak jan yo mete tèt yo ansanm pou yo revòlte.

Valè yon lwa nan panteyon an, se yon ti kras tankou yon mo nan yon lang : Valè li ka chanje e se sèlman nan opozisyon ak jan li konplete lòt lwa yo, kidonk, avèk tout fanmi divinite yo wap rive konprann li. Konsa, Legba se lwa «chèf fil» tout lòt yo, ki louvri baryè ki separe moun ak mònd lwa yo. Se toujou limenm Sen Pyè reprezante, li se tou gadyen tanp yo (ke yo rele Wonfò) ak bitasyon yo e yo rele l nan kòmansman chak seremoni vodou. Legba, lwa chèf fil divinite yo, se mèt kafou yo (yon seri kote danje ki resevwa wonga pou geri yon moun ki malad oubyen al depoze wonga pou frape yon moun yo konsidere kòm ènmi). Pami lwa enpòtan yo, fòk nou mete Ogou, ke Sen Jak Majè reprezante kòm yon gran konbatan, koulè prefere li se wouj, li renmen dife men li toujou rete konekte ak dlo kote li jwenn ak mètrès li, lwa Ezili, yon fanm chèlbé, dous, ke lavyèj mari reprezante. Ogou, se tou kouzen Zaka, lwa agrikilti a, ki limenm adopte brav gede kòm pitit li, ki se espri mò ak simityè yo. Anpil nan lwa sa yo soti nan rit rada, men espri sa yo kapab tout mèm fè pati de rit kongo ak petwo. Konsa, lwa rada yo jimo oubyen marasa yo, yo konsidere yo kòm lwa mechan (Heusch 2000). Lwa Bawon Samdi ki se chèf fil lwa mò yo, limenm nou jwenn li ni nan rit rada, ni nan petwo a.

Tanp vodou yo (wonfò)

Yo toujou onore lwa yo chak lè yo dwe fè sa, nan wonfò yo, ki se tanp vodou a ak kote yo fè seremoni yo. Ta sanble se avèk endepandans lan nan lane 1804 yo kòmanse konstui wonfò nan peyi Dayiti. Chak wonfò genyen nan tèt li yon ougan ki se mèt li, yon fanm ka gen yon wonfò tou, lè konsa yo rele li manbo. Nan rantre chak wonfò, ou souvan jwenn yon pye bwa, yon pye kalbas, ki se kote lwa legba rete.

Ou kapab twonpe w lew wè yon wonfò dekore ak imaj sen katolik, men an verite se lwa yo yap onore nan imaj sa yo. Imaj sa yo ki prezante lwa yo sou fòm moun yo, yo kole yo nan kay mistè yo, kote yo pote manje yo renemen ak objè senbolik ki mache ak yo, pi souvan lè gen seremoni. Pa egzanp, lwa Ezili ki se yon fanm chèlbè ap resevwa yon glas. Yon gwo sal yo rele (peristil), se li yo itilize lè gen seremoni kote yap danse ak chante pou lwa yo. Nan mitan peristil la gen yon poto yo rele (poto mitan) ki senbolize koneksyon ant mond syèl la ak mond tè a, li souvan gen yon desen de (2) koulèv sou li (Danbala-Wedo ak madanm li Ayida-Wedo ki marande ansanm tankou dlo ak dife). Se nan poto mitan an divinite yo pase pou yo sòti Lafrik, lè yo fin travèse anba dlo atlantik, pou yo vin jwenn sèvitè yo nan tanp lan. Ougan an oubyen manbo a, rèn kap mennen dans ak chante yo, wonsi yo kap prepare yo pou chante ak danse, epi moun ki vin patisipe yo ke yo rele «pitit kay» ke yo resevwa tankou manm sosyete a, yo ranje tou won, ak poto mitan an nan mitan yo. Anfas yo, gen yon òkès ki genyen twa (3) tanbou ki jwe wol enstriman sakre kap jwe rit lwa yo, pou lwa ka vini nan tèt sèvitè yo. Nan komansman chak seremoni, yo trase vèvè atè a ak kafe ak farin, ki se yon seri desen ki mache ak lwa yo, pou fè yo vini. Sou yon tab, yo depoze tout afè lwa yo : Manje ak tout lòt objè, tankou boutèy nanm.

Lakou Souvnas ak Soukri, yo konsidere yo tankou de pi gwo lakou nan peyi Dayiti, yo tou prè vil Gonayiv. Chak ane, pou fèt pak ak mwa dawout, yo resevwa anpil vizitè ak sèvitè, san nou pa bliye ayisyen kap soti lòt bò dlo yo. Fok nou di tou, chak ane, vodouyizan yo anvayi fèt patwonal legliz katolik yo, se yon okazyon pou yo fè pelerinaj vodou yo. Pa egzanp, lè 16 jiyè ki se fèt sodo yo konsakre a Notre Dam Monkamèl, plizyè dizèn milye pèleren vodouyizan toujou fè deplasman pou yo ale nan yon so selèb ki antoure ak anpil pye bwa yo konsidere tankou kay divinite ki mache ak Sen an. Souvan, pèleren yo ale nan legliz la, ki nan lokalite a, ak menm ouganman ke yo ale nan so a.

Kijan de espri lwa yo ye, kisa yo egzije? Lwa yo nan yo menm, pa ni bon, ni pa bon, yo sèvi ak nou selon jan nou respekte prensip yo bay yo. Nan mitan lwa yo genyen grad, sa ki pi wo a toujou vle pou pran ka li pi plis pase sa ki pi ba li la.

Sèvis lwa yo

Kijan pou nou byen sèvi lwa yo e kisa yo reprezante nan lavi pèsonèl moun yo tankou nan lavi kolektivte a. Yon moun resevwa youn oubyen de lwa kòm eritaj familyal. Lè konsa, yo pale de lwa rasin Gen plizyè fanmi ayisyen, ki genyen nan yon chanm, yon kote je moun pap tonbe, yon ti lotèl yo rele «wogatwa», yo depoze sou li foto yon sen, ki se lwa eritye fanmi an ke yo fè sèvis pou li chak lè yo dwe fè sa. Sou plan kolektif, gen kèk fanmi ki se pitit yon seri sosyete nan yon wonfò. Yo vin gade oubyen patisipe komsadwa nan yon seri seremoni ki mache kot a kot ak kalandriye litili legliz katolik la : Nan lannwit fèt nwèl yo mande lwa yo favè, 6 janvye ki se fèt wa yo yo fè yon seremoni ki reyini plizyè fanmi, 1er ak 2 novanm ki se fèt mò yo, se okazyon pou yo fè bèl fèt ki sanble ak yon fèt nasyonal nan simityè yo (Metreaux 19598 : 216ss). Pandan tout ane a, ougan ak manbo ap resevwa moun ki vin fè leson epi jwe wòl yo kòm moun ki konprann lagaj divinite vodou yo pou oryante moun yo nan sa yap fè nan lavi yo chak jou.

Pou w jwenn favè lwa yo, fòk ou ba yo sa yo bezwen chak lè ou dwe fè sa. Nou kapab jete dlo atè pou n ba yo bwè, se jès sa a ki ouvri seremoni yo. Nou sakrifye bèt tou (volay, kabrit oubyen bèf) pou nou ba yo manje (manje lwa). Fòk nou presize, chak rityèl yo dwe fèt egzateman jan yo dwe fèt la, si se pa sa, nou riske fè espri yo fache. Yon seremoni toujou mennen nan moman kote moun ap pran lwa, ki se yon fenomèn kote lwa rantre nan tèt vodouyizan epi li pran fòm ak jès li (lwa monte sèvitè li kom si l monte yon chwal). Depi premye siy ki montre lwa pral rantre a, asanble vodouyizan yo kòmanse prepare yo pou resevwa l pandan yap prezante l objè li yo. Lè lwa yo manifeste se siy seremoni a reyisi.

Gen kèk vodouyizan ki pa kontante yo de senp rapò tradisyonèl yo genyen ak lwa yo nan fanmi yo oubyen nan kad sosyete. Yo kapab genyen yon relasyon pi sere ak yon lwa oubyen yon lòt. Nòmalman, se lwa a ki sanse chwazi moun nan. Konsa, yon maryaj mistik kapab fèt aprè yon rèv, yon maladi, yon aksidan oubyen echèk vire tounen yon moun ap rankontre nan lavi l. Seremoni sa fèt tankou yon maryaj òdinè, yo beni bag devan temwen yo. Lwa dwe fè konnen li dakò ak maryaj la, nan dòmi oubyen li danse nan tèt yon moun kap patisipe nan seremoni an. Maryaj mistik la se yon fason yo pase yon moun eritaj lwa yo paske, se gras ak yon parenn oubyen yon marenn ki inisye deja ke transmisyon an kapab fèt, nouvo marye a vin fiyèl. Li dwe rezève kèk jou nan semèn nan pou li bay lwa kèk bagay li renemen epi pa fè bagay. Sa konn rive ke gen kèk vodouyizan ki al achete nan men yon ougan oubyen yon bòkò^[3] lòt lwa ki pa lwa rasin li pou l kapab ajoute sou pwoteksyon l oubyen fè moun li konsidere tankou ènmi li mal. Se yon bagay ki riske paske yon lwa kapab mande w kèk bagay aprè ki ka difisil pou ou pou w ba li.

Inisyasyon an se yon rityèl fèmen nan yon wonfò, pandan plizyè jou. Moun lwa chwazi a, li pap fasil pou li pou l deside li pap sèvi. Men li ka deside vin yon inisye (wonsi kanzo) pou li kapab viv ak lwa a kole nan tèt li pou yon pwoteksyon san kanpe jiskaske li mouri. Inisyasyon an dire tan moun nan pran pou li aprann mès lwa a, fèy ak plant gerizon yo, manje yo, brèf tout sa ki konsène lwa a. Lè inisiye yo ap sòti (aprè yo te fin fèmen nan wonfò a) avèk parenn ak marenn yo bò kote yo, se yon seremoni solanèl. Lè inisye a mouri, yo dwe desounen li, ki se yon rityèl pou separe li ak lwa a, pou fasilite li travèse nan lòt mond lan. Se aprè yon bann tan inisye yon ougan ka vin yon moun lwa yo itilize pou bay mesaj, se wol moun jwenn an jeneral kòm eritye.

Nou kapab mete sosyete sekrèt vodou yo nan pratik inisyasyon yo, anpil moun kwè yo gen yon pouvwa senbolik. Yo fè pati eritaj Afrik Lwès yo, yo pote non chanpwèl, zobop ak bizango e se nan nwit sèlman yo reyini. Yo fonksoyne sou baz yon yerachi ki gen yon ougan nan tèt li ak tit anperè. Sosyete sa yo genyen pou objektif pwoteje vodou a ak tanp li yo, epi se yo menm ki gen pouvwa sòsèlri yo (wè Hurbon 1988 ak Justinvil 2020). Se sak fè yo pè yo. Imajinè sosèlri a se yon bagay protestan yo itilize anpil nan prèch yo, pou yo ka fè ayisyen kap viv nan katye popilè yo konvèti nan pwotestan (Hurbon 2001 : 227-44).

Avanse antwopoloji fè sou vodou

Pami pwoblèm ki kenbe atansyon antwopoloji vodou a nou jwenn fenomèn pran lwa a, sosèlri ak senkretis la. Sou koze pran lwa a, yo te panse ke sa gen pou wè ak yon pwoblèm mantal oubyen se yon kriz foli. Entèpretasyon sa a marande ak yon vizyon ki mete nan kategori anomal kapasite pou yon moun agite nan yon pwen pou l pèdi kontwòl tèt li. Fòk yo te tann travay Claude Lévi-strauss te tanmen aprè Marcel Mauss ak enfliyans nouvo rechèch nan lengistik yo nan lane 1950 pou konprann koze pran lwa a se yon fòm langaj. Pran lwa nan yon seremoni vodou se yon bagay nòmal pou tout moun ki prezan nan espas la. Sa pa etone pèsonn. Nou dwe konprann se yon bagay nòmal selon règ sistèm kiltirèl ki anfas nou an. Se nan suiv tras chimen analiz senbolik Claude Lévi-Strauss louvri a yo pral rive eksplike rapò moun yo ak sosyete a avèk divinite nan vodou yo (Hurbon 1972, 1987). Lè lwa a rantre sou moun nan, lwa dwe jwenn salitasyon espesyal, bat tanbou nan rit pa l la, danse dans li, epi objè senbolik li yo tankou manchèt si se lwa lagè a ki se Ogou. Seremoni ak rityèl yo ki se zak ki pèmèt rekonèt divinite yo fome yon lanagaj, yo pèmèt moun nan konn plas li nan sosyete a. Pandan yap suiv rityel sa yo, ayisyen yo di kiyès yo ye, pale de istwa pèsonèl ak moman difisil yo, epi santi yo gen fòs lwa yo avèk yo pou konbat ak lavi a. Sa vle di, pèdi langaj lwa yo riske mete moun nan nan yon batay ak pwòp tèt li, epi pèdi laganj tou bònman. Lwa yo pran responsabilite lavi moun nan, e li metel nan yon espas ki plen siyifikasyon ki pèmèt li bay yon sans ak tout bon ak move bagay ki rive nan lavi l.

An menmtan, konn gen lwa mande pou w toujou pwoteje kòw kont move lespri ak vye maladi yo ka voye sou ou. Rele lwa a pat janm yon bagay vay kevay, fòk li gen kòd li, kontwole, epi yon jan metrize. An jeneral, vodouyizan yo pa wè maji ak sòsèlri byen, pou yo, se yon kote negative ak danje nan vodou ke moun yo dwe kanpe lwen (Heusch 2000). Si nou pati de prensip ke espri kapab rantre sou yon moun (lwa yo oubyenn espri mò yo), yon ènmi kapab voye move espri (movè zespri nan lagaj chak jou ayisyen) sou yon moun pou fè l malad oubyen menm touye l. Inisyasyon ak maryaj mistik (maryaj ak lwa), se jis yon mwayen pou vodouyizan yo bay tèt yo plis pwoteksyon. Men nou pa dwe kite atè diferans etnològ Evans Pritchard (1972) fè ant maji (witchcraft) ak sòsèlri (sorcery); maji a se yon teknik ki gen ladan l gès, rityèl, objè materyèl ak konesans oubyen yon moun ki gen don, poutan sosèlri a se pouvwa pouvwa yo kwè sèten moun genyen pou souse fos vital youn lot moun.

Lòt pa enpòtan antwopologi vodou a fè, se travay Roger Bastide te fè sou senkretis lan. Melanj seremoni katolik (priyè, foto sen, angouman pou batèm) ak tradisyon ki pwòp ak Lafrik (divinite oubyen espri ki rete nan pye bwa, nan dlo, e ki kapab danse nan tèt moun) sa yo fasil sibi move entèpretasyon. Bastide (1967) montre pou pwemye fwa ke eleman kilitirèl nou wè anndan vodou yo pa senpman kole youn ak lòt, li aplike «prensip separasyon an» («principe de coupure») pou eksplike kominote nwa ki sòti nan esklavaj yo pase byen de yon sistèm relijye ak yon lòt. Prensip separasyon an pèmèt yo rann yo kont de jan yo kapab itilize yon eleman kiltirel oubyen yon lòt tankou yon mas pou konsève menm eritaj Lafrik yo, an menm tan pou bay yon nouvo entèpretasyon eritaj sa yo sou baz eleman yo prete nan yon lòt sistèm, vise vèsa. Alò, nou fas ak yon pwosesi kreyasyon kiltirèl ki mete ansanm plizyè eleman ki pa sanble epi ki pap ka fonn nan lòt.

Yon lot rechèch antwopoloji sou lanmou gade wol fanm ak gason jwe nan seremoni vodou yo. Lidwina Meyer (1999) montre nan liv sou mit yo, gen yon diferans kap parèt ti kras pa ti kras ant sèks maskilen ak sèks feminen nan fason yo mete pèsonaj sou sèn nan ak diferan wol yo ki ranje selon sèks yo. Sa fè nou sanse soti nan opozisyon tradisyonèl feminen/maskilen, espri/kò, idantite w/sa ki pa paw. Analiz sa a finalman kesyone wòl enferyè fanm yo ak plas ki pa chita sou anyen solid yo bay gason yo tankou yon moun inivèsèl. Men nou ka remake nan vodou a, pa genyen jan de diskriminasyon sa yo. Yon fanm kapab dirije (manbo) menmjan ak yon gason (ougan) epi jwe nenpot wòl nan wonfò a.

Prejije yo

Pandan premye mwatye diznevyèm syèk la, se sèlman premye chèf leta ayisyen yo ki te tolere vodou a men ki te gen krent pou akseptel kòm relijyon. Sete pito katolisis la kite relijyon Leta rekonèt. Elit nan peyi a konnnen ki wòl vodou a te jwe nan chavire sistèm nan nan moman revolisyon an, e yo te konnnen li ka debouche sou mete yon pouvwa paralèl sou pye. Yon lòt bò, vodou a te rete kole ak legliz katolik, e fonksyone prèske tankou pwason kraze nan bouyon ak li. Leta ayisyen te fè plizyè tantativ negosiyasyon ak Vatikan pou l te rekonèt ofisyèlman endepandans peyi Dayiti depi nan lane 1820 yo, e se jis nan lan 1860 yon konkòda ta pral siyen ant leta ayisyen ak Vatikan. A pati dat sa a, Ayiti te resevwa misyonè ki sòti Bretay nan peyi Lafrans pou vin fè entriksyon piblik ak mete kanpe pawas katolik nan tout rakwen peyi a (wè Delisle 2003). Klèje katolik la ta pral pwopoze yon nouvou vizyon de sivilizasyon nan peyi a, e fè vodou a pase pou yon kote yap fè maji, sosèlri ak kanibalis. Sete prejije sa yo ki te konn sikile deja sou pratik ak kwayans ki sot Lafrik yo. Daprè misyonè katolik yo, Ayiti dwe libere li de sa yo rele «tach afriken yo» ke vodou a reprezante, pou li mete tèt li nan menm nivo ak nasyon sivilize yo. Definisyon vodou ki chita sou opozisyon primitif/sivilize ki domine nan peyi a pandan lontan an soti nan fason misyonè ak administratè nan koloni a te wè l, epi misyonè ewopeyen yo nan diznevyèm syèk la (Spencer St John 1884).

Nap site pa egzanp yon pasaj nan diskou yon Evèk fransè te fè an 1896

Se la a ènmi prensipal nou an ye, li menm nou dwe fè yon lagè san kanpe avè l, yon lagè jiska lanmò. Gade l anfas, yon fason poun pi rayi l e plis detèmine pou n konbat li ak siksè […] Konbyen moun ki imajine yo ke vodou se yon bann vye dans ki pa sosyal ak pil manje. Vodou a se vrèman yon seremoni dyab: Li gen sakrifis li ak chèf siprèm li. Dans yo se sèlman deyò vilgè yon anndan lanfè (Kersuzan 1896).

Prejije sa yo mache men nan men ak mouvman kolonizasyon an yon fason jeneral, ki chita sou yon pwojè « sivilzatè» ewopeyen ki pran elan pandan diznevyèm syèk la. Antwopoloji a ki te fenk ap parèt nan fen dizuityèm ak nan diznevyèm syèk la te rete nan premye moman li yo pitit pwojè sa a, lè nou konsidere li te «mete nan yon lòd nan divèsite ant ras yo ak pèp yo, e ba yo yon plas, sa ki vle di, yon wòl nan listwa» (Duchet 1971), nan ka sa a wòl «sovaj la». Nan pèspektiv sa a, yon teyori rasis ki pretann li «syantifik» te prepare nan fen diznevyèm syèk la.

Vodou a pral sibi nan fyèv «sivilizasyon» an, de gwo vag pèsekisyon anba men legliz katolik, ki vin relijyon ofisyèl leta nan lane 1860. Nan lane 1896, li te pouse fidèl katolik yo voye jete pratik ak kwayans vodou yo, epi, nan lane 1941, li òganize yon gwo kanpay nasyonal pandan yap boule tout sa ki senbolize vodou yo ki rele «kanpay dè rejete», ki mande chak pawasyen fè sèman di li kite vodou tankou li «kite satan ak zèv li yo» (Métraux 1958: 298ss, ak Ramsey 2011). Jacques Roumain ki se ekriven ak fondatè biwo nasyonal etnoloji te kritike kapay sa anpil nan lane 1942, e biwo sa ta pral gen pou misyon ranmase ak pwoteje tout objè sakre vodou yo, epi fè pwomosyon pou rechèch sou tout aspè vodou a ak tradisyon kiltirèl peyi a.

Nouvo pozisyon entèlektyel yo: vodou a tankou kote ki kenbe memwa

Okipasyon ameriken nan peyi Dayiti soti 1915 pou rive 1934, ta pral okazyon tou pou vizyon negatif sou vodou a retounen sou sèn nan. Nan menm moman sa nou konnen yon nouvo pozisyon entèlektyèl ayisyen yo: Jean Price Mars pibliye nan lane 1928 yon liv konferans ki gen pou tit «Ainsi parla l’oncle», ladan l li pwopoze pou yo rekonèt kilti ayisyèn nan jwen sous li nan kilti afrikèn nan, kidonk, vodou a se yon relijyon tout ayisyen dwe reklame kòm afè pa yo. Kèk liv enpòtan (pa egzanp Métraux 1958; Verger 1957) prezante plizyè etnografi sou vodou ki rekonèt wòl li nan fè afriken yo te trennen sòti Lafrik vin nan esklavaj yo rejwenn diyite yo, e kòm yon kreyasyon kiltirèl orijinal ki kenbe idantite ayisyen yo.

Aprè plizyè tantativ manipilasyon politik avèk vodou a pandan trant lane diktati Duvalier yo François Duvalier deklare li se defansè vodou a men li ap itilize l tankou yon zouti politik lè li fè kèk ougan reprezante li nan kèk vil ak kanpay (Hurbon 1979). Gwo vag nouvo legliz pannkotis kontinye sekwe vodou a jouk jounen jodi a. Legliz sa yo, atravè prèch yo ap fè yo, fè moun yo gen reprezantasyon de sòsèlri kòm yon bagay vodou a kreye. Malgre sa, vodou a kenbe yon pozisyon transvèsal pa rapò ak divès sistèm relijye ki nan konpetisyon nan peyi a, lè nou konsidere yon vodouyizan pa gen okenn pwoblèm poul di l se katolik an menm tan, batize ak kominye anndan legliz. Menmjan vèsyon pannkotis nan pwotestantis la di koze lwa a se zafè dyab, men sa pa anpeche yo kwè nan rèv ak koze lespri rantre nan tèt moun nan, ke nou jwenn nan vodou a.

Avèk pwosesis demokratizasyon peyi Dayiti te konnen, aprè diktati a te fin tonbe nan lane 1986, yo te rache plizyè ougan paske selon sa ki di, yo te konn kore diktati a. Depi lè sa a, vodou a kreye pwòp òganizasyon pa l, pou defann yo kont destriksyon objè yo ak mank tolerans kèk lòt relijyon.

Malgre sa, vodou a tap cheche jwenn an menm tan menm privilèj ak lòt relijyon yo, tankou dwa pou yo jwe wòl ofis eta sivil lè gen batèm, maryaj ak antèman. Kèk lidè politik jouk jounen jodi a konn site vodou kòm «fòs mistik» nan diskou yo, yon fason pou yo legitime tèt yo nan mas pèp la. Men, sa ki pral fè boutofen yo rekonèt li kòm youn nan kote ou ka jwenn idantite pèsonèl ak kolektif pèp ayisyen an, se paske diferan kategori pwodiksyon atistik enspire de li pou yo pwodui, tankou: penti, eskilti, mizik, dans oubyen literati (Consentino 1995). Antwopoloji modèn nan pral oblije bay tèt li misyon etidye lyen sa yo, e lap dekouvri ke vodou se yon espas kote yo kenbe memwa non sèlman pou nasyon ayisyèn nan, men tou pou limanite. Aprè tou, li te yon referans nan batay esklav yo tap mennen pou rejwenn ak fè rekonèt diyite yo kòm moun.

Pou n fini

Vodou a bay okazyon pou plizyè rechèch enpòtan fèt sou rapò ki genyen ant li menm ak penti nayiv la. Nan sans sa a André Malraux te di nan lane 1975 ke sete «eksperyans ki pi enpresyonan, e se sèl limenm nou te ka kontwole nan penti majik ventyèm syèk la», men anpil atis ayisyen chwazi wout penti «sofistike» a, pandan yap rekonèt jan vodou a enspire moun (wè Lerebours 2018). Menmjan an, nap refere nou ak trè bel liv Gérald Alexis ki te parèt nan edisyon sèk da (cercle d’Art) nan lane 2000. Nou dwe tou, sou yon baz syantifik, fè envantè divès resous ki geri kò ak lespri ki genyen nan vodou a, gras ak konesans yo genyen sou plant yo ak jan yo ka itilize nan geri moun ki malad. Plizyè espozisyon te fèt sou penti ayisyen an nan peyi Lafrans, Laswis ak Etazini, men sou lot aspè kiltirèl yo Antwopoloji a dwe fè nouvo pa. Se sèten, vodou a rete yon kilti vivan ki vin pi rich, nan entegre dives enfliyans gras ak enpotans diaspora ayisyen an nan peyi (Etazini, Lafrans, nan Karayib la ak Amerik Latin nan) ki kontinye kwè ak pratike relijyon vodou yo.

Anpil kesyon kòmanse poze sou wòl vodou a nan revolisyon ayisyèn an, nan atitid woulem de bò gouvènman ayisyen yo depi lendanpans nan lane 1804 rive jis jounen jodi a, epi sou sosyete sekrè yo ke imajinè yo kenbe lespri ayisyen nan mas popilè yo. Nou dwe siyale tou, enpòtans yon rechèch sou objè sakre vodou yo ak sit ki senbolize rezistans ak sistèm esklavaj la ki se kote ki kenbe memwa : yo ka fè konnen pi byen, pwa revolisyen ayisyèn nan nan batay kont rasis kap fèt jodi a.

Vokabilè

Bòkò : se non yo bay ougan ki plis pratike maji, swa pou geri yon moun oubyen edel atake yon ènmi l

Desounen : se yon rityèl yo pratike lè yon inisye mouri pou wete lwa a nan tèt li

Kochè: se non ye te konn bay chofè kap kondui machin chwal ap trennen yo

Lwa : espri oubyen divinite (espri zansèt yo)

Lwa mèt-tèt : se espri inisye a resevwa jou inisyasyon li a pou pwoteje l, li kole inisye a ak yon lwa ki pou pwoteje l jiskaske li mouri

Lwa rasin : lwa yon moun eritye nan fanmi l

Manbo : prèt vodou fanm (pretès)

Manje-lwa : seremoni kote sèvitè lwa ap danse, pran lwa, ofi lwa yo manje yo renmen (li kapab vyann poul, bèf, cabri). Manje sa yo prezante nan yon seremoni pou onore espri yo oubyen geri yon moun lwa kenbe pou manje, anba otorite yon ougan obyen yon manbo

Ougan: prèt vodou

Pwen: pisans mistik yon moun al achete poul travay misitik oubyen fè aktivite ekonomik li fè pwogrè

Vèvè: Desen senbolik lwa yo

Pedji: Pyès espesyal lwa yo

Peristil: kay kote seremoni vodou yo fèt

Poto-mitan : yon poto nan mitan peristi l, se ladan l espri yo pase pou yo vin jwenn sèvitè yo

Wanga: rityèl maji pou geri oubyen atake ènmi

Wonfò: Tanp vodou

Wonsi: Inisye nan vodou

Bibliographie