African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 888
embodied in usually public rituals, it constitutes a specific performance. Performances
may be comic or dramatic, suspenseful or joyful, and establish hierarchies or invert them.
They make use of music, dance, distinct clothing, and unusual speech patterns and body
movements. Possession, therefore, may be understood as a system of communication,
providing alternative, authoritative voices and critical distance, but also antilanguage and
ambiguity (Boddy 1989) and the possibility for the simultaneous transmission of opposed
messages (Rasmussen 1995). Possession is truly heteroglossic. Recent studies have tried
to break through prior restrictions to examine possession on its own terms, in the
societies where it is found. These studies locate it in wider social and historical contexts,
describing how it acts as a prism through which naturalized constructs (e.g., of person,
gender, or body) are refracted or undone.
References
Boddy, Janis. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
——1994. Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology
23:407–434.
Karp, Ivan. 1989. Power and Capacity in Rituals of Possession. In The Creativity of Power:
Cosmology and Action in African Societies, eds. William Arens and Ivan Karp. Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kramer, F. 1993. The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa, tr. M.R. Green. London: Verso.
Lambek, Michael. 1981. Human Spirits. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
——. 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit
Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Lewis, I.M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and
Shamanism. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
——. 1986. Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Rasmussen, Susan. 1995. Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Stoller, Paul. 1989. Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of
Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——. 1992. The Cinematic Griot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SUSAN J.RASMUSSEN
See also Gender: Representation in African Folklore; Medicine; Performance in
Africa; Zar; Spirit Possession in the Sudan
SPIRIT POSSESSION: WEST AFRICA
Spirit possession in West Africa is important for a number of reasons. It is a significant
aspect of local healing and social systems in much of the region, and it is the source of
many of the possession practices that traveled to the Americas via the Atlantic slave