Oktober 2001 / Göttingen

„Care of the Souls and Care of the Bodies – Changing Paradigms in the History of Anthropology on Africa“

Walther Bruchhausen

Based on ethnographic accounts on German East Africa and Tanganyika Territory as well as comparative ethnological works of that time, the competing definitions – religious or medical – of African concepts and practices around the human constitution – its securing, impairment and restoring – are explored. As in the „Second German Empire“ (1871-1918) at the same time ethnology became an academic discipline, the major German missionary societies started their work in Africa and biomedicine emerged as a distinct type of medicine, an interaction between these developments was inevitable. When the conditions for ethnology, Christian missions and medicine again deeply changed in the inter-war-period concomitant changes in the preference of paradigms occurred. Thus the historical analysis might throw some light on the question what social and cultural conditions in the Western world make the description of foreign practices prone to either medical or religious interpretation.

The development of European mainstream medicine is characterised by repeated secularisation. Both ancient Hippocratic medicine and modern science include moves away from religion and alleged superstition. This increasing division was the intellectual background of those German pioneers – mainly missionaries, medical doctors and military men, who shaped our views on the people in Africa. Their perceptions varied accordingly: medical doctors identified „physicians“ in the very same way as African experts („waganga“) were qualified as „magicians“, „sorcerers“ and „priests“ by ethnographers of other professional provenience. Their material means, „dawa“, was judged according to its pharmacological properties and if „ineffective“ discarded as cheat or magic. Magic or religious rituals were rather left for investigation to the missionaries and anthropologists. The academic field of African health-related behaviour was irreversibly divided, on the empirical as well as on the analytical level.

The two domains of research thus split developed in very different ways. Yet they still had in common that both were also determined by practical and not purely academic interests. The study of native religion, often including ideas and practices of healing, was advanced vigorously by missionaries and contributed to the academic establishment of anthropology in Germany. The structure-functionalist view of the African way of life as collectivist and determined by the religious system made religious concepts a more promising tool for understanding and controlling African society than exclusively health related-behaviour which seemed rather individually important. Therefore research on native medicine remained rare. When it generally achieved more favourable attention in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s publications were often written by doctors connected to the Nazi movement. In Germany the long-term result of this short intermezzo is obvious: As Africa after 1945 had many German missionaries and few German doctors, as in Germany a kind of Christian revival was taking place and as all those issues favoured by the Nazis were discredited, it seems little wonder that the paradigm of religion maintained its supremacy also in German anthropology after World War II.

„Devil’s dance, healing ritual, cultural performance. A history of interpretation of possession cults in South Asia“

Elisabeth Schömbucher-Kusterer
Südasien-Institut, Universität Heidelberg

Different forms of possession, either by gods or goddesses, or by malevolent spirits and demons, have fascinated observers of Indian culture since long. An overview on the history of interpretation shows a wide range of different approaches. Early observers, such as the Dutch missionary Bartolomäus Ziegenbalg, described the Tamil tiriyattam or teyyam as devil’s dance, a superstitious practice of sorcerers to worship demons. Whereas Ziegenbalg and other missionaries accepted the existence of personified evil forces such as demons and interpreted possession as an ecstatic religious practice, though in a negative sense, the functional anthropological approaches of the 1960s and 70s interpreted possession metaphorically, as something which has a different social meaning. It was argued, that the ecstatic experience of possession is ‚used‘ by persons to attain another purpose, such as ameliorating their social status, getting relief from psychic stress or medical problems. This fits the fact that mostly women, and sometimes men of marginal social status get possessed by malevolent spirits and demons. Being possessed by spirits, they get the aufmerksamkeit of society and their situation may be relieved. On the other hand, in the interpretation of possession mediumship, in which ritual or ecstatic experts get possessed by a god or a goddess, the healing aspect stands in the foreground.

More recent anthropological approaches try to consider the indigenous viewpoint as close as possible. This socalled performative approach views possession as a phenomenon which expresses itself through language. Thus, the interpretative stress lies in a linguistic analysis of what is said in which way and how are these spoken and performed texts interpreted. To understand what is being said and performed during states of possession, it is necessary to include cosmological and religious concepts of the people concerned.