Born to Die: Witchcraft and Infanticide in Bariba Culture

Abstract

Anthropological inquiry regarding witchcraft and sorcery has predominantly emphasized the articulation between concepts of misfortune and social structure (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1937; Turner 1957; Marwick 1965; Simmons 1971). Increasingly, evidence of rapid urbanization in the Third World has provoked students of indigenous cosmology to address the implications of such features of the urban environment as ethnic heterogeneity and new social and political pressures for indigenous belief systems (Croce-Spinelli 1982; Hopkins 1980; Wyllie 1973; Mitchell 1965). In one such study of faith healers and folk healers in Central Africa, Jules-Rosette (1981:127) echoed Mitchell's (1965) classic study of the meaning in misfortune for urban Africans and described the perpetuation in urban environments of theories of well-being that refer to indigenous cosmology. Similarly, the influence of indigenous cosmological beliefs evolved as a consideration during research on obstetrical care decisions among rural and urban Bariba in People's Republic of Benin, West Africa (Sargent 1982, 1984). In this research, the significance of Bariba cosmology for medical decisions made within the parameters of national policy constraints emerged. This paper focuses on one set of beliefs central to obstetrical care practice and traces the modification in these beliefs and practices occurring in response to the growth of a multiethnic urban environment within a nation-state. Thus the data demonstrate the process of cultural transformation enabling the persistence of indigenous medical and cosmological beliefs in the context of multiple medical resource use. Research among urban Bariba in Benin signals continuing concerns with concepts of witchcraft and sorcery characteristic of rural Bariba society (Sargent 1982; Lombard 1965). Crucial to an understanding of these concepts concerning the causation of misfortune in society is the practice of infanticide, associated with a belief in witch babies whose presence may be detected at birth. Infanticide represents a response to notions of good and evil, normality and abnormality that are intrinsic to Bariba understandings of social order. Thus an assessment of the ideology of infanticide among rural and urban Bariba will clarify the articulation of this practice with obstetrical care and will indicate modifications in belief and observance resulting from external sources such as national legislation, the policy and judiciary, as well as public health policy. Government policy, by defining infanticide as homicide, has intervened in the autonomy of the household and patrilineage, thus challenging prevailing Bariba concepts of morality and cosmology.