Abstract
Although neo‐Marxism informed the author's fieldwork on the therapeutic effectiveness of rituals among the Manjaks of northwestern Guinea‐Bissau, the explanatory value of materialist models turned out to be limited. Far from collapsing under the impact of capitalism because of migrant labor to Senegal and France, Manjak society retains an intact symbolic order. Migrants continue to interpret their physical and mental disorders in local terms and to participate in expensive rituals that absorb their capitalist earnings. Thus they submit to the gerontocratic order, restoring their roots in a cosmology in which the orificeless Perfect Body is ultimately the ancestral land itself. Spatio‐temporal belonging, filiation, domestic kinship power, and bodily functions merge, influencing many aspects of illness behavior and its expression in ritual and everyday life. Neo‐Marxism, epistemologically linked to societies under capitalism, scarcely explains this repertoire of symbols, yet helps us to pinpoint its unexpected vitality.
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