Ancestral Power Research Articles

Blood and Bone: Ancestors, Power, and Sacred Identity Among Nonbinary Black Womxn

This community-based participatory action research project led by the C.I.R.C.L.E. (Collective Infiltrating Research to Center Community, Liberation, and Embodiment) employed interpretative phenomenological analysis via eco-womxnist and Afro-Indigenous cosmological frameworks to examine the connection between gendered-racial identity and sacredness among 11 nonbinary Black womxn (NBBW) from the US. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews, we elicited participants’ responses to the following inquiry: Would you we describe being a nonbinary Black womxn as sacred? Why or why not? Data analysis resulted in two themes: (a) Origins of Sacred Powers and (b) Manifestations of Sacred Powers. Four subthemes informed Manifestations of Sacred Powers: Sight/Seers, Osmosis, Intergenerational Healing/Curse Breaking, and Immortality. Participants described these four interconnected manifestations of sacred powers in service of collective and individual liberation, rooted in African spirituality, ancestral power, and the gendered-racial identity. We conclude with implications for future research and clinical practice with NBBW regarding spiritual beliefs, practices, and identities.

Portals to the past and bridges to the future: exploring the impact of doulas on the birthing experiences of black and Latinx women

IntroductionIn the USA, maternal morbidity and mortality is markedly higher for women of colour than for white women. The presence of a doula has been associated with positive birthing outcomes...

Analysis of the knowledge, attitudes and practices of the population of the Mokambo chiefdom on the thermal waters of Kaswa/Mahagi (Ituri, D.R. Congo)

Since ancestral times, farmers have used the thermal waters of Kaswa/Mahagi for hygienic and sanitary practices. The present study is aimed at evaluating the knowledge, attitudes and practices of the indigenous people with regards to these waters. It was carried out from 15th January to 12th April 2022 and focused on a sample of 323 adult people obtained using the Schwartz formula. The descriptive study shows that almost all of the farmers knew the location of the thermal springs had an indigenous name which meant their hyperthermia or their therapeutic virtue. 68.89% of respondents suggested volcanic or geothermal origin of the heat of these waters, the information being transmitted mainly from parents to members of their families. The practices highlighted are frequenting thermal waters for curiosity, natural hot baths, for the relief of muscular fatigue and dermatoses including wounds and scabies according to 41.13% and 39.18% of respondents respectively. The attitude highlighted is the belief in divine and ancestral power transmitted through these waters accompanied by rituals at the hot springs. Certain knowledge, attitudes and practices were dependent on the sex, age and occupation of users. These results constitute essential basic information for future multidisciplinary research with a view to enlightening the population.

Water as Country on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, South Australia

ABSTRACTAnangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the north‐western areas of South Australia, conceptualize changes in the surface of land as evincing the presence of Ancestral power. Rain is one such catalyst of change, though it is by no means a certainty on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. When it does appear, water does not stay long on the surface: it is shimmering and unstable. This chapter examines the nature of various water sources in contemporary indigenous life, the spatial relationships between earth and sky and the dialectic between life and death that they mediate.

Ancêtres (in)communs : rencontres rituelles d’arutam et échelles de la politique territoriale achuar en Équateur

In this article, I aim to document the political imaginary of penker pujustin (good living), conceptualized by some Ecuadorian Achuar elders and intellectuals in the 1970s, as the “plan of life” grounding their political sovereignty. My analysis lies on a study of the relationships between the arutam ancestral power and Achuar’s territorial politics. While having remained steady along the last decades, the natematin ritual, which allows the acquisition of the arutam power, has undergone a major transformation: often described by anthropologists as a warlike authority-making ritual, the arutam power is now sought after by political leaders eager to produce commons against the rising of warlike conflicts, either by the legal recognition of a common and intangible territory, and by the stabilization of family and communal micro-territories. I stand that the arutam ritual, both political and territorial, is to be understood as a source of the Achuar process of “communing”, as well as it engenders some “incommons” arutam, as achuar contemporary history’s driving force.

Regeneration time: ancient wisdom for planetary wellbeing

AbstractIn these regenerative times prompted by the Anthropocene, Aboriginal voices are situated to draw on ancient wisdom for local learning and to share information across the globe as ecological imperative for planetary wellbeing. In this paper, postqualitative research foregrounds the sentient nature of life as ancestral power and brings the vitality of co-becoming as our places into active engagement. It enables coloniality to surface and reveals how it sits in our places and lives, in plain sight but unnoticed because of its so-called common sense. Postqualitative research relates with ancient knowledges in foregrounding Country’s animacy and presence, revealing the essence of time as non-linear, cyclical and perpetual. In this way, we are places, weather and climate, not separate. Postqualitative research also relates with ancient knowledge in illustrating Country as agentic and time as multiple, free of constraint and directly involved in our everyday. Country is active witness in the lives of Aboriginal peoples, here always. This is a strong basis for decolonisation. We all have a responsibility to listen, to help create a new direction for the future in the present time.

Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry, By Bolaji Campbell

Reviewed by: Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry by Bolaji Campbell Cheryl Sterling Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry BY BOLAJI CAMPBELL Africa World Press, 2019. vii + 211 pp. ISBN 9781569026274 paper. In Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry, Bolaji Campbell gives a comprehensive analysis of Egungun traditions in relation to Yoruba beliefs about death and ancestry. He grounds his analysis in Yoruba cosmology and history, situates such knowledge within the performance contexts of Egungun festivals, its transit and rearticulation in the African diaspora, and its modern-day influence and adaptation by contemporary artists. Such a multitiered approach to the subject succeeds in both elaborating on and decoding our understanding of Egungun in all of its manifestations. The term Egungun, itself, has many different meanings; it may be the ancestors, bones, a mask, a masquerader, or the masquerade. In general, however, it refers to concealed powers. Campbell, from the beginning of the text, reveals that the Egungun are ara orun, spiritual dwellers who are emissaries to our material realm and who have multiple potentialities and powers to aid humanity. Using a combination of oral sources, such as oriki (praise poetry, Ifa divination poetry, Egungun chants, legends and stories), as well as eyewitness accounts by African and European scholars in chapter one of the book, Campbell further excavates their mythical origins, but also locates the beginning of the tradition in the expansionist warfare of the Oyo Empire (late 1700s). In particular, he focuses on Oyo's war with Ibadan to set the stage for his detailed interrogation of Egungun festivals in that city. While Egunguns usually belong to a family line, they are not always the ancestors within a family, and Campbell's research in Ibadan shows how they function as markers and a balance to state power. He further intertwines their functioning as an association, with their performances within popular cultural festivals, reinforcing their roles as protectors of the community. Campbell is an art historian with over twenty years of experience researching Egungun masquerades, and a standout in the text is his focus on the ubiquity in which women participate in the tradition. Even though other scholars have written about female participation in Egungun celebrations, John Willis, in Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town (2018), is the only one to centralize women's roles (Beier; Drewal and Drewal; Babayemi). Campbell takes this work one step further, by detailing and describing the roles of female participants in all aspects of Egungun celebrations. His work reframes the discourse through the lens of gender and opens our understanding of the tradition. Most concretely, he focuses on the roles of women in chapter two of the book and, while such roles are not at all limited to the materiality of Egungun representation, they are also intertwined with the fabrics that the Egungun wears, which by the way is their primary medium of engagement. Egungun costumes are complex, [End Page 257] tiered assemblages, composed of multiple layers of cloth lappets, made from the most expensive and prestigious textiles, which cover and hide the masker's identity, but also cover the plethora of medicines, protective substances, and objects that invoke the spirit of the ancestor manifesting through the masquerader. The roles women play are apparent even in the diaspora, and when Campbell focuses on his research in Oyotunji village in chapter four, he tells stories primarily of the women who commission Egunguns to invoke and celebrate their ancestors. This work is called Fabric of Immortality because, as Campbell states, he is borrowing the words of one of his mentors, Rowland Abiodun, in emphasizing "the deathlessness and timelessness of cloth" (4); that "fabrics, in essence, represent the cultural notions of immortality, of interconnectedness, and of the ultimate ideas of cohesion and filial devotion" (5). Cloth across the board in African societies reveal complex articulations about the political, social, cultural, and gendered map of the society. The colors, composition, patterns within, tell stories. They are symbolic texts that insiders understand and depending on cultural context, special fabrics are used by family members to mark liminal events from births to...

The Dancers Who Became Transformed into Wood: the mai masks of the Iatmul, Papua New Guinea

Borrowing, exchanging, and violent appropriation of ritual artefacts have been actions that have contributed to the development of cultural diversity within a particular frame of variations in the Middle Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. The mai masks of the Iatmul, already mentioned by Bateson, are the well‐documented result of a violent appropriation, as indigenous evidence shows. However, the ‘model’ which served for the mai were ritual dancers captured in the Alexander Mountains. These dancers displayed heavily painted faces (but no masks) and rich body decoration. In the process of making the powerful ‘model’ into one of their own, the Iatmul artists transformed the painted faces into carvings according to their preferred material of artistic expressions, wood, and their predilection for the interplay of elevated and deepened surfaces. As this article shows, the creation of mai as (enlivened) persons needs the establishment of socio‐cosmological relationships in which ancestral spirits and ‘natural’ substances are crucially involved. Thus, apart from sculpting as making, actions of growing are essential for turning the masks into beings endowed with ancestral power.

Brilliance as Cognitive Complexity in Aboriginal Australia

Writers on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and contemporary commercial art have identified properties that can be described as producing ‘brilliance’, the term used by Howard Morphy (1989) for Yolngu visual art. Brilliance involves the emotionally charged knowledge that Ancestral power is manifest. We suggest that, in Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and art, two kinds of brilliance are at work, both of which we exemplify using evidence from songs and languages of the Arandic and Warlpiri region of Central Australia. One kind of brilliance is manifest as visual brightness and whiteness, the other relates to a variety of cognitive complexities that involve diverse combinations of parts both within and across modalities of expression. In extending the notion of brilliance from the visuality of brightness to include cognitive complexity, we follow other work on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices. Seeking to understand why these properties should produce particular emotional and epistemic effects in participants, we draw on psychological accounts of the sublime and awe (Keltner and Haidt 2003; Miall and Kuiken 1994), which we treat as part of the same broad family of experiences as the experience of brilliance. We suggest both visual brightness and cognitive complexity represent an ‘extremity’ that as such places considerable cognitive demands on the participants. These extraordinary cognitive demands stimulate emotion and produce the experience of Ancestral power and surprising moments of insight.

‘THE NIGHT WAR OF NAMPULA’: VULNERABLE CHILDREN, SOCIAL CHANGE AND SPIRITUAL INSECURITY IN NORTHERN MOZAMBIQUE

ABSTRACTPeople living in the neighbourhoods of Nampula city, northern Mozambique, often speak of a war that is being waged at night, during which sick infants and small children figure more and more frequently as the preferred prey of malevolent ancestors, witches and new malign spirits that come at night, and who abduct and enslave them in order to harm their families. The purpose of this article is to explore what this ‘war of the night’ reveals, to understand why it is that mothers are afraid their babies and children will be stolen from the compound and, finally, to analyse the ways in which families handle their fears and apprehensions about a child's sickness. I begin this analysis of the ‘war of the night’, and the accompanying anxieties surrounding infants and children, by examining it in relation to large-scale changes that have occurred both at the micro-level of the household and in the community more generally. Specifically, the article looks at the ways in which ongoing economic and social transformations are reconfiguring gender and generational relationships, which, in turn, generates more insecurity within the household and intensifies a sense of existential threat from external forces. The article then examines the cultural logic of rumours and beliefs involving children, as a consideration of local interpretations and experiences of infancy and childhood helps shed light on local concepts of (children's) vulnerability. With the aid of three case studies, the article charts how families manage children's diseases. It shows how the uncertainty surrounding an illness is not always ameliorated by divinations or by the healing provided by women working on behalf of ancestral power. Instead, women healers often crystallize and intensify mothers’ fears, also because their medical and ritual interventions are not always effective. The article concludes by examining the reasons why these women healers are increasingly struggling to manage the evil forces haunting infants and children and to make their medical interventions effective, and the effect of this on their local authority.

Mediations of Cloth: Tapa and Personhood among the Maisin in PNG

AbstractTapa (or barkcloth), which is made from the outer bark of specific trees, is intimately interwoven with past and present socialities across Oceania. The cloths have been used to decorate, wrap, cover, protect, and carry the human body, as exchange valuables and commodities, in land claims, and as indexes and embodiments of ancestral power. This article explores the complexities of personhood in Oceania by focusing on the making and ceremonial use of tapa among the Maisin of Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea. It elucidates dynamics of the intimate correspondence between people and things, and, in particular, how people's gendered identities are mediated: that is shaped, reproduced, and contested through the cloth's specific materiality and design. Ultimately, it reveals the mutual growth of people and things and how they are part of each other's substance, thereby dissolving the subject–object dichotomy.

The echo of things: the lives of photographs in the Solomon Islands

The Echo of Things is a compelling ethnographic study of what photography means to the people of Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands. Christopher Wright examines the contemporary uses of photography and expectations of the medium in Roviana, as well as people's reactions to photographs made by colonial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Roviana people, photographs are unique objects; they are not reproducible, as they are in Euro-American understandings of the medium. Their status as singular objects contributes to their ability to channel ancestral power, and that ability is a key to understanding the links between photography, memory, and history in Roviana. Filled with the voices of Roviana people, The Echo of Things is both a nuanced study of the lives of photographs in a particular cultural setting and a provocative inquiry into our own understandings of photography.

Begetting extraordinary humans

We are very grateful to Verso Books for giving us the permission to publish this version of Chapter eight (Fifth component 2), The metamorphosis of kinship, Verso (2012).

Recovering the tongue: memorializing grieved women through spirit possession and ritual in Zimbabwean literature

In memorializing the past, Zimbabwe's national and cultural discourses have more often than not drawn their legitimacy from selective versions of past experiences. These discourses are therefore exclusionary or inclusive depending on the cultural and political exigencies of the time. In both national historiography and cultural discourses, the total female experience has not been accounted for. The accounts of the past are fairly homogenized. This article seeks to unravel, in two Zimbabwean fictional narratives, a matrix of authorial endeavours to recover and empower female subjectivity; endeavours that are guided by the tropes of spirit possession, ancestral power and rituals. The article posits that, through spirit possession and the resultant coming to voice of wronged females as well as the authorial elevation of dead women to ancestral status, families and communities engage in integrative processes that facilitate healing and introspection. The focus of the article is on violated womanhood in both the pre-colonial and colonial contexts and in the latter case, with special regard to liberation war experiences in Zimbabwe. The article's argument is presented within the context of Shona cosmology and the place of spirit possession and ancestral memory therein.

Water as Country on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands South Australia

AbstractAnangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the north-western areas of South Australia conceptualize changes in the surface of land as evincing the presence of ancestral power. Rain is one such catalyst of change, though it is by no means a certainty on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. When it does appear, water does not stay long on the surface: it is shimmering and unstable. This paper examines the nature of various water sources in contemporary indigenous life, the spatial relationships between earth and sky and the dialectic between life and death that they mediate.

THINKING THROUGH IMAGES:KASTOMAND THE COMING OF THE BAHA’IS TO NORTHERN NEW IRELAND, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

We can learn a lot about religious ideas by studying not just the impact on them of missionization but also how religious beliefs and practices are translated into local religious forms. In this article I draw attention to the case of the Baha’i faith in the Nalik area of northern New Ireland (Papua New Guinea). In discussing how the faith became strongly associated with the ability to harness ancestral power, I argue that this relationship emerged through Nalik people's ability to think through images, in other words through transforming forms in order to create new understandings. This study not only underlines the importance of localized studies into the technology of image production but also fills a gap in anthropological studies that, up until now, have systematically ignored the Baha’i movement and its place in the contemporary Pacific.

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 29, Issue 1 p. 77-109 BOOK REVIEWS First published: 01 February 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2005.00262.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Books reviewed: John Barton (ed.), The Biblical World. Stephen Hunt (ed.), Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco. Gervaseof Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor. Rachel Fulton, From Judgement to Passion. Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200. Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation. Carter Lindberg (ed.), The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period. Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe. Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Bernard Joassart, Monseigneur Duchesne et les Bollandistes. Correspondence. Bernard Joassart, Friedrich von Hügel, Cuthbert Hamilton Turner et les Bollandistes. Correspondence. Iain M. Mackenzie, God's Order and Natural Law: The Work of the Laudian Divines. Stephan Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory. Hanne Sanders (ed.), Between God and the Devil, Religious and Magical World-Views in the Nordic Countries 1500–1800. John K. Nelson: A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishoners in Anglican, Virginia, 1690–1776. John Allen Macaulay, Unitarianism in the Antebellum South: The Other Invisible Institution. Loretta M. Long, The Life of Selina Campbell: A Fellow Soldier in the Cause of Restoration. Linda C. Raeder, John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity. Ralph Waller, John Wesley: A Personal Portrait.. Richard P. Heitzenrater, The Elusive Mr. Wesley. Michael Goldsmith and Doug Munro,The Accidental Missionary. Tales of Elekana. Allan K. Davidson (ed.), Tongan Anglicans 1902–2002. From the Church of England Mission in Tonga to the Tongan Anglican Church. Lynne Hume: Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness and Aboriginal Australians. Heather McDonald, Blood, Bones and Spirit: Aboriginal Christianity in an East Kimberley Town. Volume29, Issue1February 2005Pages 77-109 RelatedInformation

Ancestral power: the dreaming, consciousness, and Aboriginal Australians

The Dreaming, or the Dreamtime, is the English translation of a complex Aboriginal religious concept. It relates to the idea of an ancestral presence which exists as a spiritual power that is deeply present in the land. This presence or power also exists in certain paintings, in some dance performances, and in songs, blood and ceremonial objects.In Ancestral Power, Lynne Hume seeks to further our understanding of human consciousness by looking through a Western lens at the concept of the Dreaming. She examines the idea that Aboriginal people may have used certain techniques for entering altered states of consciousness. Could their experiences in such states, together with their extensive knowledge of their environment, have helped to create the cosmological scheme we call the Dreaming?With these questions in mind, she brings together and examines, for the first time, a wide range of existing literature on Aboriginal cosmology and spiritual practices, together with studies of Aboriginal art, data from anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, and statements by Aboriginal people from many different regional areas of Australia. Much of the information she highlights is little known.Ancestral Power suggests that Aboriginal spirituality is much more complex and compelling than the early missionaries could ever have imagined.

Short Notices

Books reviewed in this article:Shamita Basu, Religious Revivalism as Nationalist Discourse: Swami Vivekananda and New Hinduism in Nineteenth‐Century BengalLynne Hume, Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness and Aboriginal AustraliansHenrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds), Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial AfricaPhilip R. Davies (ed.), First Person: Essays in Biblical AutobiographyMartin O’Kane (ed.), Borders, Boundaries and the BibleCraig Bartholomew, Colin Greene and Karl Möller (eds), After Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation, Scripture and Hermeneutics Series, volume 2George J. Brooke (ed.), Book List 2002, Society for Old Testament StudyV. Phillips Long, David W. Baker and Gordon J. Wenham (eds), Windows into Old Testament History: Evidence, Argument, and the Crisis of ‘Biblical Israel’Ronald S. Wallace, Hannah's Prayer and its Answer: An Exposition for Bible StudySteven Tuell, I and II ChroniclesPaul Murray O.P., A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of BewildermentJohn Barton, Joel and ObadiahMagen Broshi, Bread, Wine, Walls and ScrollsMichael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the CrossDaniel Marguerat, The First Christian Historian: Writing the ‘Acts of the Apostles’Jan Willem van Henten and Friedrich Avemarie (eds), Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Graeco‐Roman, Jewish and Christian AntiquityGwilym Beckerlegge (ed.), From Sacred Text to InternetAlain Blancy and Maurice Jourjon and the Dombes Group, Mary: In the Plan of God and in the Communion of SaintsRonald J. Allen, Preaching is Believing: The Sermon as Theological ReflectionRobert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (eds), Suffering ReligionLaura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui‐lan (eds), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious DiscourseSusan Frank Parsons (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist TheologyHugh Connolly, SinSteven Croft, Transforming Communities: Re‐imagining the Church for the 21st Century