Becoming a Sangoma

Religious Anthropological Field-Work in Francistown, Botswana

Bibliographic Data

ID3933300
AuthorsWim Van Binsbergen (African Studies Centre, corresponding author)
Year1991
Volume21
Issue4
Pages309
Publication date1991-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Religion in Africa (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-4200 • E-ISSN: 1570-0666
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1581194
OpenAlexW2060932375
LanguageEN
Citations received69
References cited15

work experiences (but deriving its primary inspiration not from field-work per se but from a more general personal quest, one leg of which forms the subject of the present paper).In my next, and much more extensive, Zambian field-work I was again drawn to the study of ecstatic religion, but while I was deeply involved with a family of cult leaders and adepts, and sponsored several sessions for that family's junior women, my personal ritual participation remained confined to shaking a rattle in the chorus and attending to complex logistics ensuring the presence of drums and firewood.I noted the amazing similarity between the Zambian adepts' dancing and trance and the Tunisian forms, and I avidly consumed papers on the spread of ecstatic cults across the African continent in recent centuries.However, the success of my Marxist interpretation of the Zambian material prevented me, once again, from sounding out the ecstatic depths, let alone plunging into them myself.The idea that the widespread ecstatic approach to healing could be more than an external research topic, could be incorporated into my own personal life, was still far from me.Instead, I was persuaded to provide an informal outlet for western medicine at my rural research site in Zambia, and this unexpected and unqualified exercise of the doctor's role gave me immense satisfaction (van Binsbergen 1979a(van Binsbergen , 1987)); steps were taken to formalize this initiative through the establishment of a local clinic, to be financed with Dutch aid money, and to be staffed by the Zambian government, but this project aborted due to the absence of sustained organizational support at the local level.By the late 1970s, my repeated field-work and this increasing involvement in the life and language of the Zambian Nkoya began to pose serious problems of personal and family boundary management in my movements back and forth between western Zambia and western Europe, but even when this had me thoroughly desorientated it was still only jokingly, flippantly, that I considered the possibility of phrasing my being torn between 'there ' and 'back again' (van Binsbergen 1979b) in terms of possession by a Zambian affliction spirit-much as I had learned to interpret the cults of affliction in terms of traders' and labour migrants' boundary crossing, geographical and cultural displacement, and the linkage between distinct socio-cultural complexes termed 'modes of production'.Yet, was the situation of these African travellers not reminiscent of the anthropological field-worker's

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