The Ghost Cult in Bunyoro
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2737232 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Beattie (0000-0002-2007-6534, corresponding author), J H M Beattie |
| Year | 1964 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 127 |
| Publication date | 1964-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethnology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0014-1828 • E-ISSN: 2160-3510 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3772707 |
| OpenAlex | W2296448029 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 2 |
When a Nyoro2 suffers illness, childlessness, or other misfortune, his traditional culture provides three broad types of explanation of why this should be, each with its associated pattern of cultural response. It may be due to sorcery {burogo) by some living person; it may be due to one or more of the wide range of nonhuman mbandwa spirits; or it may be due to the activity of a ghost. have given some account elsewhere of Nyoro beliefs about sorcery (Beattie 1963) and of the Nyoro spirit mediumship cult (Beattie 1957, 1961). In this essay consider Nyoro ideas about ghosts, the kinds of social situations in which their activity is diagnosed, and what is done about them (for a brief outline of the pattern of Nyoro attitudes to ghosts see Beattie 1960: 75-77). A {muzimu, plural mizimu) is the disembodied spirit of someone who has died. When a man is alive this vital principle is called mwoyo (plural myoyo), which may be rather loosely translated as soul, and it is believed to dwell in the breast or diaphragm. But a is not just a person who has died; it is a being of quite a different order from the living. Though it possesses human attributes it is not human. A Nyoro who wishes to threaten another with posthumous vengeance for some injury does not say, I shall haunt you when die; he says, I shall leave you a ghost (ndikulekera muzimu). Ghosts are left by people, but they are not people. This is implied also by the fact that the noun class to which the word muzimu belongs is not that of people {muntu, plural bantu) but that of a certain class of things, a class which includes in particular most kinds of trees and other plants. Ghosts are thought of as somehow diffused through space, like wind {nkyomuyaga). An informant said
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| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 1966 - 2020 (55) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |