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"With its rich primary data about bori, its creativity and freshness, "Prayer Has Spoiled Everything" will be of enormous interest to Africanists and to religion scholars of many types."--Karen McCarthy Brown, author of "Mama Lola: A Voodou Priestess in Brooklyn"

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Prayer Has Spoiled Everything

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations...........................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.................................................................................................xiiiList of Terms...................................................................................................xviiIntroduction....................................................................................................11 Bori, Power, and Identity in Dogondoutchi.....................................................................72 Lost Rituals: Changing Topographies of Spirit/Human Interactions..............................................493 Socializing the Spirits.......................................................................................774 The Everyday Life of Bori: Knowledge, Embodiment, and Quotidian Practice......................................1205 Kinesthetic Appropriation and Embodied Knowledge: Baboule Spirits and the Making of Value.....................1596 Taking Hold of the Kasuwa: The Ritual Economy of Bori in the Market...........................................1927 The Mirrors of Maria: Sweetness, Sexuality, and Dangerous Consumption.........................................2278 Lightning, Death, and the Politics of Truth: The Spirits of Rain..............................................262Conclusion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Bori............................................................291Notes...........................................................................................................301Bibliography....................................................................................................321Index...........................................................................................................341

Chapter One

The traffic in spirits is almost as widespread and intensive as the teaching of Islam.-I. M. Lewis, Religion in Context

In one of her praise songs for the spirits, the nationally known Mawri singer Tagimba declares that "those who say they have no spirits are liars." There is much truth in the griotte's (praise singer) statement for Dogondoutchi residents who take the presence of spirits in people's existence to be a self-evident fact of life. There are spirits in many-some would say, all-Mawri households who attend to the needs of their human counterparts or who, conversely, inflict endless torments on them. The powers of these superhuman forces are sometimes denied by the very people in whose lives they interfere for better or for worse. Yet even those Muslims who most vehemently castigate bori devotees for their "sinful" practices cannot deny ever witnessing in their childhood a grandfather or father's sacrificial offering to the tutelary spirits. While such memories may have become part of the dead stuff of gargajiya (tradition) for those who have opted to follow the teachings of the Koran, they remain an important source of meaning for bori mediums who have chosen to serve the spirits. As these mediums eventually age and die, spirits must look for other suitable, yet equally transient, vessels to possess. That these spirits may find no adequate hosts in whose body to incarnate themselves, or that they make no immediate demands on the descendants of their former devotees, rarely means that they are gone forever, as some, who today profess skepticism or indifference, may find out sooner or later. Spirits come and go, but as bori devotees like to forcefully remind their Muslim foes, they are always nearby, waiting perhaps for the right occasion to reinsert themselves in a human frame.

Besides pointing to the inescapable contiguity between the world of humans and the world of spirits, Tagimba's ironic statement also highlights the complex patterns of secrecy, complicity, and competition that characterize relations between members of the bori, who call themselves 'yan bori ("children of the bori," or devotees of the bori), and Muslims. In their eagerness to demarcate themselves from bori identity, most Muslims will confidently declare that they want nothing to do with fetishes, spirits, or sacrifices. Yet every one of them, bori devotees will tell you, has had recourse to the services of bori healers, and may have even sacrificed to a spirit to insure a son's academic success or a daughter's recovery from illness. In the cautionary message she delivers to her Hausa-speaking audience, Tagimba seems to imply that many Muslims are acting like hypocrites by choosing to ignore, and even disparage, the spirits when they no longer need them.

At another level, the singer's denunciation of Muslim shallowness and duplicity partly illustrates the extent to which Islamic and bori identities overlap despite concerted efforts, on both sides, to reaffirm distinctive forms of knowledge, practice, and morality. The interaction between Islamic and indigenous world views has been extensive and complex; when 'yan bori choose to go on the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) or when Muslims turn up at possession ceremonies, the difficulties one faces in trying to pinpoint what distinguishes a follower of the Prophet from a spirit medium are further compounded.

The problem of analyzing bori in light of prevailing Muslim discourse is a complex one because bori has always maintained an ambiguous relationship with Islam: as will become clear, members of the bori tend to protest the hegemony of Islam while paradoxically borrowing from the Muslim repertoire of signifiers that they see as a reservoir of power ready to be tapped. In so doing, spirit devotees appear to revise the script of Islamic domination at the same time that they reassert the viability and centrality of indigenous values. The fact that those who seek the assistance of the spirits sometimes do so indirectly or secretly so as not to tarnish their Muslim identity only renders more problematic any attempt to locate bori within local networks of power relations, and to assess its continued influence in the lives of Dogondoutchi residents.

Bori is not a refuge from the inequities of modern life. It does not solely address the plight of divorced or childless women-as is mostly the case in the ethnographic realities described by Monfouga-Nicolas (1972) and Schmoll (1991); nor does it exclusively cater to the needs of those who identify themselves as devotees of the spirits. Bori, and this is where its strength resides, knows no boundaries and has no set territory because it often operates through the deployment of powerful tropes that touch the core of Mawri experience. In short, the strength of bori lies more in the grasp spirits have on the collective imagination than in the size of its visible membership. Through its broad concerns with the articulation of conflict-laden experience, bori speaks to a host of issues that transcend the confines of individual afflictions or personal crises to address the problems of entire communities variously confronted with such disruptive circumstances as the impact of colonial rule, the emergence of novel forms of production, or the raw reality of lightning-to cite some of the themes discussed at length in the following chapters.

Despite its centrality in the life of numerous communities, households, and families,...