Intimacy and Alterity: Prophetic Selves and Spirit Others in Central Mozambique

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

Abstract

In the context of Mozambican prophet healing, spirit-host relationships unfold between intimacy and alterity. The interweaving of spirits' and hosts' biographies in possession is enacted bodily in the form of pains, postures, and punishments, and often pits their wills and well-beings against one another. Spirit possession is an intimate exchange, a bodily and social confluence that invokes the most familiar of interpersonal relationships (spouses, parents and their children). On the other hand, the natures, motives, and agendas of the spirits often remain opaque. As prophets struggle to make sense and make use of the spirits who possess them, the power of the spirits reveals itself in their unknowability and contrariness, the elusiveness and partiality of their profiles. These intimate others both threaten and succor their hosts, to whom they are both kin and strangers, and it is through this dialectic that their special vantage on human suffering comes into view.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1163/157006611X569238

Publication Title

Journal of Religion in Africa

Volume Number

41

Issue Number

2

First Page

154

Last Page

179

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