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spirit possession Africa have mainly focused on the well-known bori cult, which has become the paragon of womens spirit possession in Muslim West Africa. Bori is a very complex religious institution started before the arrival of Islam from the Hausa people, located on the border of Niger and Nigeria, and it is highly accommodating of Islamic practices. In some areas, such as the Maradi valley in Niger, bori is a primarily female domain, where membership and possession are exclusively for women (Monfouga-Nicolas 1972). In others, such as Dogonoutchi in Niger, it is divided between men and women, and both men and women hold positions of leadership within the cult (Masquelier 2001). Similarly, OBrien (1999) emphasizes that while its clientele is disproportionately female, bori is not central to the lives of most Hausa women of northern Nigeria. Yet scholars converge to assert that female mediums largely predominate in bori. Most of these women come from the fringes of the Hausa society, be they prostitutes, runaway girls, or women who have divorced multiple times. It has been shown, however, that while bori mostly recruits its adepts among marginalized women, male mediums are more frequently possessed by important spirits and recent spirits and they are more likely to become chief of bori (Echard 1995). The pantheon of the bori is composed of a great number of spirits (both male and female, called iskooki), mainly of three types defined by their color (white, black, and red), and inclined to include new spirit characters like female warriors, French soldiers, noble Tuareg, seductive prostitutes, Zarma blacksmiths, doctors and lorry drivers, Muslim clerks and bank thieves (Masquelier 2001, 292). As among the holey Songhay, spirit possession, sickness and healing are intimately linked in the bori. The bori is first and foremost a therapeutic cult which recruits its followers among unfortunate people (who have experienced, for example, disease, sterility, or successive child deaths), and an initiation into bori is always seen as a form of treatment. Once the entity responsible for the sickness is identified by a ritual expert as being a bori spirit, the patient will be initiated to its cult for seven days. While treated with ritual herbs known only to bori specialists, she will learn the particular history of her spirit, its gestures, songs, and the dances that accompany it. At the end of the initiation, a possession ceremony takes place where the newly initiated is publicly possessed by her spirit. It is worth noticing that possession in bori is often described as a sexual act wherein the possessed woman is mounted by the spirit who penetrates her (Masquelier 2001, 87).

women threaten the social order, which has to be reconfirmed by ritual healing. Bibliography
J. Boddy, Wombs and alien spirits. Women, men and the Zr cult in northern Sudan, Madison, Wis. 1989. P. N. Boratav, 100 soruda Trk folkloru. Inanlar. Tre ve trenler. Oyunlar, Istanbul 1984. C. Delaney, The seed and the soil. Gender and cosmology in Turkish village society, Berkeley 1991. . Z. Eyubolu, Cinci byleri ve yldzname, Istanbul 1978. B. J. Good and M. DelVecchio Good, In the subjunctive mode. Epilepsy narratives in Turkey, in Social Science and Medicine 38:6 (1994), 83542. inn-Glaube, Zauber- und Heilwesen im K. Hentschel, G heutigen Kairo, Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna 1987. O. ztrk, Folk treatment of mental illness, in A. Kiev (ed.), Magic, faith, and healing. Studies in primitive psychiatry today, New York 1974, 34363. S. Strasser, Die Unreinheit ist fruchtbar! Grenzberschreitungen in einem trkischen Dorf am Schwarzen Meer, Vienna 1995. , Impurity as criticism. Reports from a Black Sea village in Turkey, in International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World Newsletter 5 (2000), 13. Sabine Strasser KEY WORDS: female body; impurity; social order; fainting spells; counterhegemonic potential; ritual healing; cin/peri.

West Africa
Although the literature regarding female spirit possession in Muslim West Africa is strikingly poor, in most of these Islamized societies where cult possessions take place it has been noted that women constitute the majority of the possessed. Among the Songhay of Niger, Stoller (1989) relates the fact that, during the holle hori (better known as the holey possession ceremony), the possessed mediums (called bari, horses of the spirits) are predominantly female, while male mediums participate occasionally in the possession troupes. Women can also become zima, priestesses of the possession troupe. To become a part of the possession group means that a woman has been sick, diagnosed as being invaded by a particular spirit, and initiated to the cult as a healing process. Once initiated, mediums devote a large part of their lives to their spirits; they wear clothes associated with them, make sacrifices to them, and attend possession ceremonies. A similar cult is found among the closely culturally related Zarma (Diarra 1971), and among the Fulbe of the Niamey area (Niger) where, in some villages, more than 70 percent of the horses of the spirits are women (Vidal 1990). Nonetheless, studies of spirit possession in West

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west africa Although literature is scarce, it is agreed that healing is also crucial to female cult possessions in the western part of Muslim West Africa. Among the Lebou of Senegal, where the men are in charge of the Muslim-inspired religious life and the women the guardians of the traditional religion, the ceremony known as ndep (ndoep or ndop) is a curing ritual headed by female religious specialists (the ndopkat). The rite aims to extract the rab (ancestral spirit) from the body of a patient. First, the ndopkat will diagnose the sickness by naming the spiritual agency responsible for it. She will then provide a ritual treatment and organize an initiation for the patient lasting three to seven days. In the course of this initiation, sacrifices and divination techniques are practiced, while public sessions of possession take place where women are seized by their designated spirit. Once the rab is expelled from her body, the patient becomes an adept of the society, and therefore a privileged intermediary between the human and the spirits (Zemplni 1966). Similarly, among the Bulongic (a people belonging to the cultural mosaic of Baga groups, located along the coast of Guinea-Conakry), the recent introduction of Islam (ca. 1950) and the abandonment of male pre-Islamic practices have heightened the social relevance of female pre-Islamic rituals, based on cult-possession (Berliner 2005). Bulongic women have their own secret ritual organization named kk. As is the case in numerous female associations of the subregion, kk women are particularly focused on illnesses linked to witchcraft. Indeed, anyone attacked by a witch no longer has control over herself: without knowing it, he/ she is attached to a witch. Being attached manifests itself in physical or mental troubles, a series of deaths, accidents, bad harvests, and social conflicts. It is through dance ceremonies during which certain women become possessed that they will be able to see things and to use their ritual power against witches. It is said that some women of the association are gifted with extraordinary powers such as the night eye, which enables them to see entities from the invisible world. Whilst the old men who are today the primary guardians of Islam no longer practice the sacrifices (otonion) destined to honor their spirits, the women of kk continue to gather together twice a year to hold theirs, regardless of the contention of the men who are fiercely opposed to these fetishistic practices. These ritual events take place at the beginning of the rainy season and at the end of the harvest, in consideration of the coming of the rain and the success of work in the fields. They are mainly aimed to pray to their protective spirit,

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known as mama. The entity is described as a fat woman with black skin. It is she alone who, during the otonion, takes the women (called the children of mama) during the ritual dance. The moment that they are taken by mama, some women become able to predict the future, literally to see the thing that is coming. They are also capable of locating ailments in a person (Such-and-such a man suffers from a swollen stomach, Such-andsuch a woman lost a child in that family). The spirit speaks through the mouth of the possessed while one of the oldest women asks it questions. Once mama delivers its message, the kk women can then intervene in a therapeutic way and propose sacrifices and medicines. During the possession ceremony, the ritual work of the kk seers consists mainly in checking the village, finding people attached by witches and talismans that could have been buried in the village. In the course of these otonion, the women stop frequently to engage in recitations from the Qurn. They view their possession ceremonies as both positive and necessary to social harmony without being incompatible with Islam in any way. Outside these public rituals (kk women also dance at the funerals of old adepts and during female excision ceremonies), the expertise of the kk women is famous within the region and attracts people with various ailments. Many women, young adult men, as well as the Bulongic elites living in the city and foreigners to the village, come to consult the kk seers to diagnose an ailment, to be cleansed, or made strong against potential attacks of witchcraft. The women of kk are reputed to possess powerful medicines that can cure many illnesses. In the past, for women who had already given birth, kk was especially known for treating problems connected to sterility, pregnancy, and childbirth, including stillbirths, nursing, and menstrual complications. While in many cases men have abandoned their own ritual practices in the name of Islam, women in many West African societies continue their involvement in pre-Islamic practices and use innovative means to contribute to maintaining religious beliefs and performances, perhaps in order to challenge their exclusion from Islam. Bori, kk, ndep, and holey are only a few examples of possession cults whose roots lie in the pre-Islamic era, and whose transmission to this day operates mostly through women. Even though these cults have been strongly influenced by Islam, they constitute a repository of pre-Islamic ritual knowledge of songs, dances, and healing techniques in contemporary Muslim societies. Thus, it is through the

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spirit possession
I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic religion. An anthropological study of spirit possession and shamanism, Harmondsworth, England 1971. A. Masquelier, Prayer has spoiled everything. Possession, power, and identity in an Islamic town of Niger, Durham, N.C. 2001. J. Monfouga-Nicolas, Ambivalence et culte de possession. Contribution ltude du Bori hausa, Paris 1972. S. OBrien, Pilgrimage, power, and identity. The role of the Hajj in the lives of Nigerian Hausa Bori adepts, in Africa Today 46 (1999), 1040. P. Stoller, Fusion of the worlds. An ethnography of possession among the Songhay of Niger, Chicago and London 1989. L. Vidal, Rituels de possession dans le Sahel. Exemples peul et zarma du Niger, Paris 1990. A. Zemplni, La dimension thrapeutique du culte des Rab. Ndop, Tuuru et Samp. Rites de possession chez les Wolof et les Lbou, in Psychopathologie africaine 2 (1966), 295439. David Berliner KEY WORDS: possession, pre-Islamic, healing, bori, kk, ndep, holey, Guinea-Conakry, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, spirit mediums, syncretism

deeper phenomenological realms of female spirit possession such as the physiological and healing qualities of trance, expressions of personhood through the body, and the range of religious memories that spirit possession brings into play that women reveal their own ritual and therapeutic expertise which can coexist with Muslim rites. Bibliography
D. Berliner, La fminisation de la coutume. Femmes possdes et transmission religieuse en pays bulongic (Guine, Conakry), in Cahiers dtudes africaines 45:177 (2005), 1538. J. Boddy, Spirit possession revisited. Beyond instrumentality, in Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994), 40737. F. Diarra, Femmes africaines en devenir. Les femmes zarma du Niger, Paris 1971. N. Echard, Gender relationships and religion. Women in the Hausa Bori of Ader, Niger, in C. Coles and B. Mack (eds.), Hausa women in the twentieth century, London and Madison 1995, 20720.