Weaving the Threads of Life

The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka

By: Rene Devisch

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Paperback | 1 November 1993 | Edition Number 1

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344 Pages

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2.29 x 1.55 x 0.17

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For the Yaka of Southwestern Zaire, infertility is a tear in the fabric of life, and the "Khita" fertility ritual is a trusted way of reweaving the damaged strands. In "Weaving the Threads of Life" Rene Devisch offers an extended analysis of the "Khita" cult, which leads to an original account of the workings of ritual healing.
Drawing on many years among urban and rural Yaka, Devisch analyzes their understanding of existence as a fabric of firmly but delicately interwoven threads of nature, body, and society. The fertility healing ritual calls forth forces, feelings, and meanings that allow women to rejoin themselves to the complex pattern of social and cosmic life. These elaborate rites--whether simulating mortal agony and rebirth, gestation and delivery, or flowering and decay; using music and dance, steambath or massage, dream messages or scarification--are not based on symbols of traditional beliefs. Rather, Devisch shows, the rites themselves generate forces and meaning, creating and shaping the cosmic, physical, and social world of their participants.
In contrast to current theoretical methods such as postmodern or symbolical interpretation, Devisch's praxiological approach is unique in also using phenomenological insights into the intent and results of anthropological fieldwork. This innovative work will have ramifications beyond African studies, reaching into the anthropology of medicine and the body, comparative religious history, and women's studies.

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Acknowledgments Prologue
Field and Method
The Yaka People
Fieldwork
Bantu Cults of Affliction
Healers in the Town
Healing as a Social and Theatrical Drama: A Critique
Body and Weave: A Semantic-Praxilogical Approach
The Cosmology of Gender Arrangements and Life Transmission
Horizontal and Vertical Space
Cosmological Portrayal of Gender
Animals and Plants
Capturing and 'Cooking' Untamed Forces
The Social Formation of Life Transmission
Life-bearing and Nurturing in the Homestead
Marriage as a Transfer "Along the Path to the Village"
The Reproductive Cell
The Two-forked Tree of Agnatic Descent and Uterine Filiation
Hunting versus Sorcery, and the Fabric of Kin
Body, Group, and Life-world: Between Maze and Weave
Physical and Sensory Modes of Contact
The Relational Body
The Body and Its Afflictions
Cults of Affliction and Communal Sodalities
Impediments of Life Transmission
Masculinist Views on Human Agencies in Infertility
Divinatory Etiology and the Work of Cults
Etiology as an Indication of Therapy
TheKhitaFertility Cult: Reversing the Evil
Khitaand Similar Cults
The First Stage: Reversing the Persecution into Uterine Bonds of Life Transmission
The Second Stage: The Decay and Cooking of Generative Forces
TheKhitaFertility Cult: Reorigination of the Fabric of Body, Kin, and Life-world
The Third Stage: Seclusion in the Uterus of the World
The Fourth Stage: Emancipating Forest Forces into Social Fecundity
Relapse of Illness
Fertility Rituals and Analyses Compared: A Look at Victor Turner
The Body as the Weaving Loom of Healing and Life
The Role of Music and Dance in Healing
The Source of Healing
Paradox, Transgression, and Homeopathic Healing
A Ternary Logic of Mediation and Effusion in Self-healing Epilogue
A Case of Infertility
Appendix B
Notes
References
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Weaving the Threads of Life

The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka

At a Glance

Paperback

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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