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- Title
The dialogical collective: mediumship, pain, and the interactive creation of Ndyuka Maroon subjectivity.
- Authors
Strange, Stuart Earle
- Abstract
This article explores how pain ritually assists in producing Afro-Surinamese Ndyuka Maroon understandings of subjectivity and the self. Ndyuka discourses conceive persons as composites of multiple human and spirit others. I describe how these discourses emerge dialogically during oracular interactions between possessed mediums and their patients. Beginning as inarticulate sensations, personal pain is ritually transformed into identifiable spirits who expose their hosts as embodiments of past and present social relations. Over the course of oracular interactions, the qualities of physical pain are made to communicate that the pain is both an identity and a vital part of the sufferers' embodied self. In parallel to this process, spirit mediums perform pain in possession to establish the origins of their authority in relations with spirits. Ritually transforming pain into identities of relation, Ndyuka oracular mediumship persuades patients to re-evaluate their subjective experiences as innate evidence of Ndyuka social ideology.
- Subjects
NDJUKA people; RITUAL; SUBJECTIVITY; MAROON Surinamese people; RELIGIOUS identity; RELIGION
- Publication
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016, Vol 22, Issue 3, p516
- ISSN
1359-0987
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-9655.12444