Scholarly Blinders And The Ontology Of A Unique Institution

Scholars, administrators, policymakers, and therapists have predictably come up with varying opinions on how to characterize the ngoma-type cult of affliction. As a final task in this chapter on identifying ngoma, I wish to argue for the proposition that it is a unique institution.

Definitions of institution abound, but they reflect a common understanding of how society is put together and functions. Durkheim suggested (in Parsons 1949:407) that "[a] body of rules governing action in pursuit of immediate ends insofar as they exercise moral authority derivable from a common value system may be called social institutions." A falsifiable proof of this definition held, said Durkheim, that "the means to these ends may vary, but the rules reflect the common values. If they are lost sight of, the result is a breakdown of control, and anomie." In another tradition, M. G. Smith noted (1974:212) that "whether culture is restrictively defined as the symbols, norms, values, and ideational systems of a given population, or more inclusively as their standardized and transmitted patterns of thought and action, all institutional organization has a cultural coefficient, since each institution involves collective norms, ideas, and symbols as well as standardized modes of procedure."

These general theoretical comments about the broad basis of institutions—norms, common beliefs, ends met by a range of means—would certainly be appropriate to describe what ngoma does in Central and Southern African society. The problem, of course, is that by Western institutional and scholarly standards some of the examples of ngoma are strange indeed. They have heretofore been put into rubrics of either Western institutions or have been allowed to languish in ethnographies as local culture, for example, Ndembu religion, Zulu diviners, and Kongo fertility magic.

The interpretation of African cults of affliction is analogous to the study of some other domains in anthropological research in that scholars have been faced with the need to bridge the indigenous concept with the analytical notion. Sometimes scholarship has come down on the side of the former, as in totemism, taboo, or shamanism; other times it has come down on the latter, which is frequently a reflection of a Western institutional category.

The debate about kinship in Western anthropology is instructive here. David Schneider's Critique of the Study of Kinship took issue with

the pervasive assumption by generations of anthropologists since Morgan of the universality of the family and kinship. This he explained, not so much by faulting Louis Henry Morgan for finding the family and kinship among the Iroquois, but by faulting anthropology at large for adopting Western notions of basic institutions and imposing them upon societies of the world. The "big four" institutions of Western society are, for Schneider: kinship (the family), the economy (business), politics (the state), and religion (the church).

Western social science, including anthropology, has extended this quartet as analytical categories onto other societies, much to the detriment of insights to be gained. Societies in which these institutions or attributes seem to be combined differently, or are only partially represented, are held to be "undifferentiated," and therefore "more primitive," or somehow disorganized or muddled.

One of the major challenges, then, in presenting ngoma has been to transcend Western institutional categorization. The difficulty of Westerners, and of Western-trained Africans, in accepting ngoma or the cult of affliction as a valid institution in its own right, has been instructive in this regard. In many African settings the colonial legacy of Western institutional structures clashes markedly with the African institution.

Ngoma in Tanzania, where there has been a commitment to build on African foundations, illustrates the point. Officially, African medicine and its institutions are recognized. Research units devoted to the subject have been sponsored. However, the research effort and the statement of the reality of therapeutic ngoma are initiated from the specialized basis of Western institutional categories. Thus, the Traditional Medicine Research Unit at the National Hospital is charged with examining the botanical and chemical character of medicines used in ngoma and other types of indigenous medicine and with creating a program for primary health within the framework of indigenous healing. The Music section of the Ministry of Culture is charged with researching the dance and song basis of ngoma, as well as sponsoring dance competitions of current ngoma groups and licensing entertainment ngoma. The Ministry also sponsors the national dance troupe and allied ngoma groups. The political party of Tanzania has de facto liaisons to ngoma and large healer's associations. Tanzanian bureaucracy thus sections ngoma into distinctive categories consonant with Western rules of social order.

In my earlier work on Lemba (Janzen 1982) I observed the struggle of publishers and reviewers to come to terms with this dilemma of the integrity of the institution versus the categories of Western scholar-

ship. The publisher, in filling out the Library of Congress Catalogue Data page, described Lemba as a "cult," thus a subset of religion. Several reviewers tried to escape the straitjacket of Western institutional typologies but succeeded only partially in doing so, coming up with hyphenated categorical types. One reviewer, after a page of discussion, noted that "to define it simply [Lemba was] a cult and a social institution that controlled trade, markets, and processes of exchange" (Mudimbe 1986). Another, picking up on my vocabulary, called Lemba a "therapeutic-alliance-trading institution" (Feldman 1988).

These reviewers appreciated the unique institutional profile better than another who spoke of the book's having offered "a new framework for thinking about a little understood region of Africa and for analyzing the relations between the political, kinship, religions, and economic aspects of social structure" (Riesman 1985), thereby virtually sectioning the subject through the Western institutional categories.

Another reviewer (Stuart 1986), whose summary of the work is a model of succinct interpretation, offered this explanation of Lemba's mix of trade, alliances, and therapy: "The ngoma , or the 'drum of affliction' became the cultural symbol of a therapeutic society ... which evolved to deal with the social stress and cultural change created by Europe's growing commercial influence." He concluded with this insight: "[T]herapeutics may be the metaphor serving to facilitate consolidation of substantial resources, material and human, and to aid long-term reordering of institutions of redress, economic redistribution, and ideological change."

We are thus confronted in Lemba, as in many other variants of the ngoma profile across Central and Southern Africa, with a constellation of practices and perspectives that are unique and yield to understanding only with some critical analysis. This realization highlights the centrality of the need to deal carefully with the homology between language, behavior, and institutions, which is closely related to the first activity of divining, science, religion, and a host of other human enterprises, to wit, naming the phenomenon.

To understand this better, it is instructive to look at reviews of the Lemba book, particularly one that discussed the question of naming ngoma. This reviewer (Stevens 1984:29–31) thought the study had been done a disservice by allowing "the term 'drum of affliction' to stand in the subtitle." It was not that "drum of affliction "—derived from ngoma—might be an erroneous label for Lemba but that only a handful

of specialists like Victor Turner know the term refers to Ndembu rituals. It has little recognition value as a more widespread type of phenomenon, he argued. Yet if none of the Western institutional labels are appropriate, and an expert's English term for the indigenous term in one African society is not appropriate, then by which term do we describe, or understand, the phenomenon if we wish to avoid having it locked into one or more versions of, or a hyphenated version of, the Western institutional grid? Beginning with Turner's local Ndembu work, Stevens reasons out an approximation of ngoma in the broader sense, freed of its Western institutional categorical boxes.

[Turner's] use of the alternate Ndembu meaning, "drum," is significant to an anthropological investigation of symbol and meaning in African cultures, and it will serve students and collectors of African art well to consider for a moment the possibility that a drum, as an object, may be meaningful only as a construction of materials, barely even as a musical instrument; its cultural meaning is revealed only through the total socio-religious context of its use. In such a context, then, "drum" is symbol: it is drumming, and it is collective sentiment, catharsis, transcendence—indeed, the whole of the ritual process. The ritual process is social effort.

Finally Stevens comes to his "discovery point":

In this sense, then, the phrase "drum of affliction" is justified as referring to a type of ritual; and we can understand why Bantu-speakers may use the term ngoma to refer even to a ritual in which drums are not used. "Drum of affliction" is a ritual with a therapeutic aim, the exorcising of some malign agency, but as both Turner and Janzen make clear, "drum" (ngoma ) means the aims, activities, actors, and institutions, and the network of symbols by which they are linked and united, that constitute the ritual process. (Stevens 1984:29–30)

Stevens is correct that ngoma , however we wish to gloss this term in English or another analytical language, refers over a wide area of Central and Southern Africa to a cluster of recurring processes and perspectives having to do with the interpretation of misfortune, usually manifested by disease or disease symptoms that are imputed to spirits or ancestors, and the rites to bring the thus "afflicted" into a supportive network with others similarly afflicted and to treat them by empowering them to deal effectively with the adversity. The particular source of the adversity, whether it is the impact of foreign trade, twinning, snake-bite, or lineage segmentation, is secondary to the fact of its definition as the phenomenon of adversity.

Conclusion

Ngoma, then, is a composite, historically unique institution widespread throughout Central and Southern Africa, with many local and regional variations. Its identity as an institution and as a behavioral process, often with name recognition, should satisfy scholarship. That it has taken so long for scholarship to catch up with indigenous usage is tribute to the tendency of scholarship, and administration, to categorize in its own, often local, terms the phenomenon before it.

This chapter's goal of "identifying ngoma" has been external and formal, based on examining comparative and historical distributions of "words, acts, and things" and how they vary in relation to one another. Its apparent central purpose as an institution is to respond to the need for order, meaning, and control in the face of misfortune and affliction as defined by a core proto-Bantu cognate, dòg : that just as words and intentions by others can afflict, so they can heal.