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Ethnos

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The Bloodstain: Spirit Possession, Menstruation, and Transgression in Niger

Adeline Masqueliera a Tulane University, USA

Online publication date: 09 June 2011

To cite this Article Masquelier, Adeline(2011) 'The Bloodstain: Spirit Possession, Menstruation, and Transgression in

Niger', Ethnos, 76: 2, 157 182 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2010.546867 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.546867

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The Bloodstain: Spirit Possession, Menstruation, and Transgression in Niger

Adeline Masquelier
Tulane University, USA
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abstract Examining the varied reactions of people to the blood-stained wrapper of a spirit devotee during a bori possession ceremony in Niger, I explore how dirt and disgust are more complex than neat structuralist models of purity and pollution often used to explain them. Understanding menstrual blood in situational terms, and looking at the reactions as shaped more about complex dimensions of agency in the course of possession, secrecy, revealing things known but not spoken, and forms of attention allows us to grasp better the varied kinds of disgust some people expressed after the incident. keywords Niger, spirit possession, menstruation, secrecy, transgression Red on White: Marias Bloody Wrapper n June 1989, during a routine wasa (bori possession ceremony) in the Nigerien village of Kallon Ruwa,1 a young bori devotee named Tsakani became possessed by a spirit when she was menstruating. When she rose to dance in front of the musicians, everyone caught a glimpse of the stain on her wrapper. The incident caused much controversy. Mediums in Mawri communities2 should abstain from participating in wasani (plural of wasa) when they menstruate for fear of offending the spirits. While the sight of Tsakanis stained wrapper was by all accounts experienced as repulsive, the diversity of individual responses which the incident elicited both on the spot and in the days that followed, nonetheless, suggests that local experiences of dirt and disgust are more complex than neat structuralist models of purity and pollution (Douglas 1966) have implied. In what follows, I consider bori devotees reactions to this public display of menstrual blood to explore what these reveal about local conceptions of taboo and transgression and question the Douglassian

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assumption that moral evaluations are necessarily derivative of some categorical needs for orderliness. Tsakani had been actively participating in bori ceremonies since her recent divorce. Attending wasani enabled her to engage in prostitution when she needed cash. When her friend Zeinabou started planning her initiation (gyara) into bori, Tsakani enthusiastically assisted with the preparations. Zeinabou had decided to hold the wasa in a remote village, miles from the town of Dogondoutchi where both she and Tsakani lived. In her eagerness to impress the bori community, she invested considerable energy in ensuring that those attending the wasa would be treated well: large amounts of food were bought, and the services of numerous women requisitioned for meal preparation. Money was apportioned to transport out-of-town guests, hire musicians, and purchase sacricial animals. In addition to the usual kola nuts, guests received gifts of soap a rare treat. On the rst day, things appeared to run smoothly. One after another, the spirits mounted the initiate and her cohort of attending devotees. For Zeinabou, Tsakani, and other followers of bori, a religion that has become marginalized in recent years thanks to the growing ascendency of Islam, spirits are a necessary and unavoidable presence in peoples lives. They both cause and cure a wide range of ills. They provoke yet also prevent drought, famine, and epidemics (Masquelier 2001). They are centrally implicated in the well-being of households and communities from which they receive offerings of sacricial blood on which they feed. Although they cannot be chased at will from the bodies they choose to invade, their comings and goings should ideally be restricted to the arena of bori rituals. During wasani, these bodiless creatures possess bodied hosts and momentarily gain texture, voice, and visibility.3 Once spirits have chosen a host, they will possess this individual for the rest of her life. When their presence is requested at a wasa, spirits arrive one family at a time, and they each possess their attending devotees. A person can be a host of several spirits, but spirits take turns possessing their hosts as they respond to the invitation of musicians singing their praises. Partly because many of the rules governing the ordering of space, the segregation of gender, and the display of bodies are outed during wasani, bori is condemned by Muslims as a sinful and anti-Islamic activity.4 While bori demeanor, dress, and dancing routinely offend Muslim sensibilities for their apparent lack of restraint, the social, sexual, and sartorial freedom enjoyed by spirit devotees is not limitless. Spirit devotees actions are guided by moral imperatives. Yet in its various expressions (the management of shame, the practice of prostitution, the
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spread of gossip, and so on), morality cannot be rmly located within categorical boundaries and must instead be understood as contextual and contingent. Because spirits themselves have their own idiosyncratic relations to dirt and disorder, morality is constantly renegotiated in the context of devotees encounters with their possessing spirits. When it came time to invite Maria, a vain but occasionally vicious spirit who thrives on candy and cosmetics, the voice of the bori praise singer rose melodiously above the sharp clap of the calabash drum. One by one, young women on the possession grounds started panting and shivering as the multiple personications of the irtatious spirit took hold of their bodies. Upon being caught by her spirit, Tsakani stood up in her impeccably white outt the color worn by Maria devotees to display a prominent bloodstain on her back side. A couple of older women rushed to cover the ignominious red spot with a wrapper they tied around the young womans waist as the audience gasped in a mixture of horror and astonishment. Tsakani was whisked away from the possession grounds. I did not follow the women who escorted her to a more private place and did not nd out what was said to her as she recovered from her ill-fated possession. The whole affair lasted but a few seconds yet it was clear, judging from the number of faces in the audience that registered alarm, dismay, even denial, that something momentous had happened. I saw a woman cover her face while most simply stared. Except for the two devotees who had stood up to intervene, no one was moving. Meanwhile, the other Maria spirits incarnated in their human hosts remained oblivious to the disruption caused by one of their sisters. Despite the loud clap of the drums, I heard a disapproving murmur running through the assembled crowd. At the time, I took this to mean that Tsakani had committed a serious violation of the bori space and that dramatic consequences would ensue. Yet except for receiving sharp remonstrances from senior women, Tsakani suffered no punishment for her transgressive behavior. It wasnt that the community sympathized with her. Many were terribly embarrassed by the incident, and quite a few thought that she should be taught a lesson. The great majority, however, felt that she had been humiliated enough and that if she deserved further punishment, the offended spirit would see to it. Maria was bound to be angry. Given the spirits peculiar obsession with dirt, that the whole thing had happened to her had uniquely complex implications which I explore below. Subsequent discussions I had with witnesses convinced me that the young womans failure to adequately contain her menstrual ow had elicited a wide
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range of emotions: shock, even repulsion followed by anger, and condemnation, and for a few, including Zeinabou, frustration for as we shall see, the young initiate had her own reasons for being upset about the incident. Everyone agreed that Tsakanis menstrual blood was out of place, yet opinions varied as to exactly how her performance during the wasa constituted a violation. In what follows, I show that peoples reactions had as much to do with the particular circumstances surrounding Tsakanis possession, the specic identity of the possessing spirit, and devotees differing level of personal investment in bori as with any widespread notion that menstruation is inimical to spirit possession. If possession, like other technologies of transformation such as smithing or cooking, is incompatible with the notion of failed conception indexed by menstruation, womens fertility, on the other hand, is dependent on spirits. In this regard, conventional notions of the repulsive or, as Menninghaus (2003:1) put it, of the experience of nearness that is not wanted, while not entirely inadequate to describe how bori devotees reacted to Tsakanis immodesty, are nevertheless insufcient to make sense of how spirit possession attends to questions of sexuality, fertility, and morality. To characterize the shock, aversion, or outrage people felt as a visceral impulse to reorder experience ignores the complex entanglements between bori and blood, spirits and menstrual disorder, possession and purity. By projecting an image of womanhood at odds with conventional views of the docile housewife whose fertility is contained and controlled, Tsakanis faux pas illustrates how bori enables women to reect upon their world, interrogate its established truths, and probe its moral boundaries. Tsakani did not consciously expose her state of impurity to the assembled crowd of bori devotees. She was, after all, no longer herself but Maria, the coquettish prostitute of the bori pantheon. Yet all the same, it was Tsakani who was blamed for the incident. She may have been speaking as Maria while in the throes of possession, yet paradoxically, it was clearly the woman, and not the spirit, who was menstruating.5 Aside from indexing the danger that generally stems from transgressing the rules governing sexuality and reproduction, the reactions her bloodstain elicited underscore the ambiguities that surround agency and the dialectic of self and other (or host and spirit) in possession.6 At another level, they also point to the inherent tension between secrecy and exposure in bori, providing a measure of what happens when that which should remain secret is accidentally disclosed. The bloodstains subversive force, I suggest below, arose out of the revelation of a public secret essential to the workings of bori. By uncovering that which [was] generally known but
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[couldnt] be articulated (Taussig 1999:5), namely, that women did not stay away from bori when bleeding, Tsakani inadvertently created a forum for airing issues that could not have otherwise been discussed openly. Situating Menstruation Across the globe menstruation evokes a variety of responses ranging from indifference to mild disgust to frank abhorrence (Richard 1956; Lindenbaum chard & Bonte 1978; Laws et al. 1985; Buckley & Gottlieb 1988; Boddy 1972; E ritier 1996; Beidelman 1997). It was Mary 1989; Delaney 1991; Herbert 1993; He Douglas who rst suggested that dirt could never be considered as a unique, isolated event but should instead be understood as the by-product of a systematic ordering and classication of matter whereby that which did not unambiguously t in was thrown out (1966:35). Following Douglass classic equation of liminality with pollution, anthropologists widely proposed that in societies where menstrual blood and menstruating women were considered polluting, the association should be taken as a sign that women presented a threat to men, male spaces, and male activities. In such contexts, menstrual blood was nothing but dead womb blood and any contact with it might cause further death and destruction. What has emerged from the more recent literature on the so-called dangers of menstruation, however, is that the social context of pollution is crucial to our understanding of dirt as a situational, rather than substantive, category (Herbert 1993). As relative, not absolute, concepts, impurity and pollution can no longer be uniformly associated with womens bodies.7 In many cases, it is only when it is placed in contexts in which it appears contiguous to other processes or principles of fertility that menstrual blood becomes a threatening substance whose effects must be neutralized. Menstruating women throughout much of Africa are thus commonly barred from furnaces and forges, their exclusion highlighting the fundamental incompatibility between provisional sterility and processes of fertility such as iron smelting chard a transformative process seen analogically as a form of reproduction (E 1965; Herbert 1993:95). Menstrual blood, here, is out of place only insofar as it is iconic of failed conception and, as such, antithetical to the transformative process by which iron ore fuses in the furnace. In diverse religious contexts (from Sabbath day in South African Zionist churches to spirit possession ceremonies), prohibitions surrounding menstruation are best understood in terms of the social control of sexuality and reproduction (Herbert 1993:90), highlighting not the out-of-place-ness of menstrual blood so much as the threatening potency of fertility.
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While this literature provides useful insight into the situatedness of dirt and taboo, it remains hampered by its structuralist perspective and is unable to account for the uid, messy, and inconsistent nature of social realities. The case of the bloodstain, for instance, suggests the limitations of assuming that the notion of transgression itself has a singular, xed, and uniformly agreed upon meaning for all members of a particular community or culture. There is more to cultural understandings of menstruation than a straightforward incompatibility with certain processes or contexts of reproduction. Accounting for the multiple, contingent, and (at times) contradictory meanings of menstruation presupposes paying attention not only to collective representations of menstruation but also to individual and accidental ones and tracing the ways in which these representations emerge through practical engagement in lives lived (Moore 1994:53). Menstruation is rarely an object of conversation in Mawri communities. Like other matters related to reproduction, it elicits embarrassment and cannot be discussed openly because it is tied to sexuality itself a shameful subject. When Tsakanis transgression became the focus of extensive, if hushed, discussions, bori devotees found themselves in the unusual position of articulating what menstruation was all about. In addition to underscoring the highly ambiguous nature of menstrual blood ranging from a positive augur of womens fertility to a dangerous sign of disorder these discussions were a reminder that the disgusting attracts as much as it repels. The disgusting, Miller (1997:22) notes, has an allure; it exerts a fascination which manifests itself in the difculty of averting our eyes at a gory accident. In the days that followed Zeinabous initiation, people could no more deny themselves the thrill of discussing (or simply listening to) the details of Tsakanis mishap than they had been able to turn away from the sight of her bloodied wrapper. Blood, Flows, Health, and Reproduction in Mawri Society Among Hausaphone Mawri communities, the notion of ow plays an important role in structuring local experiences of health, illness, and reproduction. Besides offering a vantage point from which to analyze certain principles governing the management of afiction in this region of West Africa, the imagery of ow provides further insight into how things work at the cosmic, social, and individual levels. Whether it refers to the circulation of goods in the marketplace, the gushing of blood during sacrice, or the rain falling from the skies, it is critical to local understandings of life, movement, and productivity (Masquelier 1993, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002). Flow is, rst and foremost, central to
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indigenous conceptions of a healthy body. As a prime symbol of this lifeproducing ow, blood should circulate at a certain speed throughout the entire body. Sickness occurs when this ow is blocked or otherwise anomic. A hearty appetite is a positive sign of health so long as the body consequently lets out urine, feces, children, and so on. The importance of balanced exchange is further illustrated by the way people deal with a wide range of conditions leading to (or produced by) blockage. The surgical removal of the uvula in newborns is thought to prevent overgrowth and the subsequent blockage of the throat, thereby facilitating the ingestion of food. Hymenectomy (and at times clitoridectomy) is performed on newborn girls to remove the appendage that would later in life block the healthy intermixing of sexual uids during intercourse (Darrah 1980). While excess blood tends to be eliminated naturally through sweat, it must occasionally be removed articially through cupping (small incisions on the neck and the back).8 Obstructed labor in Hausa-speaking communities of northern Nigeria is treated by making incisions on the anterior wall of the vagina to allow a good amount of blood to ow (Last 1979). Blood is shed to counter impeded ow and promote health, yet too much ow is generally unwelcome, potentially dangerous, and often subject to taboos. Butchers who shed blood and therefore attract spirits who feed on it belong to a special caste whose social behavior is rigorously regulated to prevent the unwarranted intrusion of spiritual entities in human communities. In general, accidental blood ow (such as a nose bleed) is alarming for it signals imbalance and ill health. One could say as Cole put it in the Malagasy context that blood in its proper place inside the body is proper to good health (2001:243). Menstrual ow, however, is a different kind of blood/ow. When a woman becomes pregnant, her blood ow ceases and goes toward making the structure of the infant (Wall 1988:172). This cyclical blood, Latour observes, differs from corporeal blood and never mixes with it: it appears in women at puberty and disappears at menopause: It is a very particular kind of blood which is either released from the body or transforms itself into esh (the foetus), a distinct kind of blood which expels foreign humors when it ows out of the body (1992:66). Because it plays such a crucial role in the procreative functions of the female body, menstruation is part of those physiological facts long assumed by anthropologists to place women closer to nature (Ortner 1973). From the Mawri perspective, this so-called closeness to nature is perhaps better translated in terms of vulnerability: womens inherent openness and lack of control over certain body orices make them more susceptible to the effect of the environment (heat, cold, spirits, and so on). After childbirth, the
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parturients openness must hence be counterbalanced by the application of heat which cooks the body and restores strength to it (Smith 1955; Darrah 1980; Masquelier 1995). In this regard, fertility is paradoxically both ow and blockage: while it hinges on the ow of blood and semen, these ows are blocked after conception. Eventually, different kinds of ow are released in the form of children and milk. Menarche among Mawri occurs somewhere between the age of 12 and 16, rarely later. The rst menstruation does not lead to any rite of passage, marking the transformation of the Mawri child into an initiated adult ready for marriage. Nor does it imply any change in the way the young girl is treated. It is simply taken as a physiological sign that she is ready for pregnancy and motherhood. The most common terms for menstruation are jini (blood) and haila (menstrual blood); while haila refers specically to menstruation, jini can be used to describe any kind of human or animal blood. Since menstruation is not an appropriate topic of conversation, many girls do not know about it until it happens (Piault 1963). They are not given any instructions on what to do during the period of haila, but soon come to understand that it is a shameful condition one should hide from others. Piault (1963) notes that while women ought not to engage in sex while they are menstruating, they are not supposed to advertise these cyclical ows either. By the same token, husbands are theoretically not supposed to detect their wives condition.9 Note that the shame (kumya) that surrounds menstruation as well as issues of sexuality is more than a matter of embarrassment: because it dictates appropriate conduct, it is central to the sustenance of moral order. Experienced as inhibition, kumya prevents one from engaging in improprieties, but it can also arise out of ones sense of having committed an offense or being socially inadequate. Young women who become pregnant before they marry inict shame on their families, whereas those who commit a crime or a violation (or are inappropriately dressed) are said to feel no shame. In a society where female bodies, their visibility, and mobility are the object of intense scrutiny, kumya (as both inhibition and moral discourse) often centers on womens dress and deportment as the opprobrium generated by Tsakanis shameful exposure indicates. As van de Walle & Renne point out (2001:xxvi), the continued importance of children on much of the African continent puts considerable pressure on women to reproduce, making the need for regular menstruation and reproductive health critical to their social and economic standing. Because most women are either pregnant or nursing during a large part of their reproductive years, they do not menstruate on a regular basis. This partly accounts for the
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silence surrounding the topic of menstruation. In my experience, women would much rather talk about babies than about blood.10 If menstruation is perceived as an index of fertility, it simultaneously represents the messy ux or mortal ow (Delaney 1988) that bears negative implications with respect to conception. For wives pressured to produce children, the idea that menstrual ow signals a failure to conceive translates concretely into practices aimed at bringing sharply into focus their fertility by curbing their sexuality. It is as if the two cannot coexist simultaneously. Women are thus encouraged to avoid intercourse for as long as they nurse. In so doing, they insure that blood (from menstruation) in its association with female sexuality alternates, but chard 1985:55). does not overlap, with the prime symbol of maternity, milk (E Everything, then, is done to limit the ow of blood while augmenting the chard 1985:55). ow of milk (E Prostitution, in this regard, is problematic: rst, through the commoditization of sexuality, an immoral economy emerges around the exchange of seminal uids and money. Secondly, the uncontained female sexuality that characterizes prostitution is widely thought to cause infertility. Women who have multiple sexual partners are thought to jeopardize their ability to bear children by engaging in extramarital (and excessive) sexual activity as well through heightened exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, prostitutes control their fertility (and ensure their childlessness) through the use of contraceptives and abortifacients. From this perspective, Tsakanis leak was multiply transgressive: it epitomized not just the failure to contain the ow of blood in the space of bori11 but also the danger of unbinding female sexuality from its marital moorings. Traveling out of Dogondoutchi to attend village possession ceremonies afforded Tsakani some measure of invisibility when it came to nding clients, as it did for other young women desirous of concealing their involvement in the sex trade. When she participated in prostitution, however, the sexual encounters Tsakani engaged in did not produce children. Her menses were a periodic reminder of that. Though she aspired to marriage and motherhood, Zeinabou similarly occasionally dispensed sexual favors this was largely how she had nanced her initiation. She too had experienced bleeding on that fateful day, the day of her initiation. Determined not to let her condition affect her participation in the ceremony, she had taken steps to stop the bleeding. Unlike Tsakani, she had learned how to control and conceal the contradictions inherent to the life of a young female bori devotee. Far from feeling sorry for her friend for the humiliation she had experienced, she was angry at her: through her failure to control her bodily emissions,
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Tsakani showed clumsiness and incompetence. She also revealed that not everyone abided by the rules of purity governing possession. If the onset of physical puberty is not attributed ritual signicance, certain prohibitions nonetheless surround menstruation: a menstruating woman cannot prepare sauces for the evening meal or have sex with her husband chard & Bonte 1978) lest she contaminates the productivity entailed in (E cooking and sex.12 Because her body lacks the capacity to control blood ow, she is barred from shedding blood: only male bori devotees become owners of the knife, entrusted with the duty of sacricing to the spirits. Only men become butchers. By the same token, slashing the throat of animals in preparation for meals, to celebrate a childs birth, or to commemorate the sacrice of Abraham is a task reserved to male household members. Menstruating women are also denied access to smelting grounds. As elsewhere in the world, menstruation leads to a variety of restrictions on womens domestic, professional, and sexual activities. Dangers and Powers of Menstrual Blood If women speak of menstruation in rather oblique terms, it is not for lack of concern. A good portion of the women I met were very anxious to regulate menstruation and attend to symptoms that could signal menstrual disorders and, by implication, fertility problems. By making reproduction an important focus of its therapeutic efcacy, bori plays a vital role in the lives of Mawri mothers and would-be mothers. A woman who had consulted various medical specialists to seek a cure for her constant and excessive bleeding was told by a bori healer that her dysmenorrhea was caused by the spirit Gurmunya, mother of Maria, on whom she had inadvertently stepped one night while going out to urinate. Making an offering to the spirit, he suggested, would appease her and lead to the womans recovery. As elsewhere in Africa (Turner 1968; Janzen 1982; Boddy 1989; Devisch 1993), menstrual and reproductive disorders are often attributed to spirits who have been wronged or ignored. Women unable to conceive or bring to term a pregnancy frequently seek the services of a bori healer who searches for the origin of their reproductive difculties. Once the spirit allegedly causing their reproductive disorder is identied, forgiveness can be sought through offerings and promises of continued veneration. For women who face the threat of divorce because they have borne no children to their husbands, the diagnosis of sleeping pregnancy (kwantace, a condition whereby the patient is said to be pregnant for months, even years, without ever giving birth) validates their fertile status and reinforces their
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identity as would-be mothers.13 Such a diagnosis also shifts the burden of failed motherhood to an external entity the spirit who captured the womans womb and retains a grip on the supposedly dormant fetus. Sleeping pregnancies are fairly atypical reproductive disorders.14 Continued bleeding and inability to conceive tend to be more common conditions attributed to spirits. In fact, Maria is often blamed for visiting infertility on her devotees or causing them to neglect their babies. Her mother Gurmunya is routinely found to be behind a womans repeated miscarriages. This lame but dangerous spirit likes to mess with womens reproductive capacities, although, as we shall see, her relationship to fertility is very different from Marias. By providing a space of reexivity in which women can ponder the cause and consequences of infertility, bori allows female devotees to negotiate their identities as wives, mothers, and guarantors of social reproduction (Masquelier 2001). Reproductive health is not the sole responsibility of spirits, however. Mawri women themselves are actively engaged in controlling their fertility. They use herbal remedies (see Renne 2001 and Levin 2001 for similar methods in southwestern Nigeria) to maintain regularity of menses, cleanse the womb of impurities,15 and stop menstruation altogether as we shall see, the latter practice has important implications in the context of Tsakanis leakage and Zeinabous subsequent assessment of it. Just as bleeding can be averted, irregular or insufcient menstruation (symptomatic of blockage) is often remedied by emmenagogic medication prescribed by indigenous healers. Parturients are similarly treated to accelerate postpartum bleeding and cleanse the womb of any remaining blood in the days following delivery. Womens management of the volume and regularity of their ows notwithstanding, menstrual blood is viewed with considerable ambiguity. As well as making Muslim women unt to enter mosques or fast during Ramadan and disqualifying female bori devotees from participation in possession ceremonies, menstruation is related to the pathophysiology of certain illnesses and bodily states. Leprosy and albinism, for instance, are thought to stem from sexual relations that take place during the menstrual period and lead to the conception of a defective fetus. Menstrual blood is also an ingredient, so it is said, in sorcery poisons (Wall 1988:147).16 A man having sex with a menstruating woman runs the risk of becoming temporarily or permanently sterile while his partner will experience prolonged bleeding that is generally incurable. Paradoxically, and like other agents that can both kill and cure, menstrual blood is held by some to be the most efcient remedy against hemorrhaging and poisoning. In the past, wounded warriors allegedly stopped bleeding by
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ingesting a medication made of menstrual blood collected on rags (Latour 1992).17 The multiple meanings of menstrual blood in Mawri society, its powers to heal bodies, as well as its capacity to signify mortal ux and spoil transformative activities aptly illustrate Taylors (1988:1344) observation that liquids are privileged vehicles of signication for both physiological and social processes because they possess the capacity to ow and thus mediate between distinct realms of being . . . attenuating the opposition between self and other. Bloods capacity to bridge different domains of experience is nowhere more evident than in the sacricial act. Shedding sacricial blood reenacts the pact originally established between settlers and the spiritual occupants of the land. If blood is a generative uid in the Mawri model of human/spirit relations, the ow of blood in bori is nevertheless conned to the context of sacrice. This means that whereas blood is shed to propitiate the spirits, other kinds of blood spills (such as nose bleed or menstruation) are strictly prohibited. A menstruating woman cannot sit on the same mat as the amarya (initiate) and serve as ritual assistant. If called to sit with the initiate, she must decline and ask to be excused from the wasa. The dangers of menstrual blood on the possession grounds were described to me in terms of purity, a concept that resonates with the issues of power and morality in complex ways. Although spirit mediums who have been initiated into bori can attain prominence as healers and mediators between spirits and the human community, a common assumption is that they are impure (masu dauda) because like the average person, they engage in morally disreputable or sullying activities. Only by undergoing shan ice, a second initiation during which they drink the trees (i.e. a concoction made of tree barks, roots, and leaves), do bori mediums rid themselves of impurities and become masu tsabta (clean). By absorbing in concentrated form qualities inherent in the wild, shan ice initiates acquire strength, courage, and purity. These qualities make them ideally suitable vessels for the spirits. As embodiment of purity (tsarki), masu shan ice are treated as high-ranking members of bori: they enjoy access to ritually restricted spaces and are entitled to honoric burial ceremonies. Just as morality in bori acquires specic valences that often conict with broader understandings of Muslim virtue and integrity (especially when it comes to women) so the purity achieved through initiation into shan ice does not preclude other expressions of impurity (such as those attached to sexual promiscuity). Understanding what purity means and how it works in bori implies recognizing that the distinctions people make between dirt and
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cleanliness or virtue and immorality are neither xed nor consistent. In the past, ones state of purity (regardless of whether one had undergone shan ice) could be measured through ordeals that tested ones resistance to heat since moral integrity allegedly made one impervious to the effects of high temperature. Bori devotees would dip their hands in a boiling pot of millet paste or pick up bean cakes from a hot griddle. Those who burned themselves were deemed impure, while those who showed no pain (or scalding) proved they were virtuous. That bori devotees are no longer tested in such dramatic ways is testimony to the degradation of moral standards, in the eyes of the older generation of bori practitioners. People today are thought to be less honorable than their forefathers and less committed to upholding high moral standards: they are viewed as greedy, selsh, untrustworthy, and sexually promiscuous. Preserving some measure of purity by barring menstruating women from the possession grounds remains, nonetheless, essential to the success of possession performances. In the absence of tsarki (purity) ordeals, the scrutiny that womens leakages attract is a reminder that female bodies provide a fruitful terrain for negotiating the categorical boundaries of purity.18 The requirement that all mediums be pure before they can become vessels for un-embodied beings puts women at a disadvantage during their reproductive years especially young women like Tsakani or Zeinabou who are not pregnant or lactating.19 It is only after they stop menstruating permanently that the purity constraints surrounding female mediums access to wasani are lifted and they can engage more fully in bori rituals. Paradoxically, it is generally during their reproductive years that female devotees enlist the support of spirits to ensure a healthy pregnancy. Maria Spirits, White Things, and the Dirt of Menstruation Let us turn to the spirit involved in the controversy surrounding Tsakanis violation of the rules governing possession. Maria, the prostitute spirit, most saliently expresses the concerns, fears, and aspirations of contemporary Mawri women: she epitomizes the looseness and dissipation associated with prostitution at the same time that she presents an alternative to the traditional Mawri marriage in which wives are economically dependent on and subordinate to their husbands (Masquelier 1995). Maria is both one and many. She is a vain and wanton being. She seduces men and has sex for money when she is not taking care of her own spirit husband often described as lazy and useless. A narcissistic spirit enchanted with her own beauty, Maria loves to consume sweet things. Her indulgence in sweet food itself iconic of luxury
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and eroticism speaks to the kind of deregulated sexuality which the coquettish spirit embodies (Masquelier 1995). During wasani, Maria hosts are given an assortment of candy, sugar cubes, perfume, and eyeliners. Marias character may be morally tainted but her wardrobe is immaculate. The spirit dislikes dirt (dauda) intensely. The mattress her human hosts sit on is carefully dusted and perfumed. A stained outt may compel her to punish her host by making her sick or requesting she buy new clothes. To avoid contamination, she stays away from spirits who make their hosts roll on the ground or wash themselves with sand. Her diet further attests to her fancy for whiteness: she loves rened sugar and chews only white kola nuts. When possessed, Marias devotees do little else besides contemplating their reections in looking glasses or brushing ecks of dust off their clothes. Donning sparkling white dresses and brandishing eyeliners, they turn possession ceremonies into beauty sessions. Signicantly most of the devotees of Maria I met were young prostitutes who had escaped unhappy marriages to much older men or who, like Zeinabou, had not yet married. In their relationship to fashion and maternity, they closely resembled the prostitute spirit: they dressed elegantly and were frequently childless.20 Maria dislikes dirt of any kind but is especially repulsed by the dirt of childbirth (daudar haifuwa). This abhorrence of the messy process of childbirth is yet another means through which the spirit expresses her inherent dislike for babies who are the living embodiments of the transformative capacities she negates and destroys. Maria herself is barren. She is not welcome at feasts that celebrate healthy maternities because she is a potent symbol and agent of failed reproduction. By engaging in sex without ever seeking to conceive a child, Maria speaks to the destructive impact on fertility of a sexuality focussed on commodities. Returning to Tsakanis inadvertent faux pas, we are better equipped to understand the implications of the stained wrapper. Tsakani, it came without saying, should not have participated in Zeinabous gyara while menstruating. Unlike Zeinabou who took care to conceal her condition, she did not know how to cultivate the appearance of purity so central to the proper performance of bori. Her visible lack of self-containment on the possession ground was all the more problematic in that she had deled Maria whose particular aversion to messy birthing bodies and blood ows was well known. A bori devotee told me that Tsakani should rapidly beg for the spirits forgiveness. Her offense would otherwise not be forgotten, she insisted, because dirt was the one thing Maria could not stand. Given the gravity of the offense, many agreed
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that if Tsakani did not seek mercy, she should prepare for painful retribution on the part of the spirit. Not everyone decried the transgressor so straightforwardly, however, and this is why the equation of menstruation with pollution requires further exploration. Gurmunya, Motherhood, and the Messiness of Bodies From what I gathered in the days following the incident, that the abuse had been visited on Maria and not some other, less dirt-phobic spirit was signicant. As friends explained to me, if Tsakani had been possessed by Marias mother Gurmunya, the public display of the soiled wrapper would not have caused such uproar. Gurmunya doesnt care about dirt, one friend bluntly observed. This statement points to the widely differing values that Maria and her mother personify despite their close bond.21 Though both spirits cause women to suffer from infertility or a miscarriage, they are guided in their relations to humans by widely divergent considerations, duties, and desires. Consequently, they relate differently to the realities of sex, birth, and motherhood. While her daughter chases dirt, tidies endlessly, and surrounds herself with white things, Gurmunya is a lame spirit condemned to squat on the ground, a guarantee that she will soil her wrapper. In contrast to neat Maria who has rened cleanliness to an art, she basks in dirt and is neither afraid nor offended by it. Although not entirely devoid of ambiguity (she is both prostitute and wife), Maria values categorical purity: she likes things done neatly. Her mother, on the other hand, relishes in the confusion of categories: she lives in cemeteries, on threshing grounds, or near rubbish piles dangerous spaces that people are taught to avoid (Douglas 1966) where she snares her victims. She is the ultimate transgressor for whom no boundaries are worth preserving. Unlike other spirits, Gurmunya is not revulsed by menstruation. In fact, blood ow can be said to participate in the very ambiguity the spirit embodies. The conduct of Gurmunyas devotee would be not strictly and solely synonymous with delement were she to serve as host while menstruating. Indeed, one might surmise that in outing the ban against doing bori during haila, this devotee would truly become Gurmunya, the spirit who lives in lthy places, attracts dirt, and causes women to leak endlessly but is ultimately far less removed from processes of reproduction than her fashionable and feminine daughter.22 Unlike her promiscuous daughter who wants nothing to do with children, Gurmunya is a mother. Having presumably suffered herself through some of the bloody indignities she routinely visits on her victims, she is
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more womanly than sexually hyperactive Maria can be ever be. By admitting that Gurmunya would not be bothered by a dirty (i.e. leaking) host, my friend suggested that although menstruating devotees should not lend their bodies to possessing spirits, not all leakages were considered equally problematic. That Gurmunya would simply not care about a menstruating host implies not only that the incompatibility of menstrual blood with possession is negotiable but also that spirits have different conceptions of acceptable behavior. Devotees must learn to act in tune with the spirit they embody. Tsakanis mishap and the comments of witnesses who contrasted Marias obsessive dislike of dirt with Gurmunyas indifference to it offer glimpses of the workings of bori where, similar to the case of vodou described by Brown, morality (or in this case purity) is tailored not only to the situation but also to the specic person or group involved (1991:241). Seeing Red: Transgression, Truth, and Revelation Part of the power of Taskanis violation had to do with its visual dimension. Blood is generally disturbing not simply because when it becomes visible, it is outside the body (and therefore out of place) but because in being so, it unavoidably captures our attention. Repelling, yet also oddly compelling, it imposes itself upon us (Miller 1997:x). This is all the more true in the case of menstrual blood which is relegated to the realm of the invisible and the unspoken. The sight of menstrual blood on Tsakanis wrapper was shocking because it meant that something that was previously invisible had been brought in plain view. By exposing that which must remain hidden untraceable Tsakanis possession became a defacement (Taussig 1999:51) whereby truth is nally uncovered in a drama of revelation. Defacement, Taussig (1999:2) argues, is like Enlightenment. It brings insides outside, unearthing knowledge, and revealing mystery. When something is defaced, it is only partially exposed so that its secrecy, instead of being destroyed, is revealed. Like the funeral pyre whose illuminating power is greatest at the moment of its self-destruction (Taussig 1999:2), the revelation that Tsakani lent her body to possessing spirits while menstruating lasted but a few seconds yet it was enough to break the lm of secrecy behind which bori devotees, including Zeinabou, lived their lives pretending such practices did not happen. By piercing the smoke screen of active not-knowing to expose the long knownness (Taussig 1999:6) about the messy, unpredictable side of womanhood, Tsakani unwittingly unmasked a public secret.
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In her study of prisoners protest in Northern Ireland, Aretxaga (1997) showed that cell walls smeared with menstrual blood spoke of the deant anger of female prisoners more forcefully than conventional means of protest because of their visual impact. Similarly, the presence of the bloodstain on Marias immaculate outt was a powerful expression of disorder. Large and prominent, the stain signied the wrongful eruption of menstrual blood into public space. The signicance of Tsakanis offense, like that of Irish republican womens dirty protest, cannot be separated from its inextricable connection with the play of gender and sexual difference (Aretxaga 1997:127). The exposure of menstrual blood, Aretxaga suggests, subverted the defeminization experienced by female members of the IRA by transforming the asexual bodies of girls into the sexualized bodies of women (1997:139). By momentarily turning the unmarked body of a host into the sexualized body of a woman, the stained wrapper similarly became a potent symbol of sexual difference while also highlighting the difference between un-bodied spirits and bodied (and occasionally untidy) humans. Recall that menstrual blood, more so than other kinds of blood, is carefully prevented from surfacing publicly in Mawri households. Its sudden exposure in the space of bori further complicates the ways that possession is locally understood to work. Bluntly put, what are we to make of the fact that Tsakanis body was expelling blood at the very moment that Maria had entered her devotees body and was presumably controlling its functioning? When temporarily lending their bodies to spiritual entities, human hosts are said to have no will, experience no sensations, and feel no emotions. Animated by spirits, their bodies no longer function in a humanly way. Some mediums froth at the mouth, yet, except for saliva, tears, or mucus, there should be no bodily emission during possession. In this context, a leaking body such as Tsakanis hints at the possibility of incomplete, problematic possession. However, the young womans apparent placidity at the moment of exposure suggests that she was unaware of what was happening: she was no longer her true self. Only a person in trance could have remained so calm in the midst of the intense agitation she had generated. Yet all the same, if Maria controlled Tsakanis body, some wondered, why didnt she prevent the leakage? If there was doubt as to whether or not Tsakani had faked possession, one thing was certain, however: by bringing blood and spirits into a complete realignment, the young mediums transgression had ruptured the ontological imagination, forcing the space of possession to coincide with the space of what can only happen to a woman (Spivak 1988:184). This was perhaps the
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true transgression. By exhibiting publicly what was to remain unknown, Tsakani compelled others to question certain categorical truths about possession, purity, and gender. Soiled Wrapper, Spoiled Initiation By indexing so vividly the failure of categorical maintenance, the sight of Tsakanis stained wrapper elicited varied emotions ranging from repulsive sympathy to frank disgust, but none of the reactions I witnessed participated more thoroughly in the defense of boundaries than Zeinabous. It is to her that I turn briey to illuminate the highly personal ways in which witnesses reacted to the revelation of a public secret. Determined and ambitious, 22-year-old Zeinabou had wanted the wasa in Kallon Ruwa to be a measure of her capacities as a bori devotee. To meet that goal, she had spared no expense: every step of the initiation had been carefully planned. Zeinabou yearned for the recognition earned by bori devotees who exemplied reliability, devotion, and loyalty. She worked hard to impress elder mediums with her focus, her modesty, and her receptivity to advice. When Tsakani unexpectedly stood up in her stained wrapper, seemingly unaware of the distraction she was causing, Zeinabou stared, at rst in disbelief, and later with growing shame and consternation. But she acted as if nothing had happened. I knew she was nonetheless deeply angry and humiliated. During a conversation with bori acquaintances back at home, Zeinabou recounted what had happened to Tsakani in Kallon Ruwa and how shamelessly her friend had behaved. She took great pains to stress how large the bloodstain was, how disgusted everybody in the audience seemed, and how humiliated Tsakanis lover, a bori musician, had been upon realizing that the young womans leaking body would soon be the subject of widespread gossip. To mount a spirit when she was having her period, what was she thinking? Zeinabou asked rhetorically. Worse, Zeinabou revealed, Tsakani had escaped for the bush with her lover to make love repeatedly despite the prohibition against having sex while the woman is menstruating. Insofar as disgust proclaims the meanness and inferiority of its objects (Miller 1997:9), Zeinabous merciless exposition of Tsakanis inadequacies communicated her repulsion loud and clear. It occurred to me as I listened to Zeinabous systematic destruction of Tsakanis character that she was truly savoring the moment. Aside from painting a dark portrait of the deceitful Tsakani in an effort to entertain her women friends, Zeinabou also artfully managed to distance herself from the young
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devotee she once called her friend. At some level, her depiction was ironic: as a devotee of Maria herself, dependent on the generosity of lovers, but longing for the nancial stability of marriage, she resembled Tsakani in many ways. However, by drawing attention to Tsakanis offense and insisting on her own distress, she was able to elicit contempt for the transgressor and sympathy for herself. She became the victim whose wasa had been spoiled by another mediums contemptible behavior. Through her resolute focus on the transgression, Zeinabou also reclaimed mastery over the discourse on Tsakanis possession. Sensing that the success of her initiatory wasa was inevitably tied to Tsakanis performance in Kallon Ruwa, she knew she had to take control of the events rather than let them control her. In so doing, she ultimately recast Tsakanis accidental leak within parameters of morality, privacy, and purity that her audience of married women was familiar with she knew her listeners would talk and that others would later hear the story she was artfully spinning. Ironically in attempting to protect herself by provoking contempt for the violator, Zeinabou gave away her own secret. Hoping to portray Tsakani as an irresponsible person, she suggested that the young woman should have taken medicine to stop the ow. Every woman, she pointed out, knows what to do when she attends a wasa at the time of haila. Whether or not she realized it, her statement betrayed her own strategic concealment of impurities. There was, she implied, no incompatibility between being possessed and menstruating so long as one took the precaution of stopping the blood ow before attending a bori ceremony. Zeinabou had earlier admitted to me in private that on the rst day of her wasa, she asked a bori healer for medicine to curb her own menstrual emission. Preserving purity, here, was not a matter of policing categorical boundaries between spirit possession and menstruation, but a question of preventive chemistry. By focusing on the substance of menstruation blood to the exclusion of its manifold social and symbolic implications, Zeinabou turned the ban against menstruating mediums into a simple problem of bodily management. As far as Zeinabou was concerned, Tsakani had no excuse for not taking adequate precautions against menstrual leaks. She should have known that her reputation as a devotee of Maria hinged on her ability to project an image of purity, white dress, and all. In retrospect, I suspect that while Zeinabou was angry at Tsakani for having offended Maria, the stain-phobic member of the bori pantheon, she was even angrier at her for spoiling her initiation in every sense of the term: when everyone should have been watching the initiate, the focus had been on Tsakani in a bloody wrapper. The dramatic moment of
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shock giving way to disgust had altered the rhythm of the performance and the concentration of the participants. Worse, perhaps, once the wasa was over, subsequent discussions had dealt not with Zeinabous successful initiation but with Tsakanis mistake. It was precisely because attendees at the wasa spoke of Tsakanis rishin kumya (lack of shame) rather than of the initiates integrity and modesty that Zeinabou had tried to gain control of the terms of this discourse. Only by becoming the storyteller who wove an eloquent tale of drama and deceit could she reinsert herself fully into the picture and take credit for her own spotless record. Blood, Power, and Disgust: Some Conclusions Menstrual blood, Tsakanis unfortunate experience reminded everyone, should not surface in plain sight. In the past, there was one exception to this pattern of secrecy surrounding female blood ows, however. On the morning after the wedding night, a sheet stained with the brides blood was publicly displayed as proof of the young womans virginity.23 Times have changed, and today no one engages in visual demonstrations of the brides purity. That blood is no longer unveiled as spectacle highlights the incongruity of publicly exposing menstrual leaks, if only accidentally. I have suggested in this essay that the diverse range of emotions provoked by the sight of blood on Tsakanis otherwise immaculate wrapper must be understood in terms of boris capacity to address taken-for-granted dimensions of gender, purity, and morality. Tsakanis inadvertent revelation that she was menstruating while participating in a wasa provoked responses ranging from outrage to resentment to anguish (with a few, sensing it could have happened to them, experiencing sympathetic repulsion). The original shock many felt gave way to a more abstract sense of disgust and in some cases, a recognition of their own vulnerability to the powers of delement. I myself recall experiencing a secret thrill at the sight of the bloodstained wrapper. I knew that something very wrong had happened and that I was witnessing one of those anti-structural (Turner 1969) moments whose value lies in what they reveal about fundamental, yet largely unspoken, truths about the worlds in which people live. Behind the public secret, Taussig (1999) writes, is a truth to be uncovered. Tsakanis accidental leak can be seen as a defacement, compelling a whole community to acknowledge certain previously invisible dimensions of womens engagement in bori. Douglass classic characterization of cleansing (or dirt avoidance) as a positive effort to organize the environment (1966:2) provides insight into the spirits Marias and Gurmunyas widely divergent attitudes toward lth. Yet it does not
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account for how bori, far from creating order out of confusion, actually draws attention to the ambiguity of certain categories at the heart of womens reproductive lives. I have focussed on an incident that was never supposed to happen to consider dimensions of Mawri experience that are rarely scrutinized in normal circumstances. By using the disgust provoked by the sight of Tsakanis soiled wrapper as a point of entry into Mawri understandings of purity and propriety in bori, I have shown that possession provides a forum for negotiating the boundaries of moral conduct and other concepts central to the denition of proper womanhood. Possession makes it possible for a medium to reect on her life and the world she lives in but, Boddy (1989) notes, it does so obliquely without demanding that she takes responsibility for her conclusions. Marias appearance in a soiled wrapper set tongues wagging, enabling consideration of issues never contemplated before. The fact that the spirit took hold of a leaking body complicates the question of agency and accountability, reminding us that the dialectic of self and other in mediumship is one from which no true synthesis can emerge (Boddy 1989:353). When spirits insert themselves in a human frame, they do not solve or simplify situations so much as they thicken them, often with unintended consequences.
Acknowledgements This essay was originally presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington DC in December 2001. Scholars who attended the panel have been generous with comments, although they cannot be held responsible for the essays remaining aws. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and Rijk van Dijk for their editorial assistance. Deborah Durham has read several versions of this essay and offered valuable suggestions for improvement. Fieldwork in the Republic of Niger was carried out in 1988 1989 thanks to a research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health, a dissertation grant from the National Science Foundation, and a grant for anthropological research from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Additional research in 1994 and 2000 was made possible by fellowships from Tulane University. Fieldwork in 2004 was jointly sponsored by tudes dAfrique Noirethe African Studies Center-Leiden and the Centre DE Bordeaux. My greatest debt is to the people of Dogondoutchi and the surrounding areas who opened their lives to me. Notes 1. Save for Dogondoutchi, the names of places and people I mention here have been changed to preserve the anonymity of my interlocutors. 2. The Mawri are a sub-group of the more encompassing ethno-linguistic entity conventionally referred to as Hausa. In Dogondoutchi, people reserve the appellation Hausa for northern Nigerians, applying ethnic categories such as ethnos, vol. 76:02, june 2011 (pp. 157 182)

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Mawri, Gobirawa, or Aderawa to more specically situated populations of Hausa-speaking Nigeriens. 3. Spirits are said to come from the bush. Mediums themselves come from every echelon of society, but the large majority is poor, female, and non-literate. 4. Wasani attract young women looking for romantic encounters or a clientele for their sexual services, and this is largely why Muslims associate bori practices with immorality and degradation. 5. Mediums do not remember what they did during possession, and no one questions a spirits behavior no matter how outrageous. A host who insults her spouse while in the throes of possession has no need to apologize for her behavior because it was not she who was speaking during trance. Mediumship ostensibly frees one from certain responsibilities, yet it also creates new obligations as the human host learns to cope with the demands of her alter ego. This includes attending wasani only when one is prepared (or pure enough) to be possessed by the spirits. 6. Just as mediums possessed by Dan Ganda, a spirit who disrobes her hosts, are blamed for their denuding if they fail to wear several layers of clothes at wasani, so female devotees will be admonished for attending possession rituals while menstruating. 7. In addition to the fact that menstruation may be seen as a process of purication ushing out impurities rather than a form of pollution (Corbin 1986; Sobo 1992; van de Walle & Renne 2001), other bodily substances (such as semen) may prove as contaminating as menstrual blood (Smith 1955). While women may be polluting in certain situations so are men as the Beng case described by Gottlieb (1988; see also Sobo 1992 on Jamaica) demonstrates. In sum, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that menstrual blood is not strictly speaking matter (or uid) out of place. 8. Pain in the lower back or sluggishness is often attributed to dead blood impeding the circulation of healthy blood. This blockage is caused by the heat of the sun that kills the blood while one is stooped over in the elds during sowing, weeding, and harvest (Last 1979; Wall 1988). It is remedied through surgical cupping. 9. With the introduction of sexual education in public schools, a growing proportion of young men and women have become more knowledgeable about sexuality and human reproduction and more comfortable discussing such topics. 10. With the spread of contraception, women are given increased control over their fertility. Conversations I had with women in 2004 indicated that notions of family planning have gained wider currency. 11. Here I am referring to one particular kind of blood. Obviously, blood ows (in the form of sacrices) during bori performances. 12. For parallel cases in West Africa and elsewhere, see Buckley & Gottlieb (1988) and Madhavan & Diarra (2001). 13. According to Baba, a Hausa woman from northern Nigeria who recounted her life story to Mary Smith in the early 1950s, women who used medicines to put a pregnancy to sleep (i.e. abort) could also delay a pregnancy occurring too soon after an earlier birth, thereby preserving social conventions regarding birth spacing (Smith 1955:149). Delaying pregnancy also ensured the survival of the newborn child by preventing the dreaded possibility that it might be fed pregnancy milk (sha ciki) (see also Renne 1996).

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14. Witches are also said to block the womb and to prevent pregnancies when they do not cause women to miscarry. As antisocial beings who work to undermine social reproduction, they target young mothers and would-be mothers by disrupting their menses or their pregnancies (for a parallel case in southwestern Nigeria, see Renne 2001). 15. In Hausa, wanki (which has the same root as the verb wanke, to wash something or to wash off) is another term for menstruation (Newman & Newman 1977). 16. Among neighboring Tuareg populations, menstrual blood is similarly viewed with suspicion. Rasmussen (1991:759) notes that Tuareg women surreptitiously wash menstrual cloths at night to ensure that no one will appropriate any of the bloody residue for malevolent ends. 17. The crushed bone of a leper could be added to the concoction. Once the poisoned victim drank the mixture, the menstrual blood would unite with the toxic substance (or the bad blood) and ow out of the wound (Latour 1992). 18. Womens characterization as naturally open, most markedly during their childrearing years and at the time of menstruation, Jean & John Comaroff note (1992:74), calls forth efforts to contain [their] bodies and justies the constraints women face in their participation in domestic, economic, and religious activities. 19. Tsakani had recently weaned her third child. It is very possible that the much decried leakage in Kallon Ruwa signaled the sudden return of her menses. 20. As the perfect embodiment of the nancially independent, self-assured prostitute who escaped her familys tutelage to enjoy unrestrained access to consumer culture, Maria resembles young Mawri women striving to reconcile the apparent freedom and pleasures of a Western lifestyle with local understandings of femininity and domesticity. 21. Gurmunya may be a ferocious spirit but she is reputed to be a good mother to Maria. 22. Note that this is only hypothetical since possession by Gurmunya does not, in theory at least, give one more opportunity to mess with rules. 23. The stained sheet, once washed, was made into a pair of drawstring pants for the brides younger brother. References a. 1997. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Aretxaga, Begon Northern Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beidelman, Thomas O. 1997. The Cool Knife: Imagery of Gender, Sexuality and Moral Education in Kaguru Initiation Ritual. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Buckley, Thomas & Alma Gottlieb (eds). 1988. Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cole, Jennifer. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ethnos, vol. 76:02, june 2011 (pp. 157 182)

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