Ritual, Performance and Bodily Transformation

Résumé Fr En

Kjersti Larsen analyse la transformation du corps dans des rituels où les participants acquièrent différentes identités. A Zanzibar, pendant les cérémonies du ngoma ya sheitani, les esprits habitent les participants dans le but de se matérialiser et d’agir parmi les hommes. La parodie - un jeu de répétition et de distance critique - y joue un rôle décisif. Les protagonistes sont engagés dans une création interactive. Ils explorent leurs savoirs sur le différent et le même, sur ce qu’ils sont et ce qu’ils ne sont pas. Donnant la possibilité d’endosser successivement plusieurs identités et de se projeter dans des contextes différents, la performance se révèle être comme une discipline mentale visant la production de connaissances nouvelles.

The paper explores performance and the analysis of bodily transformations during rituals in which the participants become both disassociated from and re-associated with different dimensions of their identity. Ethnographically, the focus is on certain rituals performed in Zanzibar called ngoma ya sheitani. During the rituals, spirits embody human beings in order to materialize and act in the ‘human world.’ In general, the difference between humans and spirits is one of excess rather than reversal. As such, parody – not in terms of satire but rather as repetition with critical distance – seems to play an important part in bodily transformations in the context of ngoma ya sheitani. In the process of transformation, participants are engaged in the interactional creation of what can be called a ‘performance reality,’ which, simultaneously, is and is not a state outside time. This implies that meanings are generated in social space through performance and that performance is a fundamental dimension of any culture and important in the production of knowledge about culture. Through performance, people both enact and extend their knowledge about difference and sameness, about who they are or are not, and about various others. An important aspect of knowledge representation, the author will argue, is that ritual and performance give the participants a possibility to experience reality, in the sense that participants and audience reflect on other contexts of meaning in the performance setting, as well as in the social and cultural world from which ritual emerges. As such, performances form part of the language of aesthetics.