Ambivalence and the work of the negative among the Yaka

status: publishe

Polluting and healing among the Northern Yaka of Zaire

The Northern Yaka of Zaire construct a meaningful world by reference to the human body. They understand the socio-cultural domain in terms of bodily exchanges such as ingestion and excretion, sexual processes or listening and speech. They perceive their bodies simultaneously as bounded entities and as meeting points between inner and outer, self and other, and so on. Pollution occurs in the ominous transition, or the closure of corporeal and/or socio-cultural boundaries. Healing rituals aim to integrate bodily and socio-cultural domains and to mediate boundaries and boundary-transition. Part 1 of this paper transforms Mary Douglas' social perspective into a subject-centred view of the symbolic dimensions of sexuality, of pollution, and of the main forms of healing among the Northern Yaka. Here 'pollution' (mbeembi) has to do with an ominous disturbance of the cultural body schema and of domestic boundaries. Part 2 focuses on the ideological relationship between gender, the 'transgression of sexual rights' (yidyaata), and reproduction.

Doors and thresholds: Jeddi's approach to psychiatric disorders

Professor Essedik Jeddi and his team have introduced a most significant institutional and therapeutic innovation at the Ibn Rochd and Pinel section of the Razi university long-term mental hospital in Tunis (Tunisia). The innovation focuses upon the ambiguity of doors and boundaries in the mental asylum. Doors and walls influence the rhythm of activity and the nature of contact between patients, therapists and the wider society and culture. If they are very rigid, they may disjoin the patient from him- or herself, from his/her body, social network and culture. On the other hand, if such boundaries are completely neglected they may merge these related dimensions as undifferentiated entities. Jeddi's innovation is primarily concerned with placing the spatio-temporal experience of the body and the intimate interpersonal interaction at the centre of treatment. It aims at establishing creative modes of expression, interaction and exchange such as tea-sessions, dancing, singing, verbal communication, clay-modelling, figurative or plastic expression, agricultural works. These relationships mediate and differentiate at the same time between the patient, his/her body-self, and his/her social and cultural world, thus avoiding both the disjunction and the merging. It would seem that the activities concerned with the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside', peasant and urban, self and other (e.g. dancing and singing) are of paramount importance in bringing about such mediating and differentiating relationships. In the present study we limit ourselves to one particularly revealing therapeutic activity, namely dancing to live music. Jeddi's innovation is a unique blend of current developments in psychiatry and psychotherapy with Arabo-Islamic science and philosophy.