IN LIEU OF A PREFACE
PERSONHOOD IN A COMPLEX WORLD
AN EXTRACT FROM MARIJKE STEEGSTRA’S DIPO AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN GHANA
At the foot of the Krobo Mountain during the Klo Ngmayem Festival
The focus in this chapter has been on the performance and attendance of life cycle rituals that constitute and gender a person and are either mediated by Christianity or traditional religion. For many people ‘Christianity’ and ‘paganism’ are important categories. However, people in Odumase, like the (Presbyterian) people in the town of Akuropon as studied by Middleton (1983) and Gilbert (1988; 1993; 1995), perform or attend different types of rites that “remind them of their existence and fortify the faith held in their powers” (Middleton 1983:12). As has become clear in this and the previous chapter, they may take part in rites dealing with their ancestors or ritual practices involving deities, and at the same time attend a church service on Sunday in one of the various churches. In the event of sickness, they may consult a pastor, but also a diviner. They may have their children baptised in church, but also by all means have dipo performed for their daughters. Performing and attending rites of different religions, which are in many ways opposed to one another, may seem contradictory to an outsider. African intellectuals and theologians (e.g. Baëta 1968; Fasholė-Luke, Gray, Hastings, & Tasie 1978) have seen members of former mission churches who (secretly) participate nowadays in non-Christian rituals as ‘victims of missionaries’ who are bereft of their African identity (Meyer 1999: 134-135). From this perspective people are indecisive, insincere, inconsequent, and have a ‘split consciousness’.
Do people really experience a split consciousness or ‘inner self’, when they observe Christian and non-Christian rites, as argued by the Basel missionaries? This question is the consequence of a Christian viewpoint that starts from the notion of the moral individual being responsible for his/her own actions, which seems to clash with the non-Christian notion of the self. What does the complexity of Krobo personhood as constituted by life cycle rituals tell us about presuppositions about the (invisible) world and notions regarding the self and the person? And how do Krobo people attempt to reconcile themselves to the sometimes competing demands? In order to deal with this issue adequately, we first have to delve into some of the anthropological literature on the self and the person.
Marcel argued that the idea of the individual is unique to Western thought, and that the idea is rooted in Western philosophy and in Christianity (1986 [1938]). He introduced a distinction between the ‘self’ (moi) and the ‘person’ (personne) (the public role one learns to play). The Western concept of the ‘self’, often equated with the Western person as an individual, has been widely described as individuated, detached, separate and self-sufficient, and as involving a dualistic metaphysic (Morris 1994: 16). In non-Western societies a person was hardly thought to have an inner conscience or self-awareness of a unique human being, because s/he derived identity from the clan, the kinship group or tribe. Although in anthropological writing the latter point of view has been dismissed as a product of the Western construction of Primitivism (e.g. Cohen 1994; Lienhardt 1985), and the Western concept of the self as essentialist, autonomous, bounded, egocentric and individualist has been shown to represent merely one (relatively recent) theory among many (philosophical, theological, and literary) traditions (Morris 1994: 16-17; Murray 1993), the tendency to distinguish between a Western sense of uniqueness of the (person as an) individual and a non-Western idea of the person as defined by relationships, still dominates many ethnographies and anthropological essays (e.g. Marsella, DeVos, & Hsu 1985; Sheweder & LeVine 1984).
Much has been written about the lack of ‘individuality’ among African people in particular, suggesting that a person is ‘absorbed’ into the social group (Morris 1994: 118). In Africanist writings on ‘the person’, the ‘relational self’ is usually emphasised (Riesman 1986). It is a person that cannot be considered apart from his or her ontologically prior social context, from the community of relationships into which a person is born and within which he or she lives. As Piot argues in study of the Kabre society in North-Togo:
To abstract out the individual, and his or her ‘interests’ and property, would seem, then, to be an inappropriate starting (or ending) point for theoretical analysis. Further, the divide between individual and society [ in Euro-American theories, MS] is not part of the construction of sociality in many African societies (Piot 1999: 17).
Every person is always related to other human beings and each person is defined through relations. However, Piot argues (1999: 18) that persons do not ‘have’ relations in many African societies, they ‘are’ relations. A person should be seen as composed of, or constituted by, relationships, rather than situated in them.
The sociocentric and egocentric view of the person should be regarded as different ideologies of personhood in Western and non-Western societies that may tend to highlight aspects of individual or social identity and mask other aspects (Borsboom 2002). Although Western as well as non-Western notions regarding the person show part of both aspects in everyday practice (Jackson & Karp 1990; Lienhardt 1985; Morris 1994), and highlighting either the ‘sociocentric view’ or ‘egocentric view’ regarding ‘the person’ can be called an artefact of context (Jacobson-Widding 1990; La Fontaine 1986:124), these different ideologies may clash, as the case of the Basel Mission showed. Their Western notion of the individual person, the Christian teaching of a direct communication between God and the individual and of the individual as someone responsible for his or her own destiny, was in contrast with ‘traditional’ Krobo notions of the person, where decisions and choices that people make can also be determined by non-persons such as gods and spirits, and rituals constitute and gender a person.
Morris (1994: 11) states that a person is often clearly expressed in a ritual context and rituals often have an ideological function in a conception of ‘the person’ as a cultural category, which is a conception articulated specifically in the cultural representations of a specific community. The ritual context defines and shapes various identities, and the importance of life cycle rituals in Krobo society must be seen in this perspective. The integration into the social world and gendering of the self to become a person starts from birth, and is mediated by life cycle rituals. The ritual recognition of the accumulation of roles and statuses marks the progress of Krobo men and women towards personhood, hence the dipo rites are part of a cumulative social (female) identity. The dipo rites create potential mothers and wives (cf. Grimes 2000: 109), while marriage and especially the birth of children are essential prerequisites to obtain full personhood. From this perspective, dipo is only one, but crucial, part of the female life cycle rituals.
In these life cycle rituals the ideal of the socio-centric person is the focal point. During the rites, which are family occasions, the ancestors of the family, or in case of marriage, the ancestors of the families of the groom and bride, are called up to be present and bless the ceremony. In this way continuing relationships with the ancestors are established. In the case of dipo, as described in the previous chapter, a relationship with the deity Nana Klowεki is also established. The socio-centric ideal is confirmed in the way people talk about dipo. As people are relations, no woman will say ‘I did dipo (personally)’. When asked whether she passed through dipo, she will rather answer in a passive and plural form ‘A sε mi dipo,’ meaning that: ‘Dipo was performed for me’. The proper question to ask in Krobo is: ‘A sε mo dipo lo?’, literally: ‘They performed you dipo?’, (‘Was dipo performed for you?’) Or: ‘Nyε sε dipo lo?’ ‘Have you people performed dipo?’ (i.e. ‘Have you been initiated?’).
Hence the rituals mark group membership and are designed to ensure fertility and prosperity and ward off misfortune. As Middleton argues: “By observance of rites people mark their adherence not only to a superior or constraining power, but to a way of seeing their society and their experience of the world” (1983: 12). Rather than indicating indecision or insincerity, Krobo people’s behaviour reflects a need for ritual protection and ritual purification in a world of moral and cosmological complexity, rather than in a world of contrasts. As in the Akuropon case, a need for protection, and I would add, ritual purification, is central to Krobo thought:
Throughout life it is essential to have supernatural protectors against dangers that beset people, just as in all highly stratified societies it is necessary to have political and familiar protectors and patrons. In both spheres it is advisable not to limit oneself to a single source of protection but if necessary to change protectors from one situation to another (Middleton 1983: 12).
In practice most people do not experience problems in incorporating Christian elements into many non-Christian life cycle rituals. Conflicts between Christians and non-Christians and among different Christians regarding the outdooring and naming ceremonies and marriage rites usually concern aspects of rituals that some deem ‘pagan’, such as the pouring of libation or tying of priestly beads, while others accept them as ‘African culture’. Even though most people call themselves Christians, non-Christian presuppositions continue to underlie notions about the person and as such the life cycle rituals are regarded as important. Krobo notions of personhood definitely contain ideas concerning individualism, although this individuality is sanctioned through spiritual conceptions. Krobo notions of ‘the person’ are an interplay between being the locus of a social network, of kinship ties and of a sense of individual identity in the form of a person’s susuma (‘soul’) and especially sεsεε (‘parting word’). It should be kept in mind that Krobo conceptions of the person are complex and do not deny the agency and autonomy of the self. They involve biological (material), spiritual, social and individual dimensions. They also do not express a radical dualism between the spiritual and the material, or between individual autonomy and the social context (cf. Morris 1994: 20-21).
The Authoress
Marijke Steegstra, Dipo and the Politics of Culture in Ghana (2005) pp. 234-238.