Amina: Shaking Boundaries of a Woman Inhabited by the Spirits (Senegal).

Amina, a Senegalese woman, is possessed by lineage spirits and must navigate two conflicting interpretations of her experience: the traditional Lebou view of persecution by spirits and a Western psychopathological diagnosis. She rejects the healers her tradition imposes, instead choosing a priest who respects her need to control her own healing. By strategically working within the traditional belief system rather than abandoning it, she uses possession to renegotiate her role and status within her group. This allows her to expand her agency and affirm her identity as a permanently liminal person, one who inhabits and redraws boundaries between different worlds of meaning.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In this article, I present the individual ethnography of Amina, a Senegalese woman possessed by the spirits of her lineage. Amina's story shows the lacerations of a person who simultaneously inhabits two worlds: the traditional Lebou culture and the Western one. When her spirits manifest themselves, she is forced to choose between two different interpretations of her suffering: the traditional persecutory and the Western psychopathological. She chooses the former but refuses the healers imposed by the tradition and turns to a priest of her choice, who proves to be sensitive to her need to personally own the healing journey. Amina strategically manipulates the plasticity of the traditional belief system without abandoning it; she bends it to shake the boundaries of herself, and her group and lineage. She uses the disruptive potential of possession and the irruption of the invisible world in the visible to renegotiate her role and acquire a new status in her group. She uses the performative dispositive of possession to renegotiate and expand her spaces of agency and affirm her tenacious subjectivity of a permanently liminal person, one who inhabits, shakes and redraws the boundaries between different worlds of meaning.