Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency

An English translation of a French study of the rituals of the Mande people in West Africa.

Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency demonstrates through rich ethnographic analysis how Mande people in West Africa utilise multiple ritual practices to address an "episteme of doubt."

In the context of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, climate disruptions, financial crises, and illness, members of "hunter societies," experts who handle certain agentive artefacts, and adepts in a spiritual possession cult navigate a complex past and uncertain future through creative embodied engagement.

Formed within and partially against a predominantly Islamic context and the spread of charismatic Christianities, such embodied ways of acting enable these religious specialists to become "virtuous subjects" and to change their relations to the world and to themselves.

This is an English translation of Corps rituels. La fabrique du religieux en pays mandingue (Mali, Guinée, Côte d'Ivoire).