Embodying Colonial Memories

by Paul Stoller

A study of the West African Hauka - spirits that grotesquely mimic and mock "Europeans" of the colonial epoch. The author considers spirit possession as a set of embodied practices with serious social and cultural consequences. Embodying Colonial Memories is the first in-depth study of the West African Hauka , spirits in the body of (human) mediums which mimic and mock Europeans of the colonial epoch. Paul Stoller, who was initiated into a spirit possession troupe, recounts an insider's tale of the Hauka with respect and "brotherly" deference. He combines narrative description, historical analysis, and reflections on the importance of embodiment and mimesis to social theory, with particular reference to the Songhay peoples of the Republic of Niger.

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 1995

About the author

Paul Stoller is an anthropologist and novelist who teaches anthropology at West Chester University. He has conducted ethnographic research in the Republic of Niger in West Africa and among West African immigrants in New York City. His books, novels and memoirs are attempts to convey the wisdom of African systems of thought. He is currently doing research on family life among West African immigrants in New York City and is at work on a new novel, The Sorcerer's Burden and a new work of non-fiction, The Business of Social Relations: Global Resilience Among West Africans in the World. His most recent book, The Power of the Bertween: An Anthropological Odyssey was published in December 2008 by The University of Chicago Press. Paul has a new website, paulstoller.com which up and running.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Stoller's account of the West African Hauka spirit-possession movement interprets the body of the possessed medium as a locus for communal memories of European colonialism, and the cathartic resolution thereof; if mimesis is a means of comprehending the power of an Other, then so much more so a mimesis actualized in the very agentive body of the subject. The emergence and development of the movement are also given historical context, albeit with the inclusion of a concluding excursus in several chapters on the political machinery of early postcolonial Niger which makes a rather strained attempt to find traces of Hauka aesthetics in its style of governance.

While he rhetorically privileges its sensorial, embodied nature, Stoller perhaps more successfully elucidates mimesis in general as the more powerful frame in which to understand Hauka spirit possession. In a burlesque of French colonial officers and functionaries, arbitrary European authority seen through the eyes of the African subject, the social powers of the former regime are appropriated for the benefit of the Hauka cult's members. The Hauka movement served to dispel the mystique of colonial power in the same moment that it was recreated as a catalyzing potential among West African people themselves. Satire here is a controlled reinforcement of identity distinction, rehearsed on the subaltern's terms; the image of the European that Hauka possession refracts back into the social world is one of a wild, dangerously powerful alien force, now mastered.