Symbol and Psychosomatic Symptom in Bodily Space-Time: The Case of the Yaka of Zaire

Abstract

The Northern Yaka see the body as an expanse bounded in time and space. Alimentary traffic, olfactory exchange, and procreation constitute oriented transitions of the body boundaries. The y provide a spatiotemporal order (inner-surface-outer, high-middle-low, before-simultaneous-after, etc.) which, by symbolic transference, patterns the semantic integration of the social. natural and bodily domains and which is itself patterned by this integration. The body-self has to do with the body as receptive of, and participating in, the activities of the other: in sensorial interaction, that is, in encounter, exchange, smelling, listening, speaking and seeing, individuals serve as reciprocal points of identification. The y pattern, and are patterned by, the relationships between the psychosomatic and the sociocultural, between self and other, ascendant and descendant, male and female, etc. I am concerned with the ways these multidimensional relationships in and through the body acts and the body-self may be symbolic, i.e., when they integrate, by differentiation and mediation in a metaphoro-metonymical process, the bodily, social and natural spheres; these relationships are symptomatic when they are disintegrative, dualistic, or intrusive.