Enacting Compassion: Hot/Cold, Illness and Taboos in Northern Mozambique

Abstract

In northern Mozambique, those who are ‘hot’ have the ability to harm others who are ‘cool’ through missteps in rules governing sexual activity and cooking. Such taboo complexes have been recorded across southern Africa, with analysis focused primarily on the polluting dangers of heat and the importance of metaphysical balance for well-being. My focus on hot/cold proscriptions as a cultural script – simple sentences that lay bare clear dominant social values by capturing group norms and concerns – enables a generative extension of dominant symbolic and structuralist approaches by shifting analysis from the rules themselves to context and practice. Through an analysis of ‘mgosyo’ – hot/cold proscriptions and the illnesses that result from their transgression in the Nyanja (Maravi) lake-shore town of Metangula – I argue that the quotidian nature of the complex forces continuous, active thinking about others in order to maintain social relations, avoid calamity, and claim belonging through the fulfilment of social roles that require compassionate sensibilities. Heavy weight on becoming rather than merely being moral, as an element of constructing and asserting personhood, means that individuals are perpetually obliged to craft their actions in a way that shows consideration for the well-being of others, a feature that implies that standard distinctions between morality and ethics may be based on monadic tenets. The ethnographic fieldwork presented here suggests that the relationship of mgosyo and the underlying value of compassion as essential for leading a moral life may be shifting in the economic, social, and historical context of the 21st century, reflecting transformations in threats to and constitutions of well-being in contemporary Mozambique.

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible through generous financial support from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and the Department of Anthropology and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. I thank Parker Shipton, Joanna Davidson, Laura Ann Twagira, Casey Golomski, and Shelby Carpenter for their comments, which helped me to improve on earlier drafts of this article. Sections of this article were presented at the New England Workshop on Southern Africa (NEWSA) in 2013 and the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2014. Following standard anthropological practice, pseudonyms are used throughout this article to mask the identities of individuals whose lives are depicted, with the exception of those whose authority to speak on a subject rest with their social positioning.

Notes

¹ I. Dicks, An African Worldview: The Muslim Amacinga Yawo of Southern Malawi (Zomba, Kachere, 2012).

² F. Martinez, O Povo Macua e a Sua Cultura (Maputo, Paulinas, 2009).

³ See, for example, A.G.O. Hodgson, ‘Notes on the Achewa and Angoni of the Dowa District of the Nyasaland Protectorate’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 63, 1 (1933), pp. 123–64; W. Rangeley, ‘Notes on Cewa Tribal Law’, The Nyasaland Journal, 1, 3 (1948), pp. 5–68; J. Robertson, ‘Salt and Potashes in the Life of the Cewa’, The Nyasaland Journal, 9, 1 (1956), pp. 82–7; M. Marwick, Sorcery in its Social Setting (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1965); A. Drake, ‘Illness, Ritual, and Social Relations Among the Chewa of Central Africa’ (PhD thesis, Duke University, 1976); S. Heald, ‘The Power of Sex: Some Reflections on the Caldwells’ “African Sexuality” Thesis’, Africa, 65, 4 (1995), pp. 489–505; D. Kaspin, ‘A Chewa Cosmology of the Body’, American Ethnologist, 23, 3 (1996), pp. 561–78; B. Morris, Animals and Ancestors: An Ethnography (New York, Berg, 2000); J. van Breugel, Chewa Traditional Religion (Zomba, Kachere, 2001).

⁴ H. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe (Neuchâtel, Impr. Attinger, 1913).

⁵ I. Niehaus, ‘Bodies, Heat, and Taboos: Conceptualizing Modern Personhood in the South African Lowveld’, Ethnology, 41, 3 (2002): pp. 189–207.

⁶ H. Mogensen, ‘The Narrative of AIDS Among the Tonga of Zambia’, Social Science and Medicine, 44, 4 (1997), pp. 431–9; Q. Gausset, ‘The Changing Meaning of Disease Among the Tonga of Zambia’, Paideusis, 1 (1998), pp. A43–A52.

⁷ B. Ingstad, F.J. Bruuns and S. Tlou, ‘AIDS and the Elderly Twana: The Concept of Pollution and Consequences for AIDS Prevention’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 12, 4 (1997), pp. 357–72.

⁸ For a review of relevant literature, see especially J. DeGabriele, ‘When Pills Don’t Work – African Illnesses, Misfortune and Mdulo’, Religion in Malawi, 9 (1999), pp. 9–23; A. Wolf, ‘AIDS, Morality and Indigenous Concepts of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Southern Africa’, Africa Spectrum, 36, 1 (2001), pp. 97–107; F. van den Borne, Trying to Survive in Times of Poverty and AIDS: Women and Multiple Partner Sex in Malawi (Amsterdam, Het Spinhuis, 2005).

⁹ On ‘cultural scripts’ as a method for articulating social norms, values, and practices, see A. Jacobson-Widding, ‘“I Lied, I Farted, I Stole …”: Dignity and Morality in African Discourses on Personhood’, in S. Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities (London, Routledge, 1997), pp. 48–73.

¹⁰ P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977).

¹¹ R. Devisch, ‘Symbol and Symptom Among the Yaka of Zaire’, in A. Jacobson-Widding (ed.), Body and Space: Symbolic Models of Unity and Division in African Cosmology and Experience (Uppsala, Upsaliensis Academiae, 1991), pp. 283–302.

¹² Morris, Animals and Ancestors, pp. 78–86; see also B. Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (Oxford, Berg, 2000).

¹³ A. Kuper, Wives for Cattle: Bridewealth and Marriage in Southern Africa (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

¹⁴ Niehaus, ‘Bodies, Heat, and Taboos’.

¹⁵ M. Biesele, Women Like Meat: Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/’hoan (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993).

¹⁶ Morris, Animals and Ancestors, p. 79.

¹⁷ A. Katawala, História dos Nyanjas (Licentiatura thesis, Universidade Católica, Nampula, 1999); A Huhn, ‘Sustenance and Sociability: Foodways in a Mozambican Town’ (Ph.D thesis, Boston University, 2012), pp. 39–49.

¹⁸ Morris, Animals and Ancestors, p. 82.

¹⁹ Drake, ‘Illness, Ritual and Social Relations’, pp. 4, 14.

²⁰ A. Rita-Ferreira, ‘Os Cheuas de Macanga’, Memórias do Instituto de Investigação Cientifica de Moçambique, 8 (1966), p. 132.

²¹ A. Huhn, ‘Body, Sex and Diet in Mozambique’, in L. Manderson et al. (eds), The Handbook of Medical Anthropology (New York, Routledge, 2016), pp. 54–8.

²² For an extended discussion of morality in association with personhood among Maravi populations, see Morris, Animals and Ancestors, pp. 65–7.

²³ M. Schoffeleers and A. Roscoe, Land of Fire: Oral Literature from Malawi (Limbe, Montfort, 1985); A. Werner, The Natives of British Central Africa (London, A. Constable and Co., 1906).

²⁴ For discussion on regional syncretism, see A. Musopole, ‘The Chewa Concept of God and its Implications for the Christian Faith’ (MA dissertation, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, 1984).

²⁵ T.M.S. Evans, ‘Eve: Ethics and the Feminine Principle in the Second and Third Chapters of Genesis’, in Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities, pp. 203–28.

²⁶ See Heald, ‘The Power of Sex’, for an overview of the ‘extreme reticence and restriction’ that governs sexual morality in (east) Africa. Her position is articulated in opposition to theses that argue that sex is not subject to moral control in Africa.

²⁷ J. Robbins, ‘Cultural Values’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology (Hoboken, Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 121.

²⁸ On regional colour symbolism, see Van Breugel, Chewa Traditional Religion, p. 50; M. Schoffeleers, ‘Symbolic and Social Aspects of Spirit Worship Among the Manganja’ (PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1968), pp. 207–8; M. Welling, ‘Verkenningen in Maravi Kleurensymboliek. Eenbeschouwing over doden–, regen– engenezingsrituelen’ (‘Explorations of Maravi Colour Symbolism: A Discussion of Funeral, Rain, and Healing Rituals’) (MA dissertation, University of Leiden, 1999).

²⁹ See V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1967).

³⁰ V. Das, ‘Ordinary Ethics’, in Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology, p. 142.

³¹ D. Fassin, ‘Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthropology’, in Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology, pp. 1–18.

³² J. Zigon, Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (New York, Berg, 2008), pp. 2, 7–8.

³³ F. Klaits, Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion During Botswana’s Time of AIDS (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010).

³⁴ C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York, Anchor Books, 1994).

³⁵ For additional accounts of 20th century Maravi mgosyo proscriptions, see also Hodgson, ‘Notes on the Achewa and Angoni’; W.H.J. Rangeley, ‘Notes on Cewa Tribal Law’, The Nyasaland Journal, 1, 3 (1948), pp. 5–68.

³⁶ Schoffeleers, ‘Symbolic and Social Aspects of Spirit Worship’, pp. 156–7; A. Rita-Ferreira, Povos de Moçambique (Porto, Afrontamento, 1975).

³⁷ Mogensen, ‘The Narrative of AIDS’; Wolf, ‘AIDS, Morality and Indigenous Concepts’; van den Borne, Trying to Survive; P. Peters, P. Walker, and D. Kambewa, ‘Striving for Normality in a Time of AIDS in Malawi’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 46, 4 (2008), pp. 659–87.

³⁸ Robbins, ‘Cultural Values’, p. 124.

³⁹ Fassin, ‘Introduction’; Zigon, Morality, pp. 2, 8, 17.

⁴⁰ Zigon, Morality.

⁴¹ Howell, ‘Introduction’.

⁴² Das, ‘Ordinary Ethics’, p. 140.

⁴³ By ‘monadic’ I mean a society in which individualism is central to personal integrity – the ‘self’ is perceived and experienced as fundamentally independent, separate in function and self-actualisation from others, and with powers restricted to single bodies. Such societies are also variously labelled ‘egocentric’ and ‘individualistic’. Alternative models of personhood, organised according to a principle of participation – ‘we are, therefore I am’, such as those prevalent across sub-Saharan Africa – have been described variously as socio-centric, collectivist, dividualistic, interdependent, and intersubjective. In these societies, persons do not exist first and then socially interact, but are symbolically and literally constituted through social relationships. For an overview of these distinctions, see I. Mentiki, ‘Personhood and Community in African Traditional Thought’, in R.A. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction (Lanham, University Press of America, 1984), pp. 171–81.

⁴⁴ Zigon, Morality, pp. 18, 163–6.

⁴⁵ Howell, ‘Introduction’, p. 18.