The vitality and efficacy of human substances

Introduction: human corporeality and changing death in Africa

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly work devoted to the ‘materialities of death’ in Africa and beyond. Aligned with a burst of activity exploring the changing nature of death (Lee and Vaughan 2008; Jindra and Noret 2011), ‘necro-politics’ (Mbembe 2003) and the ‘governance of the dead’ (Stepputat Forthcoming), much of this work has focused on the material dimensions of the politics of memory, commemoration and what Verdery (1999) calls the ‘political lives of dead bodies’ (cf. Posel and Gupta 2009). In part, this proliferation reflects an increasing recognition of the changing salience of human corporeality across a wide diversity of African contexts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These include movements for the repatriation of indigenous human remains from museums in the ‘north’ – such as Sara Baartman (Crais and Scully 2009) and Hintsa's skull in South Africa (Mkhize 2009), victims of Germany's Namibian genocide (Dobler 2012), ‘El negro’ in Botswana (Parsons and Segobye 2002) and the bones of Savorgnan de Brazza in Congo-Brazzaville (Bernault 2010) – but they also relate to growing concerns about illicit trades in body parts, ‘trophies’, organs and human tissues (Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002; Jenkins 2010; Harrison 2012). Although sharing a focus on human remains and the political afterlife of the dead, the ethnographic scope of these studies is vast, stretching from the changing significance of funerals, graves and reburials in the politics of land, migration and belonging in South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and elsewhere (Cohen and Odhiambo 1992; Geschiere 2005; James 2007; Fontein 2011), to the propagation of state-led and vernacular exhumations in post-conflict contexts as varied as Rwanda, Kenya (Branch 2010) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2009, 2010, Forthcoming).

In charting the changing meaning of death across the region and beyond, this expanding scholarship has also reflected upon new funerary practices, which have in some contexts created new forms of ritual expertise and, in South Africa in particular, a growing popularity of new embalming practices by ‘funerary entrepreneurs’, exploiting changing popular demands and expectations for the handling, return and burial of the dead (Jindra and Noret 2011; Lamont 2011; Lee 2011). Yet, although it is hard to deny that there have been profound changes to material practices, rituals and meanings associated with death across the region, it is also important to recognize that the salience of human corporealities has a much deeper historical purchase. For example, the presence (and sometimes disquieting absence) of bodies in the ground is central to forging links between claims to ‘autochthony’, entitlement to land, and burial in the soil, as well as in the significance of the material/symbolic processes whereby the living are made safely dead and society is reconstituted after the ‘rupture’ of death. Even colonial administrators supervising the removal of Africans from what became European farmland to ‘native reserves’, in early 20th century Rhodesia, were sometimes acutely aware of the social, cultural, political and moral significance of the ancestral graves left behind, an issue which has recently regained huge significance through land reform (Fontein 2011). Elsewhere in the region, Warnier has demonstrated with great panache how the ‘enclosure, containment and expenditure’ of human substances was key to constitution of royal authority in the 19th century kingdoms of Cameroon's Grassfields (2007). Similarly, Bernault has shown how both Europeans and Africans contributed to the ‘refetishising’ and ‘resacralization of bodies as political resources’ during colonial encounters in Equatorial Africa (2006, 238).

A key question that remains to be properly answered, therefore, is whether the recent expansion of academic interest in human corporeality across Africa reflects changing cultural, social and political practices to do with death across the region, as Ranger (2010) has suggested, or whether it reflects a changing academic focus. In some ways, the renewed scholarly concerns with death and corporeality represents a return to issues first raised by Hertz (1960) in his classic discussion of death, but which then became lost under the groundswell of structuralist, symbolic, interpretive and discursive turns in anthropology. The focus on meaning and social processes of meaning-making meant that the study of things and stuff, and particularly the physicality of ‘the body’ and human remains (cf. Hallam, Hockey, and Howarth 1999), was marginalized in social and cultural anthropology. The ‘turn’ to corporeality may therefore reflect not only broader historical changes across the region and beyond, but also (re-)emergent theoretical concerns with questions of ‘embodiment’, materiality and material agency.

Much of the new work exploring the changing significance of death in Africa has, as a result, emphasized the entangled material/symbolic dimensions of commemoration and particularly the transformative material processes whereby persons, living and dead, are constituted and re-constituted, assembled and re-assembled, and made present or absent. Yet, although scholars have drawn attention to the ‘body fetishism’ often inherent in the politics of commemoration, much less work has been done exploring the vitality of human materials and substances in what we may call ‘non-commemorative’ contexts. A key issue here is that human corporeality is significant and efficacious not only in relation to death and the ways in which ‘deadness’ is constituted and managed; it is equally concerned with life. This was a central issue underlying the panel organized for the CAS@50 conference, entitled ‘the vitality and efficacy of human substances’, from which this special issue has emerged. The task set to the panel's contributors, and the authors here, was to consider what human materials and substances do in situations where the subjectivity, ‘agency’, personhood or relatedness of the dead person, however configured, has limited or no significance in relation to the ritual or political efficacy of (their) human substances. Despite the growing literature describing trades in body parts, blood and organs, not to mention anthropology's long-standing concern with ritual practices that involve corpses and human remains, the vitality and efficacy of human substances in such ‘non-commemorative’ contexts remains under-researched and under-theorized.

The purpose of this special issue is therefore to explore ethnographically and theoretically the vitality of human materiality in diverse African (and Afro-Cuban) contexts, where the recognized ‘human-ness’ of substances is of great significance even as the personhood, identity and social relatedness of the people from which they derive are of marginal or limited relevance to the ritual or political efficacy of the materials themselves. This was a demanding task. It was demanding in part because one of the central issues an emphasis on the material efficacy of human remains raises is how ‘human-ness’ is recognized or rather constituted at all. Indeed an issue that remains appropriately unresolved is whether in the absence of ‘personhood, identity and social relatedness’ writ large, any material could be conceived of as ‘human’ at all. Yet in setting this task, and encouraging this exploration of the efficacy and vitality of human substances in African and Afro-Caribbean societies, our ambition was really to pose, if not wholly answer, the question of how a more ‘symmetrical’ account of the efficacy of human substances can be constituted.

The contributors to this panel undertook this task with admirable fortitude, and continued to do so in the long process of revising and rewriting the papers that appear in this issue. The articles published here respond to this question through a series of detailed ethnographic and historical studies of the material making and unmaking persons and collectives in South Africa, Gabon, the Grasslands of Cameroon and Cuba. These responses are articulated within and speak to a broader literature concerning the theorization of material agency and the indeterminate and relational processes of objectification and subjectification through which the stuff of the human body animates, and becomes animated within, the cultural projects of living people.

The agency of blood, bone, skin and flesh (or what human stuff does)

Over the last two decades or so, even as Africanists began to revisit death, social and cultural anthropologists have become increasingly concerned with the ‘materiality’ of things and substances. By and large, as the story goes, anthropologists had neglected materiality. They had done so because they were philosophically disposed to address ‘concerns with materiality through a reification of ourselves, defined variously as the subject, as social relations or as society’ (Miller 2005a, 2005b, 3). Our discipline had fallen under the ‘tyranny of the subject’, this human entity at once material yet transcending materiality ‘to which all else should be reduced’ (Miller 2005a, 2005b, 37). This is not to say that scholars of human culture wholly omitted things from their accounts. It is, rather, that these things were ‘shamed, mute and passive’ (Baudrillard 1990, 111), of relevance only as they were given significance within the mindful projects of human subjects. As Suzanne Küchler suggests, we allowed things ‘into the analysis of culture, but only as long as they serve as targets for a mind eager to project itself onto mirror-like surfaces’ (2005, 207).

The theoretical ‘return to things’ (Brown 2001; Domańska 2006) and the renewed interest in the ethnographic study of ‘material culture’ (Buchli 2002; Miller 2005a, 2005b; Lock & Farquhar 2007) has promised to overthrow this ‘tyranny of the subject’ and, in so doing, inaugurate a more ‘egalitarian regime’ based on a more ‘symmetrical’ account of social life (Olsen 2003, 88) – one which recognizes the ‘agency’ of non-human actors (cf. Knappett and Malafouris 2008) and the indivisibility of the material and the conceptual (cf. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 3–4; Holbraad 2011). This, as those advocating such a theoretical emancipation of matter are eager to point out, does not herald a return to material determinism which assumes that the irreducible, substantial fact of our physical being in the world can somehow ‘explain’ the less substantial orders of ideas and relations that we call culture and society. What is suggested, rather, is that we no longer proceed from the a priori assumption of a distinction between the mindful subject and dull object, but instead attend the often ‘neglected networks of material agency’ (Knappett 2008, 139) or the ‘co-entanglement’ of things and society (Hodder 2012) and the unfolding, relational and co-dependent processes of becoming by which these networks and entanglements are constituted and various entities emerge, sometimes fleetingly sometimes more enduringly, as subject and objects.

The renewed interest in questions of death and human corporeality in African studies discussed above has, therefore, emerged alongside of, and often entangled with, these theorizations of material agency. Beyond death in Africa, a plethora of studies have focused on the materiality of the body and the ways in which the stuff of the body – organs, bones, blood, skin, hair and flesh – become socially animate in relational processes of making and unmaking various kinds and categories of person. For example, Verdery (1999) has followed the political lives of dead bodies in post-Soviet Eastern Europe as they were buried and reburied in a fractious and ambiguous process of reimagining national histories (see also Paperno 2001). In a series of articles, Crossland (2000, 2009a, 2009b) has considered the ways in which the body has been ‘conceptualized as evidence’ (2009a, 69) and the dead are produced as ‘the dead’ (2009b) through techniques of forensic analysis. Renshaw has made similar arguments about the way in which exhumations reconstruct ‘affective identification’ with the dead of Spain's civil war (2010) for their living descendants, 70 years or more after their deaths (2010). Led by the work of Scheper-Hughes (2004), there has been a number of critical studies tracking the international trade in human organs which have been enfolded into a wider anthropological concern with the ‘commodification’ of the dead body and its parts (Sharp 2000; Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002). Copeman has described similar traffics and transfers, only in his case not of organs but in blood (2005, 2009). There have been special issues of the Journal of Material Culture concerning the ‘affective presence’ and ‘emotive materiality’ of human bones (Harries, Fontein, and Krmpotich 2010) and of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute devoted to essays on the ‘liquid transfers and flows’ of blood (Carsten 2013). It seems as if, after years of leaving the mess of the human carcass (living or dead) to physical anthropologists and archaeologists, while we busied ourselves writing about culture and society and calling ourselves cultural and social anthropologists, anthropological attention has once again returned to the body not simply as the site of our phenomenal being in the world, but as material stuff: leaky, fleshy, messy material stuff, which flows, mutates, dissolves and decays.

One may, however, question the extent to which this renewed concern with bodies and bodily substances actually encompasses a concern with bodies as matter. Just as the turn towards questions of ‘materiality’ has been criticized for too often failing to take account of properties and flows of materials (Ingold 2007), or failing to ‘look more closely at things themselves’ (Hodder 2012, 1), so there is an ambiguity about many writings that ostensibly take as their subject the social life of blood, bones, flesh and organs, yet appear merely to evoke materiality as a means of acknowledging the presence of things so as to secure their absence from subsequent analysis. Take, for example, the work of Verdery. For Verdery bodies and bones are indeed ‘material objects’, which are ‘indisputably there, as our senses of sight, touch, and smell can confirm’ (1999, 27). Moreover, this materiality, this quality of physical thereness, is critical to the ‘symbolic efficacy’ of human remains for,

unlike notions such as ‘patriotism’ or ‘civil society’, for instance, a corpse can be moved around, displayed and strategically located in specific places. Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends time. (1999, 27)

Nonetheless, as Verdery makes clear, other than providing something solid to hang onto and which, due to its mineral nature, endures when much else has passed beyond recognizable form (although hardly transcending time), the significance of corpses has ‘less to do with their concreteness than with how people think about them’ (1999, 28). ‘A dead body’, she adds, ‘is not meaningful in itself but through culturally established relations to death and through the way a specific dead person's importance is (variously) construed’ (1999, 28).

Similarly, in proposing a ‘theory of blood’ in a recent special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Carsten suggests that scholars should attend to the ‘materiality of blood’ (2013, S5) when undertaking more traditional anthropological studies of the ‘meaning of blood’ and its ‘unusual capacity for accruing layers of symbolic resonance’ (2013, S2). ‘Blood’, she argues:

has a unique combination of material properties that make it distinctive within and outside the body. Colour and liquidity are the most striking of these, but their co-occurrence and association in the body with heat, and the propensity of blood to clot, turning from liquid to solid, may be equally important to its capacity for symbolic elaboration. (2013, S5)

Yet the emphasis here remains squarely on how living, thinking, human subjects go about giving meaning to blood. Perhaps the meaning given to blood is in part shaped by its irreducible material qualities, but blood has no real efficacy except that which people give it. Left to its own devices, it is little more than a red liquid with an interesting propensity to clot. Ethnographically, even as blood is evoked as the shared focus of this collection of papers, there is remarkably little blood and bleeding. There is a lot of talk about blood. There are concepts of blood. Blood is symbol. Blood is an idiom of kinship (Cannell 2013) and identity (Lederer 2013). In short blood, like bone, is material medium by which people, as living human subjects, can negotiate more fundamental issues of identity and relatedness. Blood has significance, but only as it becomes entangled in these cultural processes and so acquires the aforementioned ‘layers of symbolic resonance’. There is no sense here of the excessive potentialities of blood as material substance, both more and less than the meanings that people constitute around it. Even though it is a material thing with peculiar properties, it is only that which we think it to be. Anthropology, it seems, still has much to learn from archaeology's attention to materials, substances and things (cf. Gosden 2005; Shanks 2007; Hodder 2012).

Following those who advocate for the recognition of material agency, a greater sensitivity to the properties of materials, and to the entanglements and co-dependence of things and people, we would ask how, if at all, would one extend such an analytic to our understandings of the stuff of human bodies? What would a ‘symmetrical’ anthropology of blood, bone, flesh and skin look like? How would we write studies of cultural processes of the making and unmaking of persons and relationships that do not privilege the conceptual over the material or even assume that these can somehow be held distinct? This is not to wholly set aside a consideration of the meaning of corporeal substances, but it is to suggest that their agency and affordances, efficacy and vitality cannot simply be reduced to the meanings bestowed upon them. The alternative, as Holbraad (2009) argues, is to attend to the conceptual affordances of things, while simultaneously tracking the myriad ways that people set about the work of constituting things as social objects. This work of constitution does not somehow precede the materialization of things and substances; rather it channels, sometimes ineffectually and incompletely, the excessive potentiality of matter, what Pinney calls the ‘torque of materiality’ (2005, 268–269), into determinate cultural forms. Human remains are at once those forms and yet are also that which has the capacity to exceed those forms and therefore defy the temporary stabilization of the ‘thing’ into a social object or subject (cf. Filippucci et al. 2012).

The papers presented in this special issue represent a diverse array of responses to the question of how we may imagine a more symmetrical anthropology of human substances, which elides the a priori constitution of subjects and objects. It would be too ambitious to suggest that these responses make for ‘an answer’ to this question, but in empirical conversation with local peoples and local practices across diverse contexts, they do suggest ways forward. They do so by revisiting concepts and practices that have long been elaborated in the anthropology of sub-Sahara Africa – the ‘taboo’, the ‘fetish’, vernacular autopsies and witchcraft – suggesting that these older concerns may yet offer new ways of rethinking the efficacy of blood, bone and bodily organs.

Between and beyond subject and object

Those who concern themselves with studies of corporeal substances sometimes note how these substances confound our analytical schemas, and perhaps even those of the peoples we study. In writing of the ‘agency of the body and bones in early Anglo-Saxon cremation rites’, Williams argues that ‘the dead body … might be claimed to be intrinsically situated as being both “person” and “object”’ (2004, 264; see also Greary 1986). Carsten makes a similar point when she asks whether blood's ‘uniqueness’ derives from ‘the corollary that it is irreducible to the category either of commodity or of personhood?’ (2013, S2).

In this sense, human substances present a peculiar kind of a problem for the theorization of material agency. Often such theorizations turn on the distinction between the human and non-human, even as they seek to transcend this distinction. As Williams and Carsten suggest, however, the stuff of the body elides or transects this distinction. It is of us yet not of us. This movement between subject and object, which, despite our attempts, is never quite arrested or wholly complete, is sometimes accomplished in the slightest of gestures: those moments when our skin folds or we extend outwards and touch ourselves – ‘the rear surface of one thigh crossed on the front face of the other, or one foot resting on the other’ – which Serres describes as the place where ‘our consciousness dwells’ (2009, 20). Other times, on a grander social scale, it is accomplished, albeit necessarily contingently and imperfectly, through ritual/technical (and not infrequently deeply politicized) processes, which are the more ‘conventional’ stuff of anthropological study.

If the notion of the ‘alterity’ or ‘torque’ of materiality is applicable to all substances and stuff, then it seems that human materials can exemplify the excessive potentialities of stuff in unusually acute ways. As Fontein's paper (Forthcoming) argues in relation to vernacular, and deeply politicized exhumations in northern Zimbabwe, the uncertainty that surrounds how and what human remains do pre-exists, or is rather immanent to, questions about the ambivalent agency of human bones and flesh as uneasy subject/objects. What, then, is specific or unique about human substances that sets them apart from other kinds of things or materials? Filippucci et al. (2012) suggest that the distinction between metaphor and metonym might be useful. Human materials, they argue, often ‘signal presence more than meaning; they denote more than they connote’ and these ‘excessive metonymic qualities defy, perhaps much more than other things, efforts to turn them into meaningful metaphors’. ‘As a result’, human stuff ‘can be subject to huge and often highly specialized efforts and dramatic over-determinations into particular types of subjects/objects, such as ancestors, victims, heroes or specimens – processes that are often unusually problematic, politicized and contested’. ‘What then appears to make human remains different from, and yet exemplary of, other things’ they conclude ‘is their resistance to processes of “purification” and stabilization’ (Filippucci et al. 2012, 211). This is how human materials, like spirits, defy yet demand techniques of subjectification and objectification and remain ambiguously at once both subject and object yet neither wholly one nor the other.

The articles

In different ways, all the articles here concern themselves with how this ambiguous quality of human substances is articulated within and animates processes and techniques to do with the making and unmaking of persons, things and collectives. These are material, symbolic and spiritual processes. They are also and necessarily incomplete, contingent and always work in progress, just as the subjects, or rather entities, thus constituted, remain porous, permeable and unbound, in need of containment, direction, taboos and constant fabrication and feeding.

In the first article, Isak Niehaus re-examines taboos in the Southern African lowveld, arguing that ‘an appropriate starting point for understanding such taboos is to focus analytical attention on emic understandings of the body’. With remarkably literal force, these bodies are revealed to be permeable, partible and ‘constantly engaged in the transfer and exchange of aura, breath, blood and other fluids’ with each other. This ‘coalescence of substances’ is at once constitutive and dangerous, and taboos, within this relational understanding of the distributed constitution of bodies and selves, offer ‘a standardized technique’ to ‘avert dangers’, particularly those associated with powerful dualities and multiplicities.

Nyamnjoh and Rowlands focus on the techniques by which Cameroonian immigrants living in Cape Town ‘nurture life’ and ensure well-being through the sharing of breath, the burial of the umbilical-cords of newborn children in ancestral lands, ancestral naming, funerals and most importantly, the cooking, sharing and eating of food associated with the rituals of birth, death and rebirth. They argue that, ‘[c]ultivating a nurtured way of life is key to materialising the person in both Grassfields and … diaspora settings’ in Cape Town and elsewhere. This involves ‘maintaining the balance between centripedal and centrifugal’ tendencies through practices centred on the eating and ingestion of different kinds of foods and substances, and the passage of that which is eaten through the throat which connects ‘individualistic’ heads to ‘communitarian’ bellies. To have a ‘belly’ is the achievement of a ‘cultivated life’, and this, as with Niehaus's paper, ‘is more than metaphoric’. ‘Quite literally living bodies and persons are the same thing’, the authors argue, ‘shaped and made by the ingestion of substances and the speaking of words over a lifetime’. Through these bodily processes, individuals are connected, forged and fashioned within a ‘collective life’ in the moral pursuit of ‘the perpetuity of life’. This endeavour, as the authors make clear, is ‘inevitably fraught and unsure’, particularly in diasporic contexts where it often amounts to acts of ‘voluntary exclusion’.

In their article, Salpeteur and Warnier also focus on Cameroon, albeit not by examining bodily practices of eating and nurturing a good life, but rather by addressing how vernacular autopsies reveal, and thereby reconstitute, ‘the truth about the dead and the living’. With appropriate historical sensibility, they explore the resilience of vernacular autopsies as hugely invasive public techniques by which the ‘truth about a given subject or subjects and their social relationships with others’ is constituted through opening up of the body and the close inspection of the organs revealed. This remarkable resilience

seems to lie in a specific and enduring symbolic system combined with historical situations that foster much doubt and uncertainty about the deep material corporeal and social truth of any subject … who s/he is, deep into his/herself, inside his/her bodily envelope and what s/he has absorbed or expelled, and what his/her relationship to other amounts to.

Again there is a literalism here, which is determined not to reduce materiality to meaning, and yet retains the importance of symbolic as well as material efficacy. ‘Bodily and material culture is important for what it means, for its sign-value’ yet, as the authors argue, ‘it is equally important for what it does to subjects, for its praxeological value in a system of agency’. They suggest that too ‘many anthropologists focus … mostly on speech and meaning’ and ‘collapse the praxeological value of bodily and material culture onto its semiotic and symbolic dimension as the sole mediation of its efficacy’. In contrast, Salpeteur and Warnier are determined to ‘distinguish the two kinds of knowledge cum efficacy and to articulate the two together’. In so doing, they not only explore the efficacy of autopsies as a corporeal technique that remakes subjects and reconfigures relationships between the dead and the living. They also formulate a schema that may have much wider analytical purchase, to do with ‘the peculiar way the real, the imaginary and the symbolic are intertwined in most parts of Africa’ which ‘may provide the grounds for the efficacy of witchcraft accusations and confessions, as well as the practice of autopsies, oaths, divination and ordeals of various kinds’. ‘It is not enough’, they conclude, ‘to analyse efficacy in terms of the imaginary and the real, because the two are mutually constitutive together with the symbolic, that is the signifier, especially as it expressed in speech and language’. Furthermore (as Bernault's article also forcefully reminds us) how these three are ‘knotted together’ depends ‘to a great extent on local historical trajectories’.

Many of these themes resonate strongly in Espírito Santo, Kerestetzi and Panagiotopoulos fascinating, ‘nganga-like’ paper on ‘Human substances and ontological transformations in the African-inspired ritual complex of Palo Monte in Cuba’. Bringing together ‘three quite distinct ethnographic perspectives on the effects and affordances of material things’ and various forms of human stuff in Palo Monte, they explore the techniques by which Cuba's Paleros use human bone, hair and blood, as well as stones, earth, machetes, handcuffs and nails to constitute a peculiar kind of contingent, yet decidedly present and demanding subject/object/spirit/thing: a ‘god-cauldron’, at once human and non-human, material and spiritual, and dead and alive. They show how

Palo Monte engenders ontological forms that are irreducible to either “matter” or “spirit”, thing or idea, but instead predicate their agency on a hybridity that necessarily encompasses objects, human bodies and the spirits of the dead, as well as their bones.

As Paleros are enveloped in the techniques of assembly and disassembly through which nganga are forged and animated, they themselves too are remade and reassembled. And like the nfumbi spirits that give vitality to these ‘god-cauldrons’ (but neither define nor are confined by them), Paleros too become part of ‘an assemblage whose intended efficacy is premised on the heterogeneity of its parts’, like the authors claim for their article itself. Cuba's evidently rich and diverse religious contexts and particular Palo Monte do indeed ‘present us with a panoply of possible trajectories, both of life and death, biographies as well as “necrographies” … where by the subjectivities engendered or enabled by materials may indeed look very different’, revealing the ‘multi-dimensionality of materiality and embodiment’ which ‘can dissolve essentialist notions of substance, integrity, individuals agency, animation and automation’.

Bernault's article shares Espírito Santo, Kerestetzi and Panagiotopoulos’ concern with the techniques of ritual specialists and the magical efficacy of human body parts and what this discloses about the excessive potentiality of corporeal substances. She concludes this issue by addressing the history of the technical and spiritual processes by which body parts are made into charms and medicine in colonial and postcolonial Gabon. At first glance, her article seems to suggest a classical distinction between Gabonese ‘beliefs in the sacred agency and animacy of the human body’ and that of the French colonialists, who, bringing with them a biomedical tradition of viewing flesh and bone as dead matter, attempted to police African superstition and the careless confusion of substance (an ‘objective/material reality’) and spirit (a mystical/immaterial’ reality) – as subsumed in the notion of the fetish and in techniques of ritual autopsy – which was regarded as typical of ‘primitive’ thought and the ‘monstrous regressive state of local politics’. However, as Bernault carefully demonstrates, this dichotomy, itself an artefact of the operation of colonial administration, obscures the complex and ambivalent processes by which the stuff of human bodies moves between the position of subject and object, while never wholly and comfortably becoming one nor the other. She argues, for example, that even as French officials espoused a vision of the body as a ‘mechanical device’, this vision was haunted by their own ‘religious beliefs and a strong attachment to the sacred value of the body’. Similarly, even while the Gabonese believed in the ‘sacred agency of human flesh’, they also participated in a trade of body parts as a commodity.

To understand the potency of the body and body parts and their ambivalent articulation as both subject and object in colonial and postcolonial Gabon, Bernault proposes the notion of ‘carnal technologies’. This notion moves the discussion away from concerns with beliefs and what bodies ‘mean’ within contrasting belief systems to ‘techno-rites of multiple and congruent valuation’ by which ‘various people invest, invent and produce seemingly contradictory assets or capitals in the flesh’. As such the concept of ‘carnal technologies’ serves to undermine the often unhelpful dichotomy between those who think the body to be a mere object, a fleshy carcass made animate by the presence of a soul or mind, and those who, proceeding from a more distributed and permeable notion of the person, think the body to be a ‘spiritual entity’ ‘suffused with sacred power’. This is not only a matter of undoing a distinction we have made between what different people believe, it is also, and more profoundly, a matter of undoing a distinction we have made in different kinds of practice. The notion of ‘carnal technologies’, as Bernault argues, has the ‘benefit of bringing various processes of valuation in the same theoretical space’, and offers ‘the possibility of of breaking down conventional oppositions between rite and technique’ thereby creating ‘an analytical place where the technical and the ritual, the secular and the sacred are no longer understood as mutually exclusive’.

This focus on technique, which Bernault's paper shares with those of Espírito Santo, Kerestetzi and Panagiotopoulos and Salpeteur and Warnier, would seem to suggest that human remains are what we make them and if they do possess a quality of agency it is only because we have endowed them with this quality. However, as with the other papers, Bernault also suggests the possibility that there is a quality to human remains that both animates and exceeds this process of making. Through a discussion of apprehensions provoked by the ‘incautious use of charms’, she argues that such concerns point to the possibility that these entities, in a manner broadly similar to the nganga fashioned by Cuban Paleros, possess a quality of animacy and agency that could not wholly be devolved to the work of the ritual specialist.

One would hesitate to read too much commonality into such a rich and diverse set of studies; however, read in conjunction with the other articles, Bernault's approach usefully takes us back to where we started: to history and changing notions of death and corporeality. Like the other papers, there is an emphasis on irreducible and powerful multiplicities, transgressions and contradictions. Ritual killings ‘desecrate human flesh at the same time as they sanctify it’, confusing and conflating ‘the economic, the technical and the religious spheres’, and illustrating again how human corporeality is powerfully distributed across co-existent repertoires of meaning and materiality caught in fraught historical tension, exactly because of its excessive multiplicities that are at once metaphorical, literal and metonymic. Because of the unpredictable and ‘high undecidability of their agency’ human materials remain defiant of any stabilization, and the ‘double life of the body, dead or alive remains an elusive reality’.

Notes

1 This was the 50th anniversary conference for the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, held in June 2012. In addition to the authors published here, the panel included papers by Joe Trapido and Joost Fontein. Fontein's article was already committed elsewhere and is coming out in 2014 (Fontein Forthcoming). Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Diana Espirito Santo and Katerina Kerestetzi delivered separate papers, but to our immense gratitude, responded enthusiastically to our suggestion to co-author a paper, which resulted in their remarkable ‘nganga-like paper’ published here.