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This chapter examines the manifestation of public witchcraft suppression practices in Ulanga District, historically and in the present. Movements for the suppression of witchcraft have swept across south eastern and central Africa throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps the best documented is kamcape, observed at different places and points in its history by Audrey Richards, Max Marwick and Roy Willis. The practice of such movements tends to be similar. They are often associated with a single practitioner, either based at a cult centre or on whose authority itinerant specialists work. Their ritual practice is generally public, involving groups of people or even entire villages. It centres on the use of medicine that both suppresses the powers of witches and protects potential victims from witchcraft attack. Often, both witches and accusers participate and receive the same treatment, a key component of which entails the purification of clients. This is achieved by washing parts of the body in special medicines thought to have cleansing, as well as anti-witchcraft properties. The anti-witchcraft medicine of kamcape was explicitly associated with cleansing, the very name of the movement being derived from the verb ‘to clean’ or ‘to scrub’ (Richards 1935: 149; Willis 1968: 8; Marwick 1950: 100). In the Tanzanian movements, this purification sometimes involves shaving off the hair, hence witchcraft suppression practices are talked about in terms of ‘shaving witchcraft’ (Redmayne 1970: 114; Green 1994). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The embodied containment of contagious power by women in specific ritual categories is also a feature of funerary practices, together with the notion that containment cumulatively changes a person's substance. Bereavement, as a life experience, leaves a cumulative trace in people's bodies. This affects both men and women. The once bereaved acquire a degree of immunity from the ravages of death power, and can assume specific roles at the funerals of others. The funeral process is structured around the imagined transition of a dead person into a spirit, achieved through the manipulation of a series of parallel identifications between the dead person and the circle of key mourners, who are most closely identified with the body (cf. Goody 1962: 188; Wilson 1957: 49). It is the extent of this identification which makes possible the series of repeat funerals which constitute the extended funeral process without, as in the case of the secondary burials described by Hertz (1960) and others (Pina Cabral 1980; Bloch 1971, 1982; Huntingdon 1973), an actual body to rebury. The identification between mourners and deceased is most pronounced for those women closely related to the dead, who wear around their necks strips of cloth (lijemba) representing both corpse and shroud until the funeral process is over. The identification between women and houses serves to identify female mourners with the corpse, and what happens to both the core bereaved and to the corpse closely parallels what happens to the mwali. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Africa, as elsewhere in the world, gender is experienced as a process of gradual transformation in a person's physical and emotional being. Bodies matter, and are made to matter through the repetitions and reiterations which performatively effect gendered personhood (Butler 1993: 9). For Pogoro Catholics, bodies are given meaning at the level of experience through a twofold process of incorporation. Symbolic constructions of gender are embodied and incorporated into male and female persons through rituals that establish and consolidate gendered identities by the manipulation of both physical substances and cosmological powers capable of affecting the body. Participation in such rituals is not merely experienced in the symbolic terms of representations, but as progressively emotionally affecting those who participate. Representations of gender are not confined to the abstract level of symbolic discourse, but are enacted and experienced through specific ritual roles of gendered interdependencies (cf. Kratz 1994). These roles centre on a division of labour between men and certain categories of women who assume responsibility for dealing with the potentially dangerous powers generated through fertility and death. I argue that women's experience of loving and caring for others, and of managing death and sorrow, underlies a distinctly female religiosity premised on the remembrance of the crucified Christ through compassion for his bereaved mother, Mary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]