8 - Spirit Mediums at the Margins: Materiality, Death and Dying in Northern Zimbabwe

Summary

This chapter is part of an ethnography primarily exploring the relations between materiality, corporeality and death, objects, and the multiple pasts in which spirits and mediums are involved in their communities in Zimbabwe. It focuses regionally on the mid Zambezi Valley in northern Zimbabwe, and historically on current mediums of spirits of clans that claim to have ruled this area in the long past (mhondoro ancestors).

My ethnography builds on long-term fieldwork in the Angwa and Kanyemba areas in Zimbabwe (including Mozambican border-villages) within a PhD programme and subsequent short visits to the area. Research methods were based on open-ended interviews with mediums and their kingroup (both consanguineal and ritual), headmen, and other key informants in the community. In addition, my observation and documentation of discussions and consultations at the shrines (mediums possessed) were post-actum reconstructed and contextualized in text. They became an invaluable source of qualitative data on local politics, ritual and performative practices. Archival data, photographic and film materials added to this ethnographic record.

Scholarship on mediums and spirits in Zimbabwe is extensive and cannot be summarized in this brief introduction. It informs about rich regional variations from historical and anthropological perspectives covering considerably long timeframes such as the ‘precolonial’, colonial and postindependence periods. In particular, materiality and human bones in Zimbabwe's colonial and postcolonial violent state contexts have gained relevance in recent scholarship. It links the materiality of human remains to aspects of ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ arguing that human bones’ agency is related both to representations of the past, and to ‘their “emotive materiality” as substances and their “affective presence” as dead persons; spirit subjects which continue to make demands upon society’ (Fontein, 2010: 431) in the present. In line with this, others have focused on ‘what bones do to people’ in the sense of what they do to constrain or allow in various social and material contexts. Hence it has been suggested to consider bones as ambivalent subject/objects. Bones as subjects ‘provide a physical reminder or indicator of how well the wishes of the deceased are being fulfilled’. Bones as objects ‘have “agency” as materials and things’, that is, they ‘do things’ (Krmpotich et al, 2010: 372– 373).