Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
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children rushed in when, finally, a test bulb flickered overhead. The screen lit up and the word SHARP appeared as if to signal the substitution under way: bold blue pixels displacing the faint blue reflection of the evening sky. Afro-pop beats soon resounded from the speakers. Everyone cheered and fixed their eyes on Mr. Ong’eng’o, the Kenyan megastar on screen. Though the Gusii words he sang were meaningless to us, the images and sounds were electric.
The bass lines thumped so intensely they would nearly drown out the beats that sounded a short time later from elsewhere in Kaveya. Summoning villagers to an all-night mirusi ceremony, these rhythms were amplified not by sleek new speakers but by the goat hide of hand drums, their source of power not diesel but deities. These deities were the ancestral spirits integral to all healing ceremonies, the same spirits Deacon Nório had just called evil and banished from Kaveya’s new longhouse cinema.
The distant throb of drums presented me with a dilemma. I was tempted to go; it was one of my first opportunities to witness a traditional healing ceremony. But I worried about how I could be present for both it and this signal event in the life of my friends. I hung around a bit longer, then rose to leave, apologizing for having to break away. No one saw the need for apologies; everyone respected my desire to go. Leonardo, tireless in his offers of research assistance, even promised to join me later, once his services at the cinema were no longer needed.
I thanked him and began the ten-minute walk down the laterite road. In the darkness I made out the profiles of children and teenagers sharing the path with me. We exchanged greetings as we crossed: Munetta phama? (Are you walking well?)
I knew I had arrived when five or six fire pits came into view, all at a single compound where usually just one burns through the night. Around each fire sat clusters of people on the ground or on stumps, their hands alternately extending toward the flame and tearing balls of porridge paste from a common tin plate. I was invited to sit and share in the meal.
After eating, a number of young people got up and left. They headed in the direction from which I had come, and I realized that those whose paths I earlier crossed were not just heading to Mutúali’s cinema. They were leaving the mirusi grounds to do so. It was tempting to see this as a harbinger of things to come. Were we at a tipping point where people increasingly opt for transnational pop over ancestral ceremonies? The short journey from the ritual grounds to the cinema seemed suddenly a passage of great import. The only one swimming upstream was the anthropologist.
The mirusi ceremony eventually got under way. All the women—and only the women—made their way into the healing hut. But they scarcely remained there. At various points through the night, they exited in single file, shaking gourd rattles and chanting rhythmically: “Let’s go to the mountain and seek out wood for the pot.” “Let’s seek the naruru, the medicine from the bush.” “I’m returning from where I came, to take the nihiro bath.” Each verse named an element of ritual significance. Firewood was used to heat the medicine consumed by the afflicted. The naruru (water strider) was brought into contact with the patient, then released to return her vertigo to the bush. The nihiro was a river bath, taken just before sunrise, wherein, I was told, “the sick person moves from the old environment to a new life.” Transformation, in all these cases, presupposed motion: from inside to outside, from land to river, from village to bush. Yet there was always, also, a return.
In so many ways the mirusi ceremony differed from what was simultaneously occurring just up the road. One event was retrospective, done because “this is how our ancestors did it”; the other was prospective, evoking electronic futures from which ancestral spirits were explicitly expelled.
There were also, though, similarities. As central as motion was to the healing ceremony, the same could be said of the motion pictures, mostly of dancers, broadcast at the cinema; and both events summoned forces from other worlds—whether ancestral spirits or the Holy Spirit, whether bush animals or pop stars. Two seemingly disparate events were connected by movement. The past and the future conjoined in a mobile present.
That mobility manifested most clearly in the youths whose paths I had crossed earlier that night. It turned out I would see them again, when they returned to rejoin their mothers. Back on the healing grounds, they tended their own fire pits, varyingly following the ritual and entertaining themselves with riddles. It struck me as I observed their seamless inhabitation of parallel worlds that although radical changes were afoot, such changes were not one-way. There was, it seemed, a return route on the path to modernity.
I saw it not just in the ease of young people’s movements but in the fact that many women at the mirusi ceremony had been, and would perhaps again be, involved with the village Pentecostal church. I saw it in the good cheer with which my friends wished me off to what, for them, is a forbidden ceremony. I saw it in the enthusiasm with which Leonardo, though Pentecostal, arrived around midnight to aid my introduction to it.
All this made me rethink what had so troubled me earlier that day: “How would I be able to attend both the cinema’s inauguration and the healing ceremony? How terrible that both had to fall on the same night!” I now wondered whether the sense of this as a dilemma was uniquely mine.
Continuities of Change
This is a book about change, about how it is conceived and experienced, received and initiated. Dominant discourses, following Michel Foucault’s (1972) view of history as a series of epistemic ruptures, have come to present historical change in terms of discontinuous epochs. Attending this is usually a strong sense of the exceptional nature of the present, its radical alterity from the period just past. Hence, the present world, the one we are all said to inhabit, is that of the “post”: postmodern, postcolonial, postsecular. Germane to this book’s opening narrative is the “postelectronic world” now upon us, one in which media technologies connect even remote corners to far-off places (Appadurai 1996: 5).
Of course, there are exceptions. As late as the year of my fieldwork (2011–12) no cell phone signals reached Kaveya or other rural parts of northern Mozambique; electricity was confined to the core of the district capital. Yet plans for constructing cell phone towers were in the works. And, as seen at the longhouse cinema, living off the grid could not keep resourceful villagers from accessing hitherto unknown styles and stylings. Mr. Ong’eng’o was just a hint of things to come. On future visits I saw villagers enjoying videos from as far away as Nigeria and Hollywood. Especially popular among the latter was the film Undisputed II: Last Man Standing, promoted on the DVD cover as “Intensive! Explosive! Mind Blowing!” Major changes under way, indeed.
There is indisputable value in seeing often-overlooked locales as developing in these ways. Worried by globalization trends, anthropologists once made it their mission to document and thereby salvage “tribal” folkways before modernity could render them extinct (Gruber 1970). Well-intentioned though they were, the anxieties driving these efforts also betrayed a measure of ignorance about how cultures have always been dynamic, adopting and adapting to foreign and unfamiliar forces. An anthropological alternative to the caricature of vulnerable natives powerless before homogenizing pressures arose in the late twentieth century along with similar developments in postcolonial theory (Bhabha 1994). The argument here was that however universalizing its rhetoric and however expansive its ambitions, no cultural, religious, or political formation succeeds in taking similar form in dissimilar settings. People do not passively accept the new. They hybridize and syncretize it, they localize and indigenize it, all in accord with underlying, context-specific logics.
With his 1996 book Modernity at Large, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai marked yet another shift, not by denying processes of hybridization but by intensifying possibilities of change. Due not only to electronic media but also to greater means of long-distance travel, a far wider set of possible lives has become imaginable, if not achievable, for more people than ever before. It is not just that people appropriate the new in terms of the old. Today most have it in their power to transcend their places of origin. Consequently, “the world in which we now live … involve[s] a general break with all sorts of pasts” (Appadurai 1996: 3).
Nothing better illustrates this turn from hybridity to rupture than the oeuvre of anthropologist