Misfits & Heroes: West from Africa

Misfits & Heroes:  West from Africa, by Kathleen Flanagan Rollins, takes place around 12,000 BC, and as you may have guessed, starts off in Africa.  Naaba is an outcast from his village and a wanderer.  It has been a long time since he's been part of a village, so when he comes upon one, he is drawn to it and watches a weaver at her work.  While in this village, he finds Asha, a woman being held captive, and he frees her.  She is drawn to water, and follows it even when it cannot be seen, and she decides to join Naaba in his wandering, so that she may follow the water without being punished.

Naaba and Asha follow the river until they see a circle of standing stones.  Naaba especially is curious, and this is the point where the book really takes off.  Naaba and Asha fall in with a group of people and become a part of something that will change forever the course of everyone's lives.  The Black Rhino, a power-hungry leader, has a grand vision of uniting all the people and all the villages as one.  The campaign to bring this into being, however, is violent, and opposition is not met with in a diplomatic way.  One of his main concerns is another leader, Dwyka, the She-Eagle, and it is between these forces and the conflicts that arise that Naaba and Asha find themselves.  They know they must find a new place.  They become thrown together with a group of people, some they are familiar with, and some strangers, and they all set off together down the river and out into the sea, where none of them have ever been.

Wombs and Alien Spirits

Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan by anthropologist Janice Boddy is a book with a mostly self-explanatory title (I say "mostly" because it is not, in fact, about aliens). I chose this book as my other alternate reading selection for a course in Anthropological Theory, but don't let that frighten you away! I promise you the book is not dry, as the name of that class would suggest.

This ethnography, based on about two years of fieldwork, takes us to a village Boddy calls "Hofriyat" (names of individuals and the name of the village have been changed) in northern Sudan. Although the people in this part of the country speak Arabic and are largely Muslim, the people in this (and other) villages also maintain a strong belief and indulgence in a very specific form of spirit possession - these spirits are known as zār.