Acknowledgement
Our thanks are due to Duncan Fulton for translation and editing.

1Manjak society is organised into kingdoms (although the use of this term is debatable) (Carreira 1947; Gable 1990; Carvalho 1998). These are situated on the Atlantic coast of North-Western Guinea-Bissau, between the Cacheu and Mansoa rivers. Farmers, specialised craftspeople and royal lineages are social categories but not endogamous castes. A bilineal kinship system with a matrilineal inflection gives women a dominant place in the transmission of certain social statuses.

2There is a high rate of emigration to neighbouring countries including Senegal, Guinea and Gambia, and to industrialised countries, especially France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and United States (Diop 1996). In Guinea-Bissau, Manjak farmers cultivate rice, harvest palm wine and produce cashew nuts; livestock is essentially reared for ritual use. As migrants in Senegal, Manjak men work as builders, house painters and drivers, and women trade on a small-scale or are employed as maids or in laundry work.

3In Guinea-Bissau, the Manjak practise a religion based on local cults, with the exception of the inhabitants of the Pelundo kingdom who have mainly converted to Islam. Some Manjak people from other kingdoms have become Christians, usually during periods of migration.

4How should we characterise the ensemble of West African religious phenomena, each of which is distinctive, but whose similarities emerge clearly in the ethnography? Religions described as ‘animist’ are rooted in a particular form of relationship between man and nature, in which everything is animated by vital forces and energies—not only human beings but also the animal, vegetable and mineral realms, and the natural elements of water, fire, earth, wind and stars. In everyday speech, the term ‘animism’ has pejorative connotations and is undisguisedly patronising. Describing West African religions as ‘local’ reflects their special relationship with the land. This term does not have, at present, any negative connotations in current speech. However, the link to the land appears to fade with urbanisation and the establishment of shrines in towns and cities. Local shrines whose role is to combat witchcraft and sorcery, illness and misfortune, tend to multiply, and may be transported and established far from the original home area, to form a network of units which are related and which share a common origin but are widely separated geographically. Their common origin links them back to a particular locality, even though this may be the home of a different ethnic group as demonstrated by Crowley (1990). Shrines set up in urban areas are also points of origin for new cult sites; this is because, in the representations of the Manjak, occult entities, like human beings, give birth to offspring, and their progeniture can be transported and established in new communities. During periods of migration, it is the feeling of belonging to a single spiritual family rather than loyalty to territorial origins—which are not shared by all those in the community—that cements the relationship between shrines and their adherents. Many of those who go to these shrines for consultations are not members of the Manjak community, and some may even practise other religions.

5In this society there is no shrine where one can pray to a god who is the creator of the universe. Humans address their requests to invisible intermediary occult beings (Teixeira 2001a). These various deities oversee the respect for community rules and have their own specialities—acting against theft or lack of rainfall, ensuring good harvests or successful childbirth, looking after the sacred grove and the cemetery, protecting the kingdom… Infringement of rules and prohibitions can upset the balance of the community; any such disturbance of equilibrium endangers the person who has given rise to it, their family, and society as a whole. The evil produced by the disequilibrium is contagious and can spread widely, causing diseases, misfortunes and deaths unless and until it is ritually deactivated by a competent officiant man or woman.

6Following each episode of disorder unleashed by the entropic forces of the universe and by evil-intentioned entities, a struggle plays out between invisible powers working for good and those motivated by evil. But this opposition is not a simple Manichean division. Invisible powers are often neutral, merely reacting to ritual demands presented by human beings, who may themselves be ambivalent. Usually, in Manjak religion, the dialogue between supplicants and invisible entities is carried on through libations to establish a contract between the occult entity and the client. If the client’s request is fulfilled, a sacrificial ritual is performed as payment in recognition of the entity’s service. (Crowley 1990; Gable 1990; Teixeira 2001a).

7In this way, invisible entities support humans in their efforts to combat the forces of destruction and maleficent actions, or, on the other hand, to provoke them to action. Affliction engenders an eventful existence, creates events, assembles people and welds the community together.

8Ritual procedures with their origins in mythical tales or historical events are born, flourish, transform or fall into disuse. Reconfigurations are a way of adapting rituals to new social realities. For the Manjak, the study of these performative settings and their metamorphoses contributes to the understanding of the collective representations of male and female roles. The sexual division of ritual labour places women from the Babok kingdom at the centre of the sacred sites involved in the struggle against affliction, where they have secured for themselves the position of chief ritualists. The analysis of their representations of the body and of consciousness, and those of their witch adversaries, shows the structural framework of their power. By assuming flexible positions of occult power women acquire strategic positions that lead to their empowerment in the practical and secular world.

9This work is based on more than two years of field-work (observations of rituals and everyday life, formal and informal interviews) among Manjak people in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau between 1989 and 2001. There are great differences between Manjak populations. This paper concerns only the Manjak from the kingdom of Babok (Canchungo and Bukul) in Guinea-Bissau, and those from that kingdom who have migrated to the city of Ziguinchor in Senegal.

Religious dynamics and gender order

10What do the anti-witchcraft Manjak cults tell us about body and gender order? The sociologist Linda Woodhead, in her work on the relationships between gender and religion, considers that religion ‘can reinforce existing gendered distributions of power or try to change them. At any one time a religion will exist in a particular structural relation to the gender order of the society of which it is part.’ (2007: 9). She sets out a schema in which the vertical axis moves from religions which are fully part of the distribution of power in society to the more marginal cults which are unaligned with the social and gender order, and the horizontal axis is a continuum between two types of female strategy: confirmatory strategies which are hierarchised and seek to legitimate, support and sacralise the social and gender order, and challenging strategies which are egalitarian and which attempt to reform, critique or transform this order.

11In this way Woodhead identifies four major categories of religion in terms of their placement along these two axes.

12In this typology the four major categories are: consolidating religions which contribute to strengthening the existing gender order and reproduce the inequality between the sexes; tactical religions which have a stake in the gender order but which use it to subversive ends to acquire more power from within; questing religions which occupy a marginal position in terms of the distribution of power, but which are used to acquire a power from outside that does not call the prevailing order into question; and counter-cultural religions, which has a marginal position and is used to contest and to redistribute the gendered distribution of power. These four categories are not impermeable but are to some extent porous. In terms of this matrix, Manjak women as ritual actors occupy shifting positions.

14At the same time this is a religion of quest, in which issues of personal, affective and professional fulfilment are treated. The particular areas relating to witchcraft and anti-witchcraft attract clients for consultation who may or may not be members of the community. The acquisition of sacred powers by women creates a synergy which can give access to greater secular power. They improve their position through gaining charisma in their role as intermediaries between deities and human beings, either on the individual or the community level. They appear as facilitators of social change within an order which they respect and on which they rely in a flexible manner, legitimating a number of new forms of behaviour. At the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, when there were problems with the separatist movement of Casamance, they appeared as territorial protectors and the cult was particularly active.

15When occult entities pick out women who will become priestesses, they are enabling women to acquire forms of social and religious power which were previously inaccessible to them. Within this established religion, women have worked tactically to enter new sacred domains and to take on responsibilities which have become mainly female. At first sight these women appear to be acting to preserve custom, but because they feminise it they may also be seen as subversive actors for social change, transforming what is considered to be traditional (Latour 1997). While it is true that it is easier for rituals which are beginning to be devalued in the eyes of some people to be taken over, it is still interesting that power is not left vacant, and that women are using it in a tactical way to bring about changes both in established forms of ritual and also at the same time in their own lives. Their speech carries beyond the sacred domain and is heard in the realm of the profane. They are listened to and respected. Sometimes, people see them not for a consultation in their shrine but simply to ask their advice, or to ask for their mediation if they encounter a problem with another person. In a polygamous marriage the ritualist occupies a dominant position in relation to a first spouse, and the husband will not dare to contest his wife’s decisions, which are protected by occult powers. Female power is thus orientated around an oblique axis between the two categories of religion as quest and religion as tactical. The cohabitation of quest and tactics has allowed for the development of hybrid categories which are transformed and reorganised depending on the social and religious dynamics operating in the area. Women have assumed a presence in the domains of the occult, but have not stopped making migration journeys, sometimes profiting from their status of diviner-healers. In the Paris region, new diviner-healers arrive from Africa and install their shrines in the closets of a their relatives’ apartment. While they stay practising their art, their success is due to information about their presence spread by word of mouth (Teixeira 2013). Far from leading to the abandonment of rituals, life in cities develops them: migration brings encounters with new realities and new questions, such as the problems of finding salaried employment, a good education or training. In this way women have created a virtuous circle, in which advancement in their position at the heart of rituals simultaneously strengthens their day-to-day power within their families and localities.

16To understand the structural power of these women, it is necessary to grasp the perception of and relationships between diviner-healers and witches.

Ethnography of diviner-healers and witches

18In the kasara shrine there are miniature stretcher-beds. Each one contains the strength of the occult entity. There is also space reserved for women to give birth, and for their children to live with them temporarily while the victims of witchcraft attacks as they place themselves under the protection of the shrine’s power. A number of types of ritualist co-exist within the kasara shrines. The bamañã (pl.) are female officiants who manage the shrine and the term ilima (pl.) is reserved for men who have this role. They pour the libations and address the requests that those who have come to consult the shrine wish to make. They do not necessarily have to be clairvoyants. The entities who are resident in the kasara shrines are the only ones able to communicate by incarnating themselves in the body of a person, which gives rise to a state of possession with altered consciousness. Only women are possessed; these are the balemp (pl.; literally the ‘workers’). They carry out divinations and healing. These women are also called bayela (pl.), which means the ‘envoys’ or those sent by the power behind the kasara cult. They are all clairvoyants. Around these officiants are women who make up the community of devotees of the cult and who do not have the ability to see the invisible (Teixeira 2001b; 2004; 2007).

19These ritual specialists do not use herbal medicine, but on the other hand they are the only ones who can drive away the ‘wind’; in other words only them can repel the pathogenic powers sent by maleficent witches. The ‘winds’ are driven out during nocturnal patrol rounds carried out collectively by officiants and kasara devotees.

20Among the Manjak, when there is a possessed person in a family, the responsibility conferred by possession is not lost after her death. The responsibility stays in the family. But there is no fixed criterion for its transmission to another family member. One day a person is possessed and the community members interpret the phenomenon as a ritual possession by a deity. Or the person may be designated by divination without any previous possession phenomenon having occurred before the nomination. There is no formal initiation. Through imitation the officiant learns to control her possession step by step and via the alternation of different personalities. At first she may be possessed during a therapeutic ritual led by the principal officiant of the cult, and she merely assists the older possessed women. Later she becomes able to speak to reveal a problem during collective rituals, and later still she will be able to carry out divination for patients. Here, only women are possessed, men are known not to be able to control their possession.

21Possession exists in so many societies that it seems banal. But as anthropologists we are always interested by this phenomenon, its structure and its social meaning (Teixeira 2001b). Here we are not analysing possession as a disease, or as a pathological perturbation of the person. Like Georges Lapassade (1997) I argue that the capacity of dissociation is included in the human psyche. This capacity of dissociation is interpreted by the actors, from an emic point of view, as the emergence of a deity in the body of a person. The possession can be analysed as an acceptance of the unification of separate personalities and social roles. This dissociation is not the result of a process, but is rather the initial condition of the process.

22Officiants can cause themselves to become possessed by breathing deeply, by trying to force themselves to weep, by repetitive music or by wearing symbolic objects. The transformation of the consciousness of a woman brings with it new standardized attitudes and gestures. Specific roles are performed in an organized space and time. Each society gives this phenomenon a particular place and meaning within its religious system. In a world that is changing rapidly, there is great diversity in the selection by possessing entities of who to possess—male or female, and in the degree of spectacle and organization of rituals. However, we can analyse the structure of the possession by studying the structure of the actions of the human bodies and minds of witches and witch-hunters. The social representations of these actions reveal different forms of power and knowledge among the members of the community. Power is strongly connected to knowledge and specifically to occult forms of knowledge. The officiants of possession cults are able to conduct a process of interaction between the visible and the invisible worlds.

23There is a symbolic language of possession. Through their articulate and corporeal languages, possessed persons express the disharmonies and the tensions of the society. In a changing world, everyone needs to align his or her representations of invisible and visible forces to new realities. Among the Manjak, men are now occupied with more paid employment and are becoming dependent on women to resolve their occult problems. Nowadays these occult problems are multiplying, as are the numbers of shrines devoted to solving them. Money is given to the officiants for their divination activities and for their therapeutic rituals, with the result that some women have become famous and popular, and now have a remunerated role and responsibility.

25Some persons are possessed with or without changed consciousness. They have responsibilities in the two types of shrines and combine the two functions. Both forms of possession are useful, depending on what the officiant has to do. And both forms need an apprenticeship in order to improve control of the possession, even if there is no formal initiation in one case. The officiant continues to learn her office throughout her life.

27The natapar (sg.) is believed to project pathogenic substances, which can be innate or acquired, onto other people. People with some physical characteristics such as a domed forehead may be suspected of making persons whom they encounter sick in this way. Others in the same neighbourhood try to avoid them in everyday life to guard against an occult attack.

Body, consciousness and structure of actions

30To confront these evil-doers, women diviner-healers are able to face and counteract witchcraft attacks, to heal the physical, social and psychic disorders of those afflicted with them, and to provide responses to the disorder they cause in the community. All those who have the gift of clairvoyance resemble each other as diviner-healers, whether they are socially recognised or not, because they move in the same spheres at the outer limits of society. While in theory they are opposed to each other, it may happen that they collaborate, because a person who can combat evil and subdue it is also capable of producing it.

31The organization of the different forms of possession (divinatory possession and therapeutic possession), and of the different symbolic forms of witchcraft attacks (anthropophagic or via a maleficent object), has a structure, as can be seen in the following diagram. Here we analyse the structuring of the occult capacities of the persons involved.

32At the centre of the schema is a person without a specific power. Even when ignorant of the invisible world, this person can be a channel to the witchcraft or sorcery side of the society or to the positive and therapeutic side. This neutral ambivalence is fragile, and easily influenced by maleficent entities.

33On the left side of the figure, the nalemp (sg.) body and consciousness are invested with a beneficent power (therapeutic and divinatory). Both the human body and human consciousness are invaded. This type of possession occurs with an altered state of consciousness.

34The napene (sg.) body is invested with a beneficent power (therapeutic and divinatory). Here the human body is invaded but not the consciousness. The possession occurs without an altered state. During the initiation there is a stage with a sort of shamanistic contact with spirits, deities and ancestors. The initiation includes a journey of the vital principle of the novice into the occult world, as in a shamanistic system. Manjak say that the neophyte is dead. As Bertrand Hell (1999) suggests in his analysis, there is no rigid separation between possession and shamanism; in some societies the two forms of contact with the spirits co-exist.

35Among the bamañã (pl.) consciousness and clairvoyance co-exist unsystematically in the body. The namañã (sg.) is rather positive. He or she is authorised to use the domesticated power of a shrine. The clairvoyant can take action to help the society without possession.

36The collective kasara cult brings together adepts, balemp, bapene and bamañã. The collaboration between balemp and bamañã is important. The namañã pours the libation and the nalemp is possessed; she does not remember what she has said, but the namañã does, and can warn people affected by the problem. The namañã is sometimes a possessed person who is too old to continue this tiring experience.

37These responsibilities are means to enhance a certain power and aura in the community. They are also a means of empowerment for the ritualists, who have the knowledge and the capacity to take decisions involving the healing or the death of members of the community. Their flexibility in their interpretation of misfortune ensures and consolidates the continuity of the cult. The cult-leaders are able to adapt to a reality which is always changing. The more violent the social crisis, the more active the cult becomes; when there is no major problem, the cult tends to be less active. But witchcraft is growing in importance in rural and urban West Africa at the present time.

38On the right-hand side of the schema, the clairvoyance of the nakalam is not systemically in the body, and the nakalam actions involve wild powers, or the illegitimately diverted power of a shrine.

39The body of the natapar (sg.) is constrained to launch a pathogenic substance in order to avoid affliction to him or herself by casting his affliction onto others by projecting a maleficent substance into the body of the victim.

40The nare kakut’s (sg.) human body is left behind in bed during the night, while his wild and occult body goes out to perform maleficent actions. He or she invades other bodies to hide. They steal and transform the vital principle of others into pigs to eat their flesh.

41This structural opposition between positive and negative power is not fixed. A person can be a positive officiant one day, and a witch in secret another day or during the night. An officiant can be a napene, and a nalemp, or a witch can be a natapar and a nare kakut, accumulating powers.

42As we can see in the schema, for every power there is an opposite force. The two poles are matched in opposition term by term. The most important of these pairs is the equilibrium between the different entities of witches and diviner-healers. Possessed persons and the adepts of the possession cult have to maintain the world in a certain order to avoid chaos. Each ritual must be performed with a minimal oblation and libation that nurtures the occult entities and the witches, the witch-hunters and the circle of their family and friends. Each one has a role and a function to fulfil in the structure of the system.

Conclusion: women and ritual power

43Françoise Héritier has shown how simple recognition of the observable difference between the sexes has been elaborated into a hierarchical classification of masculine and feminine (Héritier 1996). She gives the example of the passivity/activity opposition in our society. Here passivity is classified as feminine and activity as masculine, with feminine passivity being inferior to masculine activity in hierarchical terms; whereas elsewhere, in India for instance, passivity is considered a masculine quality and is hierarchically ranked above activity, in this cased conceived of as feminine (Héritier 2009). Feminine is subordinate to masculine. For Héritier, the basis of this ‘differential valence of the sexes’ lies in the fact that in order for reproduction to take place, men need women. Producing and nurturing a child takes time, and to prevent women from leaving and taking with them the important resource that a child represents, men have taken control of women’s bodies. In this schema, contraception appears as one of the means of “dissolving the hierarchy” (Héritier 2002).

44In Africa, conjugal arrangements involve a sexual division of labour in which women carry the obligation to ensure the descendance of their spouses. Maternity becomes for them a source both of power and of subjection (Tabet 1998). Joola women, who are neighbours of the Manjak, have a ritual formulation of this injunction imposed on their sex (Journet 1985). A woman who does not have the status of mother may not occupy a social position which is recognised and commands respect in the community. She cannot be party to the main shrines linked to female power. Manjak women, as those mainly responsible for the health of their children, are the first to go into action in case of illness or death. This privileged relation of women to death and birth is a feature of many of the myths of sub-Saharan Africa. (Kilson 1976; Mbiti 1988).

45Men and women share ritual spheres which may be separate from each other or may be accessed in common. Specifically male rites are those which concern male initiation, whereas those carried out by women typically involve the birth and health of children. In the ancestral shrines the two sexes both perform rituals, but a man will always take precedence over a woman, even if he is younger.

46In the kasara cult, women can sacrifice animals such as pigs, goats or sheep by themselves. At cult shrines which are jointly managed by a man and a woman, the man is the one who sacrifices. In cults managed by two women, there is one woman who performs the sacrifices. If there is a man present, she will ask him to assist, because the act of sacrifice is thought to be physically easier for a man to carry out, but the man will simply follow the directions of the ritualist. In practice, however, this is not always the position, and women can be observed in some cases cutting an animal’s throat themselves even though a man is present. But although women do personally sacrifice poultry, sheep, goats and pigs, they are never observed to do the same for cattle; according to the women themselves, this is for reasons of lack of physical strength. For these kinds of animal, women call on men to help them.

47In the West of Guinea-Bissau, as Odile Journet-Diallo (2003) explains, in a number of different ethnic groups it is women who wield the sacrificial knife. However, the question that may be asked is whether what is offered in sacrifice is in fact the female body itself: not necessarily the bleeding body of the woman during her menses or in childbirth, but the body which is physically engaged in ritual action to the point of total exhaustion. The rituals are so physically demanding, especially for women who undergo possession, that those performing the sacrifice can be considered as ‘sacrificial beings’ (Zempléni 1987).

49Héritier (1984: 20) proposes the idea that even if ‘women succeed in invading the domain reserved for men, or if part of this domain is progressively taken over by women, the key feature is that the reserved domain itself continues to exist, however it is modified’ [my translation]. In Manjak religious organisation, women can be seen to acquire power in certain rituals, in particular in those where they wield the sacrificial knife. But does this suggest that at the same time men have taken over a new domain which is reserved for them and to which women can have no access? It would be interesting to analyse further the changes and reversals in gender relations in this society.

50Kasara has enabled a network of female solidarity and mutual aid to be established, with links that take the form of regular anti-witchcraft activities: rituals to combat witchcraft or, more exceptionally, festive rituals in which the participants enjoy singing, dancing, eating, drinking and talking together. These festivals sometimes become divinatory ceremonies, in which deities who are pleased by the feasts use the opportunity to deliver their messages by taking possession of one of the priestesses. The kasara sanctuary is a space of female freedom, speech, solidarity and power. For example, a widow without resources who rejects a leviratic marriage can, as an adept of Kasara, take refuge and live in the shrine with other women (Teixeira 2001b). These charismatic diviner-healers, who are respected within their families and communities, manage the values of the society by legitimating or condemning new kinds of behaviour introduced by urban life. A person may want to differentiate him or herself by achieving social success in a society that is usually rather egalitarian, or by marrying someone who was not chosen by a parent (Teixeira 2001a). The social position of these clairvoyant women who are chosen by deities is reinforced by their economic role as distributors of meat, rice and drinks and as receivers of the cash payments involved in sacrifices. Although these incomes are unequal and often very limited, some women succeed in achieving financial autonomy, especially in towns. Some go on trips to developed countries, to build up a modest amount of savings and return endowed with an even greater aura (Teixeira 2013).