Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 411
Chapter 3.15
Dghweɗe ideas around existential personhood
Introduction
Here we mainly want to explore Dghweɗe ideas around traditional selfhood and spirithood. I
have been pondering whether to make this a separate chapter, or should I include it in the next
chapter about worldview and cosmology? However I have decided to separate it because it is
more about the mechanisms of individual self-conceptualisation than the general mindset of
society, and therefore deserves to be singled out.1
There was a time in the mid-1990s when I asked about the Dghweɗe words for soul and spirit,
and I tried to explore the interplay between those two concepts in the context of the local
belief in witchcraft and sorcery. This was because I wanted to progress from just an
understanding of institutions and local group formation, and wanted to understand the
Dghweɗe concept of components of the mind. We will see in this chapter how oral memories
about belief in witchcraft and sorcery take on specific forms, but we cannot present all the
different aspects in question, such as divination. Divination is not included as a component of
Dghweɗe existential personhood in this chapter, but we will present what we know about it in
Chapter 3.21 as part of our data on past ways of decision making.
This chapter is more about personality structure and personality traits, and how we think they
need to be understood from the perspective of the Dghweɗe structure of the mind. In previous
chapters we presented the way relational personhood was embedded in a ritually dense pattern
of egalitarian competitiveness, where patrilineal extended family priests were seen as
managers of hope for good luck and avoidance of bad luck as part of the religious belief
system. Now we will try to construct a comprehensive model towards an understanding of
existential personhood, which will help us to better imagine the pre-Copernican mindset of
Dghweɗe adults of the past, and how their view of the world was conditioned by the
cosmographic orientation we will describe in the subsequent chapter. During this attempt to
reconstruct the mindset and worldview of late pre-colonial Dghweɗe from the perspective of
individual actors we will remain aware of the patrilineal kinship system practised.
In the first chapter section we start by presenting the concepts of safa (breath or life) and
sɗukwe (shadow), and explore the limitations of translating them respectively as soul and
spirit. In the same comprehensive way we will begin to discuss the concept of divinity
(gwazgafte), to obtain a first understanding of how the belief in the supernatural as Supreme
Being influenced individual wellbeing and social action. We will explore the underlying
gender aspect of the supernatural world by introducing the reader to the meaning of ghaluwa
as the word for the cosmological world above, which was seen as a place of spiritual warfare
between sorcerers and specialist healers. In light of this, we will briefly discuss the word
shatane (shaitan in Arabic 2), used by one of our protagonists for 'evil spirit', as most likely
being a pre-colonial influence of Islam, and will explore the modern re-conceptualisation of
Dghweɗe words used in the translation of the New Testament by Esther Frick (1980). We will
show how the Christian belief system had already influenced the underlying Dghweɗe
concept of existential personhood during my time. It certainly influenced my ethnographic
translations, as my friend and research assistant John Zakariya was a devoted Christian. This
became particularly obvious when we explored the ideas of soul and spirit, and of a celestial
world above this world which had been substituted by the belief in Christian heaven and the
spirit of God. Both of these constructs of spirithood were translated into the Dghweɗe
language as part of the 1980 Bible translation. They represent concepts of divinity which have
1
2
Unlike F.J. White (2013) we see existential and relational personhood as two sides of the same coin.
Shaitan is the word for evil spirit in Islamic belief and it is derived from the Hebrew word satan.
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