Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 47
unfolded in the most compact space. This becomes evident in the chapter about the house as a
place of worship. We learn how religious rituals once unfolded in the context of the seasonal
calendar, starting with the house as the base unit of ritual life, and then reaching out into the
wider local community. We learn about the cosmological dimension of manure production as
a symbol of fecundity for successful food production.
The ritual importance of manure production also becomes obvious in the chapter on the bull
festival, while the chapter about adult initiation (dzum zugune) highlights the ritual context of
the long-term agricultural success of the individual in a competitive environment of extended
family connections. The four stages of dzum zugune unfolded along kinship lines, and we try
to underpin its visual presentation with sketches and photographs of body adornment. We
show how important adult initiation once was as a cultural expression of crisis management in
the face of potential crop failure, an experience linked to cyclical aridity as an environmental
condition of the past. Neither the bull festival nor the adult initiation rituals, the latter
extending over several years, was in existence any longer when I worked there, and I had to
reconstruct both from the collective memory of my local protagonists.
After our chapter on adult initiation, we change course by writing less from a perspective of
Dghweɗe social and ritual organisation and its manifestations in material culture, and more
from the view of the world of the individual as agent. This change of focus is specifically
expressed in the chapter about the Dghweɗe concept of existential personhood, where we
present some of our protagonists' ideas about the structure of the mind and the worldview
inherent in that. In this chapter we also address the Dghweɗe idea of witchcraft and sorcery,
and describe them as internalised ideas of personhood. I found this the most difficult chapter
to write since it confronted me with my own preconditioned mindset.
Our modified approach of looking more from the perspective of an imaginary agent when
analysing and contextualising our field data is maintained to reconstruct the model of a late
pre-colonial cosmological worldview from the oral memories of our Dghweɗe friends. We
start with our description of a flat-earth cosmography as the underlying cognitive orientation
of their belief system. To cosmologically contextualise the traditional concept of divinity
(gwazgafte) and the belief in God as Supreme Being is part of this also, as is the role of
mythology to explain cultural inventions such as guinea corn and fire. We show that God has
a gender and lives a mirror image of life in this world, and such an image also exists inside
the earth where the ancestors live and where the sun passes through in the night, rising again
into this world out of the earth's backside. In readdressing the idea of worlds above and below
this world as an interchange of terrestrial and celestial supernatural forces, for example
rainmakers and cornblessers who as representatives of specialist lineages function on behalf
of divinity, the concept of existential personhood remains indicative.
The chapter on Durghwe as a mountain shrine will demonstrate how the cosmological ideas
of our Dghweɗe friends are manifested in the three pillars marking the summit of Durghwe,
and also in the underground structure of Durghwe. The pillars that represent three granaries
are connected to the interior of Durghwe which has a connection to a permanent water source,
and there are three bulls living underground, which we see as a cosmological expression of
the mixed farming system on terraced hillsides. Apart from making an ethnoarchaeological
suggestion to better understand the cosmological meaning of the DGB sites, we show how the
Dghweɗe and their montagnard neighbours of the wider sub-region used Durghwe as the most
northerly shrine for rainmaking. We further suggest that Durghwe was perhaps identical with
Mt Legga which Heinrich Barth saw in June 1851 while travelling down the western plains.
Altogether, very little regional comparison is used but questions are rather left open.
However, we will use some for comparison, such as in the chapter about the bull festival,
where we take a wider regional view related to the geographical position of the Dghweɗe bull
festival in comparison to their neighbours. In that context Gudur plays a role, a place of
legendary reputation on the eastern side of the northern Mandara Mountains. We rely here
mainly on our previous ethnographic research among the Mafa to explain the link between the
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