Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters

Author:Ethan Watters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2009-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Creatures in Our Heads

The other religious belief that was central to the family’s conception of the illness was spirit possession. It would be easy for a Westerner to assume that belief in spirit possession would almost certainly increase the stigma for a mentally ill person. McGruder remembered the horror stories of spirit possession she learned as a child in the United States. Those beliefs were informed more by pop cultural representations (such as the movie The Exorcist) than by what she heard in church. Nevertheless her cultural understanding of these devil-focused narratives about spirit possession included dramatic suffering and ostracism for the person believed to be possessed. In the Christian context, possession is nearly always thought of as a profoundly disturbing experience, usually requiring dramatic and sometimes violent interventions. Given the choice between the biomedical understanding of schizophrenia and the spirit possession narrative, most Westerners assume the drier science-bound explanation for the disease would certainly inflame less emotion and stigma. As McGruder came to understand the spirit possession beliefs of families like Amina’s, however, she found them to be very different from Christian beliefs in the West. To begin with, spirit possession in Zanzibar was not an uncommon or necessarily an extreme experience. As Amina explained to McGruder, we all have “creatures in our heads.”

The beliefs surrounding spirit possession in Zanzibar arose from the complex combination of traditional Swahili culture and Arabic beliefs about jinns. These spirits that often inhabit living individuals aren’t uniformly good or bad but can cause problems if they are not dealt with in appropriate ways. A spirit handed down from one’s ancestor is generally thought to have a protective effect for the person who carries it. Such an entity will cause difficulties only if it is ignored or not properly appeased. These spirits can have an ethnicity, gender, and religious affiliation of their own. A spirit might be picked up accidentally or through witchcraft. Sorcerers are said to raise and feed spirits, which they use to harm their enemies.

The main difference between the character of spirits and of humans, McGruder learned, is that spirits are often autonomous, rude, selfish, and not given to concealing their emotions. (In this way they are sometimes compared to tourists who intrude but do not greet.) When a spirit possesses someone, he or she often violates the social norms. A sister momentarily influenced by a spirit may strike a brother who is harassing or threatening her, for instance.

Because nearly everyone on the island believed in spirit possession and had a personal experience with it, the application of the belief to mental illness had the counterintuitive effect of lessening the stigma attached to the behavior of the mentally ill person. It made bizarre or disruptive behavior more understandable and forgivable. Like the sister who has a ready explanation for hitting her brother, mentally ill persons and their family can evoke the narrative of spirit possession to explain unusual or antisocial behavior.

Belief in spirit possession also gives the family a sense of agency in that it allows for a variety of socially accepted interventions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.