Article-P154 2

Journal of Religion in Africa 41 (2011) 154-179 brill.
nl/jra
Intimacy and Alterity: Prophetic Selves and Spirit

Others in Central Mozambique
Tracy Luedke
Anthropology Department, Northeastern Illinois University,
5500 N. St. Louis Ave., Chicago, IL 60625, USA
[email protected]
Abstract
In the context of Mozambican prophet healing, spirit-host relationships unfold between inti-
macy and alterity. The interweaving of spirits’ and hosts’ biographies in possession is enacted
bodily in the form of pains, postures, and punishments, and often pits their wills and well-beings
against one another. Spirit possession is an intimate exchange, a bodily and social confluence that
invokes the most familiar of interpersonal relationships (spouses, parents and their children). On
the other hand, the natures, motives, and agendas of the spirits often remain opaque. As proph-
ets struggle to make sense and make use of the spirits who possess them, the power of the spirits
reveals itself in their unknowability and contrariness, the elusiveness and partiality of their pro-
files. These intimate others both threaten and succor their hosts, to whom they are both kin and
strangers, and it is through this dialectic that their special vantage on human suffering comes
into view.
Keywords
prophets, spirit possession, religion, healing, selfhood, Mozambique
In central Mozambique those who have been chosen as prophets (aneneri in

Chichewa) struggle to cohabitate with the biblical spirits who are both a cause
of suffering and the only means to its resolution. Prophet spirits are relative
newcomers to northern Tete Province, brought by residents who took refuge
in Malawi during the warfare of the 1980s and returned to Mozambique after
1992, bearing their spirits with them. Prophet spirits provide a powerful
means of articulating bodily and social dis-ease in a context of hardship, speak-
ing to both individual illness histories and longer trajectories of social suffer-
ing experienced in contexts of warfare, dislocation, and poverty. From this
perspective, possession by prophet spirits can be understood as a ‘public idiom’
(Lambek 1993) by means of which interpersonal and sociohistorical trials are
processed and addressed. Indeed, prophetism, as a set of activities and a
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157006611X569238

T. Luedke / Journal of Religion in Africa 41 (2011) 154-179 155
network of relationships, can be understood as precisely a counterresponse to

the disintegrative effects of the violence, displacement, and interpersonal strife
of the war years. In imagining and asserting new varieties of relatedness and
new sorts of families, which provide new avenues for gaining purchase on and
conquering suffering, prophets counteract the attacks on home and family
that political violence wrought.
The capacity of prophetic practice to speak to dynamics of suffering at
grander sociopolitical and historical scales begins in the much more intimate
exchange between individual spirits and hosts. Contexts such as this, in which
people live intimately with spirit associates, evincing porous, dividual, and
culturally particular models of selfhood, would seem to vindicate critiques of
the notion of a categorical, a priori ‘self ’ (Battaglia 1995; Lock 1993; Strath-
ern 1988). However, the precise nature of enspirited subjectivities and the
forces that inform them are less often interrogated. In what follows I address
the particular relationship between intimacy and alterity within which the
spirit-host exchange unfolds. In the context of Mozambican prophet healing,
the interweaving of spirits’ and hosts’ biographies in possession is enacted
bodily in the form of pains, postures, and punishments, and often pits their
wills and well-beings against one another. Spirit possession is an intimate
exchange, a bodily and social confluence that invokes the most familiar of
interpersonal relationships (spouses, parents and their children). On the other
hand, the natures, motives, and agendas of the spirits often remain opaque. As
prophets struggle to make sense and to make use of the spirits who possess
them, the power of the spirits reveals itself in their unknowability and con-
trariness, the elusiveness and partiality of their profiles. These intimate others
both threaten and succor their hosts, to whom they are both kin and strangers,
and it is through this dialectic that their special vantage on human suffering
comes into view.
Intimate Spaces: Prophetic Bodies as Subject and Object

Prophetic life histories begin with suffering. It is in illness that the spirits first
make themselves known and through illness that they make their demands.
Many prophets described a quest that led them to multiple healers before they
finally encountered a prophet healer who could identify their affliction. It was
only by drawing forth the spirit, hearing and honoring its demands, that
recovery was possible. Spirits, then, engaged intimately with the body of the
afflicted from the beginning, identifying its vulnerabilities, manipulating its
sensations, gauging its suffering. Indeed, spirits often began by demarcating
and claiming the bodily space of the prophet-to-be. Many prophets who first
156 T. Luedke / Journal of Religion in Africa 41 (2011) 154-179
went to government hospitals for their illnesses reported that not only were
the treatments received ineffective, but modern medicines would not even
enter their bodies: pills became lodged in their throats or were vomited up
whole, and injected medicines refused to enter the bloodstream, demonstrat-
ing that their bodies were already the domain of the spirits.
Once brought forth in a consultation with an established healer, spirits
enunciated their requirements of their hosts, which took both material and
behavioral forms. New prophets were compelled to buy specially designed
clothing and Bibles, erect buildings where healing and praying could take
place, and stage ceremonies that assembled the regional collective of prophets.
Spirits instructed their hosts in a list of taboos by which they must abide,
which mandated dietary restrictions; the eschewal of alcohol and tobacco; and
the refusal to engage in fighting, adultery, and other morally questionable
activities. Dietary taboos required new pans, plates, and utensils, and a new
eating regimen, separate from family members if they were unwilling to com-
ply. Failure to observe the strictures of the spirits often meant new bouts of
illness, an application of pressure that could take a dire form.
Michael Lambek has suggested that spirit possession is best understood as a
kind of ‘know-how’, ‘knowing how to live gracefully with and through posses-
sion’ (Lambek 1993, 308), one example being adherence to food taboos (Lam-
bek 1992, 1993). Taboos simultaneously differentiate and conflate sprit and
host, marking the incorporation of the spirit yet also (especially when taboos
are broken) reminding that hosts and spirits are different types of beings, or
categories of persons, with unequal access to power. In the act of abstaining
from that which repulses the spirit, especially when the human host is other-
wise compelled to consume it, spirit and host are framed as separate persons
with separate needs and desires, even as their common bond in the body they
share is highlighted.
This sort of ‘negation as affirmation’ (Lambek 1992, 249) is especially
underlined in prophets’ narratives of the consequences of refusing to comply
with taboos. I heard many prophets engage in this form of witnessing, a cau-
tionary tale from those who lived to tell of their epiphany and ultimate acqui-
escence. A notable example was an older man I interviewed, a fairly recently
discovered prophet who insisted on being photographed—he wanted to docu-
ment the scarred surface of his skin, which was covered with the marks of now
healed sores. He had been afflicted for some twenty years, he retrospectively
surmised, by the spirit Lazaro (Lazarus), notorious among the members of the
prophet pantheon for the special discomforts he exacted form his hosts.
Lazarus’s backstory as a wretched beggar was reflected in his demands on and
punishments of his hosts, who wore clothing made of burlap sacking to reflect
their namesake’s poverty and were subjected to measures that signified his
destitution and suffering, such as fasting for extended periods, sleeping without
a mat, and eating off the floor without a plate. This particular man had pursued
a cure for the sores for many years, at a hospital in the rural district, then in
the provincial capital, and finally even in the national capital, all to no avail.
In desperation, he had sought the assistance of a well-known prophet healer
named Magdalena. On his first visit Magdalena’s spirit discovered the presence
of Lazaro. In order to recuperate, he was told, he must attend to the demands
of the spirit and follow its proscriptions. Magdalena also treated him with
herbal medicines. He soon began to feel better and ignored Magdalena’s advice
to comply with the spirit’s mandates. He recounted, ‘When I started to get
better, I didn’t worry about the spirit. I drank and I spent time around people
who were drunks, forgetting what I had been told. Suddenly I fell ill again.
When it befell me again, I could not eat or walk. My son told me I should go
back to Magdalena’s. It was then that the spirit came out and began to speak,
saying, “I am Lazaro”’. He began to receive medicines regularly and to par-
ticipate in prayer sessions at Magdalena’s hospital. Three months after his ini-
tial contact with Magdalena, his health was much improved. He explained
that it was not the medicines that had allowed him to recover, but his decision
to accommodate the spirit: ‘When the spirit came out is when things began to
change, because I began to follow the orientation of the spirit and to read the
Bible constantly’.
The prophet’s body, then, becomes a site of both conflation and contesta-
tion. As the spirits’ revulsions materialize in the bodily reactions of the host,
the visceral fusion of spirit and host is demonstrated. Further overlapping of
their personhood is conveyed by the fact that prophets take on and are known
by the names of their head spirits. Prophets stop using their own names and
‘become’ ‘Mary’ or ‘Peter’ or ‘Jesus’, a blurring of distinctions between self and
other in the body and person of the prophet.
Then again, there is an ongoing sense of two persons struggling for control
and, at times, even space for debate and negotiation between them. This was
most clearly demonstrated around the use of tobacco, another of the items
prohibited by prophet spirits. Prophet healers working in northern Tete were
particularly concerned about this restriction because tobacco cultivation was
one of the few commercial enterprises that might provide them with cash. A
regional tobacco company supplied local farmers with inputs so they could
produce tobacco in their fields and then, theoretically, bought the product at
the end of the growing cycle. Some enterprising prophets entered into nego-
tiations with their spirits, arguing that tobacco income would allow them to
more readily serve the spirits by buying Bibles, spirit uniforms, and so on.
Some were successful in these negotiations and others were denied—some of

the latter persisted anyway and paid the penalty, whether in renewed illness or,
as one prophet recounted, by receiving a terribly low price for his tobacco. The
spirits know and manipulate their hosts’ bodily experiences, the discomforts
of illness, the temptations of prohibited items, and social circumstances, the
trials of poverty, the challenges of familial crises, and exploit them to enforce
embodied lives of purity and discipline. In the interchange between mortal
body-self and possessing spirit-other is forged a subjectivity poised between
conflation and distinction, sameness and difference, self and other. The selves
of prophets encompass the interlocution between two persons, only partially
perceivable given the absences of possession, and yet enriching of prophets’
capacities for addressing suffering—as a subjective experience in individual
bodies, as a political force that upends societies, and as a bond around which
communities form in order to transcend, if only temporarily, its constraints.
Possession: Presence and Absence

From the internal dialogues and private machinations of spirit-host relations
described above, I turn now to the public side of possession. The public pos-
session event itself is perhaps the most notable example of the dialectic of
intimacy and alterity—in this moment spirit and host are most fully con-
flated, the host’s body acting as the corporeal vehicle for the spirit’s work and
voice. But it is also a moment of absence for the host, as her cognizant self is
displaced—after a healing session is over, she is the only participant who needs
to be informed of what transpired. It is also in this moment that the healer is
able to access and act on the suffering bodies of others, the healer’s patients.
At the heart of spirit possession, including that among Mozambican proph-
ets, is a conundrum that makes it both crucial to and ambiguous with regard
to debates about embodiment. If, as Bourdieu suggests, the social becomes
subjectivity through embodied practice (1977), then how does the embodied
absence of the spirit-possessed relate to his or her inculcation into the pro-
phetic social world? The actual experience of prophetic spirit possession is an
empty space—an absent embodiment or, conversely, a total embodiment by
an other whose actions, thoughts, and experiences can only be known second-
hand. The healer’s demonstrated ignorance of all that transpired while he or
she was possessed and claims of passivity in the proceedings are in fact key
components of the perceived legitimacy of the technique.
Despite the absence of ‘self ’, of a perceiving ‘I’, in the proceedings, there is
a learning curve to possession—people get better at it with practice. The expe-
rience brings multiple physical symptoms, from relatively mild responses such
as burping, swaying, sweating, and weeping to violent shaking and rigidity or

paralysis of the limbs that can send a possessed healer crashing to the ground.
Neophytes describe the particular challenges of early possession experiences—
physical pain and extreme exhaustion. Some explained that one consultation
with a patient laid them out for the rest of the day—disconcertingly, they were
unable even to attend to their fields. I met a young couple of recently discov-
ered prophets, Marko (Mark) and Rute (Ruth), who were in such a position,
finding themselves frequently debilitated by the work entailed in this new
endeavor.
We met at their hospital, which was still under construction, a roofless
space delineated by half-walls of mud bricks, where I observed Marko consult
with a patient. They donned their spirit uniforms—not yet complete, consist-
ing only of hats and cloth belts to tie at the waist—and asked those present to
close their eyes while they pronounced several prayers. They began to sing a
hymn as Marko beat on the drum he wore on a strap at his waist. After a few
minutes of singing, Marko began to suck in his breath sharply and to tremble
violently. When his body went rigid, Rute removed the drum. She acted as
assistant, interpreting the language of the spirit and acting as caretaker as
Marko’s body was pushed and pulled by the spirits. Marko was the first spirit
to arrive, and he described the difficulties the patient was experiencing. After
some minutes Marko fell to his knees and a second spirit, Yesu (Jesus),
appeared. After Yesu had spoken, he fell to a prone position, which marked
the arrival of a third spirit, Lazaro, who had only recently arrived in Marko’s
life. As Marko fell to the ground, his wife caught and supported him; she
placed a Bible under his head as he rolled and shook. Lazaro demanded a
uniform made of burlap sacking and also that Marko eat off the floor without
a plate for ten days to reflect the fact that Lazaro was poor when he was alive.
Rute, who also had a Lazaro spirit, explained that this was a common but seri-
ous demand—if one did not comply, one became sick; if one tried to eat off a
plate, one vomited right away.
After the spirits left, Marko slowly sat up and took several minutes to com-
pose himself. He asked his wife to hand him the Bible and he used it to slap
himself on the chest and knees. The process of the spirit inhabiting and speak-
ing through his body was a violent one—Marko said it brought pains and
weakness. He explained that it was because the spirits were fairly new and he
and Rute had not yet fully complied with their wishes—for example, the hos-
pital building remained incomplete—that the possession process was espe-
cially difficult. They suggested that once a healer was accustomed to it, it was
possible to conduct many spirit consultations in the same day without a prob-
lem, a prospect they looked forward to. Each of Marko’s spirits laid claim to
its host’s body by wrenching it into a particular position: Marko stood, Yesu
kneeled, Lazaro lay down. In throwing the prophet down like a doll, the spir-
its demonstrated their brute force and the prophet revealed his as yet rudi-
mentary command within their relationship.
Although it remains a draining experience, capacity for possession develops.
With time and practice the host learns to accommodate the spirit’s presence;
from this accommodation is born a rhythm for attending to and treating
patients. The experienced prophet healer, fully realized in her relationship
with her spirits and her social role as a healer, displays a different set of pos-
tures. No longer overwhelmed and incapacitated by the spirit, the experienced
healer turns the physical and social tensions of the possession experience into
a manic and compelling performance.
Observation at the hospital of an experienced prophet healer, Yosefe
(Joseph), yielded this sort of bodily performance, that of a mature healer and
her well-developed relationship with the spirits. Yosefe’s consultation room
was large and square, and a collection of patients sat along the wall facing the
open door. Yosefe arrived wearing a white dress with a red cross sewn onto the
chest and a white floppy hat, and carrying an animal tail whisk and a Bible.
She began whipping the tail whisk through the air and making whistling
sounds through her teeth. She pronounced an opening prayer, during which
the spirit arrived. Her teeth chattered and she made sobbing breathy noises,
her feet shifting spastically into a corner, eyes closed, hands together as if in
prayer. She began to prance and sway, moving around the room in a lilting
dance as her assistant and onlookers sang. After some minutes, she began to
speak in a high, creaky voice and called for her assistant to read a verse from
the Bible. It was Corinthians, chapter 12, on the diversity of spiritual gifts:
‘The Spirit has given each of us a special way of serving others. Some of us can
speak with wisdom, while others can speak with knowledge, but these gifts
come from the same Spirit. To others the Spirit has given great faith or the
power to heal the sick or the power to perform mighty miracles. Some of us
are prophets, and some of us recognize when God’s Spirit is present. Others
can speak different kinds of languages, and still others can tell what these lan-
guages mean. But it is the Spirit who does all this and decides which gifts to
give each of us’.
Yosefe positioned herself with her back in the doorway, facing the patients
who remained seated along the wall. She held the open Bible in her hand,
there was a snuffling intake of breath, and she said, ‘I, Yosefe, am asking that
you pay attention and listen well. I will now relate the problems of those pres-
ent’. She began to do consultations for the patients, one by one. After each
patient had been addressed, he or she went outside to await medications.
Patient 1: an older woman. The spirit said, ‘You are feeling pain in your feet, legs,
arms, and head, as well as your belly and back. You feel weak and you are not able to
work in your fields. This illness came because you stepped on something strange in the
road [nchesso, a form of witchcraft]. Today you will receive medicines in the form of
vaccination, and also to drink, and to rub on your body’.
Patient 2: a young man. The spirit said, ‘You are feeling pains in your legs and pains
throughout your body. This comes from a spirit. In the past you were told that you
have a spirit, but you haven’t complied with all that the spirit requires. Is what I am
saying true? [The patient responded, ‘yes’.] If you don’t follow the spirit’s wishes, some
day you will leave your house naked and go to live in the woods. I am going to give
you medicines to alleviate the situation but in order to be well you must participate in
prayers and obey the rules of the spirits’.
Patient 3: a middle-aged woman. The spirit said, ‘What I see is that your spirit Lazaro
is unhappy because he requires a ceremony. He is unhappy and it is because of this that
he has not been appearing in your dreams. There is a group of people that does not
want to see you get better and these people are creating a barrier such that the spirit is
not free. I am going to give you medicines to use for four days when you take a bath.
You should also pray, as this will help to make your enemies flee and leave the spirit to
work in peace’.
After the consultations and once the spirit had gone, Yosefe stepped outside
and proceeded to chop with a machete the medicinal roots that the spirit had
prescribed.
Adeline Masquelier (2002) describes the trajectory of increasing facility
with possession, in the case of Nigerien Bori, as a movement from ‘hostage to
host’—as new mediums learn to accommodate their spirits, they gain control
and agency in the relationship. She suggests that this progression is premised on
the ‘socialization’ of spirits in relation to their human hosts; spirits have lives as
individuals as well as in relationship to their spirit kin, and the genealogies of
spirits and humans inform one another, especially in visceral reactions of avoid-
ance or affinity (cf. Lambek 1993, 320-31). Masquelier suggests it is by virtue
of their complex, humanlike personalities and relationships that Bori spirits
become so closely entwined with their hosts’ subjectivities: ‘It is because they
think, act, feel, and react like “real” people that spirits . . . can be so intimately
a part of the devotees’ everyday lives instead of simply making up a pantheon
of dull, abstract, and distant figures’ (2001, 137). Through their exchanges the
spirits are socialized and their human hosts become ever more spiritlike. At the
individual level, this embodied domestication of spirits takes time, progressing
over the course of a host or healer’s career (Masquelier 2001).
As described above, those afflicted by prophet spirits in central Mozam-
bique also travel a path from ‘hostage to host’. Although for the neophyte the
spirit’s presence was often painful and debilitating, capacity for the physical
experience could ultimately be learned, and over time prophets also learned to
accommodate the sprits socially, including how to negotiate with them, to
manage instead of react, strategize instead of capitulate.
Gaining such capacity for the spirits was not just a defensive response.
Although possession by these spirits was considered a lifelong affliction, their
presence was also understood as beneficial—the spirits were ultimately consid-
ered a positive force and being chosen was viewed as an indication of the
moral uprightness and worthiness of the host. Weathering these challenges
and honoring the spirits’ wishes brought the power to heal, to help the ‘sheep’
the spirits were sent to earth to assist. By acceding to the invasiveness of the
spirits, the prophet gains the ability to transgress other patients’ bodily bound-
aries via a penetrative and all-seeing diagnostic gaze and to attend to the afflic-
tions discerned therein. The spirits also pledged to protect their hosts, especially
from the threats of sorcery.
However, among the prophets the trajectory of increasing expertise in
embodying and interacting with the spirits and even the personal endorse-
ment possession was taken to signify were not matched by familiarization,
domestication, or even elaboration of the spirits as social persons. In contra-
distinction to other accounts of spirit-human relationships, prophet spirits
maintained a profound sense of alterity, even as they inculcated themselves
into the embodied lives of their hosts in the most intimate ways. Indeed, I
suggest that it is in part by virtue of their intractable otherness, their social
distance and opacity, that prophet spirits were understood as powerful beings
and therefore powerful tools for transforming the human world. Instead of the
socialization of the spirits, the learning curve of prophetic spirit possession
entailed the cultivation of what Csordas calls a ‘somatic mode of attention’—
‘culturally elaborated attention to and with the body in the immediacy of an
intersubjective milieu’ (Csordas 1993). Even as the spirits remained alter, or
became more so with increasingly arbitrary demands over time, facility with
the bodywork of possession and healing increased. The ongoing disjuncture
between spirit and host as persons was paired with an increasingly integrated
embodiment of the two—the selfhood of the mature prophet encompasses
both the discord and concord of this trajectory.
Kindred Spirits: Familial Relationships in and around Prophet Healing

If prophet spirits were ‘others’, what sorts of others were they? Prophets’ com-
mentaries regarding the nature and origins of their spirits did not yield a con-
sensus. Although many had seen visions of white people in white clothes,
exactly who they were or where they had come from was often unclear. Some
prophets explained that they were the spirits of people described in the Bible,
who had died and returned, in much the way that ancestor spirits did, to con-
tinue with the healing work they had begun in biblical times. Others sug-
gested that prophet spirits had never been human beings, that they had always
been spirits, and referred to them as angels (angelo). On the question of the
spirits’ origins, prophets offered a number of sites, including heaven/above
(mwamba), Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Galilea, Judea, and Egypt. Still others gave
more conceptual answers: several explained that the spirits came from the
Bible (ku bibelo); others that they came from God or from the creator
(ku namalenga). In keeping with the conceptual overlap between the spirits
and the illnesses they provoked, one healer said: ‘Idachokera ku masautso . . .
mabvuto’ (They come from suffering . . . from hardship).
Many prophets responded that they did not know what or who these spir-
its were nor where they came from, only that they had arrived, had made
them sick, and had installed themselves in their lives. Theorizing beyond this
was deemed unimportant or impossible. For example, Magdalena explained:
‘When the spirit appears in my body, I have seen a white woman in my eyes
and she is dressed in beautiful white clothing and this spirit is Mary Magdalene
and it is with this spirit that I begin to do consultations. The spirit begins to
name the roots and my family members go and dig the roots and give them
to the sick people’. When asked about the identity of this woman in white
from her visions, she responded, ‘I do not know if she is a person or an angel
because she has appeared in the moment when the spirit is in my body and
has said that I should buy white scarves, white clothes, and white gloves. I do
not know who she is’. When asked where the spirits come from, she replied,
‘I do not know, when the spirits appear in me, they don’t explain’. Whatever
the case, it was clear that the spirits were from elsewhere, somewhere far away.
The distant provenance of the spirits was further indicated by the fact that
they spoke foreign languages—among those claimed were Latin, Greek, Eng-
lish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Korean, Shona, Swahili, Tswana, Tumbuka,
and Jawa.
There was consensus among prophets as to why the spirits had come: to
help people in need and relieve their suffering. One suggested that ‘the spirits
arrived in me because they have a mission to assist the modern hospital here
on earth by curing sick people’. Indeed, when the spirits themselves were asked
they provided similar responses. The spirit Malita explained: ‘We wanted for
the sheep (nkhosa: people, patients) not to suffer so much’. The spirit Mariya
replied in a similar vein: ‘We saw that the people were suffering a lot and that
we should help them’.
If these both beneficent and punishing strangers from elsewhere were in

some ways unknowable and remained largely unsocialized (that is, not incor-
porated into local spirit or human genealogies), they still created and informed
social relationships and networks. I became interested in the examples of
cross-gender possession I encountered—women possessed by male spirits,
men possessed by female spirits—at first imagining that these cases might
reveal something interesting about gender identity. The rarer case was male
prophets possessed by female spirits, and I remember questioning in a very
pointed way a man I met who was possessed by the spirit Mariya (Mary). I was
trying to get at what it was like, and what it might mean, for him to periodi-
cally ‘become’ this female persona. What I realized as the conversation contin-
ued was that he considered Mariya not a female aspect of self but a wife.
Cross-gender spirit-host relationships were often understood in these terms, as
spousal figures, ‘significant others’, and with the obligations such relationships
required. Far from being an opposite-gendered aspect of self, the opposite-
gendered spirit was a partner.
In some cases the spirit was a jealous or possessive partner who harassed a
possessed woman’s human husband, demanded she put aside one night a week
for the spirit, or even drove the human husband away. A number of prophets
pointed out that many prophets were single women, in part because of con-
flicts between the women’s husbands and their spirits and/or husbands’ unwill-
ingness to accommodate the demands the spirits made on their wives, which
often became restrictions on them. One female healer, for example, explained
that when she became a prophet her husband arranged a second wife. Because
of her spirit she could not make pombe (traditional beer) for him, although he
liked to drink; she could not have anything to do with tobacco, although he
cultivated it; and there were periods when the spirit prohibited her from hav-
ing sex for weeks at a time. Her husband proceeded to arrange a new wife with
whom these restrictions did not exist.
Another healer explained that her husband left her out of fear of her spirits,
who would sometimes arrive at night and torment him, telling him to stay
away from her. This healer’s case was especially ‘good to think’ with regard to
the multiple subjectivities and complex relationships prophetic lives entail.
Petulo (Peter) had a long-standing relationship with two prophet spirits as
well as with an ancestral spirit, who took the form of a snake (the spirit of a
distant male relative on her father’s side). In addition to the conflicts the spirits
engendered in her human family, she also had to weather conflicts between her
prophet and ancestor spirits. Although the prophet spirits prohibited tobacco,
the snake spirit liked to smoke and insisted that she do so when he incar-
nated. Unfortunately, this meant she was further punished by her prophet
spirits for this infraction. She had tried many times to expel the snake spirit
but was unable to. Although she did her best to accommodate her prophet
spirits in other ways, buying their specified uniforms, holding ceremonies on
their behalf, maintaining an active role in prophetic activities (indeed, she
was the vice bishop of a large congregation), still they were unyielding on
this point.
While a number of female prophets described their husbands leaving them
because of the spirits and their demands, others made the decision themselves.
One healer explained that she had to divorce her husband because ‘he did not
want me to continue working as a traditional doctor. When I saw this I began
to think and I decided to divorce him so that I could continue with my work
and care well for my children. I preferred to continue with the power of the
spirit given by God than with a man of this sort. It is now three years that I
have been alone and I expect that some day God will show me a man who
wants to live with a woman of the spirit like me’.
If in some cases the presence of prophet spirits strained or ended marriages,
in other cases it brought families together around the shared endeavor of pro-
phetic healing. I encountered a number of families in which both parents and
all the children, down to the youngest infant, were prophets and each family
member played some role in the operation of a family-run hospital. Couples
in which both partners had spirits typically worked together at healing, either
switching off doing consultations or dividing the tasks at hand, one doing
consultations and the other handling the medicines. This seemed to be the
case at least in part because once there is one prophet in the household, when
other family members fall ill it is more likely that they will be directed to
prophet healers, who may discover spirits in them as well. Some couples went
so far as to say that once one of them was found to have a spirit, they prayed
for the other to also receive one.
Prophetism also engendered new sorts of familial units, based not in bio-
logical reproduction but in the social reproduction inherent in this sort of
healing. The healer who makes the initial discovery of the presence of a spirit
in a patient is referred to as the person’s ‘mother’ (mayi), the term used regard-
less of the gender of the discovering healer, and the newly discovered prophet
is referred to as the prophet healer’s ‘child’ (mwana). The use of kin terms
among prophets reinforces a sense of the spirit discovery process as the birth-
ing of a new social being, or the birthing of an individual into a new social
status and a new set of relationships and obligations. As Boddy suggests,
‘Whether possession clarifies, modulates, or obfuscates kin ties, it invariably
denaturalizes them, and undermines their givenness’ (1994, 423). Spirit pos-
session has a tendency to ‘thicken’ human relationships, adding ‘new layers of
meaning’ (Lambek 1980, 328). Whether creating new friends and family
members or challenging, straining, or dissolving existing relationships, the
spirits bring greater density to the interactions and affiliations among the
members of these social networks.
Because many prophets come to this role through an illness that is long-
lasting and difficult to treat, it is also not uncommon for ‘children’ to remain
interned at the hospitals of their spiritual ‘mothers’ for extended periods as
they are treated for the initial illnesses of the spirit’s calling. Prophet healers
with active hospitals will often maintain a ward of small rooms for patients in
treatment. Caretaking of these patients falls primarily to relatives who come
and stay for this purpose, but also involves daily care and treatment by the
healer in the form of the preparation and administering of herbal medicines,
as well as assisting with food preparation, water collection, and other domestic
tasks when patients’ relatives are unavailable. Indeed, one of the primary con-
cerns of active healers was their lack of necessary resources (blankets, food,
time) to support patients who ended up staying at their home hospitals for
weeks or months. Thus the ongoing caretaking and medical treatment of spir-
itual children furthered the kin associations of these relationships and fostered
bonds that often continued indefinitely, even after the patient recovered.
In addition to these more explicitly kinlike aspects of the relationships
among prophets, there is a great deal of caring collegiality enacted among
co-prophets who attend the same ceremonies and events. This was especially
evident in prayer and healing sessions, at which it was common for individual
spirits to spontaneously arrive in a member of the crowd without warning.
When this occurred one or two people standing nearby would always spring
into action, physically comforting the possessed by patting her on the back,
holding a Bible against her body, or physically supporting her if she started to
keel over; encouraging the spirit to voice its concerns and listening attentively
to its requests; and delicately negotiating with the spirit on its host’s behalf
when its demands seemed onerous. There was a sense of taking seriously the
need to care for another’s well-being while she was ‘absent’, and this role was an
important aspect of the intimately communal nature of prophet gatherings.
Frederick Klaits describes similar practices in his account of the Baitshepi
Apostolic Church in Gaborone, Botswana, where the senior church leader cul-
tivated a particular ‘sentimental orientation’ and ‘moral passion’ that informed
participants’ emotions and actions and thereby their relationships. In the
context of this church, providing love to one another was understood as the
core mission and the primary route to physical and spiritual well-being. Love
and care were enacted through speech and action in ways that indicated that
loving emotions were understood to affect the bodies and psyches of others,
encouraging healing as well as easing the passage to death for both the ter-
minally ill and their survivors. This approach, premised on an expectation of
long-term interdependence among participants, required of the church’s bishop,
MmaMaipelo, not only that she actively encourage public words and acts of
love and care amongst her congregation, but that she and her followers also
carefully avoid or maneuver around divisive elements of suffering, including
the potentially accusatory aspects of AIDS diagnoses and occult explanations
for illness. Thus MmaMaipelo suggested that she did not ‘believe in’ witchcraft,
not in the sense of questioning its existence but in that she refused to fuel the
interpersonal discord that such explanations brought about (Klaits 2010).
While there is a comparable ethos of caring support among Mozambican
prophets, prophetic identities and activities preclude such total dedication to
loving relations. While the spirits aver a commitment to serving their patients,
addressing suffering, combating malfeasance, and maintaining moral upright-
ness, they are also committed to treating and defending against witchcraft,
which often puts them at the center of interpersonal strife. Moreover, although
healers who establish leadership roles within the community guide the activi-
ties of their followers, they are still understood to ultimately take orders from
the spirits, who do not generally provide explicit guidance or instructions as
far as relations among prophets.
Intimate Events: Prophet Ceremonies

Spirits indirectly nurture caring relations among prophets by calling for all-
night ceremonies that bring together larger regional groups of prophets for
extended occasions of singing, dancing, healing, and communication with the
spirits. Mozambican prophets are organized in a way best described as a net-
work. Unlike more localized church congregations and other sorts of institu-
tions, the ‘community’ of prophets is spread across a large area in both Malawi
and Mozambique. The shape of this network reflects its origins in migration—
a hallmark of Mozambique’s twentieth-century history (Newitt 1995).
During the first half of the twentieth century Mozambique, especially Tete
Province, acted as a labor reserve for the surrounding British colonies, drawing
hundreds of thousands of men across the border (Newitt 1995). Two extended
periods of warfare, before and after independence, also spurred residents to
flight. During the war for independence between FRELIMO and the Portu-
guese, thousands of people left northern Tete for Malawi (Juergensen 1996),
and during the postindependence war between FRELIMO and RENAMO,
approximately 70 percent of Tete’s residents fled to Malawi, Zambia, and
Zimbabwe, many staying for as long as ten years (Azevedo 2002).
The war between FRELIMO and RENAMO began to heavily affect

Angónia district (one of the two districts in which my research was based) in
1984, when RENAMO established a permanent base there. Although many
residents fled at RENAMO’s arrival, some remained and lived within REN-
AMO territory, which eventually came to include all but the two main towns
(Juergensen 1996, 2000). In Dedza, Malawi alone, one of the primary desti-
nations for Mozambicans fleeing northern Tete, there were approximately
20,000 refugees by 1986, approximately 110,000 by 1988, and approximately
170,000 by 1990 (Juergensen 1996, based on UNHCR data). The sharp
increase in refugees in Malawi over the last half of the 1980s was paralleled by
an equally dramatic reversal of these flows after the 1992 peace accord:
90 percent of the Mozambican refugees in Malawi repatriated on their own
between early 1993 and the end of 1994 (Juergensen 2000). Whereas Mozam-
bican refugees in Zimbabwe and Zambia lived in camps separated from the
rest of the population, refugee settlements in Malawi were integrated into
existing Malawian villages, and interpersonal ties, old and new, were an impor-
tant factor in people’s experiences of exile (Englund 2002).
For the residents of northern Tete, suffering, both individual and social, has
been a constant across the history outlined here. During the postindepen-
dence war, some witnessed extreme violence including killings, beatings, rapes,
and destruction of property; as a woman who lived near Ulóngué described to
Juergensen: ‘The RENAMO were demanding things from us. They also killed
a lot of people. They came three times and many people were hiding in the
bush. About six people were buried in one grave. After some days in the bush
we came to Malawi. I only brought a few things in a basket; all our things were
destroyed’ (quoted in Juergensen 2000, 20). In other areas, RENAMO’s rela-
tionship with local people involved the extraction of tribute and labor. How-
ever, even these less violent exchanges could and did turn violent, as when
villagers were unable or unwilling to provide what was demanded (Englund
2002). The prophet healer Magdalena with whom I worked in the Domue
area recounted to me her own experience of being kidnapped by RENAMO:
‘I fled to Malawi because of the war perpetrated by RENAMO. One time the
armed bandits came and abducted me, they made me carry a pig and I had a
child on my back. . . . I stayed with them for almost two weeks without eating
anything’. She went on to say that as she was traveling with RENAMO, they
came to a river and she was put in a canoe with others in order to traverse it.
Halfway across, the boat capsized, and they all fell into the water. Although
she was able to make it to the other side, the small child she had on her back
drowned. She was with the soldiers for fourteen days before she was able to
escape and flee to Malawi.
It was during their time as war refugees in Malawi during the 1980s that
Mozambicans first encountered Malawian prophet healers, who set them on
the path to becoming prophets themselves. After the accord, prophets among
the returnees from Malawi established their own hospitals and churches in
northern Tete where they continued to practice, which included discovering
new prophets among their patients. Thus generations of particular prophetic
‘families’ can span a significant geographical area, from central Malawi across
the border and throughout Tete. The centrality of mobility to the elaboration
of this network has been furthered in postwar times by those prophet spirits
who have a penchant for further movement. I encountered several prophet
healers in districts where few resided and that were not their original homes
who explained that they had been sent to these locales by their spirits—mis-
sionaries of a sort, sent to assist the ill in underserved areas.
The historical and ongoing mobility of residents of Tete, in response to
various economic, political, and spiritual exigencies, provided the circum-
stances through which the prophetic community was established. This also
means there is an inherent tension in the very structure of the group—a ten-
dency to expand that strengthens the community but that is also a tendency
to dispersal, both geographic as branches of the network end up far apart, and
political as ‘mothers’ with greater followings of children and/or aspirations to
power may choose to split off from the rest of the group. The prophets, then,
are a collective and a site of social support even as their organizational form
includes certain centrifugal qualities.
Given these characteristics, the all-night ceremonies periodically called for
by spirits play an important role in effecting and demonstrating the commu-
nity coherence of the prophets and the emotions, relationships, and identities
that accompany it. Spirits call on their hosts with demands both big and small,
from expectations of daily adherence to food taboos, to periodic additions to
the spirit’s uniform, to the construction of buildings to serve as hospitals or
churches. Common among these requests is the appeal for a ceremony in their
honor. The lead-up to a ceremony usually begins with a particular prophet
feeling unwell—established prophets typically understood illness of any sort
as a sign of disgruntlement or want on the part of their spirits, especially if the
bout of illness lingered. Under these circumstances, the spirit would be called
to possess his or her host and asked to reveal its needs, toward the goal of heal-
ing the afflicted prophet. In cases where the spirit desired a ceremony, it would
specify the date and any other particulars (if the ceremony were to involve
animal sacrifice, for example), and the host would begin organizing the pro-
ceedings. Ceremonies were commonly held to accompany the opening of a
new hospital or church, to cleanse a hospital where a death had occurred, or
to bless and protect the hospital from sorcery, among other reasons. Within
more active corners of the northern Tete prophetic network ceremonies were
held nearly every weekend, at one prophet’s compound or another.
Regardless of the specific premise, these ceremonies took a common form.
Participants arrived on Saturday afternoon, having been called through word
of mouth or by their own spirits. Some traveled quite a distance, walking or
bicycling for several hours. As the evening progressed prophets donned their
spirit uniforms and participated in increasingly animated sessions of dancing,
singing, and spirit possession stretching late into the night. After a few hours
rest, the ceremony proper began again around 6 a.m. on Sunday morning,
with more dancing and singing leading up to the ritual event of sacrifice, bless-
ing, or cleansing. Afterward participants shared in a meal before packing up to
return home.
The ceremonies provide another angle on the collegial intimacy among
prophets. These events speak to the prophet network as ngoma (Janzen 1992;
van Dijk et al. 2000), wherein expressive culture, performative public healing,
and spirit possession come together in a collective response to suffering. As
a public event that brought many people to the same physical space—I saw
some ceremonies attended by upwards of 200 people—the ceremonies instan-
tiated a community that was otherwise quite diffuse. Just as Klaits relates that
attending funerals is an important expression of caring among church mem-
bers in Botswana (Klaits 2010), so is attending all-night ceremonies a sign of
communality and belonging among prophets, as well as an act of caring for the
afflicted individual prophet whom the ceremony is meant to relieve. Further,
the expressive aspects of the events, the extended sessions of dynamic singing
and dancing, are particularly important as a forum of intimate exchange.
Dancing was typically done in a circle, sometimes with a drummer and/or
lead singer positioned at the center. Groups of women danced around the
inner ring of the circle and men around the outer ring, some men breaking off
in smaller groups to race around the outskirts in a coordinated dancing, jump-
ing line. Any individual prophet could start a hymn and all would join in,
creating one swirling body of movement and sound. As the dancing heated up
and the tone of the event intensified over time, individual dancers would be
struck by the spirit, spinning off to the outskirts of the circle to be tended by
others or jumping into a nearby hospital building where a calming Bible
would be laid on the possessed person’s head. Through these coordinated
bodily expressions, prophets professed their connections to one another and
their identities as elements of a collective.
Though ceremonies provide the most dramatic example of the import of
shared expression among prophets, it is also present on a smaller scale in the
daily and weekly activities of individual prophet healers. In preparation for a

consultation with a patient, a healer calls her spirits through the singing of
hymns. Whatever the circumstances of the consultation, whether for a solitary
visitor or as part of a regular healing session that includes multiple patients,
healers made a point of involving multiple voices in the act of singing to call
the spirits. In some cases this entailed the healer summoning his or her spouse
into the hospital to participate; more prolific healers often had a standing
coterie of spiritual children on hand who acted as a chorus at healing sessions.
Either way, there was something in the combining of singing voices that car-
ried the power to call the spirit to its host’s body.
However, though intimacy, connection, and shared identities clearly
informed these events and the prophet network more generally, ceremonies
also carried signs of division along the fault lines of political allegiance to par-
ticular healer-leaders. The prophet network was hierarchical in nature, with
discovering healers accumulating neophyte followers who then felt allegiance
to their ‘mother’. These hierarchies were also entangled with other hierarchical
institutions (the local government, the traditional healers’ association), and in
some cases spiritual children acted as constituencies that favored certain can-
didates over others in various struggles for power (Luedke 2006). These strug-
gles were informed not only by the micropolitics of the present but also by the
dynamics of political history—by battles between FRELIMO and RENAMO
and the postindependence FRELIMO government’s persecution of religion
and traditional medicine. The postwar, postsocialist present in Mozambique
is still animated by the ghosts of the past. The prophetic community both
highlights discord and makes efforts to overcome it, and at volatile events
such as the all-night ceremonies different valences come to the fore at differ-
ent moments.
The Dark Side of Intimacy: Prophetic Battles against Sorcery

The interpersonal tensions within prophetic practice also reflect its relation-
ship to witchcraft. Whereas the church members Klaits describes refuse to
engage in discussions about witchcraft because they understand the divisive
role such explanations play, prophets’ activities are fundamentally entwined
with witchcraft. Prophetic consultation centers on the examination and diag-
nosis of illness, especially ‘strange’ illnesses that are not readily treated at gov-
ernment clinics. Prophets understand themselves to be locked in struggle with
sorcerers who constantly challenge and test them through the difficult illnesses
their patients present as well as through direct attacks on healers’ persons,
families, and homes. One of the most common complaints prophet healers
lodged was the difficulty of defending themselves against the threat of sorcery,
and a considerable percentage of healing activities is devoted to prevention or
treatment of its effects.
As Africanist anthropologists have noted, witchcraft represents the ‘dark
side of kinship’ (Geschiere 1997; Geschiere and Fisiy 1994) as it is often fam-
ily members who act out their jealousies through occult attacks. Familial inti-
macy, then, is accompanied by certain dangers that inhere in knowing what
others have and how resources are distributed as well as knowing how to gain
access to someone’s person in the comings and goings of the household. As
elsewhere, witchcraft in central Mozambique overlays these familial politics
with broader regional and national politics, and the form that witchcraft prac-
tices are understood to take in Tete speak to this intersection. The most com-
mon means of enacting witchcraft in northern Tete is nchesso or machera, both
of which refer literally to traps, and which are always explained in Portuguese
as ‘mines’ (minas), either ‘traditional mines’ (minas tradicionais) or ‘antiperson-
nel mines’ (minas anti-pessoais). These terms were in fact used much more
often than the more general term for witchcraft, ufiti. Unlike witchcraft pred-
icated on abominable, otherworldy impulses such as the desire to eat human
flesh, ‘mines’ are a manifestation of interpersonal resentments and jealousies
very much of this world. The mines themselves are described as medicinal
substances that are buried or laid in a path where the intended victim will
tread. When the victim steps on the mine it triggers adverse bodily reactions
of one sort or another. The mine’s effects are specific to its intended victim: as
one healer explained, when planting the mine the attacker ‘calls the victim’s
name’ so that the mine will affect the intended alone. Within this more gen-
eral ‘mine’ form, there are specific varieties of deployment that vary from dis-
trict to district within the province. Stories about regional specialties circulate
widely and certain regions or districts develop reputations regarding the vari-
ety of sorcery at which they excel (cf. White 2000). For example, in Angónia
and Macanga, where I conducted the majority of my research, the mines that
sorcerers set attack their victims in the form of lightning.
Residents of northern Tete frequently lamented that simple disagreements
too often led to the deployment of witchcraft. Healers nearly universally
reported that they received more, or even mostly, patients with illnesses result-
ing from witchcraft; my observations at their hospitals supported these claims.
Most healers averred that there were both more illnesses in general and espe-
cially more witchcraft-related illnesses in the present than in the past, which
they attributed to an increase in envy and hatred stemming from postwar
conflicts over land and time spent in other countries during the war. As one
explained:
These days are different than days of the past, because during the time of the war we
took refuge in Malawi and there we learned many bad things. When we returned
sorcerers came to be more common, contempt also increased and lack of respect.
Witchcraft began to have a large effect in our lives, witchcraft on a grand scale. For
example, if two people have a small argument, this now is cause for them to use witch-
craft on one another. Cases of witchcraft are so frequent, the illnesses that we have here
aren’t natural.
Lightning mines were known to be used among laypeople, neighbors against

neighbors, and family members against family members. The perceived ubiq-
uity of such practices meant that in cases of illness the possibility always lurked
that witchcraft was the cause. Both healers and lay people suggested that any
illness could be either natural or caused by witchcraft, and that symptoms
alone did not definitively indicate which was the case. Although the symp-
toms might appear the same, it was said that a condition stemming from
witchcraft was far more dangerous and could rapidly lead to death. With such
a condition, going to a biomedical health clinic first could prove fatal because
time was lost on ineffectual treatments and because the witchcraft turned any
modern medicines that entered the body into poison. Healers stressed that it
was only possible to definitively know the cause of an illness through a spirit
consultation and that their ability to discern this crucial difference was a key
aspect of the spirits’ powers. As a healer suggested:
Without doing a consultation we can see that the person has a problem with his leg or
his arm, but really to know if this illness is caused naturally or by witchcraft we have
to do a consultation with the spirit. Through a spirit consultation we know that for
this illness I need to use this plant. If it is an illness coming from God, we know. If it
is an illness from witchcraft, we know. We must know plants for both of these kinds
of illnesses.
The very premise for seeking out a prophet healer was often precisely the prob-
lematics of perception and the opacity of symptoms, which could only be
clarified by prophets who specialized in discerning and treating the results of
witchcraft. Through their ability to gaze inside the body of the patient and
discern the nature and cause of the illness therein, prophet spirits were under-
stood as uniquely capable of revealing the source and knowing how to treat
these more difficult occult illnesses.
In talk of witchcraft, its practitioners were presented as both a cause of ill-
ness and death and a symbol of amoral, greedy worldliness; prophets presented
themselves as the moral and practical inverse. If prophets described witchcraft
in terms of darkness (‘things of darkness’, zinthu za kumdima) and associated
it with the night, much prophetic activity was explained using the imagery of
light and illumination—for example, when prophet spirits looked inside the
body of a patient during a consultation they were said to illuminate or light up
(kuunika) the body of the patient and his or her ailments.
Prophets portrayed the relationship between healers and sorcerers as a full-
fledged battle. Because their work included identifying sorcerers and undoing
the effects of their attacks on their victims, prophets stated, sorcerers despised
them and worked assiduously to shut down their hospitals and/or kill them, as
well as testing them to measure particular prophet healers’ abilities. Although
prophet healers were understood to be targeted especially frequently by sor-
cerers, they also had more protections, both medicinal and spiritual, against
such attacks.
Healers’ battles against sorcerers and dedication to treating the ill were com-
plicated by the rebounding effect of prophets’ treatments of witchcraft vic-
tims. Healers’ treatments often included a boomerang effect that sent the
intended results of the witchcraft back at the person who authored it. As one
healer explained:
One of the main problems I have encountered is with people who know magic. These
sorcerers use witchcraft against others and we treat these others who were bewitched
and the illness returns to the ones who sent it and then the sorcerers come to us
for treatment and we ask ourselves, when I treat this sorcerer won’t he/she attack
that other person I already treated? This is one of the biggest problems that I have
encountered.
Another said:
There are many people who want to get rich and others are envious of the children of
their relatives when they see them well dressed in good clothes . . . when these people
try to kill the child or make the child sick, when the parents bring the child for treat-
ment and I say, ‘The person who did this is that guy’ . . . when I treat the child and the
child recovers and the parents are content, they say, ‘You can kill the person who did
this so they don’t ever bother us again and so that they too will feel pain’.
This aspect of the battle reveals the ambiguity of the distinction between heal-
ing and harming, and the difficulties of categorical definitions such as ‘healer’,
‘sorcerer’, and ‘victim’. Indeed, healers noted that it was often those who pro-
fessed support for the patient who were most suspect. As one healer explained:
‘When a sick person arrives here at my hospital, I can see and I always tell the
person accompanying him to return home, that I want to see just the patient,
because many times the family members accompanying them are the ones
promoting the illness’. As much as they strove to oppose themselves to
sorcerers, healers themselves recognized the fine line that divided them, and
the difficulties of differentiating perpetrator from victim and friend from foe.
Thus for prophets as well as patients, knowledge of and knowledge about
the spirits remained tricky and even dangerous, something with which par-
ticipants wrestled, not something they possessed (cf. West 2005). Knowing in
a definitive way was neither expected nor necessarily desirable. For lay people,
knowing who or what caused their illness was at best impossible and at worst
dangerous, associated as such knowledge was with the realm of sorcery. Prophet
healers as well understood their position vis-à-vis knowledge to be untenable.
It was the spirits, after all, not they, who knew; they did not even hear the
spirits’ pronouncements firsthand but had to be told of them after the fact.
The unknowability of spirits, their alterity, was a double-edged sword—
prophets possessed by these spirits lived with the distance and opacity of their
possessors, which at times made the spirits’ demands and actions seem des-
potic, unreasonable, or incomprehensible. On the other hand, the opacity
around who and what the spirits were, what they knew and how they oper-
ated, also provided a necessary buffer between mortal healers and the danger-
ous and morally ambiguous practices of their spirits.
Conclusion: Intimate Others

Spirit pantheons often showcase powerful personae modeled on historical and
contemporary, local and international Others. The referents are figures nota-
ble for their fame (or infamy) in domains dense with cultural meaning—reli-
gion, politics, popular media, and so on. Thus one finds spirits modeled on
Hitler, Mussolini, and Bruce Lee in Uganda (Behrend and Luig 1999: xiii); on
Catholic priests, archaeologists, big game hunters, and airplane captains in
Sudan (Boddy 1989); on Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, and George Bush in
Madagascar (Emoff 2002); on Confucius and Abraham Lincoln in Brazil
(Brown 1994); and a shaman in China calling on Chairman Mao to help her
drive the demons out of a patient suffering from mental illness (Chao 1999).
In Mozambique Honwana found that the spirits of nineteenth-century Nguni
invaders were central to healing practices in the Maputo area (Honwana
1996), and Marlin, working in southeastern Tete Province, encountered heal-
ers working with the spirits of deceased RENAMO soldiers (Marlin 2001).
The biblical personalities who possess Mozambican prophets are also power-
ful, foreign Others. In light of local histories of colonization and missioniza-
tion and insofar as political power, class privilege, race, and Christianity are
bound up together in these histories, it can be understood why spirits in this
region take the form of characters from the Bible.
From this angle the embodiment of otherness that prophetism entails speaks
to mimesis as described by Taussig—copying or imitating an Other as a means
of capturing its power. He describes, for example, carved wooden figures used
in Cuna curing that took the form of stylized Europeans—one historical
account of a 1940 exorcism involved the use of a seven-foot-tall figure of Gen-
eral Douglas MacArthur (Taussig 1992). Mimesis does not just entail the act
of copying but also ‘a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body
of the perceiver and the perceived’ (Taussig 1992, 21) that takes one ‘bodily
into alterity’ (Taussig 1992, 40). In the colonial and postcolonial ethnographic
evidence on which Taussig draws, ‘alterity’ follows not generic notions of dif-
ference but ‘the ideological gradient decisive for world history of savagery vis-
à-vis civilization’; it is composed of ‘interlocking dream-images guiding the
reproduction of social life no less than the production of sacred powers’
(Taussig 1992, 65).
Perhaps indicative of the particular otherness of prophet spirits in this con-
text is the significance of the objects that surround them. The material culture
of the prophets includes a number of items, all of which are central to the
personhood of the spirits. Many of these objects allude to major modernist
projects of colonial and postcolonial Mozambique—Bibles, uniforms that ref-
erence both Christianity and medicine, eyeglasses, flashlights, mirrors, eating
utensils—items for seeing and knowing, assertions of ‘civilization’, donned
and deployed in a context in which the workings of power and dynamics of
suffering are often difficult to decipher. The spirits themselves remain largely
opaque, of unclear provenance, timeless, elusive, and contrary if not antago-
nistic to their hosts. Yet the spirits are consumers, and it is through their desire
for objects and their hosts’ obtaining them that a material interface with the
spirits is constructed. Perhaps their appeal lies in the combination of the spir-
its’ social distance and the palpable nearness of their belongings. Prophets are
able to capture something of the spirits, something they can hold onto, even
as the mysteries of pain, illness, and death persist.
Through these palpable connections prophets body forth the biblical figures
they ‘bring to life’ and harness and direct their unfamiliar and far-flung pow-
ers, turning them back on themselves and other suffering ‘sheep’. The intimate
navigations entailed in being a prophet, however, are not fully captured in the
notion of mimesis. Being a prophet is not entirely about trafficking in same-
ness and difference within an imageric economy of selves and others. What is
missing from mimesis is the intimacy of the experiential, not the traversing of
reified chasms between social categorical selves and social categorical others
but the negotiating of fine lines between ‘you’ and ‘me’.
If embodiment is the ‘existential grounds of culture and self ’ (Csordas

1994), bodies under duress may be expressed as disjunctive selfhoods. Illness
is an emotional experience, as a physical trial—indeed, Jackson, in her work
on chronic pain, suggests that ‘pain is emotion’ (Jackson 1994, 209)—as well
as a source of distress, fear (of sources of illness both ‘natural’ and human-
made), alienation, limitation, and debility. The self requires ‘orchestration’
(Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007, 15) under any circumstances—illness and
pain, loss and displacement only increase the need for the active work of sense
making that is subjectivity. The at least provisionally intelligible self provides
the ‘ground for subjects to think through their circumstances and to feel
through their contradictions, and in so doing, to inwardly endure experiences
that would otherwise be outwardly unbearable’ (Biehl, Good, and Kleinman
2007, 14). In some contexts or under some circumstances the functional self
takes the cultural form of an integrated whole; in others, such as those
described here, the self responding to affliction opens a space for an elusive
and combative yet intimate and knowing other, an interlocutor that acts as
both personified suffering and a means to challenge it in oneself and others.
The prophetic selves described here, then, remain a site of struggle, one that
yields both discomfort and relief, both confusion and enlightenment. From
the dialectic between intimacy and alterity that is the spirit-host relationship
emerge prophetic selves well versed in the seeming inevitability of human suf-
fering, individual and social, of the past and in the present, yet still committed
to its relief.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to IIE/Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and
Northeastern Illinois University for funding the research upon which this arti-
cle is based and to my research assistant Pedro Rodrigues and the prophets of
Tete Province for their assistance and generosity. I thank Adeline Masquelier,
Frederick Klaits, and an anonymous reviewer for JRA for providing valuable
insights that significantly enriched the article.
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Journal of Religion in Africa 41 (2011) 154-179 brill.

Intimacy and Alterity: Prophetic Selves and Spirit

In central Mozambique those who have been chosen as prophets (aneneri in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157006611X569238

network of relationships, can be understood as precisely a counterresponse to

Intimate Spaces: Prophetic Bodies as Subject and Object

Some were successful in these negotiations and others were denied—some of

Possession: Presence and Absence

as burping, swaying, sweating, and weeping to violent shaking and rigidity or

Kindred Spirits: Familial Relationships in and around Prophet Healing

If these both beneficent and punishing strangers from elsewhere were in

Intimate Events: Prophet Ceremonies

The war between FRELIMO and RENAMO began to heavily affect

daily and weekly activities of individual prophet healers. In preparation for a

The Dark Side of Intimacy: Prophetic Battles against Sorcery

Lightning mines were known to be used among laypeople, neighbors against

Conclusion: Intimate Others

If embodiment is the ‘existential grounds of culture and self ’ (Csordas

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