Locality and Belonging

Nadia Lovell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415182812
• eBook ISBN: 9781134739790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Locality and Belonging provides an international overview of the close relationship between territory and cultural identity. The issue of 'belonging' has long been recognized as crucial to the study of identity within anthropology. Here, contributors from Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, France and the UK present rigorous case studies of 'belonging' from the UK, South Africa, Argentina, Zanzibar, Amazonia, Indonesia and West Africa. Among the themes explored are:
* space, memory and ethnicity
* the mnemonic use of objects
* mythologies of football and history
* use of 'natural features' of the environment
* nationhood and post-colonial identity making.

Chapter 1
The rootedness of trees
Place as cultural and natural texture in rural southwest Congo*

Filip De Boeck

Introduction

This chapter analyses notions of place (as localised space), ancestral space-time, history and remembrance as revealed in, and through, the tree symbolism of the ancestral miyoomb shrines among the aLuund of southwestern Congo (ex-Zaire). Victor Turner, in a brief sentence in The Forest of Symbols, describes how, among the Luunda-related Ndembu of former Northern Rhodesia, the miyoomb trees (singular muyoomb) are ‘planted as living shrines in the centre of villages’ (Turner 1967:10; my emphasis). I will elaborate on this intriguing and enigmatic notion of ‘living shrine’ to investigate the Luunda sense of place. More generally, I will look at the relation between trees, notions of rootedness and (male) personhood, and the way in which these give rise to a sense of place, in which both history and ancestrality are spatialised and incorporated. As such, the concern here is not with locality, and its loss of ontological moorings, in the context of processes of globalisation or destabilisation of the nation-state (Appadurai 1995; De Boeck 1996), but rather with a more traditional anthropological preoccupation, namely the ‘production’ of social space and, through it, the (re)production of society and its history.

What turns a space into a place for the aLuund of southwestern Congo is, literally, its rootedness in the past and its capacity to constitute, and conjure up, a living spatialised memory and link between past and present. Among the aLuund, the (image of the) tree and, by extension, the land, becomes the means by which one’s place in the social landscape is ‘rooted’ in a material historicity and in an ancestral space-time. The tree and, in particular, the muyoomb tree, seems to be one of the aLuund’s preferred means for the production of historically situated locality. Trees convey a meaning of rootedness, of immobility. The tree simultaneously conveys the idea of a central nexus, combining notions of immobility with images of interconnection, knotting and hence mobility (as spatialised in the pathways leading into and away from each village). Therefore, in a seeming paradox, the Luunda notion of ‘place’ (pool), although drawing on a pool of meaning related to rootedness, fixity, tying and knotting, allows for movement through space, as the centuries-long Luunda history of migration and conquest exemplifies. Although place, and a sense of locality and belonging, are strongly situated in socially and spatially defined communities, they are also in a sense transportable and repetitive. As such, locality can be moved through space, recreated or repeated in different spaces, by planting new trees and thus creating or ‘growing’ memory, history and belonging. Physical and metaphorical roots can thus emerge out of any social and material landscape, thereby allowing the transformation of forest into village, turning the subjects of newly conquered, dominated space into localised (i.e. Luunda) subjects, and rooting the present place into the ancestral past while tying it to Luunda history. However, the image of the tree also suggests that the production of culture and history are underpinned by a history of natural rhythm and processes of gestation, germination and growth. The interpretation of the production of Luunda locality as a practice of birth-giving, or ‘world-making’, informed by the cyclical rhythms of the natural world, has certain implications for our understanding of the relationship between nature and societal production.

Situating the Luunda world

The village of Nzofu forms the traditional political centre of the Mabeet, the land of the western aLuund, situated in the southwestern corner of Congo’s Bandundu province (Kwaango sub-region). Luunda-land forms a major part of the administrative zone of Kahemba, an area of some 20,000 square kilometres. The village of Nzofu—which with its two hundred inhabitants is one of the largest villages in the Mabeet—is considered the ‘royal’ village (musuumb) where the Kwaango’s paramount Luunda title-holder holds his court. The royal court is called the ‘knot’ (mpuund), the central nodal point of a wide-ranging network that connects the numerous small villages and hamlets that lie dispersed in a glowing landscape of endless hills and valleys, an ecologically varied habitat characterised by a mixed vegetation of savannah, bush, flood plains and large stretches of gallery forest.

The Luunda social system is characterised by matrilineal descent and viri- or patrilocal residence. As aLuund say: ‘the husband builds the house, the woman gives birth to the children’. The father and his brothers play an important role in daily life. In the residential household unit, ‘one leans towards one’s father’. The agnatic household, referred to as ‘fireplace’ (jiikw), is thus headed by an ‘elder of the fireplace’ who may be either a male ego’s (classificatory) father or older brother. It is he who represents the social unity of the residential unit, which also consists of his wife or, in the case of a polygamous household, co-wives (usually two to three) and their children. They may also be joined on a more temporary basis by some of the family head’s unmarried sisters, sisters’ children, (unmarried) younger brothers, some of his wives’ younger sisters and some of his grandchildren.

Lineage membership, however, is predominantly reckoned in the mother’s matriline through a common female ancestor, who is seen as a source of female regenerative powers. A number of related residential ‘fireplaces’, which are scattered over several villages, constitute a lineage or ‘womb’ (vumw), headed by an ‘elder of the womb’ who is normally one of ego’s mother’s brothers.

Both the father and the maternal uncle thus play a constitutive role in ego’s life. Both are referred to as ‘guardians of the herds’. Both intervene on one’s behalf as representatives in disputes, ritual practices, therapeutic interventions, divinatory consultations and in the most important moments of one’s life-cycle: birth, ritual initiation, marriage, pregnancy and death. To be a naantany, someone without an elder to take care of you, is to have ‘no place to go to’. Such a person is compared to a goat, for goats do not have a herdsman, nor a place to which to belong.

The poetics of Luunda politics

The role of the Kwaango’s Luunda paramount title-holder is marked by the dual (masculine and feminine) entities of opposing complementarity that are at play in Luunda society at large. The paramount title-holder of the Nzav lineage is believed to be a direct descendant of the mwaant yaav’s royal dynasty of the Ruund homeland (kool) in the east (in Kapanga, Shaba province). Some three centuries ago Nzav and his followers started to migrate ‘downstream’, westward towards the Kwaango. Other Luunda groups migrated to the east and the south.

The paramount stands at the apex of a pyramidal political structure. In his capacity of sovereign lord (mwaant mwiin mangaand), he rules over a large geographical and political unit (ngaand). Although Nzav is identified with the land of the ngaand, he does not own it. In his capacity of political overlord, the paramount title-holder allocates large parts of the ngaand to the sub-regional title-holders (ayilool), who represent him one level downwards. All these major titles (as well as those of the numerous minor local title-holders) are distributed according to a system of perpetual kinship and positional succession (Cunnison 1956). In this way, the use of land and political administration are linked to perpetual titles that are defined in terms of real, putative or fictive consanguinity, and that strengthen the typical Luunda tributary network (Bustin 1975). This serves to incorporate the various layers of the smaller segmentary authority structures into one integrated whole.

The politico-cosmological imagery which metaphorically associates the paramount title-holder to the sun, the rainbow, the flash of lightning or the rain pouring down, illustrates how the social and political organisation of the ngaand is converted into more vertical and hierarchical relations on the level of the mwaant mwiin mangaand.¹ As a sovereign ruler, Nzav represents these hierarchical structures of social organisation, vertical and linear public order and social control. He embodies the mythical ancestral order (wiinshaankulw) which precedes the origin of society, but he is also the source of this social order and of cultural, ritual, and political Luunda institutions.

Yet, the nature of the paramount title-holder’s rule is twofold. No distinction is made between dominium and imperium (Crine 1964), that is, between chiefs and landowners. Instead, Nzav unites the function of sovereign ruler and paramount political territorial chief (mwiin mangaand) with that of mwiin mavw, a title that refers to his personal identification with, rather than his ownership of, the land.

In his capacity of ‘lord of the soil’ Nzav assumes the responsibility for fertility and fecundity, social and biological reproduction, and the material welfare of the community as a whole. In this capacity, the office and function of the paramount title-holder is marked by a regenerative and mediating characteristic. The paramount thus combines typically agnatic and vertical/linear, political, principles with uterine and more cyclical ones. The royal body politic embodies a continuous attempt to integrate these convergent and divergent forces.

The muyoomb tree

As father and mother (or mother’s brother, ‘mother without breasts’) to the subjects of his territory, Nzav will invoke the royal ancestors, represented by his miyoomb trees (Amnacardiaceae, Lennea antiscorbutica or L.welwichii) at the royal courtyard’s entrance, for matters that regard his own lineage. He will also address the ancestral trees in matters that transcend the interests of the royal lineage proper to ensure, for example, the well-being of all the commoners in the ngaand, to welcome newcomers and bestow an ancestral blessing upon them, and to enhance social and natural reproduction and fertility (such as, for instance, before the start of a new agricultural cycle and the preparation of new fields in the ngaand, before the caterpillar harvest or a major collective hunt, on the occasion of a sub-regional title-holder’s enthronement or death, or in times of hunger). On each of these occasions, the title-holder, assisted by senior court members, will recite a royal charter or genealogy, relating the migration from the Luunda homeland (kool), and the battles and events that marked each title-holder’s rule. This discourse is rooted in a memory characterised by a linear, diachronic and historical conception of time.

All major or minor political title-holders possess their miyoomb trees too, planted in front of their houses after the construction of a new village or following their own enthronement. The health and life of the tree(s) as ‘living shrines’ is indicative of the elder’s authority and wisdom, and thus of the health of the village (or the ngaand) as a whole.

In the paramount title-holder’s case, two groups of trees are planted in two separate enclosures, one to the right of the courtyard’s entrance, representing deceased patrilateral male kin of the title-holder, and a second to the left representing his matrilateral male kin. While planting the trees immediately after his enthronement, the title-holder invokes the ancestors and asks for the protection and the prosperity of the village or the ngaand.²

Representational space: emplacement between the boundaries of body and landscape

For aLuund, place is the space where agnatic and uterine qualities— verticality and cyclicity—conjoin, and where the natural and cultural orders of things (nshiku) converge. In order to promote our understanding of local concepts of ‘place’ and identity, and of the tree symbolism which is used in miyoomb shrines to express these, it is necessary to present an ethnography of Luunda representational space. How does Luunda society generate its social space and time, referred to here as its representational space (body, house, village, land, graveyard and so on)? How does emplacement occur between the boundaries of body and landscape, and how does this representational space tie in with a representation of space, time and a notion of place?

This section reviews the structuration of the various spaces that constitute the environmental horizon of experience and the daily life-scene for the aLuund, by focusing on the quotidian activities that take place in each of these spaces. It highlights the spatial and temporal relations of contrast and complementarity, and shows how they underpin the social organisation of the Luunda community, and its relation to the natural world. Basic to these sets of complementary oppositions is the masculine/ feminine polarity. The physical facts of the human body, and the corporeal praxis of the male and female body-self, signify and convey their own structuring logic onto the aLuund’s social and natural worlds, the architecture of which, in turn, produces living bodies.

The dual sets of spatio-temporal relationships are combined into social relationships, for example through related series of complementary oppositions between public and private, or individual and collective. As such, the aLuund’s experience of their daily environment is rendered by means of metaphorical-metonymical processes that combine and shift between the complementary attributes of sense (visual, tactile, olfactory), gender and orientation (east, west; right, left). These inform the perception and structuration of the different spaces that constitute the village and its surroundings, and link these to cosmological time-space and historical narrative. They also pattern the various social activities and the gendered labour divisions in each of these spatial units.

Space, as it is lived, experienced and organised by aLuund, is a topological space, combining what Lefèbvre (1991:164) has called isotopias, heterotopias and utopias (analogous places, contrasting places, and places for what has no place which, in the Luunda case, refer above all to the omnipresent rhythms of life-force) into one projective space in which different social spaces interpenetrate and superimpose themselves onto one another. Taken as a whole, this topological space forms the expression of the way in which the aLuund perceive and live their own body, their social relations, their history and their relation to the surrounding environment and cosmos.

It is in, and through, the body that space is perceived, lived and produced. On the day of the coming out ritual which ends a long period of seclusion in the boys’ circumcision camp (mukaand), the novices sing: ‘Oh mother, Foot gets lost in the surrounding world. Foot rejoices. It looks at the world and how it wakes up. Foot looks at the world awakening. Oh foot!’. According to the aLuund, your feet provide you with the joy of discovering the world which, as we shall see, in itself constitutes an image and a living reflection of one’s corporeality. The joy of discovery is above all of a practical, rather than aesthetic, nature. The Luunda sense of the natural environment is firmly anchored in the necessities of daily life. In this sense, people stand in a very pragmatic relation to their natural environment. Yet, the characteristics of this environment simultaneously provide a constant reminder of one’s own place in the world. They are a tangible comment on one’s own insertion into the natural flow of time, of one’s own life-cycle, one’s relationship with past and future generations, and one’s place in the village community. Relationships with the surrounding world are basically characterised by a doxic, taken-for-granted sense of oneness, ‘at homeness’, and rootedness in the here and now, constituted by complex links which connect the here and now to a historical, ancestral and mythical space-time.

The cradle of Luunda culture (kool) in Shaba, is situated in the east and is considered by the aLuund to be a geographically higher point. It is there, in an eastern or upstream direction, that the source of the (male) cultural order springs. It is in the east that the sun comes up (-vuumbuk: ‘to grow‘, ‘ to come out of the ground’, ‘to resurrect’) and ‘the world awakens’. Therefore, enthronement rituals will always spatially unfold from east to west, in a cosmogonic enactment of the migration movement from kool, situated at the headwaters, downstream to the west, to the land the aLuund of the Mabeet presently occupy. The waterflow from east to west also represents the course of masculine life-flow, which springs in the east.

When the sun disappears, in the evening, in the west, it goes to the underworld, kaluung, the site of death. Significantly, the west is also referred to as kuchitookil, the place where one is ‘made white’ (-took), that is, where one meets the dead. Within the context of circumcision, for example, the western end of the circumcision lodge is called kwifiil, ‘towards the place of death’. When the setting sun slowly sinks into the underworld, its last red glow against the sky is spoken of as the ‘fire of the dead’, at which the latter warm themselves. As in other savannah cultures, it is said that in the underworld at night, the sun follows a subterranean river which carries it back to the east, to appear again at the source of the river in the morning.

The life-giving connotations attributed to the upstream direction are reversed for the downstream orientation. In Luunda mourning songs, downstream is invariably associated with sterility, barrenness and death. At ritual purifications, water pacifies and purifies because it carries pollution, illness, misfortune, conflicts and death downstream.

The waterflow from east to west, from upstream to downstream and from day to night is a powerful image of the flow of life, and of the lifecycle, situated between birth and death. To dream of quickly fleeting water is cons...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Belonging in need of emplacement?
• Chapter 1: The rootedness of trees: Place as cultural and natural texture in rural southwest Congo
• Chapter 2: Wild gods, containing wombs and moving pots: Emplacement and transience in Watchi belonging
• Chapter 3: Powers of place: Landscape, territory and local belonging in Northwest Amazonia
• Chapter 4: Origin and ritual exchange as transformative belonging in the Balinese temple
• Chapter 5: Spirit possession as historical narrative: The production of identity and locality in Zanzibar Town
• Chapter 6: The need for a ‘bit of history’: Place and past in English identity
• Chapter 7: The politics of locality: Memories of District Six in Cape Town
• Chapter 8: The potrero and the pibe: Territory and belonging in the mythical account of Argentinean football