Feminine distress: reconfiguring insides and outsides on Guyana’s Indigenous frontier, Charlotte Hoskins (Univ. of Oxford, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography/LAS)
Séminaire de l'EREA
Présentation
This paper considers the phenomenon of ‘fits’ afflicting primarily indigenous schoolgirls in Guyana’s state-run secondary school dormitories. These episodes correspond to cycles of attacks, in which spirits possess the bodies of young women, prompting them to move, speak, and behave in distressing ways. The possessed are left with no memory of the occurrence. By contributing ethnographic material derived from everyday Makushi life, this paper extends the literature on the body’s chronic instability and critically engages with socio-spatial analogies that have placed femininity and masculinity in correspondence to positions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. I suggest a dynamic reconfiguration of these positions with consequences for notions of territory. Still, I refrain from explaining these ‘fits’, first dwelling on the affects of uncertainty that they express and produce as bodies on the cusp of unresolved tensions.
La présentation sera en anglais.
Illustration : cliché de l'autrice
The EREA (Enseignement et recherche en ethnologie amérindienne) seminar is a flexible discussion space open to the public that aims to stimulate exchanges between Centre researchers, University of Paris Nanterre Department of Anthropology, and invitees from elsewhere. It serves as both a focal point for reflection on ongoing Americanist research and as a platform for doctoral students, post-docs, and associate researchers’ work.
Under the form of individual presentations, thematic cycles, or half-days of study, the seminar provides a complementay research space for meetings, namely the Séminaire d’anthropologie américaniste (SAA) and the Groupe d’enseignement et de recherche sur les Mayas et la Mésoamérique (GERM).
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