Janice Boddy – författare

Adherents to the ""zar"" cult in northern Sudan encounter spirits that are parallels of historically relevant figures in the known human world. Those possessed, usually women, meet aliens who speak about issues confronting a village such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination. By manifesting spirits while possessed, women also can provocatively embody their moral antitheses. In learning to accommodate their spirits, they learn the antilanguage of ""zar"" and are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their subordination. The book is organized into three parts: part 1 examines the moral universe of village women by discussion the meaning of female circumcision, personhood, kinship, marriage, and bodily integrity. Part 2 introduces the ""zar"" cult and, with several examples, describes the conditions under which possession, initially an illness, might occur. The author discusses the role of possession in the lives of men as well as women, both as members of families exhibiting a propensity for spirit intrusion and as individuals suffering from poor self-image largely occasioned by infertility. Part 3 describes the spirit world apart from specific incidents of possession in order to understand what messages villagers will derive from their experiences of spirits. Based on nearly two years of ethnographic field work in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Janice Boddy's study offers a multidimensional interpretation of the ""zar"" that is grounded in observation, anthropological theory, and practice.

Civilizing Women is a riveting exploration of the disparate worlds of British colonial officers and the Muslim Sudanese they sought to remake into modern imperial subjects. Focusing on efforts to stop female circumcision in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1920 and 1946, Janice Boddy mines colonial documents and popular culture for ethnographic details to interleave with observations from northern Sudan, where women's participation in zar spirit possession rituals provided an oblique counterpoint to colonial views. Written in engaging prose, Civilizing Women concerns the subtle process of "colonizing selfhood," the British women who undertook it, and those they hoped to reform. It suggests that efforts to suppress female circumcision were tied to the continuation of slavery and the rise of commercial cotton growing in Sudan, as well as to concerns about infant mortality and maternal health. Boddy traces maneuverings among political officers, teachers, missionaries, and medical personnel as they pursued their elusive goal, and describes their fraught relations with Egypt, Parliament, the Foreign Office, African nationalists, and Western feminists.In doing so, she sounds a cautionary note for contemporary interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief.

_______________An intimate first-person account of a young woman's coming of age in Somalia'My name is Aman ... I am going to tell the whole world my story.'The daughter of tribal leaders, Aman recounts her dramatic life while at the same time illuminating an innocent childhood romance with a white boy that leads to murder; her circumcision ceremony; an unwanted marriage at the age of 13; and her escape to the city where her beauty and curiosity lead her into a world of white men, parties and runaway girls.