Rene Devisch – författare

For the Yaka of Southwestem Zaire, infertility is a tear in the fabric of life, and the Khita fertility ritual is a trusted way of re-weaving the damaged strands. In "Weaving the Threads of Life", Rene Devisch offers an extended analysis of the Khita cult, which leads to an original account of the workings of ritual healing. Devisch analyzes the Yaka's understanding of existence as a fabric of firmly but delicately interwoven threads of nature, body and society. The fertility healing ritual calls forth forces, feelings and meanings that allow women to rejoin themselves to the complex pattern of social and cosmic life. These elaborate rites are not based on symbols or traditional beliefs; rather, Devisch shows, they themselves generate forces and meaning, creating and shaping the cosmic, physical, and social worlds of their participants. Devisch's praxiological approach is unique in using phenomenological insights into the intent and results of anthropological fieldwork.

African societies are gifted with a rich creativity, often expressed in intimate corporeal terms. For the Yaka people of southwestern Congo, such manifestations can have individual, social, or even cosmic significance. The Law of the Lifegivers investigates the importance among the Yaka of body and space in their daily life, exercise of power, and initiatic traditions. Through this analysis, Devisch and Brodeur show that body, desire, and symbol are intertwined, so that bodily expression can act as sensuous and powerful symbol. The domestication of passion and the institutionalizing of a subject are all expressed in bodily terms, particularly during initiations; the ethical order of law rests on many bodily symbols, including the importance of maternal and paternal lifegivers. The authors vividly describe the different life-giving or life-threatening roles which function in this society, such as sorcerer, diviner, therapist, and chief, as well as the funeral drama which shapes the passage to the afterlife with the ancestors, as experienced by the dying subject and his community. Through their dialogue and correspondence, Devisch and Brodeur (an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, respectively) bring together two, sometimes conflicting, intellectual approaches. They aim to unravel a truth which is freed, as much as possible, from the presumption that only the West possesses the knowledge of objective discourse and science. Through the interaction, the authors reveal the semantic threads, located at the very heart of the most vital, life-giving processes, which weave the fabric of the practice and thought of a riveting, passionate Africa.