The Dance of Transformation: Exploring embodied space, sacredness and possession in Brekete

Abstract

Using ethnographic methods with insights gleaned from open-ended interviews and participant observation, this paper interrogates possession rituals in Brekete as a special modality of human behavior and examines the notion of sacred space and how the construct of sacred space shapes the perception of materiality, agency and territorialism. It further explores transformative encounters to determine the meaning of the physicality of dance in the creation of “communitas” (Turner, [1967] 1969) and wellbeing. Religious ritual practices are understood as expressive behavior that communicates meaning, notably about social structure, and the conscious vis-à-vis unconscious processes underlying perception, representation and performance of diverse types of actions coded in symbolic forms. In this perspective, ritual is simply not a set of distinct acts, but rather, ritual is a way of acting (Bell, 1990) and, consequently, the job of the ethnographer is to acquire the interpretational knowledge necessary to analyze the network of languages inherent in this apparently ‘irrational’ action.