Discover a range of religious and spiritual trance dance traditions-from Egyptian zar ceremonies to Sufi whirling dervish techniques-and the entities you can contact through them. Written by an expert teacher who has trained and performed with top dancers in Paris, London, and Cairo, this meticulously researched, hands-on book delves into the history and modern practice of ecstatic dance. In doing so, she sounds a cautionary note for contemporary interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief.Įxplore the living tradition of trance dancing, the practice of connecting with the subtle energies and secret knowledge of spirits through rhythmic movement to music. 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. 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. 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. Focusing on efforts to stop female circumcision in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 19, Janice Boddy mines colonial documents and popular culture for ethnographic details to interleave with observations from northern Sudan, where women's participation in zâr spirit possession rituals provided an oblique counterpoint to colonial views. His assertion that at the turn of the century Britain ruled over forty percent of the global Muslim population is enough to explain why Aden is an important case study in providing a window into the social and spiritual life of a Muslim community within the British Empire.' - THANOS PETOURIS, BYS newsletter.Ĭivilizing 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. It is beautifully written, deeply textured, and eminently accessible.' - Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Die Welt des Islams 'In Imperial Muslims, the author's ingenious use of British archival sources and Arabic contemporary publications make 19th and early 20th century Aden come alive in front of the readers' eyes. 'In Imperial Muslims we have a tremendously valuable and highly readable contribution, one that has filled a serious gap in our reading of modern Indian Ocean history, and that has also added significant depth to our understanding of Muslim religious life under colonial rule.

Additionally, the spirit world acts as a foil for village life in the context of rapid historical change and as such provides a focus for cultural resistance that is particularly, though not exclusively, relevant to women. She suggests that spirit possession is a feminist discourse, though a veiled and allegorical one, on women's objectification and subordination. Janice Boddy examines the moral universe of the village, discussing female circumcision, personhood, kinship, and bodily integrity, then describes the workings of the cult and the effect of possession on the lives of men as well as women.

In accommodating the spirits, the women are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their own subordination. Through the woman, the spirit makes demands upon her husband and family and makes provocative comments on village issues, such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination. Adherents of the cult are usually women with marital or fertility problems, who are possessed by spirits very different from their own proscribed roles as mothers. Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Wombs and Alien Spirits explores the zâr cult, the most widely practiced traditional healing cult in Africa.

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