virt_5

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

5. The virtual village in town (a): Girl's puberty ceremonies in urban Zambia 37

5.1. Historic ('traditional') village-derived ritual in African urban settings today, and its interpretation

When central reproductive institutions of the old village order, including rituals of kinship, are already under great pressure from new and external alternatives in the rural environment, one would hardly expect them to survive in urban contexts. For in town people's life is obviously structured, economically and in terms of social organisation, in ways which would render all symbolic and ritual reference to rural-based cults reproducing the old village order, hopelessly obsolete. Who would expect ancestral cults to take place in urban settings in modern Africa? What theory of change and continuity would predict the continued, even increasing practice of ecstatic possession ritual in urban residential areas, often in the trappings of new formally organised cults posing as Christian churches or Islamic brotherhoods, but often also without such emulation of world religions. Why do people pursue apparently rural forms when socially, politically and economically their lives as urbanites are effectively divorced from the village? The point is, however that rural symbolic forms are prominent on the African urban scene; as such they represent a conspicuous element of virtuality, since urban life is no longer informed by the patterns of production and reproduction that corresponded with these rural symbols in the first place.
Stressing the complementarity between a local community's social, political and economic organisation and the attending religious forms, the Durkheimian heritage in the social science approach to religion, however dominant, provided no ready answers when applied to study of historic ('traditional') urban ritual, at least in Africa.38 For how can there be such continuity when African urbanites stage a rural ritual in the very different urban context? What would be the referent of the symbols circulating in such ritual? The relative paucity of studies on this point stands in amazing contrast with the prevalence and ubiquity of the actual practice on the ground. It is as if the absence of an adequate interpretative framework has caused anthropologists to close their eyes for the ethnographic facts staring them in the face. At the same time they have produced in abundance studies of such forms urban ritual in the context of world religions (especially studies on urban Independent and mainstream Christian churches), which of course do 'feel right' in an urban setting, where (far more directly than in the remote countryside) globalisation made its impact on the African continent.

The relatively few researchers (including myself) who have documented urban 'traditional' ritual in modern Africa and sought to interpret it, have come up with answers which, while persuasive in the light of the analytical paradigms prevalent at the time, would now seem rather partial and unsatisfactory.

• The most classic argument is that in terms of socialisation and the inertia of culture: even if urbanites pursue new forms of social and economic life especially outside their urban homes, in childhood they have been socialised into a particular rural culture which seeks continued acknowledgement in their lives, especially where the more intimate, existential dimensions are concerned; staging a rural kinship ritual in town would be held to restore or perpetuate a cultural orientation which has its focus in the distant village - by which is then meant not in the intangible ideal model of community, but the actual rural residential group on the ground.

• A more sophisticated rephrasing of the preceding argument would be in terms of broad, largely implicit, long-term cultural orientations that may be subsumed under Bourdieu's term habitus: girl's initiation deals with the inscribing, into the body and through the body, of a socially constructed and mediated personal identity which implies, as an aspect of habitus, a total cosmology, a system of causation, an eminently self-evident way of positioning one's self in the natural and social world; in a layered conception of the human life-world, it is at the deeper, most implicit layer that such habitus situates itself, largely impervious to the strategic and ephemeral surface adaptations of individuals and groups in the conjuncture of topical social, political and economic conditions prevailing here and now.

• Then there has been the urban mutual aid argument: economically insecure recent urban migrants seek to create, in the ritual sphere, a basis for solidary so that they may appeal to each other in practical crises: illness, funerals, unemployment etc.; being from home, the traditional ritual may help to engender such solidarity, but (a remarkably Durkheimian streak again, cf. Durkheim's theory of the arbitrary nature of the sacred) in fact any ritual might serve that function, and in fact often world religions provide adequate settings for the construction of alternative, fictive kin solidarity in town.

• The urban-rural mutual aid argument: A related argument derives from modes-of-production analysis, and stresses the urban migrants' continued reliance on rural relationships in the face of their urban insecurity; since rural relationships are largely reproduced through rural ritual, urbanites stage rural-derived ritual (often with rural cultic personnel coming over to town for the occasion) in order to ensure their continued benefit from rural resources: access to land, shelter, healing, historical political and ritual office.

• Having thus stressed the shared economic and ideological interest between townsmen and villagers, it is only a small step to the argument of ethnic construction. This revolves on the active propagation of a specific ethnic identity among urban migrants, which serves to conceptualise an urban-rural community of interests, assigns specific roles to villagers and urbanites in that context (the townsmen would often feature as ethnic brokers vis-à-vis the outside world), and effectively re-defines the old localised and homogeneous village community into a de-localised ethnic field spanning both rural and urban structures, confronting ethnic strangers and organising those of the same ethnic identity for new tasks outside the village, in confrontation with urban ethnic rivals, with the urban economy and with the central state. In this ethnic context, the urban staging of 'traditional' rural ritual would be explained as the self-evident display of ethnically distinctive symbolic production. But again, any bricolage of old and new, local and global forms of symbolic production might serve the same purpose.

These approaches have various things in common. They assume the urbanites involved in rural kinship ritual to be recent urban migrants retaining still one foot in the village. They do not make the distinction (which, I argued above, emerged as a dominant feature of South Central African symbolic transformations throughout the twentieth century) between the actual rural residential group and the ideal model of the village community, and hence cannot decide between two fundamentally different interpretation of the ritual performance in town:

• does it seek to recreate a real village and by implication to deny urbanism?
• or does it seek to create urban community, as (in South Central Africa, at least) new form of social locality, open to world-wide influences and pressures, merely by reference to an inspiring village-centred abstract model of community?

And finally, these approaches ignore such alternative and rival modes of creating meaning and community, precisely in a context of heterogeneity and choice which is so typical for towns wherever in the modern world. If urbanites stage rural kinship rituals in town it is not because they have no choice. They could tap any of the four complexes of cosmopolitan meaning outlines above, do as Hannerz and the many authors he cites suggest, and completely forget about rural forms. And if they do insist on selectively adhering to rural forms in the urban context, further questions can be asked. Do they retain firm boundaries vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis the rural-centred model, or is there rather a mutual interpenetration and blending? What explains that these globalising alternatives leave ample room for what would appear to be an obsolete, rural form, the puberty rite? How do these symbolic and ideological dimensions relate to material conditions, and to power and authority: do they reflect or deny material structures of deprivation and domination; do they underpin such power as is based on privileged position in the political economy of town and state, or do they, on the contrary, empower those that otherwise would remain underprivileged; to what strategies do they give rise in the inequalities of age and gender, which are symbolically enacted in the village model of community and in the associated kinship rituals, but which also, albeit in rather different forms, structure urban social life?

5.2. Girls' initiation in the towns along the Zambian 'Line of Rail'

While the centrally-located farmer's town of Lusaka took over from the town of Livingstone in the extreme south of the country as territorial capital, a series of new towns was created in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) at the northern end of the 'Line of Rail' as from the late 1920s, in order to accommodate the massive influx of labourers in the copper mining industry. As 'the Copperbelt', this is the most highly urbanized part of the country, and the site of famous and seminal studies in urban ethnicity, politics and religion. While imposed on a rural area where ethnic identity was primarily constructed in terms of the Lamba identity, the Copperbelt attracted migrants from all over South Central Africa but particularly from Northern Zambia; the Bemba identity (in itself undergoing considerable transformation and expansion in the process) became dominant in these towns, and the 'town Bemba' dialect their lingua franca.
If rural kinship rituals may seem out of place in town, they would seem even more so in the context of mainstream urban churches such as the Roman Catholic church. As a major agent of globalisation, this world-wide hierarchical organisation has sought to vigorously impose its particular conception of cosmology, hierarchy, sanctity and salvation (through the image of a community of believers and of saints), in short its system of meaning, on the African population, and part of its project has been the attempted monopolisation of the social organisation of human reproduction and human life crisis ritual.
Throughout South Central Africa, female puberty ritual is one of the dominant kinship rituals (even more so than the male counterpart); its remarkably similar forms have been described in detail in many rural ethnographic contexts from Zaire to Northern Transvaal. For almost a century, female puberty ritual has been banned as pagan and sinful in Roman Catholic circles in Zambia. However, already during my research on urban churches in Zambia's capital Lusaka in the early 1970s I found women's lay groups within the formal organisation of mainstream churches to experiment with Christian alternatives to female puberty training. Therefore I was not surprised to learn that by the late 1980s, these experiments had grown into accepted practice. Nor is the phenomenon strictly confined to urban churches; for instance in the area of my main Zambian research, in Kaoma district in the western part of the country, a limited number of women now claim to have been 'matured [ the standard expression for puberty initiation in Zambian English ] in church' rather than in a family-controlled rural or urban kinship ritual.
The situation in the urban church congregations, as brought out by Rasing's recent research (1995), is of inspiring complexity. On the one hand there is a proliferation of lay groups, each with their own uniforms and paraphernalia, formal authority structure within the overall church hierarchy, routine of meetings and prayers, and specialised topics of attention: caring for the sick, the battle against alcoholism, etc. Already in these groups the organisational form and routine, and the social embeddedness this offers to its socially uprooted members, would appear to be an attempt at the construction of social locality. The latter might be of greater interpretative relevance than the specific contents of the religious ideas and practices circulating there; the result is, to use this phrase once more, 'a place to feel at home' - but at the same time a place to engage in formal organisation. At first sight such voluntary organisational form would appear to be an aim and a source of satisfaction and meaning in itself, that is how, for instance, I looked at the Independent churches which I first studied in Lusaka in the early 1970s, when my theoretical baggage was still totally inadequate to appreciate them beyond the idea that they were contexts to learn about bureaucracy and modernity. However, I am now beginning to realise that it is such formal organisations which create the bedding, and the boundaries, within which the uncontrolled flow of goods, images and ideas as conveyed by globalisation, can be turned into identity.
Some of these lay groups particularly specialise in girl's initiation. However, contrary to what might be expected on the basis of comparative evidence from my own field research (Lusaka early 1970s, western central Zambia 1980s-90s), the lay group's symbolic and cultic repertoire for puberty initiation has incorporated far more than just a minimal selection of the rural ritual, far more than just a mere token appendage of isolated traditional elements to a predominantly Christian and foreign rite of passage. On the contrary, the women lay leaders have used the church and their authority as a context within which to perform puberty ritual that, despite inevitable practical adaptations and frequent lapses of ritual knowledge and competence, emulates the historic, well-described Bemba kinship ritual to remarkable detail, and with open support from the church clergy.
Selected analytical and theoretical questions to which this state of affairs gives rise have been outlined above by way of introduction. Meanwhile the complexity of the situation calls for extensive ethnographic research, not only on the Copperbelt but also in present-day rural communities in Northern Zambia; in addition, a thorough study must be made of the ideological position and the exercise of religious authority of the clergy involved, as mediators between a world-wide hierarchically organised world religion (which has been very articulate in the field of human reproduction and gender relations) and the ritual and organisational activities of urban Christian lay women. A secondary research question revolves around the reasons for the senior representatives of the Roman Catholic church to accept, even welcome, a ritual and symbolic repertoire which would appear to challenge the globalising universalism of this world religion, and which for close to a century has been condemned for doing just that.
The crucial interpretative problem here lies in its virtuality: in the fact that the Copperbelt women staging these rituals, as well as their adolescent initiands, do not in the least belong, nor consciously aspire to belong, to the ideal village world which is expounded in the ritual. These rituals belong to a realm of virtuality, very far removed from the Durkheimian premise (1912) of a coincidence between religious form and local group. Here we have to assess the various orders of reality, dream, ideal, fantasy and imagery that informs a modern African urban population in the construction of their life-world. For while the kinship ritual emphasises reproductive roles within marriage, agricultural and domestic productive roles for women, and their respect for authority positions within the rural kinship structure, these urban women depart very far from the model of rural womanhood upheld in the initiation, where it is formally taught through songs, through the supervising elders' pantomimes, wall pictures specifically drawn for the purpose, and especially by reference to clay models of human beings, their body parts, and man-made artefacts. Admittedly, many of these women still cherish their urban garden plots, but even if these are not raided by thieves around harvest time, their produce falls far short in feeding the owners and their families through the annual cycle. These women have hardly any effective ties any more with a distant village - and those that exist are mainly revived in the case of funerals. In their sexual and reproductive behaviour they operate largely outside the constraints stipulated by the kinship ritual and the associated formal training; as female heads of households are often without effective and enduring ties with male partner; and not even all do subscribe to the Bemba ethnic identity.

Very clearly this urban puberty ritual is concerned with the construction of meaningful social locality out of the fragmentation of social life in the Copperbelt high-density residential areas, and beyond that with the social construction of female personhood; but why, in this urban context, is the remote and clearly inapplicable dream of the village model yet so dominant and inspiring? Is the puberty ritual a way, for the women involved, to construct themselves as ethnically Bemba? That is not the case, since the church congregations are by nature multi-ethnic and no instances of ethnic juxtaposition to other groups have been noted so far in relation to this urban puberty ritual. Is the communal identity to be constructed through the puberty ritual rather that of a community of women? Then why hark back to a rural-based model of womanhood which, even if part of a meaningful ideal universe, no longer has any practical correspondence with the life of Copperbelt women today - women who do not till the soil, in their daily life including its sexual aspects to not observe the rules of conduct and the taboos to which they were instructed at their initiation, and who will in many cases will not contract a formal marriage with their male sexual and reproductive partners. Or is the social construction of womanhood, and personhood in general, perhaps such a subtle and profound process that foreign symbols (as mediated through the Christian church) are in themselves insufficiently powerful to bring about the bodily inscription that produces identity - so that what appears as virtuality, as a lack of connectedness between the urban day-to-day practice of womanhood today and the ideological contents of the initiation, might mark merely the relative unimportance of the details of the women's day-to-day situation (including the fact that this happens to be urban), in the face of an implicit, long-term habitus?
But why should the interpretation be in terms favouring either the Christian or the historic rural part of the equation? Might we perhaps come closer to an answer if we concentrate on the striking amalgamation of fully-fledged non-Christian ritual encapsulated within a Christian church context, and could we then say that the attempted construction of community involved here is that of a viable moral community which happens to be urban-based, and which is viable precisely because it combines, as a reference of virtuality, the symbolic potency of a local rural tradition with the organisational power and prestige of a world religion - a veritable instance of the kind of interactions and accommodation typical of the globalisation process.
It is time for us to proceed to our second example of virtuality, which again explores the relevance of rural-derived models in African urban contexts.