Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger (review)

As a form of spirit possession practiced among Hausa and related peoples so important to African cultural history, bori possesses such a rich literature that surely most Africanists know something about it. In the United States and France, we are still afflicted by linguistic divides, however, and unless one is a regional specialist, those who know English accounts are unlikely to be familiar with French ones, and vice versa. Adeline Masquelier's Prayer Has Spoiled Everything is welcome both as an introduction to bori among the Mawri, a Hausaphone people of southwestern Niger, and as a review of francophone authors unknown to many hidebound anglophones.

The book presents a strikingly nuanced view of bori as a context "for concretizing many of the elusive processes of transformation that have impacted Mawri society" in recent times (p. 5). The bori practitioners with whom Masquelier has studied feel that Islam is "spoiling" the world they have known. "Pre-Islamic communal rituals" are "disappearing," resulting in a "sense of loss . . . by spirit devotees in the wake of Islam's progressive erasure of the moral geography in which non-Muslim Mawri traditionally anchored their history and identity" (p. 4). Masquelier recounts such opinions with unabashed bori-centrism, and so joins the many anthropologists seeking "new ways to represent adequately the authority of informants" through "rapport . . . recast as alliance" (Clifford 1988:45, 1997:41). Yet a curiously romantic isolationism results that risks undermining Masquelier's substantial accomplishments.

"Bori provides a crucial medium for representing the unseen, interpreting the novel, and mediating the foreign" (p. 10). Masquelier analyses specific performance events in an effort "to explain the 'real' of possession without explaining it away through a singular focus on the 'meaningfulness' of the phenomenon" (p. 14). Happily, spurious synthesis and reductive functionalism are eschewed, and Masquelier wisely chooses to challenge any notions of center and periphery that would consider "marginality" to be a liability. Instead, she follows Jean Comaroff in recognizing marginality as a "source of empowerment and a means of self-assertion" (p. 20). Other preconceived dialectics, such as politics/ritual, mind/matter, symbolic/instrumental, are similarly dismissed as mechanistic, for Masquelier asserts that "power . . . can no longer be located in the sphere of institutional politics but must be traced in mundane practices and everyday representations" (p. 22).

Like the late Nicole Échard, Masquelier finds contemporary bori "a product of colonial history and . . . an implicit, yet cogent, protest to colonization and Islamization" (p. 26). She is insightful when she recognizes that bori "spirits became more personalized as religious practice evolved toward a greater individualization" (p. 37) through colonial capitalism. She is engaging as she describes intersections of "moral geography" and physical topography (p. 55), for not only is place understood through ideology, but ideology is understood through place. In such assertions, Masquelier is reminiscent of David Tait, Meyer Fortes, and other earlier Africanists who sought to delineate the emplacement of social relations among northern Ghanaian peoples. The best insights of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything lie in Masquelier's discussions of how "female bodies provide the naturalizing ground for expressing the conflicts and ruptures of the modern era" (p. 75), as readers are treated to topics such as "kinesthetic appropriation and embodied knowledge" (chapter 5). Her most compelling case study is surely that of a spirit called Maria, "a complex, endearing, yet also frightening character," who "condenses in her life some of the most central paradoxes of contemporary Mawri life" (p. 228). Maria helps Mawri grapple with "the temptations of consumer culture and the dangers of uncontrolled consumption" (p. 228), and is both a "sweet" lover and a destructive whore, a bearer of bounteous fertility and a barren harpy who sows discord and disease (p. 249). Here, Masquelier brilliantly discerns the details of social process; but where is her sense of cultural comparison? How can one...