The sickness : sociality, schooling, and spirit possession amongst Amerindian youth in the savannahs of Guyana
Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to explore the recent changes in the social landscape of a
Wapishana village, due to long-term separation from kin. I consider the impact of a recent
educational shift from small scale community based education to regional boarding schools on
family life and community structure amongst Amerindian people in the hinterland of Region 9,
Guyana. Furthermore, the project analyzes an emergent form of spirit possession that affects
almost exclusively young women who live in the dormitories, locally referred to as the sickness.
Using the sickness as an analytical lens, the thesis examines the ways in which young Amerindian
women navigate a shift in expectations from their parents and communities as well as how they
experience this rapid social change and transformation.
Various vantage points employed in the analysis of the sickness help to illustrate the
complexities of the current lived reality of Amerindian life. By exploring the experience of
kinship and community in the Wapishana village of Sand Creek, it is possible to demonstrate
how these relationships are produced and reproduced in everyday life through the sharing of
space and substance. Furthermore, it is necessary to consider different aspects of the Creole and
Amerindian notions of the spiritual world and their intervowenness in Wapishana lives, drawing
out human and non-human agency and how they effect change in the world. Additionally,
drawing on the anthropology of education, the thesis identifies the influence the state has on
people’s lives through institutionalized education, and locates this process within the wider
context of historical indigenous residential schools. The ethnographic data on the experience of
the sickness is put in dialogue and contrasted with other conceptions of spiritual vulnerability in
Amerindian communities, examples of ‘mass hysteria’ in schools or other institutional settings in
other parts of the world, and the Afro-Caribbean experience of spirit possession. Finally,
through an analysis of the etiology of the sickness, the final chapter draws on Amazonian literature
to examine the embodiment of gender and the local gendered history of knowledge production
in the area.
The sickness is a phenomenon that permeates life in Southern Guyana for Amerindian
youth, their families, and their communities. Undoubtedly, these various themes found in
Wapishana young women’s lives influence one another, irrespective of an ultimate manifestation
of spirit possession. In the concluding section I show how these themes can be placed in the
wider Amazonian framework of alterity and ‘Other-becoming’, illustrating how this
phenomenon provides a productive tool for the analysis of the experience of rapid social change
among Amerindian youth and the impact of these transformations throughout the region.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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