In issue 7 of Figure Emergenti, entitled “Beware of the Wolf,” in the Experiences section, you will find the article “Moving Borders: Towards Other Ways of Understanding Otherness,” dedicated to the work in Senegal that I have been carrying out for several years with medical anthropologist Angelo Miramonti. This article provides a glimpse of the qualitative research conducted in 2023 at the Moussa Diop University Psychiatric Center in Dakar on the topic of return migration.
The narrative of our experience seeks to combine the significance of the repatriation of Senegalese migrants with their hospitalization in a psychiatric facility in Dakar and is constructed around some central themes of the therapeutic process and the management of psychological distress.
The paper in question is an approach to a different way of interpreting mental illness and treatment and is a first attempt to translate some key terms from ethnopsychiatry and transculturalism into the language of Gestalt.
How can the notions that form the basis of our clinical perspective contribute to the construction of a doctrine that takes into account cultural complexity?
What might be the experience of a therapist who places himself as an environment facing the otherness of the other?
On what basis does the encounter rest when subjectivities correspond to such alien human constructions?
Every question opens up new perspectives.
Questions guide our exploration through different fields of knowledge, not in search of an answer or a resolution, but rather towards a deeper understanding that can be the prelude to a more nuanced and polymorphic theoretical vision.
Our complementarian perspective, informed by cultural anthropology and Gestalt therapy, is driven by an interest and curiosity that seeks not to confine knowledge to already known and consolidated constructs but rather to foster openness and flexibility to foster the emergence of new definitions and interpretative readings.
While waiting to share in this magazine the results of our new research, recently completed (March 2025) at the Moussa Diop psychiatric clinic in Dakar and the Émile Badiane Psychiatric Center in Ziguinchor, I am sharing with you the Prologue to the book “Amina. Portrait of a Woman Inhabited by Ancestral Spirits,” which Angelo Miramonti wrote a few years ago and which collects the results of ethnographic research conducted in Senegal, starting with the life of Amina, a Lebu woman possessed by the spirits of her lineage.
Below you’ll find links to the article and book in question, which unfortunately couldn’t be published in full on FigureEmergenti. We hope this introduction will inspire you to read the entire book and guide you ever closer to a different understanding of illness and healing.
In Senegal, the body of a person suffering from what Western culture defines as a “psychiatric illness” often becomes the terrain where two different systems of treatment meet: that of Western biomedicine, which confines mental distress and suffering within an intrapsychic space, and that of traditional medicine, which opens up to the invisible and animist world of the rabs, ancestral spirits, the origins and causes of the malaise.
The two different paths to healing offer very different etiologies and practices. Amina, in Miramonti’s article, chooses to seek the help of a traditional healer and to entrust herself to the cult of Ndöp in the hope of curing what has tormented her for years.
The ritual of possession, organized in ceremonies that primarily involve women (the presence of adult males in the audience is much more marginal) of an entire village or neighborhood, is divided into collective moments, at times spectacular, through the sound of drums, trance states, and animal sacrifices. Its aim is to invite the rabs who have taken possession of the person to manifest themselves, not so much in order to exorcise them—that is, to expel or remove them from the body—as to integrate them through the construction of an alliance symbolized by the construction of a domestic altar.
While the practice of exorcism establishes a clear separation between the human and the divine (think of the conflict between God and the devil in Christian culture, which tends to be resolved by expelling Satan from the body of the possessed), in line with a dualistic vision of Western culture, the practice of adorcism by the Ndöp cults, on the other hand, transcends the concept of polarity and refers to the idea of holism through the unity between the human and spiritual worlds.
Just as Gestalt theory relies on the definition of field-organism-environment to define the dynamic and inseparable relationship between the individual and the environment, emphasizing the fact that experience can only be understood as a whole or a “gestalt” that emerges from the interaction between organism and environment, so too adorcism embraces an integrated and fluid vision of the material and spiritual components that define the person, eschewing a Manichean and fragmented vision of the phenomenon.
The spirit calls and makes itself heard, attacks the person by disturbing and tyrannizing them, tries to attract attention and manifests its presence through the patient’s body, through what biomedicine defines as psychological and behavioral symptoms.
The intervention of a traditional healer within a collective ceremonial space initially allows for the identification and naming of these génies, who can thus be recognized. Subsequently, it allows for the construction of a mediation and dialogue that can lead to the establishment of a lasting pact with the invisible being who will receive permanent worship and, in exchange, will bestow luck and protection.
The resulting reconciliation will lead to a gradual remission of symptoms and a sense of liberation in the person, who will recognize themselves as part of a “brotherhood” of possessed people.
Amina’s story and her recovery journey allow us to take a further step into a world where mental illness takes on different nuances and tones, raising further questions about our clinical practice.
Unable to publish the book or article here
I hope that reading this clear and engaging prologue that opens A. Miramonti’s book will spark new curiosity in you about the three-dimensionality of the human being and how stereotypes, prejudices, and intercultural misunderstandings can sometimes, beyond our awareness, erroneously guide our clinical choices and our psychotherapeutic work within the work setting.
Monica
Prologue: Drums in the Night
by Angelo Miramonti
August 3, 2014, Saturday, 10 p.m. I arrived in Dakar two weeks ago. I’ll be working here for a few years, but I don’t know how long. Dakar isn’t new to me; I lived here for a year, in 2003. Two days ago, I found an apartment in Yoff, a suburb of Dakar, a hundred meters from a Lebu fishing village. The village is a maze of sand-covered alleys, where cars aren’t allowed and you walk slowly, sinking in with every step. The town stretches along the ocean, on a stretch of beach on the Dakar peninsula. In 1444, the Portuguese “discovered” this peninsula on the westernmost tip of Africa, where centuries later the capital of Senegal arose. Every night, the pirogues of the Lebu fishermen set out from this beach. They are a people who came from the interior centuries ago, settled on the coast, and became fishermen and farmers. The sea in front of the village of Yoff is one of the richest in fish in the world: the part of the Atlantic Ocean that borders Senegal and Mauritania.
Tonight my new colleagues have invited me to join them in town for dinner. I leave the house to find a taxi. My apartment is in a building overlooking a paved square with a few restaurants, where cars circulate at all hours of the day and night; there I can find a taxi and get to the city center. It’s night, and I scan the dimly lit square for a yellow car. My gaze wanders toward the dark buildings of the village, a hundred meters away. As I gaze at that dark mass, I think back to when, eleven years ago, I crossed the village at night to go and call my family at a call center on the other side. I think back to those distant moments and feel the desire to cross the village again, immersed in the night. Nostalgia calls me back to those dimly lit buildings and that deep sand, where years ago I walked slowly, to reach a shop that has long since disappeared. I feel an inexplicable pull to walk those alleys again at night, when the ochre-yellow lights of the streetlamps filter through the houses and paint the walls, the sand, and the people a deep, unreal yellow. A taxi suddenly stops in front of me and offers me a ride. I shake off my memories, hesitate for a moment: it’s the right thing to do, to take that taxi and go to town. I’ll pass through the village again, I’ll be here for years after all.
To this day, I don’t remember, or can’t explain, why I refused that taxi driver and decided to walk through the village to find a taxi on the other side. I wanted to relive the emotions of eleven years earlier, seeing the women roasting peanuts in the fire-heated sand, the children playing, and the men in long robes arguing, sitting in front of the doors. The taxi drove off without me.
I walk toward the village, realizing I’m entering when I feel the asphalt becoming uneven, bumpy, and finally I feel the sand give way under my feet with every step. With the asphalt, the modern Dakar ends and the land of the Lebu begins, an ethnic group proud of its identity and traditional religions, who converted to Islam only in the early twentieth century and retain many of their ancestral beliefs. It’s August, stiflingly hot. There are many people on the streets, women selling, children, and entire families sitting next to piles of construction gravel. I turn into the alley I used to walk down years ago to get to the call center. The walls get closer, the light from the streetlamps pours down from above and floods the walls; there’s a white image of Sëriñ Touba painted on a wall, which turns ochre under those lights. I turn into the alley that leads to the other square, where I hope to find a taxi. As I walk, I hear a deafening drum roll in the distance. I keep walking, the din getting louder. I enter the alley, and fifty meters ahead I see a crowd of people crowded around a narrow opening in a dark red wall, a few meters from where my call center used to be. I stop and ask a young man, “What’s going on?” He replies, “It’s the Ndöp.”
That word hits me like a punch: I studied the Ndöp possession ritual among the Lebu a few months ago, in a book by one of my professors. Now the Ndöp is here, behind a crack in the wall and a crowd of curious people. I’m afraid, respectful, and shy; I don’t want to ask, but the question comes out of my mouth before I can think about what I’m saying, almost against my will: “Can I go take a look?” I regret asking as soon as I finish saying it, expecting an offended, indignant response, or perhaps a polite denial: these are ceremonies deeply rooted in Lebu culture; they won’t allow a Toubab, a white person, to witness them. The answer comes unexpectedly, seductive and unsettling like a gift from a stranger: “No problem.” He told me I could go. I pass through the crack in the wall, pushing my way through the crowd, and arrive in an internal clearing, surrounded by walls and covered in sand. There are about two hundred people seated around a circular space, the roll of the drums deafening. On one side of the clearing is an entire troupe of griots, the ancient caste of batteurs, drummers who pass down their knowledge from father to son. They play to a rapid, repetitive rhythm, a priest intones a chant, and the people respond in chorus. I understand they are invoking a spirit to come to the assembly. The people look at me; I’m the only white person among those two hundred people; no one protests, everyone is absorbed in the ceremony, enthralled by that “festival of spirits” that are the Lebu possession rites. In a few minutes, I forget my appointment in the city and, without realizing it, I spend two hours observing the ceremony I had studied in books, months before. Some women dance before the griots, falling into a trance, trembling and shaking. They are barely supported by other women, and after a few minutes they collapse on the sand, unconscious. The priest intones several chants to invoke the spirits, to come and possess their initiates. Other women dance before the griots, trembling and shaking in a trance, until they fall to the ground. These are women who have formed an alliance with one of the spirits invoked by the chants. Their spirit has come and taken them, made them dance until they fall into a trance, and then collapsed to the ground, their eyes closed and their sweaty faces covered in grains of sand. Possession dances always take place on the sand for this very reason: to cushion the possessed from falling.
Around midnight, the drums slow to a stop, fallen women are picked up by the officiants, and people begin to leave. The young man who let me pass says, “So? Did you like it? Come back tomorrow morning, we’ll sacrifice an ox in honor of Samba Diop, the spirit ally of so many women here in the village.” I tell him I’ll be back.
I never took that taxi into town. I stayed until the end of the ceremony and returned home, pensive, my shoes full of sand. That sand that stuck to the sweaty faces of the possessed women symbolically entered my home, three hundred meters from the place of worship, in an apartment in modern Dakar, inhabited by a newly arrived white man, near a tourist beach and two kilometers from the international airport. If I had taken that taxi in front of my house, on the asphalt of modern Dakar, this writing would not have existed.
I’ve given myself many explanations for why I decided to walk through the village that night: nostalgia, the desire to see the village again at night, the peanuts roasted in the scorching sand, the alleys, and the light bathing everything from above. The truth is, I don’t know why I didn’t take that taxi. That day, a mysterious voice called me toward the village, toward those narrow alleys and the ancestral cults of the Lebu, “tètes de poisson,” as the neighboring Wolof say, fish heads, proud, stubborn, and possessed. That day, a voice called me toward that yellow-tinted darkness and toward those mysterious drums in the night.
______
August 4, 2014, Sunday, 3:00 PM. A few hours have passed since my first encounter with the Ndöp. I returned to the ceremony to witness the sacrifice in honor of an ancestral spirit: Samba Diop. The entire village has collected donations to buy the sacrificial ox. I arrive at the same clearing as the previous evening and notice that it is surrounded by elevated concrete structures I hadn’t noticed last night, the skeletons of rooms whose doors and windows haven’t yet been built, empty, gray cubes, slightly higher than the clearing, where people are crowded together to watch. The ceremony begins. I’m still the only white person, but I recognize the young man from the previous evening. I know at least one person. I observe the ceremony and, for the first time, see an ox slaughtered and its blood collected in a basin. The drummers begin to play, the priest sings a song, and the dancing begins. Several hours pass. Toward evening, the ceremony draws to a close, the griots stop playing, and the crowd begins to disperse. It’s time to leave. I begin to make my way through, passing under one of those rooms under construction that people use as stands, looking for a gap in the crowd. Suddenly, I hear a voice behind me, calling me from above, from one of those gray cubes, and saying, “Good morning.” I turn around: it’s a woman in her fifties, with a lively, deep, benevolent gaze, looking at me curiously. “You’re white, what are you doing here?” I’m a little intimidated, but I decide to simply tell her the truth: “I just arrived in Dakar. Last night I happened to pass through the village and they told me there was an Ndöp ceremony. I asked to attend and they said I could. After the ceremony, they invited me back today for the sacrifice, and I did.” She continues to stare at me curiously: “And why are you interested in these things?” “I studied them at university, in a book by one of my professors. When they told me there was a ceremony, I thought I’d come and see for myself what I’d read in the books. I asked permission, and they let me in.” “Yes, but why do you study our things in books?” “Because they interest me a lot. I don’t have them here, at least not like this, and I’d like to meet them.” Her gaze is still benevolent, but becomes more determined: “If you want to meet them, write down my number and call me tonight. I want to tell you what happened to me. My name is Amina, I live in the village, the spirits follow me and give me no peace. I’m here to honor one of them, who has lived with me for many years. If you come visit me, I’ll tell you what’s happened to me since the spirits took me.” I write down her number.
I called her the next day and arranged a visit the following evening. Since that day I heard that voice calling me from a concrete cube, I’ve visited her house dozens of times, from August 2014 to September 2017. Thanks to Amina, I’ve been able to meet griots, priests and priestesses of the Ndöp cult, and various possessed women. I’ve attended about twenty possession ceremonies with her, accompanied her in four private ceremonies, and on other occasions in her recent life, where her family history and her unique experience of encountering ancestral spirits are intertwined, to the point of becoming confused.
An excerpt of the research is available free of charge here:
https://www.ledijournals.com/ojs/index.php/antropologia/article/view/1737
You can read the entire research here:
https://www.amazon.it/Amina-Ritratto-abitata-spiriti-ancestrali/dp/0244744998
