Maximizing the Body as Sensor: The Work of a Bantu Healer

• In Event: The Body as Environmental Sensor - II

Abstract

A Bantu healer and founder of the Association of Research in the Anthropology of Medicine (ARAM) based in the periphery of Yaoundé, Cameroon, invited me to live in the midst of his practice which revolves around his enhanced abilities as sensor in the milieu. At the heart of his work is encountering plants, minerals, animals, elements fit for healing a specific illbeing, the most fortuitous encounters found from the ancestral forest nearby, a process which he described as seeking joy. I want to explore how Spinoza’s ethics of joy enables to understand his practice as enhancing vitalities in-between bodies (understood non-anthropocentrically as composed of many bodies), making a distinction between ‘affectio’, how bodies mix and leave traces of each other in one another, and ‘affectus’ (passions or affects) of bodies which augment (joy) or diminish (sadness), favor or hinder one’s power to act (1849: 82). His ability is one of skilled improvisation to augment another body’s desire or effort (conatus) to persevere in existence through lateral correspondences creating affects. I want to express this practice through sounds and movement, intensities, speeds and slowness, tempos, timing and rhythms invested by the healer as well as in my own anthropological approach which aims to maximize these vitalities without dividing or hindering them. This in turn points to ways of learning to become sensor in milieus without decomposing them, rather offering new compositions or ways of cohabiting through this flux.

Author

• julie laplante, University of Ottawa