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3 - Interpreting Africa's Seselelãme: Bodily Ways of Knowing in a Globalized World
- Edited by Anne Marie Champagne, Yale University, Connecticut, Asia Friedman, University of Delaware
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- Book:
- Interpreting the Body
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 July 2023, pp 66-87
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Summary
West Africans enjoy a sensory-emotional, embodied way of knowing that can be summed up with the Anlo-Ewe phrase seselelãme. This compelling term, seselelãme, comes from the language Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie grew up speaking in southeastern Ghana, and it forms the basis for decades of work Kathryn Geurts has conducted as an anthropologist and guest among Anlo people. Functionally, seselelãme captures a panoply of sensory-emotional experiences, signals, and perceptions, distinguishing it from ontological traditions that emphasize atomization, fragmentation, and categorization. This situates seselelãme almost in opposition to longstanding Euro-American ways of being, which have privileged splits among cognition, sensory perception, emotional feeling, and behavioral expressions. Those seeking to challenge the mind/body dichotomy can be found throughout society, from academics such as linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (1999), as well as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2000), to practicing psychotherapists such as Susan Aposhyan (2007) or medical doctors such as James S. Gordon, who founded and directs The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. With Anglo-Americans and other Global North populations fervidly trying to weave or knit together entities that have been epistemologically separated for centuries (such as mind, body, spirit; individual, community, globe; human, animal, planet), seselelãme seems to appeal to some as a potential (if small) panacea. This chapter explores its contemporary spread into a globally popular phenomenon appearing in films, workshops, blogs, therapy sessions, and other venues spotlighted on the world wide web.
This early twenty-first century spread of seselelãme raises thorny questions. For example, what sorts of interpretations are being made about seselelãme by people attempting to deploy it in Euro-American contexts? When claiming that seselelãme is a “concept” that “posits that everything is connected” (Jude, 2016), how does this distort and “Westernize” an organically African phenomena? What are the implications of individualizing and commoditizing seselelãme in New Age, self-actualization workshops in Global North contexts? In what ways does this perpetuate “symbolic and structural asymmetries underpinning institutional power/violence” (Champagne and Friedman, personal communication, November 5, 2019)? When seselelãme is culturally appropriated and then marketed as “an inner realm in which all the world is experienced and felt” (Shepherd, 2017, p 17), how does this compound Global North and Global South discrepancies, tensions, and mistrust?
6 - Disability and Cultural Meaning Making in Africa
- Edited by Toyin Falola, Nic Hamel
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- Book:
- Disability in Africa
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2021, pp 137-158
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Summary
Making meaning around and about disability in African contexts is a diverse, multifaceted, and often contested phenomenon. Historically, African languages rarely contained terms designating a broad category encompassing all forms of impairment. Instead, terminology reveals how communities perceived people as “without eyes” or “without ears” or when a body part was not functioning well, they were sometimes said to have “dead organs.” Physical disabilities caused by polio or limb amputation were perceived as wholly different than deafness and blindness, as were intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Meaning making, therefore, has evolved significantly with the influx and growth of rights-based approaches to disability. However, several enduring themes can be traced both in time and across the continent's space: misfortune and disruptions in kin groups; coalescing of “therapy managing groups” as an unresolved illness transmogrifies into disability; situating an anomalous body/mind in a continuum from normal to aberrant and a consequent shifting sense of identity with associated struggles over belonging. Long before the label of disability entered an African consciousness, concerns with misfortune, its cause, and accountability served as a powerful meaning-making practice for many families and lineage groups. Drums/cults of affliction were precursors to self-help groups. When a “therapy managing group” exhausted its quest for cure, a shift ensued into an identity replete with inadequacies and inabilities that often precipitated a crisis of belonging. As the pace and extent of globalization increased in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, DPOs have created alternate meaning-making opportunities and spaces. But the backdrop remains, and the themes endure, resulting in a complex hybridized set of meanings surrounding disability. So while enduring African understandings of disability have combined with rights-based meanings to create more globalized orientations toward neuro and somatic human diversity, we still find that disability connotes anomalousness, peripherality, and dependency.
“Disability questions the existence and the meaning of life,” wrote Africanist anthropologist Patrick Devlieger. It was not simply an assertion but rather embedded in a longer thought, a question, really: “If the why of disability in the African context can be understood existentially, in the sense that disability questions the existence and the meaning of life, then what does this mean in the European context?” (emphasis added) Devlieger pointed to World War II as a critical moment for disability histories because an “ideology of equal chances” began to globalize in the ensuing years.