摘要：The Kunama, a people from the Western Eritrean Lowlands, have been arousing both
ethnographic and historical interests, especially from the second half of the nineteenth
century onwards. The cultural features thought to be theirs – representatives of ‘Black
Africa”, “aborigenes” of their own region, “matriarchal society”, “residues from
totemism”, “animism”- resulted into explorers, colonial civil servants, settlers,
geographers, ethnographers, and linguists being fascinated. Accordingly, a social category
of possessed women, healers and diviners, named Andinne, has been given anthropological
and iconographic attention.
The essay’s assumption is that possession (binà) is a public idiom for the interpretation of
Kunama historical experience. The social memory of political violence and subordination
is a significant factor in possession among the different Kunama groups. All of these
groups are parts of a continuum of societies exposed to different influences both from the
sub-regions of the Tigray highlands (Wälqayt and Shire) and of the Sudanese States.
Fragments of this long lasting experience are embedded in the mimesis of Andinne.
Complexity of possession is emphasized. Andinne’s performances and discourses could be
interpreted as a system of meaning, a measure of gender conflict, an emotional and
aesthetic mise en scene of the collective experience, the interpretation of the sufferances
and pains of individual biographies within a specific social context.
