「子供」としての憑依霊

ドゥルマにおける瓢箪子供を連れ出す儀礼

抄録

Among the Duruma, a Bantu-speaking people in the Coast Province of Kenya, many illnesses are attributed to the possessing spirits of various kinds who afflict their human victims for the purpose that their requests for goods, food, and recognition are to be met. There are specialists (called muganga) who can treat such illnesses and who themselves once were victims of the afflicting spirits. Gourds, elaborately decorated with beads and representing particular possessing spirits, play an important role in the activities of these specialists. These gourds, called ‘gourd-children ana a ndonga (sing. mwana wa ndonga)’, were given to them when they were initiated into their present vocation, and are thought to help them with their divining and curing practices. A similar gourd, also called gourd-child, is sometimes given to a patient with fertility problems in the course of her treatment.
In the present paper I will describe and analyse two types of rituals where a gourd-child is given to a patient; initiation rites for ritual specialists, and ritual treatment of fertility problems. It will be shown that the main aim of both rituals is, by incorporating as a ‘child’ the dangerous spirits of the bush (nyika), who caused the patient's illness and infertility into the orderly human world (mudzi lit. ‘compound’), to transform them into benevolent spirits who help the ritual specialists with their activities or who assure the patient's fertility and health. A gourd-child proves to be the central symbol which effects this transformation. In the course of the ritual, a gourd-child, being prepared and ‘taken out kulaviwa nze’, represents three different and mutually incompatible propositions in turn; (1) a gourd-child is a child of the spirit, (2) a gourd child is a child of the patient, (3) a gourd-child is the spirit himself. The whole ritual is analyzed as an attempt to establish all these propositions at once through the manipulation of a single central symbol, i.e. a gourd-child.