The Graves and Groves of Restless Spirits: Noctambulant Legion and the Living Landscape (Luke 8:26â39)

Helen C. John

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Chapter 5 The Graves and Groves of Restless Spirits: Noctambulant Legion and the Living Landscape (Luke 8:26â39)

In: Biblical Interpretation and African Traditional Religion

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Helen C. John

Helen C. John
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 122â163

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004399310_007

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on domestic, burial, and wilderness landscapes in the narrative of the Gerasene Demoniac. Western scholarship has often polarised culture and nature, and presented the landscape as tabula rasa (a blank slate upon which human action takes place). The CCBIGs, on the other hand, presented a landscape infused with pockets of potency and overall agency (particularly linked to sites of burial and corpse-disposal). They understood it to act independently on living human inhabitants. In this context, Legion's possession is seen as just that: literal possession. The character in the narrative is negotiating a 'living landscape', which is occupied by a complex of spirit agencies (John 2017). The contextualised interpretations from Iihongo are brought into conversation with, and actively challenge, Halvor Moxnes's understanding of landscape and spirits as symbolic (2003), and the postcolonial interpretations offered by Ched Myers (1988), and Richard Horsley (2001). This is despite the fact that Namibia is itself a postcolonial context.

This chapter illustrates quite clearly the contemporary prominence of belief in spirits, ancestors, and witches as part of peopleâs lived experience in Iihongo (iiluli: named, recently-deceased; aathithi: unnamed, long-deceased; aalodhi: witches). The community would appear to extend beyond just its living members (an extended social landscape, just as would have been the case in pre-Christian times). The persistence of the autochthonous in this regard is further illustrated by the descriptions that participants gave of the nature of the physical landscape, as well as prescribed actions taken to engage, pacify, or render impotent spirit beings in that landscape (corpse-mutilation, offerings to the dead). Participants across the age-range recognised the notion of âspirit grovesâ that ethnographic studies describe and could identify particular examples of possessed places.

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Biblical Interpretation and African Traditional Religion

Cross-Cultural and Community Readings in Owamboland, Namibia

Series:Â Biblical Interpretation Series, Volume: 176

Cover Biblical Interpretation and African Traditional Religion

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004399310

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 02 May 2019

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Chapter 5 The Graves and Groves of Restless Spirits: Noctambulant Legion and the Living Landscape (Luke 8:26â39)

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Biblical Interpretation and African Traditional Religion

Cross-Cultural and Community Readings in Owamboland, Namibia

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Chapter 5 The Graves and Groves of Restless Spirits: Noctambulant Legion and the Living Landscape (Luke 8:26â39)