Tales of a Stitched Anus: Fictions, Analytics, and Personhood in Kilimanjaro

Abstract

This article revisits the fiction explored by Sally Falk Moore more than forty years ago that initiation among the Chagga‐speaking people of Tanzania's Kilimanjaro region involved men having their anuses plugged and stitched to ensure complete digestion. It combines historical sources and contemporary fieldwork material on which it deploys an anthropological analytic adopted from Marilyn Strathern's account of the partible person of Melanesia. The move makes room for the Chagga concept of horu and investigates how this life force is converted and conveyed by means of different parts of the body, which emerge as both effects of and means for its transfers and transformations. It renders the person a composite of social relations that are objectified in his or her body, and constitute persons as husbands and wives, and male and female. Gender categories and positions are thus modes of being that emerge as effects of particular relations. These also involve bodily alterations, like the stitched anus, that channel horu in specific forms and in certain directions for particular purposes. The result is not a partible person, but a vectorial person that is a conduit of life force.