Le sacrifice, le mariage, la mort et la folie chez les Thonga

Among the Thonga in southern Africa, blood is not the key element in sacrifices. Information from H.A. Junod’s fieldwork raises questions about both the sociology and cuisine of sacrifice. What is represented during major rites of marriage or bereavement through the animal’s cut-up carcass is the very “body” of the society, shared between patrilineal and matrnal lineages. A herd of goats constitutes a literal stock for sacrifices, as compared with the bovine “capital” used in transactions for wives. During the sacrifice that puts an end to bereavement, the animal’s rumen (used raw) and the two distinct but requisite ways of cooking (roasting, boiling) underscore differences of both social status and place of residence. Carving up the goat both asserts and wards off the menace of society being destructured. The Thonga thus claim that bloodletting sacrifices help “build the village”. Another paradigm applies to the sacrifice of exorcism. It has the function of restoring the unity of the body and mind of the possessed person, who has fallen victim to a violent aggression by a supernatural power alien to the village community. In this case, the culinary code involves taking in and vomiting the animal’s raw blood and the calcination of its bones in a process for restructuring the sacrifier’s social personality.