| Summary: | 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.
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