Permeating purity: Fluid rituals of belonging in Ghana

Abstract

In this thesis, I analyse how flows of fluids and people shape each other in southern Ghana. They do so both literally and metaphorically, as landscapes and people are defined, sorted, contested, and manipulated in projects of inclusion, exclusion, containment and combining often framed through purity. The building of the Akosombo Dam on the Volta River and, relatedly, the building of the Ghanaian nation-state, greatly changed the socio-physical environment of the Akwamu Traditional Area. In the adjustment of and to flows of water, people and ideas of belonging, how do Akwamu customary authorities make sense, manage identity and seek to maintain power? I suggest we can explore this by returning to ritual and revisiting the politics of purity and pollution.

In Akwamu understandings, water, as well as blood and alcohol, are attributed qualities of cleanliness and/or purity and, by extension, moral value. These ideas of purity and pollution are often generated and expressed in ritual. A key observation in this thesis is that, in some Akwamu rituals, water, blood and alcohol are intermingled, rather than separated, to achieve purity as indexing spiritual and - by association - human power. By exploring the porous thresholds of fluids to people, and vice versa, in ritual, we can also consider physical and socio-political pressure, power and control of and by human and non-human actors.

As unstable entities with multiple meanings, fluids can also slip beyond containment to combine in powerful ways. In this thesis, then, I also consider how uncooperative fluids - in their excess or in their absence - can undermine certain claims to legitimacy and be seized upon by marginal groups to index alternative power and challenge dominant discourses of control. In ruled and unruly states, fluids offer people opportunities for political creativity and challenge. I analyse Akwamu customary uses of fluids in ritual and ritual as fluid in that, through it, multiple meanings of cleanliness are negotiated and/or incorporated. I suggest that purity as permeation can in fact strengthen claims of belonging that reflect, and also reconstitute, power relations. Show more