Zār is the complex of healing rituals connected to belief in spirit winds that afflict the body with physical and psychic pain. Linked, by anthropologists, to the movement of enslaved Africans from East Africa to Southwest Asia, zār is sometimes considered a trace of Indian Ocean slavery—a history for which archival evidence is scattered, imprecise, at times hardly available. Zār thus calls into being an alternative archive, one predicated on kinesis, self-disintegration, and the active use of the senses. (Rapture through scent is integral to the zār ceremony and is why those associated with the ritual are sometimes called ibn or bint bukhūr, “born into incense”).1
The archive, as a repository of information, documentation, and evidence, is the dominant mode through which scholars produce knowledge about the past. What does it mean to consider a practice like zār a historical trace? What does it mean to approach healing rituals...
University of California Press