Body and Affect in the Intercultural Encounter

The volume draws from René Devisch’s encounters with groups in
southsaharan Africa, primarily. The author had the privilege to immerse
himself, around the clock, in the Yakaphones’ activities and thoughts in
southwest DR Congo from 1972 to 1974, and intermittently in Kinshasa’s
shanty towns, from 1986 to 2003. The author first examines what sparked
his choice to come to Congo, and then to pursue research among the
Yakaphones in the borderland with Angola. He then invites us to follow
the trajectory of his plural anthropological view on today’s
multicentric world. It leads us to his praise for honorary doctor
Jean-Marc Ela’s work. He then examines the proletarian outbursts of
violence that rocked Congo’s major cities in 1991 and 1993. These can be
read as a settling of scores with the disillusioning colonial and
missionary modernisation, along with president Mobutu’s millenarian
Popular Movement of the Revolution. Furthermore, after considering the
morose reduction of a major Yaka dancing mask into a mere museum-bound
curio in Antwerp, the book unravels the Yakaphones’ perspectives on
spirits and sorcery’s threat. It also analyses their commitment to
classical Bantu-African healing cults, along with their parallel
consulting physicians and healers. By sharing the Yakaphones’
life-world, the analysis highlights their body-group-world weave,
interlaced by the principle of co-resonance. A phenomenological and
perspectivist look unfolds the local actors’ views, thereby disclosing
the Bantu-African genius and setting for a major reversal of
perspectives. Indeed, seeing ‘here’ from ‘there’ allows the author to
uncover some alienating dynamics at work in his native Belgian
Flemish-speaking culture. To better grasp the realm of life beyond the
speakable and factual reasoning, the approach occasionally turns to the
later Lacan’s focus on the unconscious desire, the body and its affects.
The book addresses students and researchers in the humanities and, more
broadly, all those immersed in the heat of the encounter with the
culturally different.