Healing bodies: Materiality, history, and power among the prophets of central Mozambique

This dissertation concerns the aneneri or prophets of northern Tete Province, Mozambique, a network of people possessed by biblical spirits whose central concern as individuals and as a community is healing. I address healing as a crucial site for understanding the connections between embodied practices and the politics of social bodies by examining intersections between materiality, history, and power. The prophet healers I worked with in central Mozambique understand that powerful forces come to rest in material forms such as bodies and objects. Spiritual power is channeled through the bodies of healers and directed toward those of sufferers, and objects, local and "foreign," occult and mundane, are used to hone, direct, magnify, or contain that power. The personae, objects, and practices associated with prophet healing bear power from across history, some preserved in the living memory of those who experienced it, others faint echoes of the past remembered via bodily practice. Individual prophet healers utilize their relationships with the spirits to become powerful personalities and leaders among their peers, acting as spiritual "mothers" to their "children," bishops to their church members, and presidents to their association members. The prophets, then, manage both individual and social bodies, utilizing resources from past and present, and drawing a connection between healing and political power. The bodily transformations entailed in sickness and healing are paralleled by social transformations enacted in a context recovering from the violent disruption of warfare and dislocation that affected Mozambique during the second half of the 20th century. Prophetism turns suffering patients into ministering healers, displaced refugees into links in a dense social network, voiceless and marginalized peasants into prophets who speak with the voice of God.