Power and paradox in Hausa bori: Discourses of gender, healing and Islamic tradition in northern Nigeria

Based on fourteen months of archival and ethnographic field research in Kano, Nigeria, this study examines discourses of healing and possession associated with the pantheon of Hausa spirits called bori over the last two centuries. Since the 1804–1812 jihad of Shehu Usman 'dan Fodio, the practice of bori possession has constituted a controversial aspect of Hausa therapeutic and religious life, and both the leaders of the Sokoto Caliphate and the British colonizers (1903–1960) of northern Nigeria sought to suppress bori in some way. Both anthropological and historical scholarship on northern Nigeria has portrayed bori as distinct from and outside of Islamic tradition, thereby compartmentalizing the literature on Hausa religiosity. This dissertation aims to bring previously segregated objects of study—Islam, spirit possession, Hausa women—within a single analytical framework and, in so doing, to broaden our understanding of how the majority of Muslim Hausa access and negotiate religious power in everyday practice. Taking bori seriously as a cultural and religious ideology of power, I assert the primacy of bori therapeutics, ritual, and symbolism in shaping Muslim Hausa identities over the last two centuries.;To do this I examine how and why successive states have responded to bori as a political threat and social menace, and how contemporary malamai (Islamic scholars) grapple with the continuing problem of possession illness through rituals of spirit exorcism that both mirror and seek to subvert bori therapeutics. I also examine the life history narratives of bori adepts to challenge portrayals of bori as a tangential and ineffectual practice of a powerless minority of social deviants. Their stories demonstrate that bori practice is neither inimical to marriage nor synonymous with prostitution. For women, bori membership provides unique opportunities for social authority and economic autonomy that enable them to negotiate more equitable marital relations at odds with the ideal of female immobility and kunya (shame, modesty) in Hausa marriage. In narrating their participation on the hajj and the popularity of their healing services in Saudi Arabia, adepts further suggest how bori practice enables the acquisition of valuable social capital in Muslim Hausa society.