Description: Acknowledgments Prologue 1. Field and Method 1.1. The Yaka People 1.2. Fieldwork 1.3. Bantu Cults of Affliction 1.4. Healers in the Town 1.5. Healing as a Social and Theatrical Drama: A Critique 1.6. Body and Weave: A Semantic-Praxilogical Approach 2. The Cosmology of Gender Arrangements and Life Transmission 2.1. Horizontal and Vertical Space 2.2. Cosmological Portrayal of Gender 2.3. Animals and Plants 2.4. Capturing and 'Cooking' Untamed Forces 3. The Social Formation of Life Transmission 3.1. Life-bearing and Nurturing in the Homestead 3.2. Marriage as a Transfer "Along the Path to the Village" 3.3. The Reproductive Cell 3.4. The Two-forked Tree of Agnatic Descent and Uterine Filiation 3.5. Hunting versus Sorcery, and the Fabric of Kin 4. Body, Group, and Life-world: Between Maze and Weave 4.1. Physical and Sensory Modes of Contact 4.2. The Relational Body 4.3. The Body and Its Afflictions 4.4. Cults of Affliction and Communal Sodalities 5. Impediments of Life Transmission 5.1. Masculinist Views on Human Agencies in Infertility 5.2. Divinatory Etiology and the Work of Cults 5.3. Etiology as an Indication of Therapy 6. The Khita Fertility Cult: Reversing the Evil 6.1. Khita and Similar Cults 6.2. The First Stage: Reversing the Persecution into Uterine Bonds of Life Transmission 6.3. The Second Stage: The Decay and Cooking of Generative Forces 7. The Khita Fertility Cult: Reorigination of the Fabric of Body, Kin, and Life-world 7.1. The Third Stage: Seclusion in the Uterus of the World 7.2. The Fourth Stage: Emancipating Forest Forces into Social Fecundity 7.3. Relapse of Illness 7.4. Fertility Rituals and Analyses Compared: A Look at Victor Turner 8. The Body as the Weaving Loom of Healing and Life 8.1. The Role of Music and Dance in Healing 8.2. The Source of Healing 8.3. Paradox, Transgression, and Homeopathic Healing 8.4. A Ternary Logic of Mediation and Effusion in Self-healing Epilogue Appendix A: A Case of Infertility Appendix B: Herbarium Maps Notes References Index

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