L'alternative de la vision et de la possession dans les sociétés religieuses et thérapeutiques du Gabon

Vision and possession: an alternative in Gabonese religious and curative societies.- Vision, as an initiatory experience calling for the absorption of a hallucinogenic drug (eboga), has been retained by the Fang bwiti cult as a privileged medium of surreal communication. It displays a number of traits differentiating it from possession as practised in other Gabonese therapeutic cults. The relations of complementarity or exclusion between vision and possession in the religious and curative field demarcate the male-dominated bwiti societies from the women-controlled ombwiri communities. The combinatory laws pertaining to these two kinds of initiatory experience govern the logic of ceremonial activities, the conception of worship, the calling up of spirits or genii through trance-inducing dances or mask parades. Since independence, there has been a weakening of the significant oppositions between vision and possession, together with a shifting of functions. The stressing of the divinatory use of vision, issuing from the constraints of a neocolonial situation, the fight to dominate the ritual scene bear witness to a new distribution of power in favour of women, with political and social meaning as yet ambiguous.