Feminine distress: reconfiguring insides and outsides on Guyana’s Indigenous frontier, Charlotte Hoskins (Univ. of Oxford, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography/LAS)
2026-04-10 15:30 - 17:30 (Europe/Paris) | Lesc – salle 308F (3e étage) - 21, allée de l’Université, Nanterre, , 92000, France
This paper considers the phenomenon of ‘fits’ afflicting primarily indigenous schoolgirls in Guyana’s state-run secondary school dormitories. These episodes correspond to cycles of attacks, in which spirits possess the bodies of young women, prompting them to move, speak, and behave in distressing ways. The possessed are left with no memory of the occurrence. By contributing ethnographic material derived from everyday Makushi life, this paper extends the literature on the body’s chronic instability and critically engages with socio-spatial analogies that have placed femininity and masculinity in correspondence to positions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. I suggest a dynamic reconfiguration of these positions with consequences for notions of territory. Still, I refrain from explaining these ‘fits’, first dwelling on the affects of uncertainty that they express and produce as bodies on the cusp of unresolved tensions.
La présentation sera en anglais.
Illustration : cliché de l'autrice
