Spirit possession, power, and the absent presence of Islam: re-viewing Les ma?tres fous (original) (raw)

2006, J Roy Anthropol Inst

In the history of ethnographic documentary, the late Jean Rouch's film Les maîtres fous is widely regarded as initiating a new phase in the development of the genre. It concerns the hauka spirit-possession cult of Songhay-Zerma migrants from the middle Niger river who had come to work in Accra, then the capital of the British colony of the Gold Coast, West Africa. When released in 1955, the film was both banned by the colonial authorities and simultaneously denounced by African intellectuals and leading French anthropologists. Since then it has gone through a progressive rehabilitation and today, some fifty years on, it is hailed in many sources as a remarkable counter-hegemonic representation of European colonialism in Africa. This article proposes a re-interpretation of Les maîtres fous, arguing that in order to defend the film against criticism, its counter-hegemonic features have been overemphasized , thereby obscuring its continuity with other forms of Songhay-Zerma religious belief and practice. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the place of film in anthropology. The death of Jean Rouch in a car accident in the Republic of Niger in February 2004, at the age of 86, deprived ethnographic cinema of its most eminent figure and arguably its most original genius, whose influence extended far beyond the world of academic anthropology. In a film-making career that spanned more than fifty years, he produced over 100 films of very diverse lengths, characters, and subject matters. Amidst this immense oeuvre, there are a number of works that stand out particularly, but even amongst these, Les maîtres fous is one of the most salient. Released in 1955, towards the beginning of Rouch's film-making career, it is in colour and has a running time of barely 30 minutes. 1 The subject of innumerable commentaries, in the view of Marc Piault, West Africanist anthropologist film-maker as well as historian of ethnographic film, it is a 'truly foundational film, without doubt one of the cult films of both cinema and anthropology' (1997: 2). Les maîtres fous (henceforth Lmf) concerns the hauka spirit-possession cult that developed in Accra, capital of what was then the British colony of the Gold Coast (later to become Ghana). The adepts were mostly migrant workers from the * Curl Essay Prize, 2004.