Italy Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Magic rituals and Nigerian prostitution: the experience of an anthropological consultation for an Italian court of law.
International Conference: “Life on Ioan: work, debt, dependence”, Certosa di Pontignano (Siena) september, 24th to 26th 2004.
The paper illustrates a part of the results which emerged during the research I carried out on behalf of Bergamo Law Court, in my capacity as technical adviser in the field of cultural anthropology. This type of consultation is far from commonplace in Italy. The magistrates who, in pioneering fashion, commissioned the report, needed to arrive at a better understanding of the claims of young Nigerian women who reported their pimps (“madams”), also Nigerian women, to the police. The crimes the latter are accused of (the trial is still under way) are reduction into slavery; aiding and abetting and living on the earnings of prostitution; and aiding and abetting illegal immigration. The accounts of the accusers featured references to the use of magic rituals (commonly referred by the mass media to as “voodoo ceremonies”) as well as to forms of violent intimidation. Moreover, searches carried out by criminal police in the houses where the accusers and the accused cohabited revealed organic and inorganic materials, which appeared to bear out the supposition that magic rituals had taken place. The petition for an anthropological consultation regarded the cultural contextualization of these practices through a comparison with existing ritual practices in Nigeria. The report did not so much aim to confirm the credibility of the accusers’ claims, but rather to provide a cultural context useful for understanding the circumstances recalled. The work used the testimony of young Nigerian women, victims of the trade (some of these were interviewed personally), documentation provided by the court and numerous ethnographical texts on Nigeria. The work was first delivered in the form of a written report and then presented in court during a hearing.
The ritual practices Nigerian women involved in the activity of prostitution in Italy claim they have been subjected to by the madam are divided into two types, which we have examined separately: the first performed by an adept back in Nigeria, and the second performed in the madam’s house in Italy.
As far as the ritual performed in Nigeria is concerned (despite the heterogeneity of the young women’s descriptions probably owing to the fact that the adepts who carry out the ritual come from different traditions), we can find accounts of similar acts in ethno-anthropological literature on the “magical-therapeutic” rituals of the populations of the south of Nigeria The ritual the girls are subjected to often assumes the form of a sort of oath-curse through which the girls are enjoined, under threat of death, to settle their “debt” (that is to pay back the sum they are told was loaned to pay for their journey) and not to report the madam.
The ritual practices performed in Italy by the madam require more extensive and detailed research. However, from studies carried out so far it is clear that these practices consist in removing organic substances (nails, hair, body hair, blood and menstrual blood), clothes or personal objects from the victim, as well as in parcelling them up. This with the threat that the material will be used in rituals which might lead to death, rituals which the girls normally do not see and which they are therefore unable to describe. In some cases the threat is that the material will be sent to the same native-doctor who performed the ritual in Nigeria.
Whether it is carried out or not, the madam’s threat to perform (or to have somebody perform) the ritual at the girl’s expense appears to appeal to a shared native cultural substratum, pertinent to the existence in Nigeria of magic-medicinal practices. Indeed, these practices are widespread and familiar in Nigeria, though not always accepted by worshippers of various religious faiths. In the case of young Christian girls- though scarcely aware of details concerning the adepts and the techniques and the materials they use- it emerges that they at least know of the existence of these practices and some of their aims. I am especially alluding to the very much feared practice of the curse.
To sum up, we can affirm that we are actually dealing with two types of ritual. The first is the oath-curse performed in Nigeria by which the girl’s escape would betoken her death. This appears to be central. The second is the removing of organic substances carried out in Italy, which appears to act as a call to order, done as a precaution, or at critical moments (when the girl fails to obey the madam), involving the threat of performing a magic ritual and/or the evoking of the magic ritual previously performed in Nigeria.
On the other hand, oaths and curses performed by ritual adepts are recorded at length in anthropological literature, just as Nigerian legal literature testifies to rituals performed to subjugate an individual (Penal Code and Criminal Code). The aims expressed or threatened by the madam’s rituals do not appear to be an entirely new phenomenon. Subjugating someone, cursing them, preventing them from speaking or reacting, are the aims of some types of ritual which are described in ethnographic literature as often as they are found in the evidence given by Nigerian women in Italy. A peculiar element of the rituals commissioned by the madam consists in their methodical, organised and large-scale nature (indeed they do not act on a single “enemy”). This enables us to interpret these rituals as a criminal “recycling” of traditional “magic-medicinal” knowledge and techniques.
Regarding the ritual performed in Italy, the marked preponderance of human organic materials compared with the numerous other ingredients (vegetal, mineral, etc..) listed in ethnographical literature on Nigerian rituals, is striking. This preponderance is observed both in victims’ accounts –where the extraction of organic substances appears to be fundamental- and in the criminal police’s descriptions of materials seized.
Between rituals belonging to Nigerian tradition and those performed within the context of the trade there appear to be both divergences and parallels concerning the purposes, techniques, or materials employed. Besides these divergences or parallels, what matters most of all is that- by virtue of common references to the madam and her victims to a universe of practices existing in Nigeria- there is clearly some form of blackmail taking place. Organic substances are extracted, appealing to the deep feelings and emotions these trigger, as they are associated with the victim’s individuality, with the aim of frightening the victims of the trade. Other objects or materials represent specific cultural references. These seem to have the purpose of directly and explicitly evoking magic practices (principally curses) current in Nigeria. Being organic substances, these objects and materials either foreshadow a future act of magic, or are genuinely used in a ritual, their principal role appearing to be explicitly, within the context of the madam/victim relationship , that of threatening the latter, and preserving and representing on a physical and sensorial level the relationship of total subjugation to the madam.