This is a book about positions: the position of religion and nationalism among the Kongo; bodily positions whose study illuminates coalescing moral economies; and the position of the researcher as it informs her research. Through careful ethnographic research of the gestures of religiously and nationally committed women and men in the Luozi district of Bas-Congo, attention to historical documents of relations between Europeans and the Kongo, and through analysis of her own positionality as an African-American anthropologist and dancer, Covington-Ward provides a sensitive and thoughtful account of her subject.
She places the body at the center of her analysis of everyday cultural or embodied performances, using the understanding of Victor Turner (The Anthropology of Performance [New York: PAJ, 1987]) that performances should not be regarded simply as reflections of culture, but as active agents able to produce change (7). For Covington-Ward, the body affects subjectivities and identities. It is a conduit of ideas and it is a catalyst of social transformation, able to legitimize political and religious claims.
The themes of the book flow through each of its four distinct parts. The first part addresses the method and sites of research and the author's own positionality. Covington-Ward makes much use of personal field notes, and her own particular gestures and power dynamics in a community whose Kongo nationalism was infused with Pan-Africanism as well as with tropes of independence and Kongo authenticity. In part two, she examines Kimbangu and the Kingunza movement of the 1920s, and the way in which ecstatic trembling was used to subvert the religious and political authority of European missionaries and colonialists. In part three, she turns her attention to the animation of the Mobutu era and the women who took part in the regular dances in honor of the president and his party. She examines the gendered banalities of power and the connections between performance and authority. The Zaire-wide animation, she concludes, was a form of civil religion, a performed nationalism that was compelling and coercive. In the final part, Covington-Ward analyses Bundu dia Kongo (BDK), a movement which deliberately intertwined religious beliefs and practices, ethno-nationalist politics and Kongo cultural heritage, in order to promote an independent Kongo state. The hand and body gestures deployed in greetings, for example, she identifies as agents in asserting heritage, belonging, and a specific membership of BDK, gestures and adherence that are also rejected by other baKongo. Thus the everyday social interactions contained in gesture are a subtle, but potent, embodied performance of establishing authority among competing religious, political, and cultural claims.
Covington-Ward is to be commended on her warm, sensitive, relational research. She is thoughtful about her distinct position and the way in which it affects access and perceptions. Following the trend towards heightened reflexivity expected in much contemporary anthropological analysis, she discusses at length how her own body intrudes upon and blends into research sites. Her winsome descriptions of fieldwork and its influence on her conclusions and her thick descriptions of her encounters with the people amongst whom she carried out research make the book appealing, accessible, and refreshing. However, for this reviewer at least, it occasionally erred on indulgent rapportage, which obscured rather than illuminated her subject.
Covington-Ward draws upon the Africanist literature that examines prophetic movements as resistance (94–91), most notably the work of Jean Comaroff (Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]). Whilst Comaroff has been criticized for over-stating the political nature of the religious performance of her subjects, Covington-Ward examines in the BDK a movement that has a deliberate political, scientific, and spiritual ideology and deliberate confrontation with contemporary governance, and places it alongside the Mobutu-era animation where religious performance was a national duty. Aligned with these later movements, the 1920s Kingunza movement does appear to be intentionally political, rather than primarily responding to internal Kongo social or spiritual impetuses. In this analysis, Covington-Ward takes the claims for the marginalization of the baKongo in Luozi for granted, presumably in comparison with Kinshasa, without taking the political position of other areas of the country into account. It could be argued that the relative strength of the baKongo has made their movements relatively successful.
This is a complex book, but perhaps especially from a historian's perspective, it is sometimes not complex enough. Similar gestures link the different historical periods, the reader is told. These gestures have polyvalent meanings over time and space; they can service different causes; they can be reassuring or shocking. Sometimes, however, historical comparisons and connections are unclear. The historical relations of the various movements are not explained. It is not always apparent how the performing body or everyday gestures connect them, or what historical processes move through embodied performance.
Covington-Ward argues forcefully for scholars to take embodied performance seriously. Many already do so, understanding the intentionality of apparently ordinary cultural acts. However, her attention to the micro-dynamics of gesture brings the study of rite and ritual into the domain of the everyday and highlights the profundity of common acts as makers of religious and political meaning. In doing so, she raises questions about position and positionality that are pertinent beyond the powerful dynamics of religion and politics in Congo.
