Tobie Nathan - The Immigrant, His Shrink, His Judge His Social Worker

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The Immigrant,His Shrink,His Judge,His Social Worker,and OtherRepresentativesof the Occult1

Tobie Nathan

D ROFESSIONS, OBJECTS,N E T W O R K SSomeone goes to see a psychologist,a psychiatrist, a social worker, at e a c h e r . . .But behind every professional stands an entire world and above all, ofcourse, a profession: teachers wh o have handed down habits, attitudes, philos o-phies, a "school" of thought; clans, hierarchies; and also, networks of influence,of power, of friendships . . . and let's speak plainlynetworks of objects. Foras

we well know, networks are structured around objects.W h at kinds of objects? you may well ask. Real objects, objects as we ordi-narily understand the word object.In the West, when one approaches questionsof psychology and psychiatry, those objects are books, that is, publishers, ed itors,publicists, printe rs, d istributors, booksellers, trade presses and specialized press-es, critics who guide their readers, etc. O ur professions are also organizedaround drugs: laboratories, factories, m arketing techniques, colossal budg ets,tens of thousands of e m p lo y e e s. .. . Finally and perhaps especiallythere areobjects of thought, concepts2: the "psyche ," the "uncon scious," "anxiety,""depression" . . . banner-concepts under which are grouped specific networks,specific ideas that are propagated thanks to elaborate strategies, nepotism, con-quests of fiefdoms and bastions: Such and Such University has an "Institut dePsychanalyse" approach; So and So's private practice has an "Association dePsychanalyse de France" tendency; the entire education philosophy of the"Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse" has yet ano ther tendency. . . .

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As a rule, when one reads a form of the verb "to be" in a text from thehum an sciences, it means that one is coming up against one of these "banne r-con-cepts." For example: dreams are the indirect and hallucinatory actualization of arepressed desire"; "the unconscious is structured like a language"; "the father isthe separator of the fusional relationship between the m othe r and her infant"; andso on and so forth.

Behind these banner-concepts there is a kind of army organized into bat-talions, regiments, cells, whose strategy consists of getting hold of a sector ofpower by means of tactics that are very similar to those of political influence.Such is lifelet's adm it itin ou r hybrid, complex, fragile professions th at couldbe called those of the "practicioners of the hum an sciences."T hus , a person comes to consult one of us and perceives, behind the psy-chologist, the psychiatrist, the social worker, the psychoanalytic school that dis-seminated the banner concepts, the conflicts of influence with other schools andwith related pr o fe ss io ns ... an imm ense network. T he n, overcome by the verti-go of the abyss, he dives into a kind of confused fear that some people call "trans-ference!" W he n this person comes more or less from the same world as we do,he appropriates fragments of the network, and ends up saying, in one way oranother, "In F rance , we have at our disposal the psychoanalytic m ethod tha t

comes closest to Freudian intuition (not like in A m er ica )... or th e most hum ane(not like in A rg en tin a) ... or th e most ethical (not like in Eastern E urope).""T he treatm ent didn't cure me, of course, bu t those seven years of week-ly appo intments in the semidarkness of an op ulent office o n the boulevard Saint-Ge rm ain . . . the smell of wax on the wooden floors in the cool of Decem berWednesday mornings, the dark paintings hung on the walls that led me to imag-ine a thousand things . . . a school of philosophy and of individual freedom . . .Socrates revived."Or else, "Thanks to their tireless research, our scientists have proved thatdepression is a sickness like any other, a chemical imbalance capable of being cor-rected," etc.And, in one way or another, the we will come to take the place of the illand lone ly /. And even if his position is peripheral, the white man will alwaysmanage to integra te himself in one of the white man's networks. And he willderive pride, pleasure, and intellectual understanding from b elonging to th e greatwork of light, even if he thinks himself, forever after, to have missed, one damnday in the first year of his life, that delicate transition between "primary, canni-balistic orality and paranoid expulsion of bad internal objects . . . "For if the psychoanalyzed white man thinks of himself as a "unique andirreplaceable" individual, if he believes that he has gotten, not without suffering,a unique strength from the ascetic experience of spreading his personal responsi-bility to the wild unconscious drives that are boiling on his "lower floors," thisstre ng th derives especially from having joined a group . A curious paradox,indeed, to feel oneself to be "un ique" because one finally conforms to the model

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propo sed by an ideological group. Analyzed, yes, but from now on an obscureLacanian, seeking in the twists and turns of dusty corridors his peers huddledaround the same light. ..Psychoanalyzed, social worked, rehabilitated, and, dare I say, pasteurized'the white man lives in solitude, proud to recognize himself amid a crowd of oth-ers living in solitud e. If he gives up his illusions, the all-powerfulness of his infan-tile thoughts, if he accepts the supposed Oedipian interdicts, he does so in orderto join an elite that preceded preceded him only by a few lengths on the p ath toredemptive illumination.

T hi s is perhaps true for the white ma n. But what about others? W ha tabout the (obviously Islamic) Moroccan, the great-grandson of a Berbermarabout whose tomb pilgrims still come to honor from the four corners of thecountry, and whose grandmothers, mother, wife and sisters all know the secretingredients of lovemaking: spices to pu t in the sauce to make wives even mo redesirable to their husbands; incense th at will make a man lose all his vitality in thepresence of a strange woman? T his m an, too, is inscribed in a mu ltitude of n et-works, at th e crossroads of which we will necessarily find imam s, cheikhs, fkib (tra-ditional healers), chouafas (seers), as well as the Bambara from M ali, a conscien-tious street cleaner between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 and 11:00p.m ., who has been nam ed, circumcized, initiated, and healed by karamokos, moris,an d Bamanans.

And this dissymetry becomes flagrant when these people find themselvesconfronted with the Western professional. N o t that the networks of whites arem ore pe rtinen t (this is of course what they claim), or h arder (as in "hard " science),or more effective (as everyone knows, this effectiveness is very often revealed tobe relative in our disciplines), but simply because the worlds of others aredeprived of all representatives. O n the one hand , we find the white professional,the app roved and labeled rep resentative of a complex network w ith countless off-shoots inviting the other into an infinite solitude that he is also advised todesire the solitude to conceive of himself as a uniqu e being, a psychically struc -tured monad, the individual bearer of universal lawsand this solitude is noteven nourished by the same theoretical ancestors, by the same philosophicalsources. A brutal solitude, the solitude of a hum an being cu t off from his un i-verse, his gods, his beliefs, his dead. T h e solitude of a naked m an, a "wild ch ild,"an almost animal solitude."Who are you?" is a question the black man doesn't dare ask.And the evasive action consists in not giving the only answer that wouldno t be a lie: "I am the local representative of the neo-H egelian tendency of thethird scission of the psychoanalysts of the fourth group (the one from 1988).'"For the otherthe Bambaracould never present himself in this way:"And I, I belong to the second generation of Malinke from Kita to emigrate toK o n a k r i. . . the family that was in charge of burying the boli in the sacred forest."He cannot introduce himself for, usually, those who need to know him can guess

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The Immigrant, His Shrink, His Judge, His Social Worker,

Prsentation

Qui tes-vous?

Je suis le reprsentant ^local de la tendance no -hgellienne de latroisime scission despsychanalystes duquatrime groupe...

"I am the localrepresentativeof the neo-Hegelian ten-dency of thethird scission ofthe psychoana-lysts of thefourth group(the one from1988)."

his origin by the way he holds himself, by the way he pronounces the Bambaralanguage. H e cannot introduce himself especially since in no sense is he a rep re-sentative, he who, most of the time, has not been invested with any authority tounw rap offerings, h on or divinities, "treat" the dead, or worship ancestors.In his world, in fact, just as in ours, certain categories of people are enti-tled to en ter publicly in relation with the vital forces of the group . T h e Bamanansdo business, in the name of the group, with the powers of the forest and withfetishes; the karamokos and the moris with the god of Islam; and the griots, the"men of words ," with public wo rds, public speech, speech that appeases and tha tdeclares war, that curses, words of the daylight, brightly sung to the mono tonousrhythm of the cora; words of the night, murmured in the hole in the tree by themaster hunter. D urin g ceremoniespublic or privatethe hron, the "free man,"requests, under his breath, the public word from the griot. Thus, solemn mes-sagesof births, marriages, deaths; of leavetakings and return s; and naturally ofmisfortune and illnesscirculate, thanks to the griots, from one individual toanother, and from one familial or ethnic structure to another.6So, knowing all this, let's not try to bring up here notions of transference,coute, empathy, and I don't know what other ideas that are as "profoundly" mys-tical as they are intellectually vapid. W ho ever speaks solely to the individual, cir-cumventing the authorized representatives of that individual's groups of refer-ence, powers, and the objects that animate them; whoever claims to understandthe person, "recognize the subject," "listen to his desire," is in fact merely pre-venting the representatives of the powers of his group from speaking.If the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) can, at the end of his treat-

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ment, recognize in his therapist the representative of the group to which hedreams of belonging and with which the therapeutic movement has slowly ledhim to desire being affiliated, the "other," on the contrary, the Moroccan, theBambara, when he is taken up by the white man's network, can only experiencethe cruel absence of any authorized representative of his groups of reference.

Once the question is framed as such, cultural or ethnic affiliation or iden-tity7 reveals itself to be a false prob lem or, rathe r, a misplaced problem . As I havejust explained, belonging to a certain universe is never an automatic given; it isnot at all a matter of identifying the "member of a logical class"and who wouldhave determined the ensemble of logical classes in the first place?8 And whowould have determined the criteria for belonging? In reality, it is always a ma t-ter of the dynamics of connections among a mu ltiplicty of networks. Fo r exam-ple, take the Bambara grou p: it seems that the word Bambara is a Fren ch defor-mation of the word Bamanan. When one asks a Bambara what language hespeaks, in Fre nch he replies Bambara and in his language he replies Bamanan. Butthe Bambara language is a close relative of the Malinke and Mandingo languages.Everyone seems to agree tha t the originary language would be M and ingo . But inM and ingo , the word "Bam anan" signifies "insubord inate" or "rebellious." T h estory goes that during the founding of the Mandingo empire, under the harshrule of Sundjata Keita, one group refused to submit to Islam and seceeded fromthe larger grou p, und er the name Bam anan"insubordinate" to Sundjata? Andin Arabic, the word M am is the command "submit [to authority]." The Koraneven explains that when Abraham came to tell his son Ishmael tha t G od had askedhim to sacrifice h im , the son responded to his father "Islam!" ("Submit!") Giventhat, today, most Bambaras are Muslim, the fact that they designate their owngroup by a non-Islamic nam e, one that indicates that they are not subm itted to theM uslim religion, highlights two things. T h e first reminds us of a historic fact:"We are Bam anans, the descendent^ of those who, refusing to sub mit to Sundjata,went to take refuge in the Segou and Bamako regions." T he second brings intoplay another meaning of the word bamanan. When a person is sick and all theother family recipes of plants, incantations, and various fumigations have beenexhausted, a M uslim healer is first called in, someone w ho knows "the book" andwh o knows how to "make writings." H e is called a mori or a karamoko. But whenthe Muslim healer has proved ineffective, or even at times simultaneously, aBamanan, an "insubordinate on e" will be consulted, tha t is, someone w ho handlebolisfetishes.9 Thus, in this second meaning, the word Bamanan signifies thegroup of people who are still part of the networks structured arround extremelycomplex and powerful objects: the bolis. In other words, a Bamanan is the per-son who, when h e is seriously ill, can only be healed by the bolis of the Bamanan,the fetish manipulator.10 Things become even more complex when we considertha t this definition is the only one th at respects the B ambaras' own formulation.For, if they recognize themselves in several kinds of groups: "I am a Muslim"; "Iam a Marxist"; "I am a Man dingo"; "I am from M ali"; "I am an engineer," they

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com pletely change their way of formulating when they anno unce : "I was curedby the Bamanan."A Bambara th us does no t define himself throug h h is affiliation with a log-ical class (the abstract group of Bambaras), but b y an almost visceral tie tha t bindshim to the bamanan, the manipulater of the bolis, the objects that structure the

ne t w or k o f t he Bam bar as. A Bam bara therefore defines himself by identifying his mostactive therapist.W ha t, the n, is m ore logical than giving this therapis t the nam e ofthe entire group, that is, Bamanan?IMM IGRANTS, SHRINKS, AN D TH E JUDGE

The problem of belonging is naturally even more acute in the judge'scham bers. M agistrates are obsessed with questions such as: "Do es the Bambaraund erstand the m eaning of the law I am refering to? Do es he even know this lawexists? M usn't we make sure that the person in ques tion falls within the law'sjurisdiction? D on 't all Bambaras, as a matte r of principle, fall unde r Article 64? "Isn't the law that I am going to apply to him in direct contradiction to Bambaralaw? W ou ldn 't he fall under th e laws of M ali, or even the laws of custom ?" Andwe react sympathetically to the magistrate's questioning, for we know thatbetween the suject and th e penalty, the judge mu st necessarily cons truct m eaning .Between the crime and the author of the crime, the judge must insert motives.T hi s is why judgesall judgesare so fond of psychology and psychiatry.

But jurists have two advantages over psychiatrists and psychologists intreating the cases of imm igrants: first, they believe the laws they deal with to beapproximate and m odifiable, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists imagine tha tthe re exist "laws of natu re" th at have been scientifically established and are there -fore im mu table. Fo r a jurist, it is easy to imagine th at a "Bambara law" exists,wereas no thin g is m ore difficult for a psychologist or psychiatrist than to imaginethe existence of a "Bambara psyche." Secondly, jurists are used to dealing withfabricated truth, truth that has been constructed by means of confronting a greatnu m ber of representatives of different in terest groups : prosecu tors, defenseattorneys, experts, social workers, etc., whereas psychiatrists and psychologistshandle one truth "in and of itself," a natural tru th, and thu s in general they dis-miss from their office any representative of their patient's group, or, when they.do let him in, treat h im with suspicion and skepticism.

Th us , in situations concerning imm igrants and which involve the cooper-ation of legal experts and shrinks, we are faced with a paradox: legal expertsrequ ire, even m ore so than o thers, psychological discourse in order to insertm eaning between the offense and th e persons involved, whereas shrinks, by theirvery mod e of functioning, have a tendency to make any trace of a "representative "of the group of the other disappear, and to put themselves in the position of themost active therapist of the p erson in question , that is to say, in the final analysis,to try to affiliate him to their own group.

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A CASE STUDYI first m et Bachir when he was in prison and. I had been called upon as anexpert. H e was fourteen years old, had light-colored eyes, a perfectly sm oothface, a sleepy way of carrying himself. He barely seemed to notice me through acloud of confused preoccupations.H e had stabbed a man . H e didn't know why. H e had been a bit on edge.H e ha dn't been alone; others had been with him. T he y had all taken part.T h e policemen interroga ted him for three days before he confessed. Ofthe five youths, he is the one to have held out the longest.Does he ever think abou t the dead man? Yes, a little, sometimes. I hard -ly dare ask him : how can this event be explained? I wait for an answer . . . no th -ing! I think: "W hat good is it to ask him questions? Ho w can he, a child, bearwitness to whatever forces were working in him?"Bachir was born in France, the second son of a Moroccan father and aPortuguese mo ther. T h e father had wanted to give this nameBachir to hisfirstborn, bu t finally decided to give him another. And this is how Bachir becameBachir. I would learn later tha t when th e father called hom e to announce th ebirth of his first son, to whom he was about to give the name Bachir, his ownfather asked him to call the boy Soliman. One day when his bro the r had appearedin court, the father promised that if his son were freed, he would give the nameSoliman to his next born. But the old man had had no mo re children, and theboy who was just born was his first grandson. H e still wanted to make good onhis prom ise. So this is why the eldest son the old man's grandsonwas calledSoliman, like the judge, and the youngest Bachir, a nam e originally meant for theeldest.Bachir's father took him back to Marocco when he was two, and placedhim with his own aunt. T he re , Bachir became a little M oroccan boy, speakingArabic, calling his great aunt mo the r and her husband, father. W hen he was sixor seven, his father came to take him back to France. H e literally had to kidnaphim . Bachir did no t want to hear of leaving with his father.Since then, he grew up in France , smiling, discrete, secretive. H e forgotArabic, expressed himself well, in Fren ch, did well, more or less, in school.And there you have it. W h at other elements are needed to draw up anevaluation? How can motives be comm unicated to the judge, how can he behelped to formulate his own meaning regarding Bachir?I only have at my disposal descriptions of behaviors based on the youngman's own words. H e was separated a first time from his foster mo ther at the ageof two and from his nanny at seven. Twice he changed languages. Am I to basemyself on attitu des, on behaviors? W h at can I say? Should I speak of, calculatethe anxieties of separation? Call Spitz, Bowlby, or Ha rlow to the rescue?Should I take advantage of the situation to p ut forward my own theories?Can I honestly base wha t I am saying on his mo od, his gestures, his behavior dur-

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ing the meeting tha t I had with him? Do they have any life beyond the tim e andspace of the interview? How can I decide if they are not simply reactions to m ypresence, even to'my personality?Fate had it that a few months later a temporary parole enabled me toreceive Bachir with his parents for a long ethnopsychiatric consultation.12

The young man sits down near his father, a man of about forty who wasvisibly tornm ente d. Little by little we begin to speak in Arabic, talking abou t hiscountry, his hom e tow n. As we speak about these things of the past, about th ehomeland, Bachir is silent and looks at his father, his eyes wide with surprise.Bachir and his father belong to an old family of marabouts, of Berberorgin. T h e father is the only one of eight children to have emigrated. H e m ar-ried Bachir's mother, a Portuguese orphan, who was also rootless after havingbeen placed as a servant in several families.T h e father says that he himself was no t religious, bu t rathe r quickly I pe r-ceive tha t he has a priviliged and special relationship w ith G od.Because he had been very troublesome as a child, he had been sent as ateenage r to an extremely disciplined religious M uslim boarding school. O ne dayhe was caught misbehaving and was tied up and suspended from the ankles infront of the oth ers before be ing beaten with a stick on the soles of his feet. H efled. After having had several small jobs in cafes and hotels , he decided, a t sev-enteen, to go to France and take his chances there.T h e idea seemed to be tha t he occupied a special place in the eyes of Godand tha t he didn't deserve the treatmen t he had gotten.A few mom ents later he says that the problem s of his teen years had beenpreceded by two remarkable events: first, when he was two years hold, he fellseriously ill and it was believed he would die. A taleb told his moth er to go on apilgrimage-on foot, carrying the child on her shoulders-to a shrine located some100 kilometers from their hom e. T he entire family believed this pilgrimage tohave saved his life. Second, when he was about seven years old, he consisten tlyhad nightmares in which he saw the same man dressed in white come out of thenight. Today, no t one nigh t goes by without his being overcome w ith a kind ofparalysis in the m iddle of his dreams. H e wakes up , wide-eyed, startled, andremains for half an hour or so in his bed. T h en he must get up and doesn't ma n-age to fall back asleep for a long time because of his confusion. H e knows exact-ly what to call this event: abougbetat, literally, "father of the cover." The under-

lying idea is naturally that a supernatural forceGod or one of hisemissaries-comes to him just as Gabriel had come to the p roph et, suffocatinghim."It is only then, after an hour and a half of discussion, that Bachir finallybegins to talk. H e says that he, too , in his dreams sees himself slow down to thepoint where he can barely move, to the point where he is almost paralyzed.I say, "T he son is no t as far gone as the father . . . he can still move, eventhough he does so with great difficulty."

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We have just brought into the room the living forceaboughetat-and itspossible representatives talebs, cheikhs, and fkihs capable of controlling it. Inoth er words, those professionals who are mandated by the group to control theties with this power. N ow we need only to inform Bachir and his father of this.W e ask him, " O n w hat day was Bachir born? "

"O n a Friday! I remember it well! In fact, both of my children were bornon a Friday." Friday: in Arabic, "the day of the Mosque"yam et gem'aa"theday of assembly." W e ask him th e time of birth ."At noo n," he responds.N oo n, the ho ur of the disappearance of shadows, the h our when ihejnouncome out into the hum an world. W e tell him then th at he must absolutely,urgently, pay a visit [ziara] to the shrine and make an offering in Bachir's name.One of my cotherapists says, "I have the feeling that Bachir is older than hisfather." An other adds: "O r that he was sent to his father because his father didnot know how to receive the messages that the hidden powers were sending tohim ." Father and son look at one another. I catch a glimpse of em otion in thesocial worker's eye. La ter she will tell me, "T ha t was the first time I saw thefather react like that."

It's safe to say that from that po int on Bachir became "recoverable." Infact, the adjectives that professionals were attributing to him suddenly becomeunsuited to him. W e can no longer think of him as a "psychopath, p repsychoticand imm ature." An other network of meaning is suddenly revealed to us, a net-wo rk tha t the judge will in fact be able to use.And by w hat miracle did this occur?Simply by the fact that we convoked the representatives of his group and,in so doing, in a very intense dynamic m ovem ent, we recognized his affiliation.

SOME THEORETICAL AN D TECHNICALREMARKS TO CONCLUDESince we must, at any price, make the authorized representative of thegroup appear, it is indispensable for the session to take place as much as possiblein the patient's language and according to his way of doing things. 14 It is just asindispensable for the nodal point of the treatment of the patient to be an under-standing of his problem according to the logic and the objects of the therapists ofhis group the only true representatives of the concepts of a given universe.Thus we are obliged to describe the therapeutic exchange as communica-tion from group to group, from representative to representative; it becomes theonly way to avoid the sadistic condescension of the advocates of "good medicinefor everyone."What can we say about our profession other than that it forces us into aplace that is already known to the professionals of the intermonde, a placedescribed by Isabelle Stengers, who knew so well how to discover its true natu re,its adversity and its greatness: the place of the diplomat.'11

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If our profession could be said to have a "m oral," that moral should for-bid us-yes, forbid us!-from thinking about an immigrant's suffering without referenceto his own group. T h e power relations are just too unequal. A network, structured,organized, equipped, armed to the teeth on one side, and on the other a singleindividual who hasn't at his disposal the least means of integrating himself intothe network, even in an isolated niche... . How do we get back symmetry, bal-ance? It is enough to understand tha t in a particular case, the interlocuto r is notthe person , but the group, because we are all ourselves a group ! N o t the group,but its representatives, since we are all nothing more than representatives.

But we hate to th ink of ourselves as members of a group, don 't we? Sowha t are we do ing he re, together, talking abo ut all this?

translated by Alyson WatersN o t e s1. This paper is a revised version of an article that appeared in 1996 in Melanpous: R evue des uges des enfants.2. For the notion according to which a concept is a created object and the fabrication of concepts the main

activity of philosophers, see Gilles Deleuz e, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie (Paris: Minuit , 1991): Deleuzequo te, 10. I t st il l remains to be seen wh ether th e concepts used within the hum an sciences deserve thenam e "concepts-espec ially those at the origin of social and professional practices. Th ese a re indeed t hepo int of origin o ut, like armies, to con qu er entire areas of social reality. T hi s is wh y I call the m he re"banner-concepts."

3. And I dare, if only in homage to Bruno Latour 's remarkable work on Pasteur: Les microbes: guerre et paix.(Paris: A-M Me tail le, 1984), and Pasteur, une science, un style, un sicle (Paris: Perrin, 1994).

4. A kind of saint who , while alive, heals, and circulates Mu slim doctrine and wh ose gravesite beco mes , afterhis death, a si te of pilgrimmage and therap eutic cults. See E. Do utte , Magie et religion dans l'Afrique duNord (1908) ; revised by Maisonneuve an d G euthn er (1984) ; and E . Dernebg hem , Le culte des saints dansl'Islam maghrebin (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).

5. And h ere I am using a somewhat parodied version of one of Bruno L atour 's examples: "Let 's take a verysimple example. D urin g a study that I did recently at the Pasteur Insti tute, a scientist introdu ced him -self to me in the m ost wonderful way, saying: 'He llo, I am beer yeast chrom osom e eleven, ' to which Iresponded, 'Hello, I am Bruno Latour! '" In "Note sur certains objets chevelus," Nouvelle revued'ethnopsychiatrie 27 (1994): 21-36.

6. See Ismael Maiga's com me nts in S. de Pury-Toum i, Cl. Me smin , and Tobie Na tha n: Rapport de recherche.Du role des entretiens en langue m aternelle dans l'interaction avec lesfamilles migrantes et notamment de leursbenfices dans insertion scolaire et sociale des enfants et de s adolescents. Recherche MIRE/DEP, Convent ionno . 93235, Septembe r 1995.

7. See G. Devereux, Essais d'ethnopsychiatrie gnrale(Paris: Ga llimard , 1970), and Ethnopsychanalyse compl-mentariste (Paris: Flam marion , 1972), especially the chap ter enti t led "L'identit ethniqu e, ses baseslogiques et ses dysfonctions."

8. See J. L . Anselle and E. M'B okolo , Au coeur de l'ethnie. Ethnie, tribalisme et tats en Afrique (Paris: Ladcouverte, 1985).9. For the meaning of the word "fetish," see Bruno Latour 's interesting, complex, and problematic discus-sion "D u culte mo dern e des dieux ftiches," forthcom ing from Les empcheurs de penser en rond.

10 . T h e Bam baras' lives are f il led with narratives w here patients move from the rapist to therapist until th eyarrive at the boli, who, having put them back into contact with their fetish, allows them to be cured.Also, we recall here the president of Benin, who was hospitalized in Paris right after he was elected,before returning to the forest to be treated by voduns, and, reportedly, was immediately c ured.

11 . According to Article 64, "there is neither crime nor misdemeanor" is the person is recognized to havebeen insane at the rime of committing the acts.

12 . For a description of the main techniques of ethnopsychiatric consultation, see my Fier de n 'avoir ni paysni amis, quelle sottise c'tait. Principes d'ethnopsycbanalyse (Grenoble: Editions de la Pense Sauvage, 1993).

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13. Gabriel squeezes the prophet until he begins to suffocate him and presents him with the Koran, crying"liera" "Read!" But Mohammed did no t know how to read. Twice the angel asks th e same question,squeezing the prophet until he begins to suffocate. T h e third time, Mohammed begins to read.14. See my L'influence qui gurit (Paris: Odile Jac ob, 1994).15. Isabelle Steng ers, Ecologie des pratiques.

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