ABSTRACT
This passage from Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols bears witness to a transition period when Zambia along with many other African countries underwent its first years of emancipation from colonial rule and thus faced the consequences of a complex cultural shift from traditional indigenous practices to modern intercultural customs. Relatively unharmed by British authority, the Ndembu had been able to retain their tribal unity, at least while Turner conducted his famous fieldwork a good ten years earlier in what was then Northern Rhodesia (Turner 1957).1 He thus had the opportunity to observe continuous and still efficacious rites of affliction and life-crisis rituals; the latter type has subsequently become a paradigmatic example of anthropological discourse in line with Van Gennep’s (1960) master trope, rites de passage. From a contemporary perspective, it is remarkable that precisely those geopolitical changes Turner associates with the waning conditions of tribal life today are perceived as key factors in the spread of HIV in Africa.
