THE CULT OF SAINTS IN NORTHWESTERN TUNISIA An analysis of contemporary pilgrimage structures Part 2 (chs. 6-9, references) Wim van Binsbergen

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Part I:
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1. INTRODUCTION
2. REGIONAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
3. SEGMENTATION IN KHUMIRIYA TODAY
4. SHRINES IN KHUMIRIYA
5. SAINTS AND THE LIVING

Part II:
6. SEGMENTATION AND TYPES OF ZYARA
7. LOCAL ZYARA IN THE VALLEY OF SIDI MHAMMAD
8. ORIGINAL AND PERSONAL ZYARA IN THE VILLAGE OF SIDI MHAMMAD
9. CONCLUSION
REFERENCES

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6. SEGMENTATION AND TYPES OF ZYARA

The principal set of people who have a definite relationship with a particular saint are the actual members (i.e. inhabitants) of the territorial segment with which that saint is associated. All these people, male and female, must partake in the routines of the saintly cult, including dedication of meals, at least twice-annual zyara, and observance of the saint’s festival.

            Male members of the segment are not under formal obligations of zyara, although many of them do visit, as individuals, the shrines, and attend the festivals, of the major saints in their own valley and adjacent valleys. Some men are involved in the saintly cult as ritual specialist: as shrine-keepers, and as members of the ecstatic cult in whose songs local saints feature along with international saints, and demons. for most purposes, men rely on the women in their households and compounds to deal with the local saints. Yet men who intend to definitively settle elsewhere, in the realm of a different saint, will find their plans crossed by dreams and omens through which the saints protests against their absconding.

            Women, through their dedication of meals and their zyara, carry the bulk of the saintly cult in Khumiriya.

            This ritual involvement of women is intimately linked to the marriage pattern. Marriage is virilocal: both according to the rule and in c. 95% of actual practice. and since no woman marries into the household in which she was born, every marriage involves a woman’s crossing of segmentary boundaries at least at the lowest level of segmentation (in the rare case she marries within the same compound). Like other Islamic societies, and explicit rule as to the preference of agnatic endogamy exists in Khumiriya. demographic processes, the dynamics of marital alliance, the essentially bilateral kinship system hiding under the patrilineal idiom, and the intergenerational transfer of property, however, are much more complex than that they could be summarized, at the analytical level by the participants’ ideology of patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage. This is not the place to present my very extensive data on this point. Let it suffice to say that roughly 50% of contemporary marriages involve partners belonging to different villages, each with their own distinct set of local shrines and saints. A village-exogamous marriage means that a woman leaves her original set of village-level local shrines behind and adopts a new set, that of her husband’s female consanguineal relatives. it is part of a woman’s extensive incorporation into her husband’s segment[9] that she fully adopts the shrines of that group. Within the compound, hamlet and neighbourhood, elder women coordinate food production, food processing, water hauling and firewood collection. From these female leaders the in-marrying woman will learn about the identity and relative importance of the segment’s shrines and saints. She will soon dedicate some of her household meals to these saints, and join the other women in collective zyara to the shrines. However, she will not as a rule give up her relationship with the shrines in her original segment. Although a woman will not often leave the immediate environment of the village for the purpose of visiting relatives, the hospital, the market, or diviners, she has an unalienable right to visit her original shrines, and thus her segment of origin and her relatives there, twice a year.

            A married woman is involved in two complementary sets of relationship with saints — which mirrors, and in fact sustains, her involvement in both her original segment and that of her husband. The picture is further complicated by the relative nature of segmentation. The greater the segmentary distance a woman crosses for marriage, the more different the two sets of shrines will be. If she marries in a different village within the same valley, the two sets will overlap in that the valley’s main shrine and festival will be part of both sets; in that case marriage will only add a few lesser shrines of her husband’s segment (at the village neighbourhood, hamlet and compound level) to the woman’s pre-existing set. With intra-village local endogamy (c. 50% of all marriages) the differences will be even less significant, and in fact the set of shrines before and after marriage may entirely coincide. The differences are far more conspicuous in the case of a marriage linking people from different valleys or even chiefdoms. But the principle remain the same throughout.

            thus every Khumiri woman has zyara obligations vis-à-vis the local shrines associated with the territorial segment (or better: nested hierarchy of segments at various levels) to which she belongs at a given point in time; for descriptive purposes, this type of zyara will be called local zyara. In addition, all women who have migrated from their segment of birth, i.e. mainly in the context of marriage, retain zyara obligations vis-a-vis the local shrines in that segment; this type of zyara will be called original zyara. For the sake of completeness, we should not overlook the fact that marriage is the main, but not the exclusive occasion for a woman to adopt a new set of zyara obligations: when the household of which she is a dependent member takes up residence elsewhere, a similar situation obtains regardless of her marital status. However, such cases are so rare as compared with the virtual universality of marriage among Khumiri women, that they require no separate treatment.

            Local zyara comes with actual membership of (i.e. residence in) a territorial segment, and unites all adult women of that segment under a female leader. The latter co-ordinates the collective zyara of the segment’s women to the local shrines, as part of her general tasks of female leadership. In fact these collective visits to local shrines present an amazing spectacle of territorial segmentation in action. At the occasion of the festival of a valley’s or village’s main shrine, the various female leaders of segments will have agreed on a time for collective zyara. Compound by compound, hamlet by hamlet, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, one will see small groups of women in their best clothes converge along the village path, and team up on their way to the shrine, only to break up again, segment-wise, on their return, Alternatively, the fact that virtually every woman in a compound, hamlet and neighbourhood derives obligations of original zyara from her own, unique life history, endows her with an individuality in the religious sphere which she will normally be allowed to maintain despite strong social pressures towards incorporation in her husband’s segment. the frequent attribution of misfortune to irate, neglected saints suggests however both the practice of individual shedding of original zyara obligations, and the deep-lying tensions in the marital and inter-generational sphere that would seem to attend the incorporation process.

            Personal zyara to major regional saints in the context of illness or infertility results, finally, in the third type of women’s zyara obliga­tions in Khumiriya. For here again the norm applies that a living human cannot at his or her own initiative terminate a relationship with a saint once entered into. For a variety of reasons (which seem to include female under-nutrition; a very low marital age of women before marital legislation was revised in the 1960s; and a repressive sexual culture instilling profound fears and sexual inhibitions in young people of both sexes) many Khumiri women are recorded to have suffered from impaired fertility in the first years of their marriage. In order to remedy this complaint, women would often resort to pilgrimage to distant shrines of regional saints outside the set of shrines falling under local or original zyara obligations. The personal relationship between a woman and a regional saint invoked for reproductive troubles would ideally last a lifetime; in later years, as a woman would take her daughters and daughters-in-law with her on this personal zyara, the younger generation would automatically inherit this relationship, even though the regional shrine would be too distant to be listed among the territorial segment’s local zyara obligations.

            Numerous are the cases when material misfortune, illness and even death are attributed (via various techniques of divination) to irate saints revenging humans’ lack of respect, breach of promises, failure to dedicate meals and make pious visits, or neglect of duties vis-à-vis one saint while honouring the expectations of another saint. since Khumiri saints are shown to embody, on the one hand, concepts of intra-kin intimacy and inter-generational relations, on the other hand a structure of complementary opposition of segments, it will be obvious — even without a discussion of specific cases — that the social, mental and psycho-somatic dramas enacted in such cases reveal deeply-rooted tensions and contradictions within the Khumiri social process and symbolic order. However, an explanation of misfortune like the Khumiri one would represent a welcome escape clause in any religious system: given a certain degree of recognized non-observance of rules and of opportunism[10] among the living humans involved, the supernatural entities invoked are free to honour or to ignore human requests without succumbing to their professional disease: credibility gap. In fact, not all Khumiri women attend to their original and personal zyara obligations with equal zeal; the factors apparently determining this variation in religious behaviour will be discussed below.

            In modern anthropology, paradigmatic consistency and elegance have become reasons for healthy mistrust. Therefore, the above general­ized description of the saintly cult, and particularly of zyara, in contemporary Khumiriya needs to be substantiated with evidence on actual religious behaviour as stipulated by the models and rules described here. We find ourselves here in the somewhat exceptional situation that such evidence is, in fact, available, and that it corroborates the generalized description with amazing precision.

7. LOCAL ZYARA IN THE VALLEY OF SIDI MHAMMAD

In the remaining sections of this chapter I shall describe the patterns of local, original and personal zyara as found among the adult women inhabiting the villages of Sidi Mhammad and Mayziya, in the valley of Sidi Mhammad.

            The data were collected in 1968, at a point in my field-work when I had sufficiently mastered the principles of Khumiri popular religion and society to phrase my questions properly; and when my stay in the village of Sidi Mhammad had generated a sufficient amount of trust and rapport to allow me to systematically interview the majority of the adult female population in both villages. In Sidi Mhammad, of the total population of 42 resident adult women, 35 (= 83%) were thus interviewed. The 17% non-response could be shown to form an a-select sample from the total population of 42, with regard to important background variables: relative economic position of their household; number of years of their marriage had lasted; geographical distance across which their marriage had been contracted. (Table 1).

Mann-Whitney U-test, corrected for ties: z = 1.13; p = .13
§) the analysis is limited to women resident in the village of Sidi Mhammad but born in a different village

Mann-Whitney U-test, corrected for ties: z = -1.36; p = .09 [ check bottom row table ! ]

Mann-Whitney U-test, corrected for ties: z = 1.11; p .13
*) one woman was omittted from the analysis since the wealth of her household could not be assessed with certainty

Table 1. Validating the sample of women

My data on Mayziya are less complete: they adequately cover local zyara, but show gaps with regard to original and personal zyara. The analysis of the latter two types (section 8) will exclusively be based on Sidi Mhammad data.

            Zyara is public behaviour and moreover a source of prestige and baraka. It is therefore discussed without reticence, even when the interviewer is a young male foreigner. The interview data were checked against: observational data concerning the various types of zyara; systematically elicited statements about the zyara behaviour of neighbours; and many accidental statements uttered during everyday conservations or open-ended interviews. The correspondence between these data proved to be almost 100%. Moreover the data show great internal consistency, particularly in the extent to which the responses and observational data on local zyara converge for the several women of each segment. This convergence could hardly be a research artifact, because when I collected the data I was not even beginning to realize that Khumiri social organization could be described with a model of territorial segmentation. For all these reasons I consider the data to be of good quality, and amenable to such non-parametric statistical tests as I shall perform upon them.[11]

            The valley of Sidi Mhammad stretches from south to north along the Wad al-Kabir, a river whose tributaries have their sources at the highest peaks of Khumiriya, and which flows into the Mediterranean near the town of Tabarka, c. 15 km north of Sidi Mhammad.

Diagram 2. The wider surroundings of the valley of Sidi Mhammad (click on thumbnail to enlarge)

            Diagram 2 shows the wider surroundings of the valley. This diagram conveys the remarkably small geographical scale of the phenomena at hand. The valley of Sidi Mhammad has an area of about 10 km², and comprises only six villages: Sidi Mhammad, Mayziya, Tra^caya-sud, Tracaya-bidh, Fidh al-Missay and Raml al-cAtrus; together these villages comprise c. 600 inhabitants. Movements between villages id mainly on foot, and here the mountainous terrain imposes severe constraints. Thus from Sidi Mhammad it takes people half a day to reach the major regional shrine of Sidi ^cAbd bi-Jamal, a distance of barely 10 km as the crow flies. Such a distance forms in fact the effective maximal radius for most purposes of inter-village contacts, including zyara and marriage. While illustrating this point, Table 2 suggests that structures of zyara, and the affinal networks created by marriage, together constitute on relational region, of the sort which Meillassoux has called a marriage field (aire matrimoniale, Meillassoux 1964: 11 andz passim).

Table 2. A comparison of geographical distances across which women resident in the village of Sidi Mhammad visit shrines and across which the marriages of these women have been contracted.

            Like Sidi cAbd Allah bi-Jamal, Sidi Mhammad is a regional saint. The latter’s twice-annual festival lasts for several days and nights. In addition to the people of the valley itself, who are under obligations of local zyara, the festival attracts, from all over Khumiriya, scores of women who are under obligation of original or personal zyara, and moreover scores of male pilgrims, as well as musicians, showmen, ecstatic dancers, butchers, and peddlers in sweets, candles, incense, haberdashery, etc. while the saint Sidi Mhammad is locally represented by no less than four shrines including two qubbas, he is by no means the only saint of the valley. Diagram 3 shows, in their relative position vis-à-vis the dwelling houses, the location of the eighteen shrines that are found in the immediate environment of the villages of Sidi Mhammad and Mayziya alone. Table 3 summarizes the names and physical characteristics of these shrines.

            A minority of the local shrines are surrounded by cemeteries, and a segment’s right to bury its dead in a particular cemetery, i.e. near a particular shrine, is an important expression of the segmentary structure. However, this aspect is not dealt with in my present argument, which concentrates on zyara. Of the shrines listed in table 3, the numbers 1 and 8 are surrounded by cemeteries that are still in use, whereas abandoned cemeteries are found around the shrines 5 and 7, as well as several hundred meters south of 9 and 13.

Diagram 3. Shrines in the valley of Sidi Mhammad (click on thumbnail to enlarge)