conference paper / 1983

The Zande Pumbo: Social Change and Structural Change

Barbara Sellers-Young

Back to Library Read Analysis

Description

This early study of the Zande Pumbo establishes one of Sellers-Young's most durable scholarly habits: reading dance as an event in which social structure becomes visible. The Pumbo is treated not as an isolated set of steps, but as a funeral ecology made from kinship labor, food preparation, music, gendered participation, authority, mourning, and spatial organization. By comparing accounts from the 1920s, mid-century reports, and her own 1982 observations, Sellers-Young shows that the ritual retained its mortuary force while its internal organization changed significantly.

The work is especially important because it gives her scholarship a diachronic model. The Pumbo's shortening, altered leadership, changing dance formations, new musical authority, and revised gender relations register colonial administration, civil war, Christianity, weakening witchcraft anxiety, and emergent ethnic self-consciousness. The argument is not that dance merely reflects society from the outside. Rather, the Pumbo is a social mechanism through which grief, suspicion, hierarchy, and belonging are temporarily reorganized in embodied form.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year1983
Era 1980s: Ritual, Social Structure, and Performance as Communal Technology i

1980s: Ritual, Social Structure, and Performance as Communal Technology

The early Sudanese work frames dance as a social and ritual structure. In the study of the Zande Pumbo, Sellers-Young argues that dance must be analyzed with its full event-context: kinship labor, mourning, leadership, music, spatial arrangement, gender relations, food, alcohol, and social participation. This is her first major methodological principle. The Pumbo’s changing form registers colonial disruption, war, altered authority, shifting gender relations, and changing beliefs about witchcraft. Dance is both expressive and diagnostic.

The zar work extends this view to possession ritual. Here performance transforms private female crisis into public, theatrical, communal action. Sellers-Young draws on social drama and the ritual/theatre continuum to show that healing, role-playing, trance, sacrifice, music, dance, and feasting form a structured process of redress. Her early view is therefore anthropological and functional, but already attentive to embodiment, gender, and temporary solidarity.

Continuity: dance is never isolated movement.

New emphasis: performance as a mechanism for producing concord, recognition, and temporary social reordering.

Open era page
AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventCongress on Research in Dance Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, November
Rolepresenter

Reflect with VABS

IdeaSpace

Themes in this work

Open a theme or use this work as the center of the IdeaMap.

Analysis

Understanding this work

Barbara Sellers-Young’s early paper on the Zande Pumbo already contains, in concentrated form, several of the convictions that would organize her later scholarship: that dance is not merely decorative movement but social form; that ritual is legible only when one attends to its full event-structure; that performance preserves continuity precisely by changing; and that the bodily arrangements of an occasion can reveal historical transformations not immediately visible in doctrine or explicit belief. What makes this 1983 conference paper intellectually durable is not only the ethnographic material it assembles, but the precision with which it asks a still consequential question: how can a ritual remain recognizably...

Read More