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 “the same” while its internal organization, social uses, and affective labor alter profoundly?
The answer Sellers-Young develops is neither nostalgic nor crudely functionalist. The Pumbo, the Zande’s final major rite associated with death, continues from the 1920s through 1982 as the ceremony that “symbolizes the incorporation of the deceased into the world of the spirits.” Yet by 1982 it has also become, in some instances, a rite through which the relatives of the dead “can now return to normal living.” What persists, then, is the rite’s position at the threshold between death and social continuance. What changes is the distribution of meanings and tasks within that threshold. Earlier mortuary sequences are compressed; roles once concentrated in a single ritual figure are redistributed; dance formations loosen; singing becomes more widely shared; relations between men and women shift; and, most importantly, the social tension managed by collective dancing changes its character. In the earlier period, the Pumbo helped create concord among neighbors shadowed by witchcraft suspicion. By 1982, it increasingly serves as a means of expressing “Zandeness” in a world where older beliefs and practices have weakened but ethnic identity remains affectively urgent.
This double movement—continuity of ritual function, transformation of social and psychological work—is the paper’s central achievement. Sellers-Young is interested not simply in recording change but in identifying the level at which change matters. The Pumbo does not survive because nothing has altered; it survives because its structure has been reorganized in ways that allow it to continue doing indispensable cultural work.
Dance and context without collapse
One of the most important methodological claims of the paper appears with unusual clarity in its closing sentences: the study “clearly distinguishes between dance and dance context, thereby allowing the structures and functions of each to be analyzed independently and relationally.” This is not a minor disciplinary point. It resists two common reductions at once. On one side lies a formalism that would isolate movement patterns from the ritual, kinship, labor, leadership, food, alcohol, mourning obligations, and spatial arrangements that give them force. On the other lies a sociological reduction in which dance disappears into generalized “context,” treated merely as a symptom of something else. Sellers-Young insists on a middle path. The dance is part of a larger event; its meaning cannot be detached from that event; yet the dance itself has an organization and efficacy that deserve analysis in their own right.
The paper’s structure enacts this principle. It moves through “physical design,” “performance roles,” and “functions,” showing how season, duration, location, food, liquor, labor, musical leadership, vocal participation, spatial arrangement, and gendered movement relations together compose a single performance ecology. This is an early version of what would become a lasting methodological orientation in Sellers-Young’s work: movement must be studied with the total arrangement that sustains it, but not dissolved into a generalized anthropology of custom. Here that orientation is especially vivid because the Pumbo offers a ritual whose declared function remains relatively stable while its event-structure visibly shifts. The paper therefore demonstrates why dance ethnology requires a diachronic attention to form.
Ritual compression and the changing shape of death
The first major transformation Sellers-Young identifies is the simplification of mortuary practice. Earlier ethnographic accounts described a series of rites and feasts associated with death before the final large Pumbo. By 1982, “there is only a single Pumbo.” In the Yambio-Tambura area, the former ritual of removing mourning, Gbere Kuke, appears to have been combined with the baria pumbo ceremony. What once unfolded across multiple ritual occasions is condensed into one feast.
This compression matters because it shows ritual adapting under pressure. Sellers-Young tactfully links the change to the disruptions of the Sudanese civil war, which “severely disrupted Zande life in Southern Sudan for seventeen years.” The implication is not simply that war causes cultural loss, though it may; rather, under conditions of political and economic strain, expensive and time-consuming ritual sequences are often shortened, merged, or redistributed. The Pumbo in 1982 is a more concentrated form, but not an emptied one. It still marks the dead person’s passage into the spirit world, and now also publicly completes the mourners’ obligations. Ritual economy has changed, but symbolic necessity remains.
This is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s early sensitivity to structure. She notices that what a ritual does may stay constant at one level while changing at another. Death still requires a final collective act. Mourning still requires public completion. But the number of separate ceremonial stations through which these processes are managed has been reduced. The form is streamlined without ceasing to be socially dense.
Continuity in material arrangement, alteration at the edges
Sellers-Young’s account of the Pumbo’s “physical design” is deceptively modest. Much of it emphasizes continuity: the feast is still held in the dry season, between November and April, still begins at dusk and continues through the night, still takes place in the central courtyard of the homestead of the deceased’s closest male relative. Such continuity matters because it establishes that not every dimension of the ritual has altered. The Pumbo remains anchored in a recognizable seasonal, temporal, and domestic geography.
Food, too, appears relatively stable. Drawing on earlier ethnographers and her own observations, Sellers-Young notes porridge or bekende, meat with sauce, and cassava leaves mixed with groundnuts. Material culture, she suggests, has changed little overall. This relative continuity prevents the argument from hardening into a simple narrative of social rupture. The ritual’s endurance is real; it is not merely nominal.
At the same time, two shifts in the physical design are especially telling. One is the event’s shortening: before the civil war, Pumbos “were three-day events”; by 1982, the feast “has been reduced to a one-day affair that starts at dusk and finishes the following morning.” The other is the introduction of araki, a distilled liquor made from cassava and maize mash, into observances once associated with fermented beer. Sellers-Young cautiously suggests foreign influence—perhaps Arab or British—in the development of hard liquor production. Even where exact historical causality remains uncertain, the change is significant because it shows the ritual economy incorporating a new substance into an old structure.
Particularly striking is her brief notice of women who “establish small vending areas on the edge of the compound” to sell liquor to uninvited guests drawn by the music. This detail does more than color the scene. It reveals the Pumbo as a porous social event rather than a sealed family rite, one in which ritual obligation, public festivity, and petty commerce converge. The funeral feast opens onto a semi-public margin where entrepreneurship, gendered labor, and auditory attraction meet. Sellers-Young would later become increasingly interested in the layered social fields around performance; this small observation already shows that instinct.
Kinship, labor, and the redistribution of authority
If the physical setting remains partly stable, the allocation of performance roles reveals a more dramatic reorganization. Sellers-Young is careful to show that the kinship structure of ritual labor persists. Female in-laws still prepare food and drink; male in-laws still provide the stones used for the grave, even if actual grave construction is now done by a specialist familiar with cement. This distinction is subtle and important. Technical modernization does not erase ritual obligation. A practical task may shift to specialist labor while the kinship responsibility surrounding it remains in place.
She also notes a gendered symbolism in dress: male relatives are no longer visually distinct, but women relatives, especially sisters of the deceased, wear “belts of leaves over their regular clothes,” marking their position as “enforcers of tradition.” The phrase is revealing. Ritual conservatism here is not abstract; it is embodied and displayed. Women become visible as bearers of continuity precisely within a context where other aspects of social organization are changing. Sellers-Young does not romanticize this, but neither does she overlook it. Gender is not only a matter of restriction; it can also be a form of ritual authority.
The most illuminating transformation concerns the disappearance of the bayango. In Evans-Pritchard’s 1925 account, he was “the distributor of food, arbitrator of disputes, and leader of singing.” By Giorgetti’s period he seems mainly a song leader; by 1982 “the role of the bayango no longer existed at all.” Rather than simply recording disappearance, Sellers-Young traces a pattern of redistribution. Song leadership passes largely to the pinginbajk xylophone player; food distribution moves through the baria pumbo into the office now called the “Secretary of the Feast”; arbitration of disputes shifts to the chief or his representative.
This is perhaps the paper’s sharpest structural insight. The bayango once concentrated logistical, musical, and juridical authority in a single ritual center. By 1982 these functions are differentiated and parceled among distinct figures. Sellers-Young explicitly compares the old bayango to the old chief: each stood at the center of an ordered domain, distributed resources, settled disputes, and directed collective life. As chiefly authority was transformed under colonial rule, ritual authority also lost its centralizing figure. The paper thus argues that the performance’s internal organization “reflect[ed] and validate[d] social structure,” but the claim is stronger than mere reflection. The Pumbo gives social reorganization a bodily and spatial form. What changes politically and administratively becomes sensible in the ritual’s altered center of gravity.
Colonial administration and the altered place of chiefs
The role of chiefs in the Pumbo offers a second, related example of this transformation. In the 1920s, Avongara, members of the ruling caste, generally did not attend Pumbos, considering them beneath their dignity as commoner celebrations. Yet if a chief’s son did attend, “his word was accepted as law.” By 1982, however, “the chief or one of his deputies is expected to be present.” This expectation, Sellers-Young writes, fulfills an obligation defined by “the British administration: that of keeper of tribal discipline.”
The significance of this shift lies in its institutional recoding of ritual attendance. What was once a matter of aristocratic distance and occasional sovereignty becomes a routine administrative duty. Colonial rule does not merely weaken indigenous authority; it reframes it. The chief becomes, in part, a bureaucratized custodian of order. The Pumbo registers this change by incorporating the chief into the event as an expected functionary of discipline rather than an optional embodiment of superior rank.
Sellers-Young’s formulation remains succinct, but the implication is rich. Ritual is not a refuge from colonial history. It absorbs and displays that history in its personnel, expectations, and modes of authority. The Pumbo is therefore a record not only of “tradition” but of political transformation sedimented in performance.
Music, singing, and the move from delegated roles to distributed participation
The paper’s treatment of music and singing is equally revealing because it shows social change enacted not simply through new meanings but through changed participation. Some instruments, Sellers-Young notes, remained the same: the gaza and guu guu continued to be played “in the same manner as in the 1920s.” But after the civil war, the pinginbajk xylophone becomes part of the Pumbo and, more importantly, takes on a new organizing role. People say it has assumed the bayango’s former function as leader of singing. Leadership shifts, then, from a named ritual specialist to the musician-instrument assemblage.
Even more significant is the transformation of singing itself. Earlier Pumbos were led by the bayango and his assistants, the suali, who supplied the chorus after his solo lines. Others might join or remain silent. By 1982, “the majority of participants sing both solo and chorus sections.” Anyone, male or female, may begin a song; sometimes a dancer starts one, sometimes the pinginbajk player; there are “no longer assigned roles for soloist and chorus.”
This is not merely a musical detail. It signals a broad redistribution of expressive agency. Formalized delegated performance yields to more diffuse participation. Sellers-Young does not idealize this as democratization in any simple sense, but she shows how ritual authority becomes less concentrated and more collectively enacted. The Pumbo retains musical coherence while loosening its role structure. In this respect, too, the event mirrors a wider social world in which centralized figures have diminished and participation is reconfigured.
Choreographic form as social diagram
The paper reaches its fullest interpretive power in the discussion of dance organization. Sellers-Young compares three historical moments to show how choreographic relation can serve as a diagram of social order. In the 1920s, dancers formed concentric circles around the musicians and bayango; men and women were spatially segregated and danced distinct movements. In the 1950s and 1960s, especially in bagbere and nangandu, men’s and women’s movements became increasingly interdependent. By 1982, the earlier arrangement had given way to something much looser: no bayango at the center, no concentric circles of the sexes, individual dancers circling the musicians, small groups, couples, women’s circles, little intentional synchronization, and even couples not always moving in unison. The one durable feature is “a counterclockwise circle around the musicians.”
This analysis matters because Sellers-Young does not treat choreography as a self-contained vocabulary of steps. She reads it as a structure of relation: who moves with whom, around what center, under what degree of coordination, and with what distinctions of sex. The old form’s concentric organization, with central authority and segregated lines, resonated with a more hierarchical and sharply gender-differentiated social order. The later form’s dispersed groupings and reduced synchronization correspond to changed relations of authority and gender. Choreographic space here becomes a social map, but a dynamic one.
Her language is careful: the “spatial form of the dance, considered separately from the rest of the context, symbolized the existing social structure. This form reshaped itself as the surrounding social structure changed.” That last phrase is crucial. The dance does not merely depict society from outside; it “reshapes itself” within historical transformation. Performance is adaptive structure. It is both index and active reorganization.
This line of thinking would become foundational for Sellers-Young’s later insistence that movement practices produce and transmit forms of consciousness. In this early paper, the claim is framed through social structure rather than somatics, but the seed is clear: movement relations matter because they organize experience.
Gender reform and its limits
Sellers-Young links changes in dance relations between men and women to larger changes in women’s social position under British rule. She writes that colonial regulations transformed women’s status “from one of near-total subservience—in which they were used by men as commodities for barter or repayment of debts—to one in which they had greater freedom to choose marital partners and living situations.” In the ritual sphere, the visible counterpart of this shift is the loosening of gender segregation in dance. Women no longer remain in entirely separate lines; by 1982 there appear to be “no spatial restrictions or major movement behaviors distinguished by sex.”
Yet the paper is not triumphalist. A rule persists: “one man should not dance with another man’s wife.” Men with multiple wives still regulate women’s attendance, sometimes bringing only one wife to monitor her behavior, or leaving wives at home altogether. Thus dance becomes a site where historical change and continuing control coexist. Sellers-Young’s account is notable for preserving this tension. Expanded interaction between men and women is real, but so are the enduring structures of sexual surveillance and marital ownership.
The analytical importance of this section lies in its refusal of simplification. Gender is neither timeless custom nor a simple story of emancipation. It is historically shifting, unevenly redistributed, and legible in the micro-arrangements of performance. This concern with the relation between embodied practice and gendered power would remain central throughout Sellers-Young’s later writings, especially in work on belly dance and intercultural transmission. Here it appears in an early, socially grounded form.
Manifest and latent functions: from doctrine to lived necessity
The paper’s functional analysis employs a distinction drawn from Robert K. Merton between manifest and latent functions. The manifest function of the Pumbo is relatively straightforward: it incorporates the spirit of the dead into the world of the ancestors and, by 1982, also reincorporates the mourners into ordinary life through the removal of white mourning clothes. The language of incorporation and return allows Sellers-Young to show that funeral ritual concerns not only the dead but the social repair of the living.
But the essay’s real force lies in the latent functions it uncovers: enculturation, social interaction, sexual expression for the young, opportunities for small-scale economic exchange, and display of wealth and status. These are not incidental byproducts; they help explain why the event matters. A Pumbo is socially thick. It teaches children, stages family position, permits erotic play, and opens a temporary market economy. What participants may name as a funeral rite also works as a broader mechanism of collective life.
This broadening of function is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s most enduring contribution to performance studies: her understanding of dance as a social technology for handling tensions that ordinary discourse cannot adequately manage. In this paper that insight emerges through the distinction between stated purpose and lived necessity. The Pumbo is explicitly about death, but it is also about how a community endures death together.
Concord under witchcraft suspicion
The essay’s most powerful and memorable passage concerns what Sellers-Young identifies as an “important latent function of the dance”: the production of goodwill and concord. She quotes Evans-Pritchard’s description of dance as involving the “whole muscular system,” coordinated sight and hearing, collective expression, pleasurable constrained coordination, and a tendency “to increase goodwill and to produce a feeling of concord.” She then extends his insight by emphasizing the role of repetitive music and song in producing “a light trance” through which the participant “forfeited a sense of individual selfhood in favor of an experience of unity with others.”
This would already be a significant statement about collective dancing. But Sellers-Young gives it ethnographic urgency by placing it within Zande beliefs about death and witchcraft. Historically, no death was understood as natural. Male relatives consulted oracles; witchcraft was usually confirmed; vengeance magic was sought; cycles of fear and retaliation spread through the community. Neighbors were potential suspects. Under such conditions, attendance at a dead neighbor’s Pumbo became more than respect. It was a public demonstration of innocence. One “drank and danced alongside people who might suspect him of witchcraft and whom he, in turn, might suspect on another occasion.”
This is the paper’s deepest interpretive intervention. Dance is not entertainment laid atop ritual solemnity. It is a mechanism for making collective life briefly possible under conditions of mutual suspicion. “The constant movement to continuous rhythm in a mildly intoxicated state helped evoke and sustain feelings of harmony and concord among people who otherwise distrusted one another.” The formulation is exact and unsentimental. Dance does not abolish suspicion, reveal innocence, or resolve the cosmological problem of witchcraft. It creates a temporary embodied arrangement in which suspicion can be managed, if only for a night.
What Sellers-Young offers here is an early theory of performance as social diagnosis and provisional redress. The Pumbo shows what kind of tension exists in the society because it is organized to handle that tension. The latent social function is not generic cohesion but the management of a very specific anxiety produced by death, accusation, and uncertain culpability.
From social suspicion to ethnic self-recognition
The paper’s final and most forward-looking argument is that by 1982 this latent function has shifted. “Modern Zande do not consistently consult oracles”; educated Zande no longer necessarily attribute death to witchcraft; Christians are taught not to seek vengeance; other older rituals have waned. Yet the Pumbo remains. Why?
Sellers-Young’s answer is that the ritual has come to symbolize “Zandeness.” Its music, movement style, and integrated social atmosphere provide an occasion in which Zande people can experience and display membership in a shared culture. Collective movement to distinctive music, even without strict synchronization, becomes an embodied assertion of difference from neighboring groups such as the Dinka or the Lotuko. The Pumbo now helps ease “tensions within individuals themselves” by offering a culturally resonant form of self-recognition in a world “increasingly removed from traditional beliefs and practices.”
This is a strikingly sophisticated claim for an early paper. It suggests that ritual persists not because doctrine remains intact but because performance can take on new affective labor as historical conditions change. What was once crucial for managing tension between suspicious neighbors becomes crucial for managing tension within persons living amid cultural erosion, colonial restructuring, war, and multiethnic comparison. The rite’s public function remains funerary; its deeper social psychology changes.
Sellers-Young thereby avoids two common errors. She does not argue that ritual simply declines as belief declines. Nor does she argue that cultural identity straightforwardly replaces religion. Rather, she shows that one latent function recedes as another intensifies. The Pumbo remains a rite of incorporation, but its dancing increasingly serves as an enactment of ethnic belonging.
The failed “British-style” Pumbo
The discussion of the “British” or dinner-dance variant of the Pumbo gives this identity argument a particularly sharp test. After the civil war, especially in larger population centers, some Pumbos were organized with recorded popular music from Zaire or Kenya, men and women dancing as couples, and rounds announced as “men’s choice” or “ladies’ choice” by the Secretary of the Feast. Significantly, much else remained the same: the same people attended, the same food and alcohol were served, the same kin prepared the event, the same associated ceremonies were conducted. What changed most substantially were the music and dance relations.
This version “did not remain popular.” Sellers-Young argues that it failed because it did not provide “a culturally appropriate context in which individuals could express membership in the larger social group.” The reasons she offers are revealing. The music was no longer central and continuous; the songs were short and in foreign languages, so participants could not sing while dancing; people were required to dance with assigned partners and continually change partners; the arrangement undermined the freedom through which sexuality, sociability, alcohol, movement, and vocal response were integrated. The altered relation of dancers to musicians and the absence of circular formations violated persistent Zande spatial preferences. “It was not Zande. It was not Gbere, or play.”
This failed experiment is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in the paper because it isolates the variables that matter. Occasion, personnel, food, and ceremonial purpose are not enough. If the internal performance relations are changed too drastically—if song, rhythm, vocal participation, spatial formation, and movement freedom no longer sustain the experience recognized as Zande—then the ritual cannot perform its contemporary cultural work. The argument is subtle: tradition does not survive by preserving every detail unchanged, but neither can it survive any change whatever. Certain relational structures are indispensable because they carry the sensory logic of collective identity.
Here one can see, in embryo, Sellers-Young’s later interest in intercultural transmission and the problem of forms that travel across bodies and institutions. The British-style Pumbo is not simply foreign influence; it is an example of a borrowed format that fails because it cannot be incorporated into the local embodied system of meaning. Long before her mature writings on technique and consciousness, Sellers-Young is already attentive to the fact that performance structures teach people how to be together.
An early statement of a larger intellectual project
Within Sellers-Young’s career, this paper stands as an originating statement of themes she would elaborate across very different archives and geographies. The insistence that dance be studied together with its event-context but not collapsed into it prefigures her later analyses of ritual, intercultural performance, and pedagogical form. The argument that internal performance organization registers broader social transformation anticipates her continuing interest in how movement practices embody changing relations of authority, gender, identity, and belonging. The distinction between manifest and latent function prepares the ground for a more mature understanding of performance as a medium through which communities manage grief, tension, desire, and difference. Even the paper’s attention to the bodily production of concord through rhythm, repetition, and reduced self-consciousness foreshadows her later commitment to embodied knowledge, though here it is framed ethnographically rather than somatically.
Just as important is what the paper does not do. It does not sentimentalize “traditional culture” as stable essence. It does not imagine ritual as outside history. It does not treat dance as transparent expression. Instead, it offers a carefully historical account of performance as a mutable structure that both conserves and reorganizes social meaning. Colonial administration, war, changing gender relations, altered beliefs about witchcraft, and new ethnic self-consciousness do not merely surround the Pumbo from the outside; they enter it, changing who leads, who sings, how bodies are arranged, and what kind of tension collective dancing can alleviate.
For dance studies, the essay remains instructive because it demonstrates how much can be learned by attending to the relation between choreography and social form without reducing one to the other. For performance studies, it shows ritual as process rather than static inheritance. For anthropology of embodiment, it offers an early account of collective movement as a practical response to social uncertainty. And within Sellers-Young’s development, it marks the beginning of a lifelong effort to understand bodies not as mute carriers of culture but as the very means by which culture is reorganized, tested, and felt.
The paper ends by proposing that diachronic analysis of dance context may answer “the broader relationship between dance and society.” That ambition is entirely justified by what the essay itself achieves. The Pumbo becomes, in Sellers-Young’s hands, more than a funeral dance. It becomes a way of thinking historically about how communities move through change: preserving enough continuity to remain recognizable, altering enough to remain alive.
Reflect with VABS