chapter / 2018
The Zar: Enactment of Social Drama in the Southern Sudan
Barbara Sellers-Young
Description
This later chapter revisits the zar in southern Sudan with a more developed vocabulary of social drama, gendered agency, and embodied enactment. Sellers-Young again treats the ritual as a process that transforms personal distress into public performance, but the later framing gives greater attention to how women use ritual to negotiate vulnerability within patriarchal and ethnically divided settings.
The chapter strengthens a continuity across her career. From early ritual studies to later autoethnography, Sellers-Young is interested in performance as redress: a structured event that allows people to embody what ordinary discourse cannot resolve. The zar's theatrical elements are not secondary embellishments; they are how crisis becomes socially legible. Music, trance, costume, sacrifice, and communal participation create a temporary world in which suffering can be recognized and the afflicted person returned to social life.
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Analysis
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s account of the zar in southern Sudan belongs to the earliest stratum of her scholarship, yet it already displays the intellectual habits that would define her later work: an insistence that movement be read as social process rather than decorative residue; a refusal to isolate dance from ritual, ecology, gender, or power; and an increasingly explicit recognition that the scholar’s own body is implicated in what can be known. In the chapter’s Azande section, “Dancing with the Earth,” these commitments are sharpened through an ethnographic scene in which funeral dance becomes the site where grief, suspicion, embodiment, and belonging are worked through together...