conference paper / 1987

Theatrical Aspects of the Zar

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

In this conference paper, Sellers-Young analyzes the zar in Yambio, Sudan as ritual theatre: a structured performance through which private distress is made visible, shared, and ritually managed. The essay focuses on a possession ceremony for Saida, an Arab woman whose illness is linked to infertility, displacement, and marital pressure. Through music, trance, costume, sacrifice, role-playing, and feasting, the ritual turns an individual crisis into a communal process of recognition and redress.

The paper extends Sellers-Young's early concern with performance as social technology. The zar does not erase ethnic, religious, class, or gender divisions in Yambio, but it creates a rare space where Arab and Azande women can gather around shared female vulnerability. Its significance lies in the way theatricality, healing, and social drama overlap. Here, embodiment is neither decoration nor symptom; it is the medium through which women negotiate suffering, status, fertility anxiety, and temporary solidarity.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year1987
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.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventAmerican Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November
Rolepresenter

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Analysis

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Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Theatrical Aspects of the Zar,” presented in 1987, belongs to the early Sudanese phase of her scholarship, when dance and ritual were first becoming for her not simply objects of ethnographic description but privileged sites for thinking how social tensions are embodied, staged, and temporarily reorganized. The paper is modest in scale—a conference presentation built around a specific zar ritual in Yambio—yet intellectually it is already strikingly characteristic. It resists the reduction of possession ritual to superstition, pathology, or belief alone. It asks instead what becomes visible when one treats the zar as performance: not performance in the trivial sense of...

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