Death, trauma and ritual: Mozambican refugees in Malawi

For many non-governmental organizations, the treatment of war trauma among refugees has become a key issue in humanitarian assistance. There is, however, as yet little independent evaluation of the notions and therapeutic practices which inform humanitarian interventions in refugees' mental health. By drawing on intensive anthropological fieldwork, the paper problematizes two central issues in these interventions: the role of past experiences in refugees' present well-being, on the one hand, and the need to verbalize trauma in a therapy, on the other. An alternative approach to refugees' mental health draws on current theoretical insights into non-discursive bodily practices. The paper substantiates these insights by focusing on the therapeutic salience of funerals and spirit exorcism among Mozambican refugees in Malawi. By exorcizing the vengeful spirits of those who had died during the war, refugees were also healing their war traumas. It was not so much the loss as the difficulty in observing a full range of rituals that characterized refugees' predicament. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which humanitarian assistance could utilize these insights. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.