Los ritos de paso entre los bubi de Guinea Ecuatorial

Abstract

Rites of passage among the Bubi is an ethnography about the rites of birth and death among the Bubi from Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea (Central Africa). It is organized in two parts: one, a general ethnography, and two, an ethnography focused on rituality. The first one offers a wide framework about the Bubi society which permits to introduce the second part, which goes deeply into the Bubi’s ritual structures. The ethnographic introductory chapters focus on crucial topics of Bubi culture, in particular those related to their rituality: world view and kinship. Regarding their world view, our attention is focused on the way Bubi people categorize the spiritual beings and their location in different spheres or geographic spaces related to the island. Therefore, it has been possible to understand the different dimensions that connect the island with a whole spiritual system. In this sense, the island becomes a symbolic space. On the other hand, regarding their kinship, this work will deal with the notion of person according to Bubi beliefs. The notion of person would navigate between the living world and the death’s one, the visible and the invisible, and is intimately connected with a fundamental ancestor of the matrilineal clan. We can understand Bubi’s kinship and their principles of their matrilineal society with this notion of person. The specific ethnographic chapters about Bubi rituality describe step by step the ritual celebrations of birth and death. A person will go through these cycles when she is born and when she dies. The final chapter shows the internal structure of both rituals and its symbolic content, while it also offers an analysis of it following Turner’s work (The Forest of Symbols, 1967). The analysis takes into account the discourses of experts and ritual leaders. It also wants to understand the symbolic field regarding the social, cultural and ritual among Bubi people. This ritual’s analysis permits to conclude that to live and to die are opposite structures in the symbolic field. That shows how Bubi people conceive “this world” (the visible, the living one) and “the other world” (the invisible, the spiritual one). Hence, this thesis offers a re-study of the Bubi society intending to improve the ethnographic contributions done in colonial times and afterwards. The major contribution of this work, perhaps, is to demonstrate how the religious and kinship Bubi codes still survive in their rituality nowadays.

Date of Award	14 Nov 2013
Original language	Spanish
Awarding Institution	Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Supervisor	Virginia Fons Renaudon (Director)