Alina Astăluș
American Studies
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Year 1
Muchona the
Hornet
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Victor Turner
(1920 –1983)
• British cultural anthropologist and ethnographer with a
focus on symbols and rituals
• Wife Edith Brocklesby Davis (married Turner) was also
an anthropologist who helped her husband with his field
studies
• His focus was on ritual of passage and their liminal
phases
• The Forest of Symbols (1970) is a collection of essays on
ritual symbolism of the African people
• The Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing was
established in recognition of his research
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Who was Muchona?

Traditional healer (chimbuki) and a key informant of Turner, who spend 8
months talking with the researcher about his life and the rituals he had
undergone.

His mother was a slave and he had to buy his freedom.

His short stature, intelligent and knowledge of the natural world made him a
target for other tribal members jealousy, he was a “marginal man”.

He lived outside the village with his two wives and seven children, and travelled
a lot to help in either rituals or medic procedures.

Known by many names, not just Muchona. “Hornet” was word-play on his title
and behavior when drunk: “Like a hornet or a bee […] I stay near the beer
calabashes, talking loudly and stinging those who annoy me.”
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Rituals and Symbols
Nkula – a ritual performed to help with menstrual disorders, barrenness or
to help deliver children (Muchona helped his mother with her illness,
taking the role of Chaka – similar to a midwife)
Kayong’u – a ritual to get rid of a possessing spirit, that involves traditional
medicine, ritualistic animal decapitation and objects that are hidden
to be found by the patient
- Victor Turner considered Muchona to be suffering from a
psychosomatic disorder when he had undergone the ritual
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Quotes the study and Muchona

We were so absorbed in our rivalry that we failed to notice a swart elderly gnome padding perkily beside us.

Thus, while most Kaneng’a practitioners collected medicine from the interior of graves and some would even
brandish human thighbones while they dances, Muchona merely took grass form the surface of graves and bark
scraping from trees.

What hurts you, when discovered and propitiated, helps you. (Muchona)

I dream of the country of Nyamwana where I was born and used to live. I am where my mother died.[…] Does my
shadow go there in sleep? (Muchona)

The flower of altruism sometimes has twisted roots.

The philosophy don would have to return to a world that could only make a “witchdoctor” of him. Had not some kind
of death occurred?
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Conclusions
Thank you for your attention!