A matter of grave concern? Charles Jedrej's work on Mende sodalities, and the Ebola crisis

Abstract

Charles Jedrej's corpus of published work contains several papers on the Mende women's sodality, Sande. His analysis was that Sande mobilizes power (hale) to dissolve cultural complexity into its elementary form, so that causes of social confusion can then be ‘pulled’. By focusing on the ritual mechanisms involved, Jedrej found that collective representations could be reformulated and strengthened through the ideational momentum generated by ritual practices within the sanctity of the secret cult. In effect, Jedrej argued that sodalities do not perpetuate fixed traditions, but are a means through which social change can occur. His work thus anticipates more recent (neo-Durkheimian) accounts of ritual-based ‘models’ of social dynamics. The present paper provides a contextualization and restatement of Jedrej's argument, and then considers how his insights might be useful in addressing challenges of behaviour change posed by the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in Upper West Africa, especially in regard to funeral practices for society elders, deemed by some authorities to be a major ‘motor’ of epidemic spread.