Of House or Bush The Cultural Psychodynamics of Infanticide in Northern Ghana Aaron R. Denham In northern Ghana, the Nankani people describe how disabled or ill children and those whose births coincide with tragic events are spirit children sent from the bush to cause misfortune and destroy the family. Upon identification, some spirit children are subject to infanticide. People often describe spirit children as wanting to kill the same-sex parent to take over the house. Based on discourse alone, one might explain the spirit child in terms of a presumed underlying oedipal dynamic, but such an analysis is partial. When we interpret the spirit child from the bifocal vision of cultural psychodynamics, which links cultural phenomenology and psychody- namic paradigms, we gain a complex understanding of the interactions between Nankani cultural models, moral imaginations, family relations, and parental ambivalence. I interpret families’ perceptions of danger and their feelings of fear and hostility toward children and refer to infant alterity, narcissistic injury, scapegoating, and projective processes that link individual sentiments and decision- making with their cultural and material contexts. Cultural psychodynamics illuminates Nankani conceptions of child development, morality, and parental psychologies and offers insights into how and why some parents kill their children. I was sitting with Atanga outside of his compound in northern Ghana, shaded by a shelter constructed from old sun-bleached logs and piles of tightly bundled millet stalks left over from the harvest. Midway through our conversation, I asked the Nan- kani elder to tell me what he knew about spirit children. At first he described both the mythical spirits and those ap- pearing in human form. Infants born with teeth, facial hair, deformities, and illness—or those born into families experi- encing disorder or misfortune—are spirit children. Such chil- dren are sometimes given a concoction to send them back to the bush (cause their death). He recounted a case where a 2-month- old infant suspected of being a spirit performed physically im- possible feats, such as walking and eating adult foods. To the amusement of the men sitting nearby, he recounted a story of a spirit having sex with a woman without her knowledge. All were themes I had heard from others. But what followed was unexpected: “You see,” Atanga explained, “if it’s a girl and the family sees sickness in the mother, or if the mother dies, it’s believed that such a child is a spirit child. That child, it will kill the mother so it can be with the father. Or if it’s a male child, it will kill the father so it can sleep with the mother and take control of the house.” One cannot deny the strong resemblance between classical oedipal dynamics and Nankani spirit-child beliefs or simply see them as an artifact of a Western psychoanalytic gaze. What- ever we call them, they are fundamental to Nankani under- standings of certain kinds of children. Yet what value might these oedipal motifs hold for understanding spirit-child phe- nomena? And more broadly, how might they help to illumi- nate Nankani conceptions of child development, morality, and parental psychologies? It has been decades since the debates about the universality of the Oedipus complex. What can think- ing with oedipal motifs reveal or index when situated within re- cent developments in psychoanalytic anthropology, particu- larly when understood in the light of cultural psychodynamics (see Groark 2017)? Cultural psychodynamics spans a long-held conceptual gap in anthropology existing between sociocultural and psycho- logical explanations; it is a disjuncture that Fortes (1987) de- scribed as how manifest custom (culture) corresponds to or is a product of the mental mechanisms postulated by psychoana- lytic theory. In methodological terms, Fortes (1987) questioned how we might bridge the “gap between the level of observation open to the ethnographer and the level of observation and the- ory at which psychoanalysis operates” (182–183). A broad so- lution entails attuning ourselves to the dialogic interplay and tension between individual subjectivity and social forms to capture the complexity of culturally inflected experience and, ideally, to present a nonreductive, holistic reimagining of what it means to be human (Ingham 1996:ix). While psychological theories and methods can enhance our perceptual and analytic skills, they alone cannot be the pri- mary mode of analysis. As Devereux (1980) emphasized, under- standing human behavior requires the application and cross- fertilization of both cultural and psychological methods and explanations. He argued that any meaningful framework for the study of humanity must not dissociate the study of culture from the study of psyche, since both are inseparable yet com- plementary aspects of human cultural psychology (Devereux 1980:71). Offering a contemporary vision that systematically links psy- chodynamic approaches with a nuanced cultural phenomenol- ogy, Groark’s (2017) formulation of cultural psychodynamics focuses on the subtle intrapsychic processes that underpin Aaron R. Denham is Medical and Psychological Anthropologist in the Global Health Program of the University of California San Diego (9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0532, USA [adenham@ucsd.edu]). This paper was submitted 12 VIII 17, accepted 13 X 18, and electronically published 29 I 20. Current Anthropology, volume 61, issue 1, February 2020. q 2020 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2020/6101-00XX$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/706989 This content downloaded from 137.110.034.029 on January 29, 2020 10:27:11 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).