Modest Women, Deceptivejinn: Identity, Alterity, and Disease in Eastern Sudan

This article examines the cultural construction of difference, danger, and disease among the Muslim patrilineal Hadendowa-Beja of eastern Sudan and focuses on the ways in which gendered discourses, together with symbolic and ritualistic practices, diagnose historical relationships of power, powerlessness, and social conflict. In particular, I show how the female body, viewed as a “fertile womb-land,” is the locus of anxieties about foreign dangers and diseases, which are perceived to be threatening to collective identity and well being. By using “foreignness” as a double-edged category linked to both power and danger, I examine how Hadendowa's feminization of social vulnerability draws attention to their own political history of exclusion and displacement.