Paper short abstract:

By exploring Akwamu narratives about blood in Ghana, this paper will revisit the politics of purity and pollution. It will unpack how contained/uncontrolled flows of certain types of blood are imagined to uphold and/or collapse socio-environmental relationality, and ask who gains from this.

Paper long abstract:

The bounding of blood - within the body and within certain spaces in the natural and domestic environment - is key to notions of physical and social life and death. For the Akwamu people of southern Ghana, blood seems indeed to be a key concept in the story of traditional Akwamu statehood. But such bounding of blood through narrative is only as robust as those that weave and maintain the stories and rules around it.

By exploring Akwamu narratives about blood in natural and domestic environs in Ghana, this paper will revisit the politics of purity and pollution. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic field research, I will unpack how contained/uncontrolled flows of certain types of blood are imagined to uphold and/or collapse relationality between people and between people and their broader (physical and spiritual) environment. In this vein, I will consider what flows of blood are said to shift Akwamu authorities from the danger of social death back into social life - or to purify - and which bloody flows threaten to pollute and endanger Akwamu socio-environmental relationality. By considering shifts in narratives about blood, I will question just how bounded and/or collapsible traditional categories of purity and pollution, or of good and bad, really are and ask who gains from this.