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The Ewe term "aklama" designates a person's soul, a bush spirit, and the idea of contingency. The paper aims to show, via an analysis of hunting rites, that the core of the concept consists in a relation to the Other characterized both by existential antagonism and mutual identification.
The Ewe and Akan notion of the "soul" (kra, kla, aklama) is intimately connected to the idea of "chance" and "luck" in a context of danger. The paradigmatic example of such a context is hunting. However, far from reducing itself to the concept of a guardian spirit protecting the hunter, "aklama" is also conceived of as a bush spirit acting as the protector of animals and thus as the hunter's deadly enemy. What might appear as a paradox is actually at the core of the notion of the self. The familiar representation of the soul as a "double" here takes the particular form of a relation to the Other characterized both by existential antagonism and mutual identification. This relation is mobilized and modified through ritual action, in what appears as a transformation of funerary rites for the evil dead. The paper aims to clarify this relationship, drawing both on historical ethnographic accounts and recent fieldwork data from South-east Togo.