The hunted and the haunted: death, exchange and the spirits in Northwestern Ghana

Abstract

The Vagla are a small group on Gur-Grushi speakers whose ideology is strongly connected to hunting symbolism. The paper considers the special treatment reserved to hunters once it has become clear that they are about to die. While ordinary villagers ideally die in the arms of a close relative, hunters are locked in their room and left to die alone. This because it is held that the souls of the animals killed in the hunter‟s career enter the room and collect his soul. This will be presented to the Lords of the Animals in the bush, who will then release more animals to be killed in the hunting effort that will take place on a large scale at the hunter‟s funeral. The papers analyses the ethnography within the framework of the theory of exchange: the hunter‟s “bad death” constitutes a special form of sacrifice necessary for the exchange between humans and spirits to continue to the advantage of both.