February 4, 1940

Professor Wendy James [February 4, 1940] was a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and now she maintains an emeritus relationship with that institution.

Among her books we find this title: The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power Among the Uduk of Sudan (1999). This text is blurbed :

'Notions of the person and of the foundations of bodily and moral experience lie at the heart of this second ethnographic volume devoted to the Uduk-speaking people of Sudan. The first part discusses enduring elements of personal knowledge in the context of a hunters' worldview. The second part gives an account of how alien religious discourse has confronted the Uduk in the course of the region's political history. The third section tells the story of the contemporaneous rise of a new diviners' movement, in part an antithetical response drawing upon the older cultural strata. The key act of the diviners is oracular consultation of the burning ebony wood: through the ebony, personal healing is sought and the foreign gods are kept at bay.'

And:

'In the case of the older ideologies of affliction among the Uduk, diviners sought through the burning ebony to lay bare the inter—community tensions of a mode of life based on engagement with the land and the forest.'

We read in this book, published by Oxford University Press, the following:

'A cult which I have not come across in my own work has been described by earlier observers as "Lion Eyes." I have heard rather vague statements about 'some people' being able to change into lions, mainly some of the southern Bertha, but have not traced a ritually transmitted lion practice among the Uduk. However, it is very likely that ...[Such a practice]...could have been ...partly absorbed into the new Order of Ebony Diviners. The account in the MS notes on the Uduk...from the mid 1940s is of interest...

'"Mabans say that the lions are in reality 'Kwanim pa' who have changed themselves into lions. This has some foundation in fact....in that the Uduks on the Yabus have the custom of initiating some babies into the cult 'Lion Eyes.''

There is a version of this book available to download here, though I did not do so, being uncertain how to investigate the site first.