Blood Connotations and Meanings in Belief Systems: An Anthropological Study in the Tagoi Communities of the Nuba Mountains—Sudan

Abstract

Using Turner’s interpretive-structural approach, this article examines blood symbolism among the Tagoi of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. It investigates whether this symbolism derives from a cosmic order or socio-cultural shifts, how it manifests in rituals, how it functions in everyday experiences, and how it articulates opposing concepts.

The article employs a pluralistic methodology integrating narrative qualitative, historical, and case study methods. Analyses operate at two levels: field and theoretical. The field level included open, unstructured group and individual interviews, conducted across locations and times, involving Tagoi men and women from different social strata. The theoretical level synthesised foundational and contemporary scholarship, from early ethnographic accounts and classical symbolic works in anthropology to recent studies on ritual symbolism.

Findings reveal that, in Tagoi culture, blood reflects symbolism at the nexus of cosmic and socio-cultural realms. It mediates material and spiritual domains, signalling kinship and status, organising roles, sustaining body-spirit balance, and marking social transitions. This is expressed through rituals, like: spirit invocation, therapeutic interventions, rites of passage as in birth and circumcision, protective childbirth rituals, and similar events. Blood performs functions spanning health, vitality, belonging, status, and protection. It embodies dualities like purity/impurity, safety/danger, life/death, and insider/outsider amid fragile living conditions.