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Until the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Kabye country, some heads of enemies – those of men foreign to the group – were buried in a mound of earth referred to as hude, meaning ‘manure’. In each locality, this mound is situated inside a wooded sanctuary where the spirit of the mythical founding ancestor resides. In order to understand this practice, this article examines how it fitted within the overall logic of the male initiation cycle, contextualising it in relation to past and present practices. Because it was a highly ambivalent element of the bush, the head of an enemy renewed the generative power of this original ‘manure’ prodigiously, so as to ensure the group’s survival in their land. The burial of the heads of strangers appears to be an initiatory variant of other forms of mastery of the ambivalence of wild forces, entrusted in other African societies to the chief and his waste heap.
transcend national boundaries and be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.9 Among the committee decisions that have generated controversy was the inscription of the Nord-Pas de Calais mining basin, including industrial waste heaps, on the World Heritage List in 2012. In that same year there were 962 sites on the World Heritage List: 745 cultural sites, 188 natural sites and 29 mixed properties. The list in the early twenty-first century remains dominated by sites within Europe but is becoming more representative and inclusive of sites on
dozen other farms in the immediate vicinity. The fields surrounding the village are crisscrossed by a substantial number of well-used footpaths to which the public has unfettered access. Nearly two hundred years of industrial activity has also left its mark on the region’s landscape. ‘Pit tops’, the once prominent industrial complexes that supported the mining activities underground, have been partially eradicated. The substantial waste heaps – 120 feet high and with a footprint of 83 acres in the case of Dodworth – where mining refuse was tipped over centuries are
Pynchon focuses on sculptures fashioned out of the debris of the riots: ‘Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal, fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths.’20 In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon would write of new consciousnesses being created out of the waste heaps, of minds ‘kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series … to bring them together in their slick persistence and our preterition … to make sense of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of