Lewis observes a "linkage between women's spirit afflictions and domestic conflict" (77)
"diagnosis and treatment gives women the opportunity to gain ends (material and non-material) which they cannot readily secure more directly"
Nigeria ("among the pagan Hausa")
when women are "in situations of domestic conflict and strife" they turn to the bori cult
"the tolerance by men of these cults [...] may reflect a shadowy recognition of the injustice of [the] contradiction between the official status of women and their actual importance to society"
"through bori the world of women temporarily subdues and humiliates the world of men" (74) ... "in their possession rituals [...] women (no doubt often in mockery) assume men's clothing" (78)
"the husband and the family [must] mount an expensive ceremondy designed to placate [a spirit] and persuade it to leave the sick host [...] thus granting the sick woman all the attention and influence which she is otherwise denied" (75)
compare to "cult of feminine frailty which, in its aetiolated form, is familiar enough to us from the swooning attacks experienced by Victorian women in similar circumstances" (77)
an "enunciation [of needs] in an oblique fashion [which] makes it possible for men to give into them without ostensibly deferring to their wives" (78)
"neither sex loses face and the official ideology of male supremacy is preserved" (though the concessions women gain can be seen as "rewards for colluding in their own oppression," Lewis quoting Gomm, 78)
see, relatedly, a similar bori cult among slaves, "bori brotherhoods" in north-west Africa, where "the bulk of the expenses involved in [...] bori therapy fell upon the masters"