Ethnographic Sorcery (16 page)

1. Compare this with cases in the ethnographic literature on "lion-people" and/or "leopard-people" in which ethnographers and/or those among whom they have worked have suggested that people "dress up" as such beasts to attack their victims (for example, donning boxing gloves with knives protruding from the knuckles to produce the effects of an animal attack). In some instances, "lion societies" or "leopard societies" reportedly have "assassinated" their enemies in such disguise. See, e.g., Ellis 1999; Kalous 1974; Lindskog 1954; MacCormick 1983; Parsons [1927] 1970: 235-236; Pratten 2002; Pratten, forthcoming; Roberts 1986; Shaw 2001.

2. This was the line I sometimes took in my conversations with Marcos, simultaneously suggesting that the rising occurrence of lion-sorcery corresponded either with the movement of populations into previously unsettled areas or with the onset of the rainy season, which brought wild animals up from the lowlands to the plateau (West 2005a: xxviii).

3. Basso has argued that "the production and interpretation of metaphorical speech" entails "an ability to form novel semantic categories" (1976: 95). Here I argue that Muedans produced and inhabited novel ontological domains.

4. Lee similarly concluded: "Symbol is in fact a part of the whole, a component of the field which also contains the so-called
thing,
as well as the process of symbolizing, and the apprehending individual" (1959: 79).

5. "Metaphor is not simply a mapping of similarities from one domain to another; it creates similarities by demanding that we construct a category or a world in which connections between topic and vehicle can be found" (Kirkmayer 1993: 172).

6. This is, perhaps, the same
bridge
that Eliade (1964: 482) suggested shamans must cross in their healing rites.

7. On "embodied metaphor," see also Low 1994.

8. Garro and Mattingly (2000: 11-12) have similarly argued that healers' narratives do not merely reflect a world outside them but they also do something in that world. In his ethnography of Aguaruna magic, Michael Brown (1986: 25) has asserted the need to recognize a link between symbolization and its material effects, giving ontological precedence to neither. See also Lambek 1993: 291-293; Plotkin 1993: 262; Townsley 1997: 17.

9. Kirkmayer has made the same point, telling us that the metaphor "surgeons are butchers" may color how we think about the former in substantial ways (1992: 332).

10. Turner similarly suggested that ritual operates in a "subjunctive mood" (1981: 159).

1. This is not to suggest that Muedans read the Mozambican "transition to democracy" only through the discourse of sorcery. Elsewhere, I have argued that Muedans simultaneously engaged with the world through a variety of (sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory) discursive formations (West 2005a).

2. According to Rosenthal (1998: 201), Ewe similarly conceive of Voodoo as an unwieldy power.

3. Goody reported that the death of Gonja chiefs was always assumed to be due to witchcraft, as "it [was] only a matter of time" before one of a chief's many witch enemies discovered an exploitable weakness (1970: 228).

4. See also Favret-Saada 1980: 122.

5. See also Beidelman 1993: 4, 206; Gottlieb 1992: 14.

6. See also Jackson 1996: 30.

7. See also Favret-Saada 1980: 13; Palmié 2002.

8. Fernandez too has suggested that metaphors may "edify ... by puzzlement" ([1982] 1986: 222): "Symbolic productions speak to that inchoate condition, at once providing us with images which we can perform so as to act our way through those intense moments in life (the sacred ones—in which dilemmas, ambiguities and problems ultimately unresolvable threaten to overwhelm us); while at the same time they expand our awareness and temper our intolerance for such incongruities and incompatibilities" (223). Rosalind Shaw (1991) has similarly attributed the power of divination (a component of Muedan sorcery) to its "cryptic potency."

9. Philip Peek has argued: "Many African peoples maintain that 'real' knowledge is hidden, secret, available only to certain people capable of using it properly" (1991: 14). Francis Nyamnjoh has suggested: "If the reality of politics were limited to the apparent and the transparent as prescribed by liberal democracy, there would hardly be reason to explain success or failure otherwise. In general, if people had what they merited, and merited what they had in liberal democratic
terms, there would be little need for a hidden hand of any kind, real or imagined. But because nothing is what it seems, the invisible must be considered to paint a full picture of reality" (2001: 37).

10. See also Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998; Meyer 1998.

11. Whereas Evans-Pritchard ([1937] 1976: 65) argued that Azande did not constantly worry themselves about witchcraft, Muedans did worry constantly about the operation of power, whether in the visible or the invisible realm. In this regard, they acted more like Madumo, as described in Ashforth 2000.

12. In a similar vein, whereas Rosenthal has told us that Gorovodu priests, among Ewe, explicitly state that they make their own gods, suggesting that this differentiates them from Christians, who are made by their gods, she has further suggested that Ewe understand themselves to be, in the end, sometimes "undone by their own creations" (1998: 1, 45, 223).

13. Beidelman (1993: 8) and Ashforth (2001: 219) have made similar arguments.

DOCTORS
KALAMATATU

1. Ciekawy tells a similar story (2001: 174-175).

1. This was accentuated by the fact that my research on "traditional authority" and my research on sorcery converged on healers, with whom I spent a great deal of time during my 1999 research stint. Rasmussen (2001: xvi) has argued that most medical anthropology writings pay insufficient attention to the effects of the researcher's medical knowledge on his or her encounters with informants in the field. I played the part of the medical Good Samaritan with great ambivalence. As often as not, my medical training placed me in uncomfortable situations. Once, for example, I witnessed a man fall more than ten meters when the rotten telephone pole he was climbing (to restore phone service to the administrator's home on the occasion of the president's campaign visit to the town of Mueda in 1994) gave way beneath him. I hurried to the man's side and looked for something with which to immobilize him in order to protect his spinal column during transport to the hospital. Within a few moments, I found myself working at odds with a crowd that wished simply to pick the man up by his arms and legs and toss him in the back of a pickup truck that had stopped at the edge of the road. As I warned of the dangers of this, others began to accuse me of trying to kill the man by delaying his transport to the hospital. Fearing, suddenly, that the crowd would turn on me, I relented and watched him be carted off. I later learned that he was released from the hospital the following day. Although he limped, he served to some as walking proof of my suspect medical sensibilities and questionable intentions.

2. Favret-Saada (1980: 11, 168–170) reported similar comments being made of her while researching witchcraft in the Bocage. See also Whitehead (2002: 32), who reported being suspected as a sorcerer for his endless inquiries on the topic.

3. Pace Jackson 1989: 8.

4. Cf. W. Davis 1988. Davis isolated and tested the substance that he suggested Haitian
bokor
used to make zombies.

5. Cf. Stoller and Olkes 1987. Stoller reported having killed someone by means of sorcery.

6. Much of what anthropologists accept as fact is bound up with their own interpretation of their informants’ words, acts, and even dispositions—all the more so with a topic shrouded in innuendo, such as sorcery is in Mueda. If I speculate here about Kalamatatu’s and other Muedans’ understandings of ethnography and its similarity to sorcery, I do so on the basis of a wealth of interaction that contextualizes my suppositions. In any case, I seek to do what Michael Herzfeld has praised Kathleen Stewart (1996) for, namely, “juxtapos[ing] . . . ‘theory-speak’ with the local way of talking about events and experiences, not in order to mock either, but, to the contrary, as a way of empirically exposing the substantial intellectual grounds shared by those who study human society professionally and those who study it because that is the only way to make sense of their very conditions of life” (2001: 25).

7. Boddy has similarly compared ethnographic fieldwork and writing to spirit possession, telling us that both are “rooted in the conviction that knowledge is achieved through transcendence of the self in the other” (1989: 356–360). Eze has written: “Like the sorcerer, the anthropologist must ‘escape’ his world in order to encounter its objects, and fulfill the imaginary desires of his or her disciplines. Like the sorcerer, the anthropologist must also abandon his or her ‘identity-constituting space’ in order to make possible what is mysteriously called the ‘experience of a fusing copresence of confusion.’ As participant observer, and much like the sorcerer, the anthropologist must always ‘face an elsewhere,’ thus poised ‘between inside and outside,’
in the art that seeks 'mastery of alterity.' The goal of the (re)search experience, for the sorcerer as for anthropology, is to 'uncover another world'" (2001: 273). Eze further refers to the "border-crossing" of anthropology and sorcery alike as "fantastic adventures" of "longing," "hunting," and "escaping" (273-274). See also Favret-Saada 1980: 11.

8. On this point, see Herzfeld 2001: 26.

9. Cf. Jackson 1989: 182.

10. Those who have reflected critically on the so-called crisis of representation have often assumed the resolution of this crisis to lie in collective representations deriving from "collaborative" research— from "solidarity" emerging within a dialogue between ethnographer and informant (see, e.g., S. G. Brown 2004). But even in the absence of such mutuality, I would suggest, the politics of representation need not provoke paralysis. See James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997 for a more sober assessment that recognizes the ubiquity of representation in social life and the myriad ways in which representations are challenged as a matter of course.

11. As Herzfeld has written, in praise of the work of Nicholas Thomas, "Perhaps we should stop thinking that our actions are so consequential: it is time to get matters into proportion, and this we can only do by downplaying the importance of our own roles and facing the engagement of our informants in the creation as well as the reception of our ethnographic accounts" (2001: 32).

1. Sorcerers were said to turn ordinary humans into such animals to serve their purposes.

2. Ashforth (2000: 119) has also told the story of a healer's proposition to vaccinate him.

3. Cf. Stoller and Olkes 1987: 108.

4. Green (1994: 25) has suggested that Pogoro, in Tanzania, similarly believe that the power of healing ultimately rests not in the medicinal substances used but rather in the knowledge of the healer who deploys these substances. Cf. Reynolds, who has reported that while people in Mashonaland attribute the power of healing to the healer's knowledge, healers themselves stress the importance of their "spiritual endowment" (1986: 173, 183). Cf. also Voeks, who has reported that Candomblé practitioners say that "without the leaves [medicinal substances] . . . there is no Candomblé" (1997: 160).

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