Ethnographic Sorcery (14 page)

Chombo now reached for my hand and shook it firmly.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

I was not yet safe from vaccination, I knew. I drew breath and continued.

“Chombo,” I said, “I have also learned that
vakulaula
do not use their
mitela
only to heal. They also use it to protect against harm before it happens.”

“Yes,” he said, focused on my words.

“Well, as I have traveled the plateau, I have used my stories in the same way. Everywhere that I have gone, I have told people that I work here among the
vakulaula
of Mueda with the permission of João Chombo, president of AMETRAMO-Mueda. Everyone knows that I travel with your approval. Everyone knows that I work with your blessing.”

“You do,” Chombo said.

I was now close to my conclusion. I knew that Chombo might as easily laugh at me as agree with what I was about to say. I carried on nonetheless.

“Your blessing on my work and the knowledge that you have shared with me . . . I carry these things with me wherever I go.”

“It is true,” he said, shaking my hand.

“You told me once that if you gave me your
mitela,
I could not use it because I didn’t know how to use it. You told me that the power lies not in
mitela
but in knowledge.”
⁴

Chombo turned to Marcos and said, of me,
“Andimanya”
(He knows).

“I know that your blessing and your wisdom go with me to America, even if you don’t vaccinate me. Because I know that your power lies in your knowledge, I feel that you have
already treated me
by sharing a bit of that knowledge with me. So, I don’t feel like I need to be vaccinated.”

Chombo now looked at me, still holding my hand firmly and shaking it. After what seemed to me an eternal pause, he said,
“Undimanya
[You know], Andiliki.”

I held tight my breath for fear that, if I let loose the sigh within me, I would somehow betray myself. I hoped to get away as soon as I could, before Chombo changed his mind—before he sifted through the hocus-pocus of my words, before he inverted them, undid them, annulled them (
kupilikula
).

“It is late, and you will be traveling tomorrow,” I said. “We should go now and let you sleep.”

Chombo wished me a good journey and asked when I would return. I told him that I didn’t know when, but that I would see him again.

Marcos and Tissa lingered with Chombo as Mbegweka escorted me to the edge of her yard. I had declined Chombo’s offer, but Marcos and Tissa scrambled in the aftermath of my words to take the most powerful healer in Mueda up on his offer to vaccinate.

The next morning, they rose just before sunrise and returned to Mbegweka’s yard. They awakened Mbeg
weka only to find that Chombo had left for the lowlands under cover of darkness, when only “those without fear” travel.

N
OTES

1. The description that Christopher Davis provides of Tabwa "'magical' circumstantial therapies" as the production of "analogous worlds . . . fitted together like so many
concentric circles"
(2000: 300, emphasis added) similarly resonates with Borges's "Circular Ruins."

1. When I told Muedans that my English name, Harry, could be translated into Portuguese as Henrique, they informed me that, in Shimakonde, Henrique was pronounced Andiliki. Many Muedans in fact bear the "Shimakonde name" Andiliki, while others (generally more literate) call themselves Henrique in "proper Portuguese."

2. See also Sarró 2000: 179.

IN SEARCH OF THE FORWARD-LOOKING PEASANT

1. On this point, see M. F. Brown 1986: 15; Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998: 1; Hallen 2001: 80.

2. See also Bond and Ciekawy 2001: 1-5.

3. On other occasions, it was explained to me that sorcery lions were also identified by unusual behavior, such as lingering near human settlements (West 2005a: xxiii, xxvi, xxvii-xxviii). In reference to Evans-Pritchard's accounts of Nuer statements that "twins are birds" and similar ideas among Tikopia, Raymond Firth has noted, "A bird that behaves normally is 'just a bird'" (1966: 10).

4. In this regard, Muedans acted like the
benandanti
of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Italy, who intuitively understood that commentary on the lived experience of witchcraft was appropriate to some sociopolitical contexts and not to others (Ginsburg [1966] 1992: 83).

5. In this regard, my experience was similar to that of Clyde Kluckhohn (1944: 14), who studied Navaho witchcraft in the 1940s. See also Favret-Saada 1980: 77; Tannenbaum 1993: 67.

6. See also Ciekawy 1998: 120.

"THIS MUST BE STUDIED SCIENTIFICALLY"

1. Mair (1969: 199-221) offered a useful summary of such approaches, while Dillon-Malone (1988) has provided a more contemporary example of the approach, replete with statistics on the frequencies of occurrence of accusations directed at specific categories of people. See also Forde 1958: 170.

2. In his work on Navaho witchcraft, Kluckhohn (1944) also asserted that those accused of witchcraft were generally the elderly, the wealthy, and the powerful. More recently, Ciekawy (Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998: 128) and Niehaus (2001: 198) have identified the aged as primary targets of sorcery/witchcraft accusations in Kenya and in South Africa, respectively.

3. Beidelman (1963: 74) also identified outsiders and co-wives as among common witchcraft suspects. Mombeshora (1994: 71) has more recently argued that witchcraft is a "smoke-screen for generational conflicts embedded in the social fabric of kinship and marriage," while Rodman (1993) has argued that emergent postcolonial elites are most often accused by villagers seeking to level social disparities.

4. Cf. Niehaus (Niehaus, Mohlala, and Shokane 2001: 83-112), who has argued that, while witchcraft accusations
can
be read as indices of social strain, the vectors of accusation are multiple and contradictory.

5. See also Lambek 1993: 238; Whyte 1997: 200.

6. An
igoli
is a knee-high platform made of a braided reed cord lattice stretched over a rectangular wooden frame and elevated from the ground by four wooden legs. It may serve as a bed or as a bench on which to sit.

1. See also Lewis 1994: 569.

2. See also Ashforth 2000: 244-245.

3. Sister Rosa Carla’s dismissal of sorcery as superstition contrasts greatly with the approach taken to European forms of witchcraft and sorcery by the church during the Inquisition, when such forces were generally conceived of as the work of the devil (Ginzburg [1966] 1992), as well as with that of many contemporary Protestant sects in Africa. Sister Rosa Carla’s response bears evidence of the partial (sometimes paradoxical) historical penetration of Catholicism by a scientific worldview.

4. Notwithstanding his ambivalence about anthropology as a “science,” as Tambiah has told us, “Evans-Pritchard did subscribe to the notion that there was a context-independent notion of ‘reality’ (the ‘reality’ whose truth ‘science’ establishes) against which the rationality of Zande notions of witchcraft and oracles could be judged and be found wanting” (Tambiah 1990: 117). He even wrote: “Witches, as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist” (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 18). Abrahams similarly concluded that beliefs in witchcraft were “mistaken” (1994: 11). Bailey, borrowing a phrase from Ibsen, suggested that witchcraft/sorcery beliefs constituted “lies that make life possible” (1994: 4). It should be noted that Evans-Pritchard’s position on such matters changed subtly after he embraced Catholicism later in life. According to Engelke, “Evans-Pritchard stopped just short of saying a background as a believer gives the anthropologist a privileged understanding [of religious experience]” (2002: 6). Albeit still asserting a “scientific perspective,” Evans-Pritchard himself wrote that “there is no possibility of [the anthropologist’s] knowing whether the spiritual beings of primitive religions or of any others have any existence or not, and since that is the case he cannot take the question into consideration. The beliefs are for him sociological facts, not theological facts, and his sole concern is with their relation to other social facts. His problems are scientific, not merely metaphysical or ontological” (1965: 17).

5. Here, “science” connotes something different than it did in my discussions with Marcos in the preceding chapter. Those conversations were about the sociological patterns of sorcery. These are about the truth of claims that people actually make or become lions.

6. See also Plotkin 1993: 101–102, 230–231, 266–267.

7. See also Willis and Chisanga 1999. Willis has claimed to have seen spirits, to have been attacked by sorcerers, and to have himself healed people while conducting fieldwork in Zambia. Whereas Stoller has been accused by some of having “gone native,” Willis-who claimed to have been married in a prior life to “the same entity who
later became Mary Magdalene" (9)—has spoken of his own healing career not as a product of his anthropological fieldwork exclusively but, instead, as a life trajectory that has sometimes intersected with his anthropological fieldwork.

8. See also Beattie 1970: 261.

9. See also Pels 1999: 275. Pels has similarly argued that Luguru accounts of
mumiani
(bloodsuckers) can be read as a metaphorical commentary on extractive colonial relations.

10. On belief as metaphor, see also Auge 1975; Bailey 1994: 39, 85, 106; Beattie 1964; Boddy 1989: 337-360; de Heusch 1985; Fernandez 1991: 218; Firth 1966; Laderman 1991: 13; Leach 1964; Levi-Strauss 1966; Pitt-Rivers 1970: 187; Ruel 1970: 334; Sahlins 1981; Schmoll 1993: 205; Stoller and Olkes 1987: 229; Tambiah 1985. Ashforth (1998) and Willis (Willis and Chisanga 1999: 115) have explicitly conceived of animal familiars as metaphors.

11. Horton has rather cynically concluded that most symbolists are motivated by "a deep sense of guilt and anxiety about the arrogantly invidious comparisons made by their predecessors between the thought of the West and that of the non-West" (1993: 135). He has written: "Most Symbolists accept that non-Western worldviews,
if
considered as systems for explanation, prediction and control, and
if
measured as such against the yardstick of modern Western science, emerge as markedly inferior to the latter. By denying that explanation, prediction and control are the
real
aims of non-Western religious discourse, Symbolists are able to satisfy their liberal scruples" (7; see also 58-61, 128). Horton cites Barley, who once sarcastically concluded: "It looks crazy. It must be symbolism" (128).

12. Langford (2002: 200) has suggested that, in similar fashion, medical anthropologists often forgo evaluation of a practice's biological efficacy in favor of examining its symbolic efficacy.

13. Cf. Jackson 1989: 107-108.

"THE PROBLEM MAY LIE THERE"

1.
Likola
is the term for a Makonde matrilineage; a
likola
sister is a mother's sister's daughter, who is treated by Makonde as a sibling.

2. On 16 June i960, colonial police fired on a crowd of demonstrators in Mueda town. The incident—subsequently referred to by Mozambican nationalists as the "Mueda Massacre"—was celebrated as the precipitating event in the struggle for Mozambican independence.

3. In the run-up to the 1994 elections, through which the peace was consolidated after the 1977-1992 Mozambican civil war, the UN established demobilization centers throughout the country where government or rebel troops were disarmed, quartered, and prepared for reintegration into civilian life.

4. Despite buying my vehicle through a contact made via a Ford dealership in Pretoria, I later discovered that it had, at some point in its brief life, had its VIN (vehicle identification number) changed—a sure sign that it was once stolen.

5. Green (1994: 35) has described Pogoro antiwitchcraft rites that also involve painting the subject's head with a cross.

WHOSE METAPHORS?

1. Joanna Overing has written: "It is easier for us to accept the poetic informant than to accept (even intellectually) a person who claims to believe what is totally crazy, untrue and irrational according to our own empirically based truth conditions and formal rules of logic" (1985: 152).

2. See also Hallen and Sodipo 1986: 7-8.

3. See also Weiner 1994: 597-598.

4. Evans-Pritchard famously argued, with regard to the Nuer metaphor "twins are birds," that "Nuer are not saying that a twin is like a bird but that he is a bird" (1956: 131). Nonetheless, he asserted that, depending upon the content and context of Nuer metaphors, "is" may have various connotations ranging from the identity of one entity with another to the manifestation of one entity in another. He concluded that it would be a mistake to discount the "poetic sense" expressed in Nuer metaphors (142). See also Lienhardt 1954: 97-98 (where it is suggested that such statements lie between the literal and the figurative); and commentary on Evans-Pritchard and on Lienhardt in Firth 1966. Atkinson, following Castaneda ([1968] 1990), has told us that only with time did she come to appreciate that her Wana informants "treated aspects of 'non-ordinary reality'—not 'as if they were real, but rather 'as real'" (1989: 37). See also Hsu 1999: 212. Townsley (1997: 14-15) has pointed out that it is often impossible analytically to discern whether people "believe" the metaphors they use. In any case, Muedans with whom we worked did not assert that Imbwambwe was
like
a lion but rather that he
was
a lion. See also Whitehead 2002: 97.

5. Firth argued: "Belief in the existence of men-lions rests not only on abstract perception of contrast and resolution of opposites but also on concrete experiences of anxiety, terror and destruction" (1966: 3). See also Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998: 3.