Ethnographic Sorcery (4 page)

Marcos moved to the edge of the
igoli
⁶
upon which he sat, resting his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He
shook his head. When he looked up, he revealed a smile. “The trouble is,
mano,
you’re trying to understand this thing
scientifically.
You can’t understand this
scientifically.”

“But you’re the one who . . . !”—so befuddled was I that I found myself unable to finish my sentence.

“Vavi
are
vavi,”
Marcos responded. “There is no
sense
to what they do.” He threw his hands up in the air with gleeful exasperation. “They don’t kill for wealth or power. They don’t want money or tractors or airplanes.”

“What
do
they want?” I asked.

“They crave human flesh. They can’t get enough of it. That’s what they want.”

Marcos reminded me of what we had been told by Boaventura Makuka when we had asked him if a particular sorcerer—a man who, according to him, had made a lion to attack his own niece—had been motivated by envy (the “explanation” Muedans generally give for a sorcerer’s attack). “He must have been,” Makuka had answered, before adding, “although sometimes
vavi
attack because they decide that their victims have ‘good meat on their bones’—just like you or I would say about a goat we decided to slaughter.” Having invoked this image, Marcos now slumped back on the
igoli.
Following a pregnant pause, he looked at me and said, conclusively,
“That’s uwavi.
You can’t explain
that
scientifically!”

B
ELIEF AS
M
ETAPHOR

“There’s no use trying,” [Alice] said: “one ca’n’t believe impossible things.”

«
LEWIS CARROLL,
Through the Looking-Glass
([1871] 1998: 174) »

When I returned to the United States in 1995 after completion of my dissertation fieldwork and told my anthropologist friends and colleagues about sorcery lions, they seemed to know better than to ask if I “believed in” such things. Which is not to say that they knew—or even thought they knew—whether or not I “believed”; rather, they avoided the question, it seemed to me, because they considered any answer—mine
or
theirs—“problematic.” Others with whom I shared accounts did not observe this disciplinary taboo. When I started to teach in 1997, undergraduate students asked with persistence if I “believed in” sorcery. My answers were often witty, and always cagey. Embracing and adapting Mark Rogers’s idea that one can “believe a little bit” (Rogers n.d.),
¹
I often told people that I believed far more at night—when the distant grunts and snorts of lions could, indeed, be heard from some of the villages in which I slept—than I did in the light of day.

Muedans themselves sometimes asked me, in reference to sorcery, “What do you think of all of this?” It seemed to me that they expected me to dismiss “it all” as nonsense, as had
most Europeans they had known. When, during my first year in Mueda, Marcos asked me if I put stock in the power of the countersorcery “treatments” that we sometimes observed in healers’ compounds, I answered, cautiously, that if others believed in these treatments, “there must be something to them.” Clearly, I too found the question “problematic.”

The question that I so assiduously avoided, however, stalked me from Mueda to the United States and the United Kingdom and back to Mueda again. In the dark of night, just outside the village of Diaca, as Marcos and I—in his nephew Nelito’s dilapidated pickup truck—gathered speed to ascend the plateau on our journey from Pemba to begin our stint of intensive research on sorcery in 1999, a sleek silhouette appeared in the dim headlights before us less than thirty meters away. As quickly as we saw it, it slipped off the road and into the bush, its tail raised like a cobra poised to strike. So close were we that I could not bring the vehicle to a halt quickly enough to peer into the bush after the creature.

“Shuvi
[leopard]?” I asked Marcos, “or
ntumi
[lion]?”

“I don’t know,” he immediately responded, adding, without taking a breath, “a lioness, I think.”

As we completed the trip in eerie silence, I wondered to myself if we had “seen the same thing” before us in the dim headlights, despite my certainty that we somehow shared the adventure.
²

So what
does
the anthropologist
make of it
when told that people
make,
or
make themselves into,
lions? In talking about sorcery lions as symbols five years earlier in the ARPAC seminar room, I had attempted to steer a course between two hazards arising from such questions. The first of these hazards was epitomized for me by Sister Rosa Carla, an Italian nun who founded and ran a health clinic in Mwambula, the village adjacent to the Nang’ololo mission to which she was assigned after the Mozambican civil war ended in 1992. The sister dedicated herself tirelessly to the clinic, dispensing much-needed and much-sought-after medications in recycled plastic 35 mm photographic film
canisters sent to her by friends and parishioners around the world. I respected her greatly and visited her from time to time. Once, when I was accompanied by Marcos and Tissa, she told me that she and her Toyota Hi-Lux had recently come upon a group of hunters from the village of Nshongwe who, only moments earlier, had killed a lion in the roadway. She obliged the villagers’ request to help them transport the lion to the village center and, while doing so, got an earful of stories about lion-people. “It’s all so unfortunate,” she told me, glancing occasionally at Marcos and Tissa, whom she seemed to chastise as she spoke. “These
feiticeiros
[Portuguese for “sorcerers”] that they summon to come and kill these so-called lion-people—they are the same ones to whom my patients go for cures to infections and venereal diseases and malaria.” Her voice was stern. “I treat people at my clinic in the morning, and they die at night in the
feiticeiro’s
house because they believe he can cure them. These
feiticeiros
do the most outrageous things. They poison people with their superstition.” She shook her head as she lamented, “There is so much ignorance here. I can scarcely keep up with it all.”
³

To Sister Rosa Carla, I opposed in my mind Fernando Alves, a man of local legendry in Cabo Delgado. The son of mulatto parents, Alves lived in Pemba in the
bairro cimento
(the “concrete neighborhood,” composed mostly of houses built by Portuguese occupants in the colonial period). While he earned a living as a self-employed mechanic, Alves was, like his father, an avid big-game hunter. When local hunters, armed with bows and arrows, were unable to dispense with lions that menaced villages anywhere in the province, Alves was summoned by the provincial government to kill them. Curiously, according to the Makonde trackers employed by Alves, he was adept at recovering
lyungo,
the life substance Makonde say a predatory animal, such as a lion, vomits in the moments immediately before dying. Alves indeed attributed his success as a hunter to his ability to find and ingest
lyungo,
as Makonde hunters have long sought to do. But Alves was not Makonde; nor was he from Mueda. Even
his African forebears were foreign to the region in which he hunted and to the Makonde “traditions” he invoked. His father’s mother—a Ronga woman—came from as far away as Maputo, in the southernmost province of the country. In other contexts, he traced his hunter’s pedigree to his Portuguese grandfather. Hearing of Alves’s deeds, and occasionally listening to his stories, I found myself at times wondering how genuine his convictions were—whether this urban-born-and-raised man of mixed European-African descent had somehow “gone (more) native” or merely played on his guides’ convictions to consolidate his status among them.

In any case, in the ARPAC seminar room, talking about sorcery lions, I felt myself awkwardly positioned somewhere between Sister Rosa Carla and Senhor Alves. Thoughts of the sister’s dismissive words—ignorance, superstition—made me grimace. Thinking of Alves made me wonder if I had not detected sarcasm in Muedan accounts of him—indications that Muedans thought his claims as ridiculous as Sister Rosa Carla thought theirs.

Anthropologists have long searched for solid ground somewhere between the likes of Sister Rosa Carla and Senhor Alves—a position from which they might find sense in the worldviews of others without rendering their own views of the world nonsensical. E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic work,
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande
([1937] 1976), constituted a landmark in this disciplinary endeavor. Evans-Pritchard argued that the “strange beliefs” of Azande could not be dismissed as irrational. On the contrary, he asserted, Azande beliefs were internally coherent and worthy of serious ethnographic consideration (150). Even so, he ultimately concluded that Azande cosmology rested on the foundation of an errant assumption that witches existed in the first place. From the confident vantage point afforded him by the methods of scientific research, Evans-Pritchard stated that, although they were rational, Azande, quite simply, were wrong.
⁴
His conclusion echoed the assessment made of Trobri
and Islanders’ beliefs in magic by one of his professors, Bronislaw Malinowski: “subjectively true” but “objectively false” (in Tambiah 1990: 81).
5

Decades later, the anthropologist Paul Stoller would write, “The Songhay world challenged the basic premises of my scientific training” (Stoller and Olkes 1987: 227). In his treatment of Songhay sorcery, Stoller concluded, “Living in Songhay forced me to confront the limitations of the Western philosophical tradition” (227).
⁶
By contrast with Evans-Pritchard, Stoller determined, “For me, respect means accepting fully beliefs and phenomena which our system of knowledge holds preposterous” (229). Whereas the line dividing Evans-Pritchard from Sister Rosa Carla is fine, the line between Stoller and Senhor Alves may be finer. Stoller’s claims to have been, during his time in the field, not only the victim of sorcerers’ attacks but also the perpetrator were met with sarcastic derision from some of his critics within the discipline (e.g., Beidelman 1989; cf. Baum 1990; Denzin 1990; Jackson 1988; Twitty 1987).
⁷

As I spoke in the ARPAC seminar room, it seemed to me that Victor Turner blazed a suitable trail between Sister Rosa Carla and Senhor Alves. Turner’s work contributed to the development of a “symbolist approach” that gained currency in the discipline in the late 1960s (Morris 1987). Fundamental to the symbolist approach is what Kenneth Burke referred to as a shift away from treating “magical beliefs” as “bad science” and toward treating them as a form of “rhetorical art” (Burke 1969). John Beattie, in his discussion of the study of ritual, elaborated on this approach, proclaiming:

I ally myself squarely . . . with those who assert that ritual is essentially expressive and symbolic, and that it is this that distinguishes it from other aspects of human behaviour, and that gives rise to its characteristic problems. In this respect it is allied with art rather than with science, and it is susceptible of similar kinds of understanding. When we contemplate a work of art, we do not usually ask what use it is (although of course we may do so); we ask rather what it means, what are the ideas and values which it is intended to express? Like art, ritual is a kind of language, a way of saying things. 1966: 65)
⁸

Considering that Victor Turner defined a symbol as “a thing regarded by general consent as naturally typifying or representing or recalling something by possession of
analogous qualities
or by association in fact or in thought” (1967: 19, emphasis added), it comes as no surprise that anthropologists adopting the symbolist approach have sometimes conceived of their informants’
beliefs
as
metaphors.
Take, for example, the work of Jean Comaroff (1985) on Zionist healing cults in South Africa. Comaroff has argued that the physical afflictions suffered by individual Tshidi served, when she conducted her fieldwork among them, as metaphors for the larger “ills” of apartheid society. “The metaphors of social contradiction deployed by these cults,” she has written, “are often rooted in the notion of the body at war with itself, or with its immediate social and material context; and desired transformations focus upon ‘healing’ as a mode of repairing the tormented body and, through it, the oppressive social order itself” (9). More recently, Luise White has advanced a similar argument in her historical work on the widespread belief in colonial Africa in vampire-firemen (
wazimamoto
) who sucked the blood of captured victims: “I think there are many obvious reasons why Africans might have thought that colonial powers took precious substances from African bodies . . . I think bloodsucking by public employees is a fairly obvious
metaphor
for state-sponsored extractions” (2000: 18, emphasis added).
⁹
Even more apropos to Muedan sorcery lions, Michael Jackson has asserted that
“suwa’ye
[“witchcraft” in the language of Karanko in Sierra Leone, among whom he worked] is a common metaphor for extraordinary powers” (1989: 91). “Beliefs,” Jackson has concluded, “are more like metaphors than many dare imagine” (66).
¹⁰

In treating beliefs as metaphors, it would seem that Comaroff, White, Jackson, and many others have escaped the dilemma
posed by assessing their scientific validity. They have suggested that these beliefs constitute alternative ways of talking about historical events and social realities. As White has phrased it, they “look for what such beliefs articulate in a given time and space” 2000: 44).These expressions, they have told us, might best be understood as richly creative languages (to use Beattie’s terminology) with which to talk about reality—languages that inflect and refract others, including the language of science, but that need not be seen as contradicting science.
¹¹