Ethnographic Sorcery (10 page)

It might be argued here that Muedans confused semantic and ontological domains: that the invisible domain, and the sorcery lions produced therein, were merely ideas, while the visible domain, along with ordinary lions (bush lions), properly existed. Such transference of lions from one domain to the other might be dismissed as an errant Muedan superimposition of semantic sorcery lions onto ontological bush lions.
²
Following Cassirer (1946), however, we might instead conclude that Muedans conceived
of,
and thus
conceived,
a world of two domains: that both the visible domain and the invisible were, at once,
imagined and real;
that through their perception of the world, Muedans
made
each of these domains, and the constitutive relations between them.
³

Dorothy Lee has argued: “Symbols are a part of the process whereby the experienced world, the world of perception and concept, is created out of the world of physical reality” (1959: 79). As such, symbols do not refer to a separate world but instead constitute an essential part of the world of which they speak. Along these lines, Roy Wagner has argued that “neither signifier nor signified belongs to the established order of things,” that symbolization constitutes “the act of invention in which form and inspiration come to figure each other,” and that “[t]hus the tension and contrast between symbol and symbolized collapse[s], and we may speak of such a construction as a ‘symbol’ that stands for itself” (1975: 43).
⁴
Symbols, in other words, articulate the relationships that they create with, and within, the world that is conceived through them.
⁵

Whereas James Siegel has suggested that the “‘truth’ of magic is the power inherent in language to conjoin” and that shamans, in the cases with which he is concerned, achieve this conjunction by “say[ing], in effect, that ‘this’ . . . is ‘that’” (2003: 148, 149), Muedans with whom we worked effectively said that what is imagined is real—that the sorcerer is a lion. In discur
sively producing sorcery lions, and in moving them from one domain to another, Muedans in fact accomplished what James Fernandez has called one of “the mission(s) of metaphor” (1974). With sorcery lions, Muedans in fact bridged the chasm between distinct domains upon which metaphor depends for its force.
⁶
In so doing, they brought about a transference not only in semantic space but also in physical-perceptual space. Stefano Cochetti has labeled such “material substitutions” (a category that he has suggested includes sacrifice as well) “literal metaphors” (1995: 144-145, 150).Such metaphors not only stand for themselves, I would argue, but also
embody
themselves—in the Muedan case, in the bodies of dangerous predators.
⁷

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued: “In all aspects of life . . . we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor” (1980: 158). By way of example, they have demonstrated how the metaphor “argument is war” in fact shapes the way we argue (4). Carol Laderman has similarly argued that metaphor “does not merely refer to or talk about but
does something
in the world” (1991: 3).
⁸
James Fernandez has reminded us that “[m]etaphors are not only rhetorical devices of persuasion; they can also lead to performance” (1974: 125). Consequently, the imaginative predication of a lion upon someone—whether George or Imbwambwe—does not leave him unaltered. Where Muedan sorcery discourse forged a metaphoric relationship between Imbwambwe and the lion he became, Muedans saw and interacted with Imbwambwe as never before.
⁹
Through such imaginative flights of reference, Muedans formed and transformed their understandings and experiences of the domains that they inhabited and the Imbwambwes with whom they shared them, changing their world fundamentally and irrevocably.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have argued that, because no world exists independently of our conception of it through lan
guage, we inevitably speak of the world
only
through metaphor. Wagner (1986) has described culture itself as layer upon layer of metaphor, with nothing else beneath it. If all discursive engagements with the world are inescapably metaphorical, perhaps the most interesting question is not, then, whether Muedan sorcerers’ imaginings (among them, sorcery lions) are metaphors but rather whether metaphors (for that matter, all forms of discourse through which we conceive our worlds) constitute means of sorcery.

“A language, and, insofar as it can be said to have conventions (which is how we, perforce, describe it), a culture, is the ultimate subjunctive, an ‘as if’ made into an ‘is’ by the
seriousness
of those who use it” (Wagner 1986: 8, emphasis added).
¹⁰
Perhaps the only difference between the speaker of the phrase “George is a lion” and the sorcerer-producer of an
ntumi wa kumpika
lies in their degree of
seriousness
of imagination. Some people, Muedans realized, are dangerously serious.

W
ORKING WITH
I
NDETERMINACY

If sorcery discourse constituted literal, or embodied, metaphors by which Muedans perceived and engaged with their world, sorcery was not the only language through which their world was conceived. In 1994, and again in 1999, nationwide multiparty elections were held in Mozambique to elect the president of the republic and members of Parliament. Through the electoral process, Muedans were introduced to the discourse of liberal democracy—a discourse whose animating logics differed greatly from those of sorcery. In the run-up to the vote, elections organizers (Mozambicans supported materially and logistically by numerous donor nations and a plethora of international organizations) articulated their own vision for the rationalization of power and the profound transformation of politics in postwar Mozambique. In accordance with their vision, elections organizers instructed Mozambicans to register to vote by having their photos taken and voter identification cards issued to them. These cards, and the bureaucratic electoral apparatus to which they were attached, may be said to have operated as a vast material metaphor (West 2003).

Elections organizers concerned with ensuring the credibility of electoral results—both to observers and to participants—suggested that the electoral apparatus effectively rendered the
nation visible to itself in the moment of expression of the national political will. Within the electoral bureaucracy, each voter card and, later, each ballot paper operated as a metonymic extension of an individual Mozambican. The political will of that voter was made manifest by an X marked on his or her ballot card, which could be folded to conceal from observers the choice that he or she had made. When later removed from the ballot box and unfolded, each card represented for all to see the will of a single anonymous voter. Just as voter cards and ballots were standardized, the weight—the value—of each voter’s will was equal. Ultimately, the political legitimacy of each winning candidate was made manifest in the relative height and weight of the stack of ballot cards with Xs marked beside his or her name and photographic image compared with the height and weight of other stacks of ballot cards with Xs marked beside other candidates’ names and images. In this way, the elections process—as “literal metaphor”—was said both to
represent
and, simultaneously, to
enact
the confidential, yet transparent, measurement of the will of the Mozambican people and, hence, to rationalize political forces that heretofore had exercised power in hidden, arbitrary, and irrational ways.

Whether or not elections officials explicitly conceived of the electoral apparatus as metaphor, they vested faith in the notion that this apparatus afforded to Mozambicans a means of simplifying and clarifying an inchoate world, as Fernandez has told us metaphors do (1972: 43–44). Officials acted
as if
power could
actually
be rendered
transparent
and, thereby, rationalized so long as conditions were created for monitoring the electoral process
as through a pane of glass.

To the astonishment and frustration of elections officials, however, many Muedans refused to register for the vote in 1994 (West 1997, 2003). Elder Muedans, in particular, associated voter cards with other identity tokens with which they had had experience in their lifetimes, including colonial tax receipts, mandatory labor cards and passbooks, church-issued Virgin Mary medallions, and FRELIMO party membership cards
(West 2003). Each of these identity tokens had been used by powerful institutions to mark Muedans, making possible various historical forms of surveillance through which they were monitored, controlled, and often brutally exploited. Elders were loath to allow themselves to be marked once more by political actors whom they suspected of wishing to further manipulate them.

In spurning the notion that they, as voters, might control these actors, Muedan elders did not “fail to understand the electoral process” (as more than one elections official hypothesized in conversation with me). Nor did they sequester themselves within a limited, local worldview, as others opined. Rather, they understood the electoral process differently, experiencing it through the sensory organs of sorcery discourse. Indeed, they fixed elections officials within a scrutinizing gaze that transcended these officials’ limited views of the Muedan world.

As elections officials moved about the plateau region in United Nations vehicles and aircraft, Muedans watched with suspicion. Several shared accounts with me in which they portrayed these vehicles as the instruments of sorcery attack. “Crash sites” had been found, I was told, devoid of visible remains but marked by mysterious circles of flattened bush—evidence of night flights by “untruthful,” “fabricated” aircraft. In a world filled with such brazen new powers—undoubtedly in league with local agents of sorcery—many Muedans doubted that their votes would remain “secret.” Surely, the powers vying for their votes and proclaiming their intentions to remake Mozambique were all capable sorcerers and, thus, all able to see invisible ballots and hold those who cast them accountable (see also Hanlon 1995: 42; Synge 1997: 129).

In reading the “transition to democracy” through sorcery discourse, Muedans (re)constructed the world that elections officials worked to build.
¹
Ironically, where the discourse of liberal democracy explicitly empowered Muedans to (re)make their world, sorcery discourse provided means through which Muedans reflected upon, and often accentuated, limitations to their abilities to make the world as elections officials suggested they
might do. Through the accusations, denials, rumors, and innuendos that constituted sorcery discourse, Muedans had long reminded themselves of their limited abilities to (re)make their world. While, through sorcery discourse, Muedans expressed suspicions that some among them were capable of incredible things, they generally conceived of themselves as the objects upon which sorcery was enacted—as passive victims, rather than active perpetrators, of definitive power. Even the sorcerers among them possessed limited capacities to (re)make their world, most Muedans averred. The transformative power of sorcery, as Muedans conceived it, proved unwieldy in the pursuit of strategic ends—resistant to instrumentalization.
²
Sorcery, as the healer Sinema Kakoli described it to us, was a game of Russian roulette: as healers provided most potential victims of sorcery attack with sorcery prophylaxis, and laid
mapande
(countersorcery mines) in and around nearly everything that sorcerers might wish to destroy, it was only a matter of time before sorcerers mortally wounded themselves. Kakoli thus expressed awareness of what Webb Keane has referred to as the “hazards of representation”—the possibility that the act of signification, in which great power potentially rests, may indeed “go wrong” (1997: 25).As powerful as sorcerers were, Kakoli told me, “they waste no time dying.”

Countersorcerers, and even ordinary Muedans, similarly found sorcery discourse an unwieldy and perilous instrument. In time, authority figures and healers inevitably suffered the consequences of speaking ill of one more powerful than they.
³
Even those who engaged the invisible realm through rumor, innuendo, suspicion, and accusation did so with great risk (often with disastrous effect) and only because they knew that ignorance of sorcery was as perilous an option as any.
⁴
Ultimately, all Muedans—whether powerful or weak, envied or envious, knowledgeable or ignorant—were undone by sorcery.

“Men make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
found, given and transmitted from the past” ([1852] 1978: 595). As Muedans (re)made their world through sorcery discourse, they spoke a language—and made use of a symbolic repertoire—not entirely of their own invention. The sense of this polyvalent production often lay beyond the grasp of individual speaker/producers.
⁵
Thus, sorcery was not only a means by which Muedans made their world but also a means by which the world they encountered made them.
⁶

Even so, sorcery constituted a discursive space in which Muedans could speak about the world and act within it in ways they could not through other discursive formations.
⁷
For most, the discourse of liberal democracy, for example,
oversimplified
an
inescapably inchoate
world. By contrast, sorcery discourse accentuated the ambiguity of ongoing events and processes in the inchoate world of postsocialist Mozambique. If sorcery discourse served Muedans as metaphor, it more closely resembled metaphor as conceived of by Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe—metaphor that “works with indeterminacy to keep meaning safe from the final clarification that is its obituary” (1996: 50).
⁸