Ethnographic Sorcery (6 page)

“Hmmm,” Mandia said, looking me in the eyes.

Marcos turned to me and said, “The problem may lie there.”

As I sat wondering how I had arrived at this moment—how I had come to be sitting in a dank hut searching my recent experiences for signs of sorcery, and how I felt about Marcos having
brought me there—Marcos asked Mandia to show him some of the
mitela
of which he had spoken earlier in the conversation. Mandia focused his scrutinizing gaze upon Marcos—and then me—for some time. Then, without a word, he rose and entered into a small area set off from the rest of the house’s interior. He reemerged with a small animal-skin bag from which he unpacked various containers filled with ground leaves, powders, and fluids. Based upon the preceding conversation, he chose two substances. The first was a white powder called
ing’opedi.
He explained to us that the first act undertaken by a newly installed
humu
was to go from house to house treating the inhabitants who fell under his protective jurisdiction with
ing’opedi.
He placed his right thumb over the opening of the small bottle containing an ivory-white powder and turned it upside down. He pressed his thumb gently to Marcos’s forehead, painting a vertical line and then a horizontal one. I wondered if the manner in which he anointed Marcos with
ing’opedi
had been affected by Christian rites, for it was a cross he painted on Marcos’s forehead.
⁵
He turned to me and asked if I wished to be treated. I said quietly that I did, and placed myself before him. Mandia told me that as I moved about on the plateau with objects of value—my truck, my camera, my tape recorder and, even, my “project” itself—I inevitably attracted attention and envy. I was, therefore, in need of protection. After he treated me, he explained to us that the substance was made of
mapira
(sorghum) flour mixed with certain kinds of
mitela.
It would soon disappear, he told us, but the protection it afforded would linger. Apparently, sorcerers would see the mark for some time and know that, should they attack us, they would have Mandia to contend with.

The second substance Mandia did not name, but he explained that it was made of other forms of
mitela
mixed with bee honey. He took a short stick and dipped it into the bottle containing the nameless substance. He then placed the end on his own tongue, closed his lips around it, and pulled it out of his mouth while spinning it. He then did this with Marcos and, finally, with me. This treatment, he explained, gave us force that would
serve in fighting off illness. He looked at me, smiled gently, and said that I also needed this.

Days after we had visited Mandia, Marcos orchestrated a meeting with Kalamatatu as well, whom he also persuaded to treat us. Of Kalamatatu, Marcos requested
lukulungu lwa ntumi—
the throat meat of a slain lion, administered to ensure that its recipient’s voice was respected by all who heard him speak.

W
HOSE
M
ETAPHORS?

It was only weeks after falling ill—and being treated—that I addressed my colleagues at ARPAC. In speaking about lions as complex symbols, I sought not only to make sense of the ethnographic data I had been given by Kalamatatu, Mandia, and others but also to make sense of my own experiences of illness and recovery. In the sense I made of
uwavi
(sorcery),
kulaula
(healing), and
vantumi va nkaja
(sorcery lions), however, my audience heard nonsense.

Andras Sandor has suggested that, notwithstanding good intentions, anthropologists deploying the symbolist approach “[assimilate] other people’s ‘facts’ to [their] idea of ‘meaningful fiction’” (1986: 102).
¹
Luise White has warned that metaphor is often interpreted as a “polite academic term for false” (2000: 42).
²
Why might this be so? To appreciate why Lazaro Mmala took my assertion that sorcery lions were symbols (or metaphors) as a statement that they were not “real,” we must, I subsequently came to think, more closely examine how metaphor is defined, how it works, and to what ends it may be used.

James Fernandez has written, “However men may analyze their experiences in any domain, they inevitably know and understand them best by referring them to other domains for
elucidation” (1972: 58). Through metaphoric reference, according to Fernandez, people suggest that “something much more concrete and graspable—a rolling stone, a bird in the hand—is equivalent to the essential elements in another situation we have difficulty grasping” (43-44). Through such “predication upon an inchoate situation” (43), Fernandez has suggested, people are able to clarify an otherwise incomprehensible world.

The essential point here is that metaphor refers people to a semantic domain that is
separate
from the one they seek to understand. The most celebrated examples of metaphor are ones in which it is clear to all concerned—speaker and listeners—that the metaphoric predicate and the subject to which it is applied inhabit
distinct
domains. An active person is not
actually
a rolling stone, nor is an immediate opportunity
actually
a bird in a hand. Such metaphors work, David Sapir has explained, by making us “aware of the simultaneous likeness
and unlikeness
of the two terms” (1977: 9, emphasis added)
³
and then asking us to imagine,
knowing it to be untrue,
that the two terms are alike in more ways than immediately apparent. The case he used to illustrate his point is delightfully convenient. The assertion that “George is a lion,” he has written, “allows us . . . to assume for a moment that although George is ‘really’ like a lion only in certain specific ways [both are mammals, for example], he might be a lot more like a lion than in just those ways [for example, George is fierce]” (9). According to Sapir, the metaphor works not only because it links two separate semantic domains—the animal kingdom and George’s social milieu—but also because it calls attention to the chasm between the domains that it bridges. George’s lion-like fierceness makes him an
unusual
human
because
humans, after all, are not
really
animals. “Metaphor,” Sandor has said, in support of Sapir’s point, “cannot come about unless it is reflected upon” in this way (1986: 113).

So what, then,
is
to be made of the statement, proffered in a Muedan village, that a fellow—call him Imbwambwe—periodically transformed himself into a lion and menaced his neighbors? Imbwambwe—and, more importantly, the lion that he
became—inhabited the
same
domain as Imbwambwe’s neighbors. As Lazaro Mmala reminded me, the lion, Imbwambwe, bared teeth and claws with which he drew blood and tore the flesh of his victims.
⁴
His “reality” to them—his copresence in their ontological domain—was a matter of life and death, for he left in his wake mauled bodies and terrorized witnesses.
⁵
When neighbors saw Imbwambwe, the lion, in the village, they took refuge inside their homes. Once a countersorcerer was summoned to provide the requisite medicinal substances to protect them and to render the lion vulnerable, they hunted it down with bow and arrow. Their success in the hunt meant that Imbwambwe, the man, would die. Failing in the hunt, they may have directly sought out Imbwambwe, the man, and lynched him. In any case, if, when they spoke of Imbwambwe, the lion, Muedans did not think themselves to be making reference to a separate and distinct domain to express something about the character and behavior of Imbwambwe, the man (if they did not consider themselves to be “predicating upon an inchoate subject” but, instead, to be describing a
“real
and present danger”), can we call Imbwambwe, the lion, a metaphor?
⁶

Beattie himself posed the question, “[I]n what sense, if any, can we say that people’s institutionalized behaviour is symbolic if, as may well be the case, they themselves do not seem to know [here, I would substitute “do not think”] that it is?” (1966: 66).
⁷
According to Sandor, “no metaphor occurs where none is recognized” (1986: 103).
⁸
Yet Turner would not let us be dissuaded. In the essay that I shared with my ARPAC colleagues, Turner posed a similar question: “[I]f Ndembu do not recognize the discrepancy between their interpretation of the milk tree symbolism and their behavior in connection with it, does this mean that the discrepancy has no relevance for the social anthropologist?” (1967: 26). Answering his own query, Turner confidently asserted, “Here the important question must be asked, ‘meaning for whom?’” (25–26); in other words, he suggested, symbols may lie not in the eyes of their producers but, instead, in the eyes of their anthropologist beholders.
⁹

Still, Turner’s logic (not lost on Lazaro Mmala) left me in a different place than I had intended when I entered the seminar room at ARPAC. For, in the end, Turner’s position, as applied to my case—that Muedans failed to recognize their own symbols (or metaphors); that they mistook allegories for identities (a charge, incidentally, commonly leveled against conspiracy theorists; see Sanders and West 2003)—had me asserting, with echoes of colonial condescension, that Muedans’ deceived themselves; had me arguing, in the tone of revolutionary socialism, that their understanding of the world in which they lived was a form of “false consciousness.”

P
OWERS OF
P
ERSPECTIVE AND
P
ERSUASION

According to plan, in the dry season of 1999, Marcos and I conducted research in villages we knew well, but we focused, this time, on healers and healing practices, including, of course, countersorcery. Midway through our research, as previously arranged, we were joined by Tissa. Together, we spent time with more than a hundred different healers, ultimately concentrating on the dozen or so with whom we were best able to work.

Ironically, while the Mozambican state now demonstrated greater official tolerance for traditional healers and—backed by foreign researchers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—even
celebrated
“traditional healing” in some contexts, healers themselves enthusiastically embraced emergent opportunities to incorporate new techniques into their healing repertoires. The eclecticism of Muedan healers challenged the definitional boundaries of “traditional healing” in myriad ways (West and Luedke 2005). Whereas some healers adopted “modern” or “official” healing methods or both, others borrowed “traditions” from other times and places. Some, it seemed, invented healing “traditions” from scratch (West 2005b).

One healer, in particular, frustrated my attempts to understand by what criteria Muedans themselves judged the legitimacy of a healer’s practice. In the village of Namande, Julia Nkataje healed her clients by scribbling indecipherable figures on bits of paper, boiling the paper in water, and offering the water to her patients to drink three times daily (West 2005b). “Voices” instructed her to write, she told us, and while her scribblings “meant something,” she admitted that
she
“did not know what.” Although Julia herself had once been healed by a Muslim man who tore pages from the Koran, rolled them up, and placed them in a bottle for patients to carry with them, she professed to be a Christian; indeed, she proudly told us, the Virgin Mary had appeared to her four times.

In the evening after our first meeting with Julia, Marcos and I found Tissa where we had left him earlier in the day, in the compound of Marcos’s Matambalale relatives. He was seated in the open air, warming himself as best he could in occasional bursts of sun beneath a cloudy sky. He had been suffering for days from intermittent fevers and chills. He had diagnosed himself with malaria and had persuaded someone at the hospital in Mueda to validate his assessment with a prescription for chloroquine.

“It will pass,” he assured me. Referring back to my own bout with malaria, he added, grinning broadly, “We Africans are more resistant to malaria than you
vajungu
[foreigners].”

A basin full of oranges sat on the ground by his side. He asked for my Swiss Army knife, casting away the dull wooden-handled knife that he had previously been using. He asked us what we had learned in Namande.

Marcos laughed. “We learned how to boil words!” he said.

“Ahhhhh. You were with that woman there who heals with her own kind of holy water,” Tissa quickly surmised.

“That’s the one.”

“Nkataje?”

“Yes,” I answered. “How did you know?”

Tissa hesitated slightly. “She’s well known. Didn’t you see how many people were there? There were lots of people there, weren’t there?”

“It’s a healing factory!” Marcos replied.

We sat for a few minutes before Tissa broke the silence. “So what did you think of it, Andiliki?” I interpreted his laughter to mean that he found humor in his memories of Julia’s compound.

I gathered my thoughts for a moment, trying to figure out how to respond with anthropological sensitivity in the face of the skepticism that I thought I detected in Marcos’s and Tissa’s remarks.

“I don’t know what to think of her,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to me that she’s really an
nkulaula
[healer].”

Tissa worked my knife around and around the orange in his hand, creating a spiraling rind that coiled in a pile on the ground beneath him. “Why?” he asked.

“It seems to me that she has just made the whole thing up,” I said. “I mean, she scribbles on paper, boils it in water, and has people drink it. Malaria, tuberculosis, broken bones, sore throats, sorcery, AIDS . . . it’s all the same to her . . . just drink the water.”