Ethnographic Sorcery (9 page)

To my surprise, Chofer looked at me pensively, though apparently unperturbed and unoffended. “I don’t know,” he answered, earnestly.
¹⁵

A
RTICULATED
V
ISIONS

Whereas all Muedans with whom we worked were susceptible to being accused of sorcery, few, if any, publicly claimed to be sorcerers.
¹
Even as we made sorcery the explicit object of my ethnographic investigations, we encountered no one who openly asserted that he or she was a sorcerer. We nonetheless attended with great frequency conversations
about
the occurrence of sorcery. We participated in fireside chats where people made sense of illness or the death of a family member by reference to sorcery. We heard people accuse others of sorcery—sometimes in their presence, although generally not. We heard others deny accusations leveled against them. We heard second-, third-, and fourthhand rumors, and layer upon layer of innuendo.

Notwithstanding the ubiquity of witchcraft discourse (i.e.,
talk about
witches and witchcraft) among Azande, Evans-Pritchard confidently asserted that “witches, as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist” ([1937] 1976: 18).
²
Following this, I might attempt to distinguish between sorcery and sorcery discourse, concluding that the former did not exist and that the latter—despite its status as a corpus of accessible “social facts”—existed only as a set of, albeit logical, untruths. Sorcery lions, I might conclude, were made, not by sorcerers in an invisible realm, but instead by ordinary, self-deceived Muedans. As
such, I might conclude, they were not flesh and blood and teeth and claws but rather mere verbal constructs, and ultimately false ones at that.

Jeanne Favret-Saada, who studied witchcraft in the Bocage region in rural western France, has suggested, however, that it is virtually impossible to disentangle witchcraft from the words through which people speak
of
it. One cannot speak sensibly
about
witchcraft, she has argued, without entering into the social relations and verbal exchanges that
constitute
witchcraft (1980: 10). The
reality
of witchcraft, she has asserted,
is discursive
(9). What Favret-Saada has argued in relation to witchcraft in the Bocage may also be said of sorcery in Mueda. Muedans, like me, engaged with the world of sorcery in a discursive field to which they themselves made substantial contributions. Not only did they, like me, experience sorcery’s reality
through
its verbal constructs, but they conceived of sorcery and the words that spoke its reality as one and the same.

As already described, sorcerers were said to escape the constraints of the visible world by rendering themselves invisible and using the invisible realm thereby produced as a platform from which to elaborate self-serving visions of a world transformed. They were said not only to elaborate destructive visions of the world but also to
articulate
their visions on the canvas of Muedan society. Indeed, Muedans were adept at deciphering the traces of such articulations not only in the occurrence of illness and misfortune in their midst but also in discourse among themselves. Take, for example, the case of Sefu Assani Kuva (recounted in greater detail elsewhere [West 2005a: xiii–xxviii]). Sefu was accused of fabricating lions and using them to attack his neighbors in the village of Kilimani. As evidence in support of their accusations against him, Kilimani residents told the post administrator presiding over his trial that he had once brazenly boasted: “Don’t mess with me! If I want to, I can make a lion and kill you!”
³
These words—whose origins and peregrinations proved impossible to document—simultaneously constituted the threat, the accusation, the evidence, and the enactment of
sorcery. Framed in and stripped of quotations marks several times over, they not only spoke
of
sorcery but also
spoke
sorcery. Without them, Sefu’s lions were, quite literally, unimaginable—to him, to his neighbors, to the post administrator, and to the anthropologist. With them—indeed,
within
them—Sefu’s lions came to life.

If Muedan sorcerers discursively unmade the world in accordance with their predatory visions, countersorcerers discursively remade it in accordance with their reconstructive visions. To do so, they not only elaborated transcendent visions of a world remade but also
articulated
these within Muedan society. The force of countersorcerers, in fact, depended upon the persuasiveness of their metadiscursive commentaries on prior elements of sorcery discourse. Through their various methods, healers worked to convince their patients that
their
perspectives surpassed those of the attackers whose lethal visions they undid. Healers openly demeaned those with whom they did battle, saying to their patients things like “This illness that afflicts you is only
made up
.” Healers dealing with sorcery lions similarly highlighted these beasts’ inventedness: “This thing is just a
made
thing.” By affirming to their patients that their afflictions—indeed, their realities—were discursively produced, healers rendered these afflicted realities susceptible to
metadiscursive
transformation.
⁴
Similarly, settlement heads of old—and village authorities more recently—moved through their settlements in the wee hours of the morning, patrolling sorcery in their domains by painting verbal pictures of the invisible realm: “I see you!” they would proclaim in loud, authoritative voices, heard by settlement residents lying in their beds. “I know who you are—you
vavi
who are killing people in my settlement!” They gained ascendancy over chaos in their world by modeling order for all to hear—by orally conceiving
of,
and thus
conceiving,
a new world. Their
words
constituted the
enactment
of their “sorcery of construction.” By declaring that they knew what sorcerers “were up to,” these beneficent authorities disarmed them. Their power to do so lay in the persuasive force of their articulated visions.

Even ordinary Muedans remade their world through their contributions to sorcery discourse. In the colonial period, for example, sorcery accusations circulated wildly around the material goods that labor migrants brought home with them from Tanganyika. Returnees generally considered envious villagers as potential sorcerers who might seek to destroy what they had made
for
themselves and
of
themselves.
⁵
Villagers, for their part, looked upon returnees with suspicion, asking how these young men (and, occasionally, young women) had been able to accrue such wealth if not by feeding off others, a predilection they feared would persist back home. Each side accused the other of sorcery.
⁶
Ironically, where labor migrants suspected and feared the leveling force of sorcery practiced against them, their
accusations
constituted a discursive force in defense of their accumulation of unprecedented riches, rendering would-be levelers suspect.
⁷
At the same time, where villagers expressed suspicions of illegitimate accumulation on the part of returning labor migrants, their accusations served to quash rampant forms of social differentiation.
⁸
Either way, sorcery discourse constituted a tangible force in the world, inverting (
kupilikula
) the invisible force it simultaneously attested to.
⁹

Such dynamics were in play during the period in which I conducted fieldwork as well. When an agricultural credit scheme allowed Muedans of means to acquire tractors, trucks, and grain mills below market cost, rumors spread about how the new owners of these objects—mostly ranking government and party officials -had been able to acquire such prized possessions and defend them from envious onlookers. It was often suggested that these “big chiefs” had gained and sustained these goods in league with fellow sorcerers, to whom they had sacrificed members of their own families—often children.
¹⁰
It was also said that their machines were defended by
lindandosho,
the zombie slaves of sorcerer deed-holders.
¹¹
Through sorcery discourse, ordinary Muedans thus critiqued sorcery as an accumulative force for personal gain and, in so doing, placed acute pressure on the owners of these goods to share the wealth
they generated.
¹²
Owners, of course, saw the situation from a decidedly different perspective. Within a short time, their trucks, tractors, and grain mills began to break down. Owners suspected that their machines were falling prey to sorcerers in the villages through which they passed or in which they were installed. With their machines out of service and repair bills piling up and eating into the profits that owners had hoped to make, owners reported being told by the healers they consulted that sorcerers had paralyzed these machines by stuffing human skulls and other body parts inside them. Through their own contributions to sorcery discourse, then, these elites defended their rights to individual accumulation and economic differentiation, turning a critical eye on those who would, by their leveling attacks, destroy anything and everything of value.
¹³

Whether wealthy or poor, powerful or weak, Muedans not only accused others of perpetrating sorcery against them but simultaneously transcended those they accused by fixing them in their gaze, declaring knowledge of “what they were up to” and, thereby, undoing them (
kupilikula
). In some cases, the undoing of accused sorcerers took lethal form; in the wake of lion attacks that claimed forty-six lives and left another six people seriously injured in late 2002 and early 2003, for example, eighteen residents of Muidumbe District were accused of sorcery and lynched.
¹⁴
Sorcery and countersorcery were cosubstantial in these discursive acts of endless one-upmanship—acts that animated the very real unmaking and remaking of the Muedan world and those who inhabited it.

Greg Urban has written: “Discourse is about the world (it is the bearer of truth, statements, meanings), but discourse is also in the world. It has a thing-like quality, and it is that quality that makes circulation (and hence culture) possible” (1996: xiii). Along similar lines, Raymond Williams has argued that “language and signification [are] indissoluble elements of the material social process itself” (1977: 99). Not only does Muedan sorcery discourse confirm this, but Muedans themselves sometimes explicitly reflected upon it. Muedans with whom we worked
said that those who “knew a little something”
about
sorcery—like healers and settlement heads—in fact
knew
sorcery; those who
articulated
visions of sorcery’s workings
were
sorcerers;
talk
about sorcery
was
sorcery; words and deeds were cosubstantial.

Little wonder my fellow observer considered the dancer Chofer and his troupe to be sorcerers, for they boldly displayed their vision of the invisible realm for all to see. While theirs was a
commentary on
sorcery—purportedly offered as a
restraining critique of
sorcery—their articulated vision bore evidence of their capabilities
as sorcerers.
Like all “sorcerers of construction,” they were the objects of popular ambivalence—of speculation as to whether they used their power to socially beneficial, or socially destructive, ends.

While no Muedan—not even healers, not even settlement heads or village authorities, not to mention Chofer—claimed to be a sorcerer, the broadly held notion that articulated visions of sorcery
constituted
sorcery left most to wonder not only about others but, occasionally, about themselves, as Chofer did when I asked him if he was a sorcerer. After all, every Muedan spoke—if only in hushed tones—
about
sorcery. Everyone, at some moment, articulated a vision of the invisible world, no matter how sketchy. Everyone contributed to sorcery discourse. If discursive and metadiscursive engagements with reality constituted means of (re)producing reality, if sorcerers of ruin and sorcerers of construction (re)made the world by articulating visions of the world remade, if even gossip and innuendo afforded means by which ordinary people inverted the invisible forces to which they alluded, in short, if every constitutive vision of the world
was sorcery,
was the healer Atanásio Herneo not right: was not everyone a sorcerer?

B
RIDGING
D
OMAINS

That the Muedan life-world comprised two domains—one invisible, in which sorcery lions were made; the other visible, in which these beasts wreaked havoc—gives us cause to return to the question of lions as metaphors. Metaphor derives from the Greek
metaphora,
meaning “to transfer” or “to carry across” (
meta,
“trans”;
pherein,
“to carry”) (Soskice 1985: 1). Sorcerers, according to Muedans with whom we worked, not only made lions under the cloak of invisibility but also transported these lions from the invisible realm to the visible, where they attacked their victims. This act of transference warrants close attention.

Sister Rosa Carla did not dispute Muedans’ claims that the lion she carried in the back of her pickup truck was “real.” Nor do I think she objected to Muedans “telling stories”—morality tales—with “imaginary” lions as protagonists; during the year I conducted dissertation research in Mueda, the Walt Disney Corporation released the film
The Lion King,
a production which I imagine Sister Rosa Carla might have recognized and accepted as such a tale. What she and others with whom I spoke could not countenance, however, was the notion that people could “make up” “real” lions. They objected to the idea that lions born of an imaginary, invisible domain came to occupy the visible domain of ordinary people—that they moved between
these domains, attacking the rivals and enemies of their makers, producing macabre effects. Yet this is precisely what Muedans asserted sorcery lions did.
¹