Moral Power

The Magic of Witchcraft

Koen Stroeken

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient's recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce moral values that assess the state of the system and that remove the obstacles to what is taken as key: self-healing. The implied 'sensory shifts' and therapeutic effectiveness have largely eluded the literature on witchcraft. This book shows how to comprehend culture other than through the prism of identity politics. It offers a framework to comprehend the rise of witch killings and human sacrifice, just as ritual initiation disappears.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Meaning of Witchcraft

Sukuma farmers and healers from north-west Tanzania use the word bugota for medicine. The term magic in this book refers to medicine, yet with an emphasis on the structure underlying Sukuma medicine: whatever plants are used, at least one ingredient called shingila, literally ‘access’, should be added to wed the power of plants to the subject’s intention. This ingredient of access, establishing a link which Westerners would call metaphorical, is required for all potions, whether for cure, for initiation, for seduction, for business, for protection or (allegedly) for the witch’s sorcery. In magic one can never be sure of the outcome; that is to say, whether ‘access’ will be attained. While shingila is what makes magic work, it means accepting a fundamental instability as a part of life. When asked about the difference between Sukuma medicine and pharmaceuticals, most healers point to the shingila in their medicine. This complex combination of a structure, a subjective experience (including an intention) and access (to a place?) will form the main theoretical tool in this book.

Whether one calls it a philosophy of life, an epistemology, a cosmology or, as I do at times, a structure of experience or a state of the system – and at less verbose moments a place (topos) or a value – what my fieldwork allows me to differentiate is not Cartesian. It concerns not what is: mind, body, society, the latter subdivided into economy, politics, religion and so on, these subsystems themselves being differentiated into processes I would have discovered. The distinctions I will offer concern the ways we experience things. Things come into being because of the human subject experiencing the world in some way, squeezing the whole as it were through some structure, which eventually delimits a thing (while the specificity of the thing obscures its subjective, holistic structure). Seeing a continuity between the subjective and the social, I will argue that magic stands for one such structure, which permeates rituals of initiation, forms of social exchange and alliance, and not in the least, the open attitude among many Sukuma to their own beliefs in magic. Thus conceived as an experiential structure rather than as a fixed belief, magic questions the definition of modernity as ‘living with contingency’ proposed by the acclaimed sociologists Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994) in their prominent joint book. Their definition conforms to the self-image of moderns as mankind’s tragicomic heroes braving the lure of belief in magical intervention. Does the modern intention, in fact, not divulge the heightened difficulty in living with contingency, with the uncertainty of access to truth? My query does not reproduce the classic opposition of tradition and modernity. It primarily concerns a difference within Sukuma culture. It opposes epistemologically (qua approach to truth) magical practice to the construction of witches.

This introduction tackles the difficulties of such claim about difference. For starters, how could I pretend to capture another culture’s practices? That issue lies at the heart of our discipline’s ‘crisis of representation’ (Pels and Nencel 1991), acute since the 1980s and never really resolved. My answer – though I would not claim solution – consists of six brief disclaimers. Firstly, I am after a basic logic or structure rather than ‘the’ Sukuma culture. Secondly, I am not proposing a Sukuma structure but a structure recognizable to humans at large. My job is anthropo-logy, not Sukuma-logy. Thirdly, since I am not cultureless, the exercise in comprehending culture is necessarily intercultural. The proposed structure will belong to an imagined framework of interrelated possibilities, relevant for my own culture as well. As the example above shows, the concept of contingency can hardly be thought impermeable to Sukuma culture. If not at the level of a concept, contingency is relevant for Sukuma at the level of experiential structure.

Fourthly, there exist several structures in one culture, which can be found in other cultures too (at the abstract level of structures). My starting point is not separate cultures, but what I, as an experiencing subject, recognize in cultures; hence, structures of experience. I am thinking of the moments of affinity I sensed, such as my attunement to the elder protesting against his peers turning spirit mediumship into a business. Very distinct cultural backgrounds and emotional dispositions can converge into places, topoi, which humans move into and occupy together, never exactly at the same spot, but alike position-wise in relation to other possibilities. The cultural diversity authors write about begins with these potentials, which they find within themselves and stimulate. Fieldwork comes in to extend the imagined possibilities and to determine the relative significance of each within the culture experienced. So, anthropologists in practice distinguish at least two dimensions in culture: the people (usually demarcated by a linguistic group) and the possibilities of meaning-making (topoi). Sukuma do not become less Sukuma if the majority of the people actualize other possibilities than they used to.

Fifthly, comprehending culture cannot be done without some form of cultural comparison, translation and structuration of one’s own and other people’s experiences (cf. Holy 1987; Overing 1987). Therefore, to study structures of experience instead of people’s experience itself is, rather than pretentious, a form of modesty as well as honesty about what anthropologists can do with their experiences of culture. We collect and select historical events. I will at times use figures and tables to make explicit the cultural comparisons at work. For much of the differentiation, we may rely on local narratives and reflective exchange with our interlocutors. But some experiential structures are less conducive to narrative reconstruction, while still of relevance to our analysis. For instance, narratives will readily talk of ‘modernity’ and ‘witchcraft’ in terms of events such as the conflict or influence between development cooperants and farmers. To realize where epistemological affinities lie takes participation, initiation and other kinds of multisensorial experience. Present studies of witchcraft rely too much on a culture’s discourse.

Finally, experiential structures are classificatory rather than natural. In this they are true to Bantu languages and to local approaches to meaning-making, where significant positions in the social network such as fatherhood or sisterhood are always subject to classificatory extension. A Sukuma has many classificatory fathers and sisters. So does an experiential structure include many experiences.

Still, how could the author’s experience, however participatory, unravel something as non-subjective as structure? The first thing to realize is that structure is not hard, like a disposition in the body, a module in the mind or a mechanism in society, each supposedly generating (and thus predicting) events. Human structures are soft, for they exist in relations and in the holism of meaning, not in atoms or substances and their impact. As in the aforementioned attunement to the elder’s protest despite our divergent backgrounds and emotions, affinity across cultures exists in outcomes, not in origins. A better term for outcome here is meaning. The meaning experienced is what radically disqualifies the mechanistic approach of natural and social sciences. Affinity is in our experience, the thing the fieldworker has close at hand. Therefore it is disappointing in retrospect that globalization studies caused a sigh of relief in the 1990s by in fact keeping our discipline’s ‘crisis of representation’ at bay and replacing the question of meaning and of the author’s position by virtually authorless descriptions of historical, macro-social interactions. Ignoring the epistemological relations underlying historical events, I will argue, prevented us from seeing the witchcraft in modernity.

‘At the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation’, Viveiros de Castro (2004: 484) concludes after listening to pluralist cosmologies both among quantum theorists and among Amazonian Indians. Sheer pluralism is his way of escaping the Cartesian divide haunting anthropology: ‘one side reduces reality to representation (culturalism, relativism, textualism), the other side reduces representation to reality (cognitivism, socio-biology, evolutionary psychology)’ (ibid.). My interest will be in the reality of representation, notably in the relations that permit representation. I attempt to formulate the relations or structures of representation in terms that concern both Sukuma culture and academic culture. It should be a sign of modesty and reflexivity to limit our unit of analysis in the study of Sukuma culture to the structures by which our interpretation operates. At the same time I admit that this search and reflexivity may increase the introduction’s level of abstraction. I hope the rest of the book will make up for these early abstractions prior to interpretation of the data, or inspire a second read. (The impatient reader may want to skip the introduction for now and return to it at the end). The intercultural exercise sets off with my intuition of a complex structure underpinning Sukuma cosmology. It relates gift to sacrifice.

Gift and Sacrifice (I)

Everything meaningful begins with a severing of the world, the whole, in two, a distinction between something and what it is not. That, at least, is what Spencer-Brown (1969) and Luhmann (1995) posit. I here retain the importance they grant to ‘the whole’. Meaning does not come about from combining elementary bits or morphemes, as in Lévi-Strauss’s (1962) structuralism, or from adding descriptive layer upon layer, as in Geertz’s (1973) interpretivism. Both are textual approaches. Neither fully appreciates the criterion of textual analysis known as the hermeneutic circle, which situates meaning in the relation of part to whole (cf. Ricoeur 1991; Gadamer 2004). Applied to human experience, the non-Cartesian criterion insists on the bodily side of meaning, namely that an experience never emerges in a void but in relation to all the other states the organism has at its disposal. That is the holistic, organic or systemic view of meaning defended in this book. Simplified, one feels sad because one could also have felt happy. Instead, a mechanistic approach concentrates on causality, one module for each experience, as if experiences would not hold together but could be objectively delimited; as if the scientist’s meaning itself could do without the system it partakes of; as if the meaning of a thought could be known from teasing apart and reassembling its elementary origins, a mechanistic assumption that Descombes (2001) criticizes about cognitivism. The (Deleuzian) assemblages of DeLanda (2006) attest to the infinite multiplicity of reality, to the micro-level of neurons interrelated with the macro-level of social processes, but they still continue the mechanistic model. What eludes them is how humans perceive the new, as it arrives, giving it a name that structures the whole system at once, which Badiou (2005) names ‘the event’. We are looking for such structures that respect the holism of meaning and yet differentiate meanings.

Where I differ from Spencer-Brown’s and Luhmann’s holism is in the binarism of semantic distinctions. This is where the contribution of Sukuma cosmology comes in. I should let it come in slowly, as in the Preface, never occluding the cultural comparison at work. It will pay off not to plunge the reader into ethnographic accounts with notions we have fixed ideas about in our own culture such as spirits and witches, too fascinating as entities for us to wonder about the meaning behind them. To avoid repeating mistakes, we have to cast a wider net and tighten it methodically. Then, seemingly similar phenomena such as magic and witchcraft can turn out to have opposite meanings; culturally wide-apart practices such as science and witch construction can appear closely related. Now comes the opening move of our intercultural exercise.

In magic, such as an ingredient whose meaning heals, meaning arises not from a binary distinction, the Western speciality, but from a relation. I contend that the cosmology of Sukuma healers I worked with respects the nonlinearity of events and is therefore underpinned by a relation between two agonistic feelings, the one keeping the other in existence – with an unstability worthy of magical practice and its unsure outcome. What should we call these opposites? Gift and sacrifice are two concepts that seem to percolate through all domains of Sukuma society. While gifts commit the recipient to reciprocity, thus controlling the power balance in society, a sacrifice cannot commit the addressed ancestors. Non-reciprocity may even add to their authority. In magic this difference between gift and sacrifice becomes a relation of interdependence: life is partly sacrificial in that one can never be sure of a return for what one has given (in contrast to the action-reaction of non-magical technologies). Or, just as gifts do not work without some sacrifice of self to the system, sacrifice is meaningless without some expectation in terms of gift logic. Thus, against the many anthropologists for whom ‘the gift’ since Mauss (1974) answers the perennial question of what keeps societies together, Sukuma cosmology suggests to me that something more needs reckoning: the sacrificial dimension subtending the gift system. The relation between gift and sacrifice expresses the nonlinearity of events, which positivist science fails to evoke.

Within the holistic parameters of my analysis, magic’s epistemology will be defined broadly enough to show where it always contains the seeds of the opposite, so-called modern, epistemology. The epistemology has a political dimension. Generally speaking, modern state-organized societies tend to impoverish magical epistemology through specialization. They segregate gift and sacrifice into two worlds, the human and the divine, whereby religion is supposed to establish a grand ‘connection’, to paraphrase the Latin word religio. The mediation of gift and sacrifice is taken out of the hands of the subjects – potential initiands of magic – and out of everyday life. Such reduction of the palette of subjective experience to render members more calculable – for instance on the market – has always interested political organizations governing large communities and territories that escape direct communication and perception. One need not think of Western or modern institutions alone. The conflation of gift and sacrifice is, one could say, the state of the State.

States of the System: Anthropological Holism

From the above the reader may have gathered my interest in cultural comparison, if not as an aim in itself then at least as a necessary tool for reflexive comprehension of another culture. Cultural relativists would prefer my analysis to stick to Sukuma culture and to particulars about that culture. Their particularism is bound to hit a snag. In surprisingly Cartesian fashion, they are actually expecting me to leave any universalist considerations to scholars of nature, to ‘the experts’ so to say. Moreover, they forget that there is no way for ethnography to capture ‘the’ Sukuma. The author offers a cultural version, albeit within an intensified comparative exercise. Finally, every word at our disposal to describe culturally specific events is packed with universality, hence of comparative status. (Even an anti-universalist statement counts on being accessible universally).

When ethnographers manage to ‘get into’ the culture, they claim to capture a structure of experience, a relation. Louis Dumont (1986: 11, 243–44) warned about cultural traits such as individualism influencing Western expectations about social analysis, as manifested in our tendency to atomize, to grant existence to individuals and elements but not to relations. I will propose that our social theory take its cue from the epistemology of magic. Moderns have learned to disparage four possibilities: of intercultural understanding, of one experiential relation underlying disparate beliefs, of the bodily relevance of meaning, and of the universal accessibility of ritual meaning. Magic is holistic in operating on exactly those four possibilities.

The holism I propose is two-pronged. I show witchcraft to exhibit a logic or structure within Sukuma society that is interrelated with other meaning structures in that society.¹ However, I argue that this structure cannot be separated from a broader system of conditions of possibility pertaining to the human body and society as such. This second step relates the holism of ‘a culture’ – Sukuma structures of experience – to the holism of anthropos – human structures of experience.

Anthropology as the study of humanity is holistic by complementing social, political, economic and biological aspects that other disciplines do not (Parkin 2007: 6). Anthropologists thus acknowledge that cultures are systemic, all parts closely linked within and across cultures, and that cultures are dynamic, continuously prone to social, economic and biological processes, so that a people could not be stereotyped through one transmitted belief or practice, such as witchcraft and witch killing. This book can be read as an ethnographic defence of that culture concept, via the notion of experiential structures as systemic states. Anthropological holism does not, like Richard Rorty’s (1989) postmodern hermeneutics, situate holism in meanings forming a whole segregated from the real, from nature ‘out there’. Such a hermetic take on meaning is surely too culturalist, too Cartesian for our taste. Nor is it the holism of Marx, granting causality only to social aggregates, with the parts being epiphenomena. Like meaning (versus matter), the social (versus subjectivity) then becomes another Cartesian partition, again shielding off a reflexive question, namely how the author can know those social aggregates.

Integral to our holism’s second, intercultural step is that the author’s reflexivity, rather than hard data, improve our knowledge when it comes to meaning. The relations of part to whole, making up the meaning of what we study, significantly deepen as we include the author’s own relating to the whole. For instance, we learn more about the Sukuma belief in spirits if we take into account the ethnographer’s urge to downplay the universal value of this belief and stress its culture-specific aspects in order to keep at bay the cognitivist who might come up with evolutionary mechanisms to explain the surprising fact of a widely occurring belief without apparent empirical grounds (here the existence of spirits). An equally revealing part of the Western author’s experiential structure may be misgivings about the spirit element (and other forms of ‘superstition’) for mitigating the individual’s autonomy and responsibility in the world (while Sukuma might appreciate the awareness of such mitigation as more sensible and more socially sustainable, keeping people more cautious and peaceful). These intercultural tensions determine the meaning the ethnographer writes about. None of these aspects of the meaning are mechanisms; they constitute a range of possibilities for viewing the world, which relate to each other and across what could be called ‘the system’.

Anthropology uniquely has the grit to study the human, an amalgam of social, economic, political, psychological, biological, medical and other divisions begun by Cartesian dualism and delineating scientific disciplines. Anthropological holism requires we perceive the world at right angles to the way in which other disciplines do. This far exceeds interdisciplinary exchange, for such exchange perpetuates the divisions. Rather, it entails we look at what crosscuts the parallel subsystems under study. I propose we do this by studying the various states the (whole) system can be in. From a Kantian perspective this may look like shifting our focus from theoretical to practical reason; that is, from causality to intentionality (Dilthey’s famous pair), or from reality to morality. Assessing the state of the system is indeed a moral act, if we define one state as ill or abnormal and another as healthy or normal. But many cultures do not go for the dualist assessment, otherwise so popular in monotheistic religions (Parkin 1985: xi). The witch’s ‘evil’ is not a simple inversion of social order. The Sukuma witchcraft idiom I picked up in the healer’s compound distinguishes at least four interrelated, possible states of the system, which I tentatively describe as reciprocal, intrusive, expulsive and synchronous. The states will correspond to the experiential structures of, respectively, the use of mag...