Ethnographic Sorcery (12 page)

The
humu
and his wives—as well as other Muedans with whom I worked—knew, however, that I did possess some medical knowledge. They might have learned this from Marcos, who frequently told the story of my having “saved” his infant son, Godinho. Indeed, in the first weeks that I worked with Marcos, the boy had fallen ill and, after several days without improvement, I looked in on him to discover him with a high fever, a stiff neck, and a swollen fontanel. I shared my suspicions of cerebral malaria with Marcos and insisted that the child be taken to the hospital, where my diagnosis was confirmed; we then postponed our first research trip to the plateau so that Marcos and I could monitor the quinine doses Godinho received from a less-than-dependable hospital staff.

My “healing knowledge” derived from three years’ experience, while in college, working for tuition money as an attendant at the University of Virginia hospital, and three more years, during graduate school, on an ambulance crew in Madison, Wisconsin. I carried with me, in Mueda, an Emergency Medical Technician’s jump kit and a copy of
Where There Is No Doctor
(Werner, Thuman, and Maxwell 1992), and I treated those who came to me so long as I was competent to do so.

In fact, the occasion eventually arose for me to treat Humu Mandia himself. Throughout my 1999 research stint on the Mueda plateau, I had regularly inquired as to the
humu’s
whereabouts with the young man he had appointed as his successor. He was in the lowlands, I was told, tending to his fields. Near the end of my time in Mueda, however, the young
humu
informed me that the elder had suffered an accident, tripping and falling into the cooking fire and badly burning himself. I wondered, out loud, if a
humu—
a man of great healing knowledge—could be taken to the hospital. “We intended to take him,” the young
humu
told us, “but he was in such pain that we could not move him.” I asked if it would be possible to fetch him with our pickup truck, but the young
humu
told us that there were no passable roads. In any case, he told us, he feared the elder would not survive the trip. As I was scheduled to fly out of Pemba in only a few days, there was no time for me to make the journey on foot to the elder’s lowland fields. I was
hesitant to suggest that I might somehow be able to assist this powerful healer with his own health, but I felt deeply indebted to him for having treated me when I had been ill. I wondered if he had taken me as his patient despite similar ambivalence. In any case, the young
humu
facilitated my decision on the matter by asking, “Is there anything that you can do for him? Do you have any medicines that will help?” I asked the young
humu
to describe the elder’s burns as thoroughly as he could. From his description, the elder had suffered mostly first-and second-degree burns on a substantial portion of his back and shoulders, as well as second-and third-degree burns on the back sides of one leg and one arm. I provided the young
humu
with a large bottle of Betadine to disinfect the wounds. I also gave him a box of occlusive dressings and gauze wrap. I instructed him to cover the first-and second-degree burns and to build dressing tents over the more serious wounds. I described the effects of potential infection and gave him a course of antibiotics to administer should these appear, warning him to strictly follow dosage instructions and to cease administering the pills in case of allergic reaction. When I returned to Cabo Delgado in 2001, I was delighted to learn that the elder had recovered.

As a result of such incidents, many of those with whom I worked in Mueda considered me a healer of sorts.
¹
Kalamatatu’s comment, as expressed through his successor, about recognizing in me “a certain characteristic—a certain ability,” went deeper than this, however. Kalamatatu, I later came to think, saw in me a young man eager to “know a little something” about how the world worked and how its ills might be cured. In my quest to understand sorcery, I spent hours a day, for months on end, with healers like Kalamatatu—as Lipapa, Henrique, and Calisto had done with Kalamatatu, and as Kalamatatu had done with Mikuku. As anthropological participant observer, I not only made myself a student of sorcery but sought to see (as Muedan healers and responsible authority figures did) beneath the surface of Muedan life, into the realm of hidden, but decisive, forces. The more conversant I became in the language of sorcery, the
more often I heard Muedans say of me,
“Adju, andimanya shinu shoeshoe!”
(That one knows a little something!), a euphemism applied to sorcerers and countersorcerers alike.
²

Ironically, notwithstanding Favret-Saada’s assertion (1980) that witchcraft can be engaged only from within its constitutive dialogical spaces, in my attempts to discover the interior of the Muedan life-world of sorcery, I shared with Muedans the urge to somehow get outside that world, to move beyond it in order to gain perspective on it,
³
to formulate a transcendent vision of it. I eventually came to understand that Kalamatatu and other Muedans must have recognized the uneasy space of partial knowledge in which I consequently found myself—an anthropologically cliché space outside the comforts of ordinary life in both physical and metaphysical terms—as the space of
uwavi
(sorcery).

I never “discovered”
shikupi.
⁴
I never transformed myself into a lion. I never stood at night in the village center, crying out that I saw sorcerers who fed on their neighbors and kin and that I would do away with them if they did not desist.
⁵
Kalamatatu saw, however, that the tools of my trade were pen and notebook, cassette recorder and camera. Perhaps he appreciated that one day I would write a book in which I would say of Muedans—including the sorcerers among them—what anthropologists generally do say: “I see you! I know who you are! I know what you’re up to! I know what makes your world as it is!”
⁶
Kalamatatu might have recognized such claims as those of a sorcerer, for in my attempts to develop an ethnographic vision of
uwavi,
I—like Catholic missionaries and revolutionary socialists before me (West 2005a)—emulated the
muntela’s
(medicinal specialist) attempts to gain interpretative ascendancy in and over the world. Indeed, my argument that Muedan sorcery is, in the end, a “made thing” echoes the words of countersorcerers seeking to unmake and remake the world. Where Garro and Mattingly have suggested that the ethnographer seeks to be “a good storyteller of other people’s stories” (2000: 29), Kalamatatu must have understood that every story
potentially overturns (
kupilikula
) the stories it (re)tells. He “saw in me a kindred characteristic,” I believe, because he knew that, in my writings, I would attempt to produce of the Muedan world an order of my own description—because he appreciated that such interpretative visions
of
the world necessarily constitute means of leverage
on
the world.
⁷

Kalamatatu’s conception of our collegial relationship may have implied not only that he considered me a (counter)sorcerer but also that he thought of himself as an ethnographer of sorts, for, again, his métier, like mine, entailed searching for the definitive logics of the world he studied. Kalamatatu might have agreed with Roy Wagner, who has argued that, because people—like the anthropologists who study them—construct rules, traditions, and social facts in order to make sense of societies (in which
they
actually
live
), everyone is a fieldworker of sorts, everyone an anthropologist (1975: 35). Taken together, Atanásio Herneo’s conclusion that “everyone is a sorcerer,” Wagner’s, that everyone is an anthropologist, and the idea emerging from Kalamatatu’s understandings of my work, and mine of his, that sorcery and ethnography are in many ways one and the same raise the question: Are we not all—to spawn a Shimakonde anthropological neologism—practitioners of
uwavi wa etinogalafia
(translatable as either “sorcery of ethnography” or “ethnographic sorcery”)?

Of course, the sorcerer’s interpretation of the world’s workings is generally understood not only to undo (
kupilikula
) those preceding it but also to be vulnerable to being undone by those to follow. As a “made thing,” the sorcerer’s articulated vision is susceptible to being remade. If ethnographers and (counter)sorcerers are truly “colleagues,” the same must be said of anthropological visions of the world.

Some would argue that anthropological inquiry is fundamentally different from the sorcerer’s quest to understand his or her world.
⁸
Indeed, some would assert that anthropology constitutes a science whose methodology yields findings that indeed transcend the perspectives and understandings of the human
condition held by the discipline’s various native subjects. Others within the discipline itself would consider such claims as hubris. Clifford Geertz has famously argued: “Anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second or third order ones to boot. (By definition, only a ‘native’ makes first order ones: it’s
his
culture.) They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’—the original meaning of
fictiō—
not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments” (1973: 15). Not only did Geertz suggest that ethnographers’ visions, like those of the Muedan sorcerer, are “made things,” but he suggested, paraphrasing W. B. Gallie, that they are “essentially contestable” (Geertz 1973: 29). In the same spirit, Michael Jackson has concluded that we can “no longer assume that
our
texts have some kind of intrinsic epistemological superiority over
theirs,”
because “[a]ll are, in the final consideration, metaphors, more or less masked, for an existential quest for meaning” (1989: 168).

Is such a stance sustainable? “Rationalists” (or, to use Geertz’s term, “anti-relativists”) have argued that any position accepting a multiplicity of incongruent truths is logically untenable, for it necessarily accepts as possible the conclusion that it is itself errant (Tambiah 1990: 128). Wagner, by contrast, has argued that “[t]he acid test of any anthropology is whether it is willing to apply . . . relativity
objectively—to
our ‘reality’ as well as to those of others—as well as
subjectively.”
In accordance with his understanding that all cultures are the stuff of symbolic invention, he has written, “Unless we are able to
hold our own symbols responsible
for the reality we create with them, our notion of symbols and of culture in general will remain subject to the ‘masking’ by which our invention conceals its effects” (Wagner 1975: 144). The question remains, is it truly possible for the anthropologist—or anyone else for that matter—to conceive of his or her view of the world as fundamentally contestable?

I take inspiration in responding to the question from Muedans and their healers, who claimed to see the world’s hidden, but definitive, workings while simultaneously admitting the
limits of their abilities to do so. Where the former might be considered remarkable, the latter, I wish to suggest, may be even more so. Unlike Nick Jardine, who has asserted “there are certain vantage points to which we are forever tied by our humanity and hence cannot hope to transcend in our scientific theories” (1980: 24), Muedans told us that we humans can and do transcend our worldly perspectives (such maneuvers are, by definition, sorcery), even if only precariously. Indeed, Muedans asserted that we humans can scarcely avoid elaborating a vision of the world and its definitive workings—and seeing that vision, in time, replaced by another—for such is the stuff of life: one must inevitably formulate, articulate, and act within one’s visions of the world, despite the ever-present threat of subsequent visions overturning one’s own, for it is through such visions and countervisions that the world is actually made, unmade, and remade.

But what of this ethnographer’s vision? Clearly, in suggesting that sorcery lions operated as “literal metaphors” or “embodied metaphors,” I have made of Mueda and Muedans something that they themselves have not; I have remade them in accordance with my own vision. If so doing constitutes a form of sorcery, I am left to wonder—as did the dance troupe leader Fernando Chofer Nankoma—what kind of sorcerer I am. To what ends have I engaged with the Muedan life-world? What
have
I
made
of it, to return to the question as it was phrased earlier in this essay? Have I harmed, or have I healed? If, as Andras Sandor has told us, the power of metaphor depends upon reflection, have I fortified Muedans by facilitating reflection upon how they have made their world through imaginative flights of reference to the invisible realm of sorcery? Or have I—like Evans-Pritchard plucking charcoal from the witch doctor Bögwözu’s poultice to expose him as a “fraud” ([1937] 1976: 103)—
dis
empowered Muedans by calling attention to the made-ness of their world and/or exposing
how
it has been made?

I would like to think that as I have narrated my encounter with Muedans and their sorcery-filled world here, and elsewhere—as I have elaborated my vision of that world for an audience
that includes many with no other experience of it—I have challenged those before me who have portrayed Muedans, to their detriment, as ignorant, backward-looking, and primitive and that I have thus undone (
kupilikula
) such prejudicial gazes. I would like to think that I have persuaded my audience that, through the medium of sorcery discourse, Muedans have creatively interpreted and engaged with the historical events and processes shaping their world. I am left to hope that my work (
kudenga
) on, and in the space of,
uwavi
will be seen as a form of
uwavi wa kudenga
(sorcery of construction)
⁹
—that I will be judged to have engaged constructively with a world that I have shared (and continue to share) with Muedans.