Ethnographic Sorcery (7 page)

“You saw all the people in her compound, didn’t you?” Tissa responded.

“Look,” I said, “every other
nkulaula
that we have talked with uses
mitela
made from leaves, roots, tree bark, or animal parts. Some have special kinds of
mitela
that they discovered themselves. But there are many kinds of
mitela
that all
vakulaula
[healers] know. Masters pass this knowledge on to their apprentices, or ancestors pass it on to the descendants they possess.”

I suddenly realized that I was arguing, against the grain of my anthropological predilections, in favor of recognizing the “legitimacy” only of
kulaula
(healing) orthopraxis (whatever
that
was). I carried on, nonetheless, trying to convince myself along the way that I was merely playing devil’s advocate.
¹

“In any case, there is a certain ‘tradition’ to healing, isn’t there? You can’t just ignore all of this and still be an
nkulaula,
can you? I mean, would other
vakulaula
recognize Julia Nkataje as an
nkulaula
? She doesn’t know even the most common forms of
mitela.
She has no
mitela
!”

“What about the water she uses?” Marcos asked. “That’s her
mitela.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Water. Just water. Water for everyone, no matter what ails them.” I shook my head. “Where’s the
knowledge
in that? Anyone can do that.”

“It has to do with the verses she writes that she puts in the water,” Tissa answered.

“Who taught her that? What sense does it have?
She
doesn’t even know!” I turned to Marcos. “We asked her, didn’t we?” Marcos nodded. “She said she didn’t
know
what her figures mean. She’s illiterate. She just scribbles on paper. That’s not
kulaula
!”

“But it works!” Tissa answered. “Look at all the people who go to her. She must know
something,
because she heals them.” Suddenly, the touch of sarcasm was gone from his voice.

“Tissa,” I said, “she told us that she could heal infections. We asked her how long it took. She said that sometimes it takes only days, but sometimes it takes as long as six months. Six months! In six months, the body can heal itself of an infection. It has nothing to do with the healer. With all those sick people in her yard all the time, there are bound to be people who get better. I don’t see where she has anything to do with it.”

“That woman
knows something,”
Tissa responded, simply. With a mixture of defiance and shame, he admitted, finally, that he had been treated by Nkataje three years earlier. She had cured him of recurrent headaches, he told us.

The pile of orange peels at his feet was now substantial. I thought of how pleased my mother would have been that he had consumed nearly a dozen. She has infinite faith in vitamin C, my mother, and I was sure that she would see a place for it in the treatment of malaria.

We sat quietly for a few moments. I then asked them both, “Isn’t it possible that an
nkulaula
can be a fraud?” I reached for one of the orange peels. “I’m not an
nkulaula,”
I said. “But what’s to prevent me from squeezing the juice out of a dozen oranges into this basin and telling Tissa, ‘Okay, soak your feet in this orange juice. This is my
mitela.
It will cure your malaria.’ Tissa told me himself that he will survive this bout with malaria. He told me that Africans are more resistant than
vajungu.
We know he’s going to get better. But if I get him to soak his feet in my orange juice, I can claim that I cured him, can’t I?”

We all laughed together.

“I’m going to try that,” Marcos said. “I’ll be the most famous
nkulaula
in Cabo Delgado. And I’ll tell everyone that I learned my
mitela
from a powerful
njungu
!” He reached out to clasp my hand as we continued laughing.

Tissa then punctuated our laughter to set the record straight: “But your orange juice wouldn’t heal me.”

“I don’t see how Julia Nkataje’s water is any different,” I said.

Marcos now became serious as well.
“Mano,
the important thing is that people
believe
in it. You know that your orange juice is just orange juice, so no one will
believe
you. Julia Nkataje
believes
in her cure, so her patients do too. If a person
believes
they are cured, they will be cured.”

Marcos told a story to illustrate his argument. “I once healed a woman. She was trembling the way people do when they are possessed. I’m no
nkulaula,
and I don’t have any
mitela.
So I took ordinary water and ‘anointed’ her with it, the way Humu Mandia does with
ing’opedi.”
He reached forward and rubbed his thumb on my forehead in the sign of a cross. “I told her to go to sleep. When she woke up, I told her to go and bathe.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

Marcos smiled broadly. “She got better.”

“But did you
heal
her?” I asked.

Marcos continued to smile but remained silent, leaving open to interpretation whether he was himself persuaded of his
healing powers and whether he considered as “real” the healing “power of persuasion.”

In any case, I remembered my own experience as the beneficiary of Mandia’s and Kalamatatu’s healing treatments. These treatments had indeed
worked
for me, in more ways than one. Both Mandia and Kalamatatu had instructed Marcos and me to keep our treatment secret lest word of it make us targets for sorcerers attempting to prove their capacities to overcome such treatments. Nonetheless, within hours of our sessions, I caught Marcos—and even our healers themselves—speaking in hushed tones with acquaintances about our having been treated. “Don’t tell anyone, but Andiliki has been treated.” These people, in turn, told others; “Don’t tell anyone, but . . .”

Word spread quickly and soon, it seemed, everyone knew. Later, Marcos commented to me that this spreading of the news actually benefited us: people (including potential sorcerers) found out about the treatment, he explained, and then “respected” its recipients for fear of the medicinal specialist who had healed them.
²
In this way, Mandia and Kalamatatu made my illness and recovery a meaningful event to Muedans, thereby producing tangible social effects. Indeed, knowing that others knew I had been treated, I had the sense that I was afforded more “respect.” My anxieties diminished accordingly.

What is more, Mandia and Kalamatatu made my experience comprehensible,
in Muedan terms,
to me—effectively redefining the world around me. As they defined for me a role that made sense to Muedans, I began to experience Mueda differently than before. To be sure, I had collected valuable “data” as Mandia’s and Kalamatatu’s patient. But now, instead of trying to “get things into perspective” by finding a place from which to observe the Muedan social landscape—including the terrain of sorcery—
from
the outside,
as Jackson (1989: 8) has put it, I found myself trying to comprehend and engage with the Muedan world of sorcery from a perspectival space
within
it created for me by my own
vakulaula.
³

M
AKING
M
EANING,
M
AKING THE
W
ORLD

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

« FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,
"On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense" (1976: 46-47) »

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

«
ALFRED TENNYSON,
The Higher Pantheism,
line 4 »

According to Emile Durkheim (to whom "symbolist" anthropologists trace their roots), religion is essentially symbolic (Morris 1987: 119). "God is only a figurative expression of . . . society," Durkheim wrote ([1915] 1964: 226); elsewhere he called religion a metaphor for the social group (Morris 1987: 119-120).
¹
On this point, Karl Marx agreed with Durkheim: "Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself" (Marx [1843-1844] 1978: 54). "Illusory" is the key word here, for Marx was concerned that, although
humans made their gods, they came to believe that their gods had made them. Where, to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Edward Schieffelin, people “create the meaning[s] they discover” through religious ritual (Schieffelin 1985: 719), Marx worried that they failed to discover that they had, indeed, created these meanings. For Marx, the illusory symbols of religion masked “the
truth of this world”—
a singular reality that lay behind whatever mask people placed upon it (Marx [1843-1844] 1978: 54).

Philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition have taken issue, however, with Marx’s conception of the relationship between reality and meaning. From the phenomenological perspective, reality exists only through its apperception. “Symbolic forms,” Ernst Cassirer wrote, “are not imitations, but
organs
of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension” (1946: 8). From the phenomenologist’s perspective, people do not merely make meaning; in the process of making meaning, they also make the worlds they imbue with it. As they do so through various and diverse languages and symbolic repertoires, phenomenologists have asserted, people create different—albeit potentially interpenetrating, or intersubjective—realities. In the words of the linguist Edward Sapir, upon whose work phenomenologists have drawn, “the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” ([1929] 1949: 162).
²

Building upon the phenomenological tradition, Greg Urban has asserted: “If truth is carried in discourse, and if discourse is completely embedded in the human populations in which it circulates, then to study the nature of truth and knowledge, we need to study the ways in which discourse—and hence truth—varies from one part of our globe to the next” (1996: xi). In recent years, anthropologists around the globe have taken a phenom
enological approach to discursive formations reproduced within the rubric of occult cosmologies, including witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, and spirit possession (e.g., Csordas 1994a, 1994b, 1997; Good 1994; Jackson 1989; Kapferer 1997; Stoller 1995).
³
Viewed in this way, “sorcery practices are more than a representation,” according to Bruce Kapferer, “they are exercises in the construction and destruction of the psychosocial realities that human beings live and share. Their potency as representations results from this” (1997: 301–302); he has concluded, “sorcery highlights that truly extraordinary capacity of human beings to create and destroy the circumstances of their existence” (xi).
⁴
A phenomenological approach encourages us to ask what sort of world—or, to use the phenomenological term, “life-world” (
Lebenswelt
)—Muedans make and engage with through sorcery discourse. In other words, it prompts us to ask, not if Muedan sorcerers and the lions that they make (or that they become) are “real” or “illusory,” but instead to what kind of reality they belong.

In seeking to answer this question, ironically, we discover that the life-world Muedans make through sorcery discourse comprises
two domains
: one visible, the other invisible.
⁵
According to those with whom we spoke, sorcerers used a medicinal substance called
shikupi
to render themselves invisible. Invisibility allowed them to escape the strictures and constraints of the visible world, to get “outside” or “beyond” the world experienced by ordinary Muedans. Having transcended the visible realm, sorcerers were able to see it without being seen and hence to act decisively upon it. Indeed, through their collective acts, sorcerers produced and sustained an invisible realm that afforded them powerful perspective on the world inhabited by their potential victims—a platform from which to mount their ghastly forays. Sorcerers thus remade the world in accordance with their destructive visions of a world transformed to their benefit.

Such “sorcerers of ruin” (
vavi va lwanongo
)
,
as Muedans called them, were not alone in their use of
shikupi—
not alone in their ability to render themselves invisible. Beneficent authori
ties, including healers, settlement heads (in days of old), and village authorities (more recently), were said to challenge destructive sorcerers by themselves entering into the invisible realm, wherein they monitored, controlled, and even unmade sorcery of ruin by inverting, overturning, reversing, negating, or annulling it (all glossed by the Shimakonde verb
kupilikula
). To achieve this, they were required to further transcend the world known to ordinary Muedans—to “move beyond” the world of destructive sorcery and to practice “sorcery of construction” (
uwavi wa kudenga
). Such figures of authority were assumed by Muedans to be sorcerers themselves (for how else would they be able to enter the invisible realm of sorcery?), but they were assumed, or at least hoped, to be “cured,” “reformed,” or “retired” sorcerers who exercised their power to constructive ends.