Is the Magic Fading?

The recent debate around FGC on Savage Minds raised some important questions about the political implications of how we choose to perceive social practice. It also raised the issue of agency in our selection of the analytic positions through which we situate practices relationally, and hence within particular political frames of argument. The key point here is not what the issue is, so much as with what other issues is it represented as being articulated in various ways. This articulation may be represented either within a particular social context, as in for example the relation between forms of practice and social outcomes, for which in the recent example read gender. Or, adopting the kind of argument put forward by Marilyn Strathern in her Partial Connections, it may be about how the issue is related through ethnography to what are represented as equivalent examples of social practice across social contexts, that is within anthropological theory or social theory more generally.

The ways in which issues become relationally articulated within anthropology is fundamental to establishing the legitimacy of what become accepted, or acceptable, responses to social phenomena within the discipline, some of which, despite anthropology’s claims to reflexivity and to the consistent examination of constructivist positions, seem remarkably persistent. The disciplinary representation of witchcraft is a case in point. Not only is witchcraft represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence manifested differently at different times and places. It is commonly represented as related to Zande practices of the late 1920’s as somehow paradigmatic, if not in terms modalities of divination then in terms of the essential logic and systematicity of Zande witchcraft cosmology.

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic provides an account of the place of witchcraft in Zande society and the interrelationship between the persistence of witchcraft beliefs and oracular authority as mediated by princely rulers themselves subjected to Anglo- Egyptian colonial power. This book, a classic of functionalist ethnography and one which posits as its centre the question of the rationality of belief, continues to be a staple of anthropology reading lists, certainly in the UK. It also remains widely cited within the anthropology of religion, science studies and philosophy. This strikes me as somewhat surprising. What Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic actually describes is not so much the rationality of belief in witchcraft, as a political system in which the powerless are liable to be accused of involuntary murder and then forced to pay compensation for the deaths of alleged victims. To suggest that the comparative value of Evans Pritchard’s text lies in the power play of witchcraft as a weapon of violence working in conjunction with regimes of power is not to underplay the salience of ideas and world views in effecting social practice, merely to question why certain interpretations become established. Some of this has to do with what they are brought into relation to. Can disestablishment follow on then from new juxtapositions and new relations?

Maia

Maia Green works on issues of social transformation in East Africa and the anthropology of international development. She has written on diverse topics ranging from anti-witchcraft practices to the proliferation of NGOs. She teaches at the University of Manchester. manchester.academia.edu/MaiaGreen

8 thoughts on “Is the Magic Fading?

  1. It seems to me that this is a partially a problem of what issues are studied by whom. People interested in looking at “power” are more likely to study FGC or landless peasants than they are to study witchcraft, while those who are interested in witchcraft are more likely to be doing so because they are interested in studying traditional “knowledge.” For the same reason, one is much less likely to find class analysis in Taiwan studies than in China studies (or even Korean studies). There is a kind of self-sorting process. There are, of course, exceptions, but they seem doomed to remain just that.

  2. Kerim, is that really the case? Maybe because my only real course on witchcraft was with Harry WEst, who may be one of the excpetions you describe as “doomed”, but almost everything I’ve read about witchcraft dealt very heavily with “power” in the political sense. The John Adair piece I quoted in the cheating post, for instance, makes fairly explicit the relationship between political upheavals in the pueblos and witchcraft; in the wider sphere of magic in general, the Comaroffs, Taussig, Nash, Ong, Luise White, David Lan, and the aforementioned West all describe magic and sorcery explicilty in terms of social power. While magic and witchcraft remains an interest for me and not a specialty, what interest I have for the topic is almost entirely bound up with its usefulness as a means of exploring how social power works.

  3. I assume that when Maia says “witchcraft [is] represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence” she is referring to the vast sweep of the literature. Just as John Berger is not referring to the “masters” of oil painting in “ways of seeing” but the vast sweep of ordinary crap that was produced.

  4. OK, then, “Kerim AND MAIA”, is it really the case that across the discipline witchcraft and magic are dealt with in terms of ways of knowing nad not in terms of social power? I mean, Maia’s reading of E-P is pretty close to my reading (maybe she had West too?). The textbook that I teach from in Intro (Haviland’s _Cultural Anthropology_) gives a nod to the falling granary and then three paragraphs on witchcraft as social control (maybe Haviland had West too?). You can see why I might doubt that I somehow lucked into the doomed exceptional margins of witchcraft studies — from where I stand, witchcraft-as-social-power seems canonical, at least in work of the last few decades. But maybe I exist in a weird kind of theoretical firewall that has shielded me from the “vast sweep of ordinary crap”?

  5. oneman, If you’ve been shielded behind a theoretical firewall, then so have I. Witchcraft accusation as social control was a major theme in the largely Africanist, largely Mancusian/Rhodes-Livingston Institute British Social Anthropology in which I was trained in the 1960s.

    It may be worth noting, too, that in that academic tradition witchcraft was distinguished from sorcery, the former being a mystical power originating inside the witch andactivated by anger and resentment, the latter requiring the manipulation of magical ingredients and spells, elements external to the witch.

    From this mainly Central African perspective, much of what is called “witchcraft” in the European tradition, with its witches’ brews, pacts with the devil, incantations, etc., more closely resembles sorcery than witchcraft. A better analog of witchcraft would be “the evil eye” found all around the Mediterranean.

    In Natural Symbols Mary Douglas suggests that witchcraft (in the Africanist sense described above) is associated with high-group societies in which group boundaries are of paramount importance. Sorcery is found in high-grid societies in which rank and status are important. In societies which are both high-group and high-grid expect to find both. To the best of my knowledge this prediction holds pretty well for traditional civilizations all across Eurasia. It certainly works for both China and Japan, where, for example, martial arts movies and manga that take their motifs from traditional folklore commonly feature protagonists who combine internal powers cultivated through mystical disciplines with magical objects, potions and words.

    Hope this is helpful.

    John

  6. I agree with John here. Its a common misperception that WOM is a ‘classic of functionalist ethnography’ but this is not true. It is an outgrowth of E-P’s work on intellectualist approaches to religion influenced by Seligman and evidenced in, for instance, the Cairo lectures. That’s why it got taken up in the 1970s rationalism/relativity literature.

    John is right that witchfcraft accusations (as well as the literature on gossip, meetings, etc.) were directly concerned with issues of ‘social control’ — which is of coruse a different (but related) way of understanding witchcraft than focusing on power and terror. Maia have you read DMS (Dame M. Strathern’s) article “Discovering Social Control”:http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://links.jstor.org/sici%3Fsici%3D0263-323X(198522)12%253A2%253C111%253AD%27C%253E2.0.CO%253B2-7 ?

    One thing that is interesting is the way that witchcraft has come to be synonymous with Africa in the same way that, say, caste has come to be synonymous with S. Asia or exchange has become synonymous from Melanesia. Also even more recent literature on witchcraft (such as the Comaroffs) seems to this outsider to explain it as a reaction to anomie in the -social structure- Milennial Capitalism.

    The other thing to think about is how to reunderstand the phenomenon and its endurance without using the culturally loaded terminology of witchcraft, witchdoctor (used to describe African leaders, etc.). I imagine something like the Melanesian rewokring of the ‘cargo cult’ concept might work here.

  7. Only just got round to seeing these comments, but the main argument I am making is not really about witchraft and what it may or may not be, but how certain interpretations and meanings get juxtaposed within anthropology, so that certain texts always recur in only limited debates and contexts. And what the effects of this are. I think we will surely see the same happening with what are becoming institutionalised as the new wave of core narratives in the discipline. The question here is to what extent these allow for reanalysis on the basis of ethnography or whether the context is so engrained within the representation that its not possible to revisit `out of context’ later, and whehther, or to what extent, the apparent revisiting possibilities of some of the older ethnographies are simply a consequence of their abstraction from context, so that the re-reader can then recontextualise them.

  8. Hmm. The Nuer, for instance, has been widely recontextualized in anthropology (Geertz on E-P’s “African Transparencies” Kathleen Gough and Sharon Hutchinson (sp?) etc.), Geertz’s Deep Play essay on cockfighting has been appropriated by the political economy people as a sign of the sinds of hermeneutics, etc. Does this count as ‘recontextualization’ or is the continuing discussion abut the Nuer, in your view, a continuation of their iconic status as the ‘kinship’ people?

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