As I approached the top of this [orbital] arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet.

However, astronaut engagements with moments of cosmic sublime go beyond spiritual experiences and approach the realm of ritualized behaviors that would seem familiar to Malinowski and other anthropologists that study symbol, myth, and ritual. Many of these ritual forms of magic come from the ancestors of spaceflight. For American astronauts on launch day, the entire crew must complete a series of rituals before proceeding to the launch pad. First, they must eat a meal of steak and eggs, the Mercury astronaut’s food of choice before a mission. Many contemporary astronauts report that they only pick at the hearty meal due to nerves, but it is never refused for fear that it will jinx the mission. After the meal, the crew participates in a simple card game and must continue playing until the crew’s commander loses.

Malinowski—in his seminal work Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays— argued that people usually engaged in magical and ritualized behaviors when they were placed in stressful situations, or found themselves with limited control over situations. Despite his colonial generalizations, if we apply these criteria to human spaceflight, I do not believe it is too far-fetched to assert that those who ride automated rockets into the vacuum of outer space are engaging with magic and ritual in order to grasp at a certain amount of control absent within the launch itself.

Magical and ritualized behavior in spaceflight is not only restricted to American astronauts; Soviet—and now Russian—cosmonauts also participate(d) in ritual prior to launching into outer space. On April 12, 1961, as Yuri Gagarin was being driven to the launchpad prior to his mission, he was overcome with a human urge that often manifests itself when one is nervous—or drinks too much coffee. Gagarin charged the driver to pull to the side of the road where he relieved himself on the rear passenger bus tire before re-boarding and rocketing his way into the history books. Due to his mission being successful—and for fear of being jinxed should they not perform the same ritual—every cosmonaut after Gagarin has also had the bus driver pull over so that they may micturate on the rear passenger bus tire prior to launch; women are not exempt from this, carrying vials of their own urine to splash on the bus wheel (Weibel and Swanson 2006). Cosmonauts and NASA astronauts launching on Soyuz to the International Space Station today still perform this ritualized urination. Furthermore, all those who wish to board a Russian spacecraft must watch the 1969 Soviet film Белое солнце пустыни (Beloye solntse pustyni—White Sun of the Desert) the night before launch.

Further afield, during the Space Race, there was also a battle between the two superpowers over the predominantly Christian United States and the state-atheism of the Soviet Union. One prominent Soviet propaganda poster after Gagarin’s flight featured a grinning cosmonaut on a spacewalk, orbiting above a Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, and a mosque, with two bold words separating the spacewalker and the houses of worship: бога нет! (boga nyet—There is no god!). Conversely, United States astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis after becoming the first humans to circle around the moon. Furthermore, after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin asked for a moment of silence so that he might partake in the ritual consumption of bread and wine. Communion, therefore, became the first food and drink consumed by humans on another celestial body (Weibel and Swanson 2006).

Lastly, there exists many Earthly and extra-planetary memorials and ritualistic remembrances of those who have lost their lives in the name of space travel, including one on the moon. On Mars, the Pathfinder spacecraft—which brought Sojourner, the first rover on Mars—was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station after it had landed. In popular culture, Carl Sagan’s son helped write an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which the crew visits the Memorial Station, which was imagined as being inscribed with a quote from Sagan: “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars, I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.”

Magic and ritual is deeply engrained in both the practice and imaginaries of technoscientific endeavors. The more that anthropologists shift their gaze toward the so-called “hard” sciences—as well as the scientists that perform their duties—the more we can reveal the illusion of pure objectivity within laboratory sciences. Perhaps when science is viewed as a human practice—wrapped up with all the imperfections inherent within any human endeavor—as opposed to some outside force able to impart supernatural objectivity upon an expert class, we can begin to leverage science as an exercise for liberation and mutual aid rather than a practice that today tends to first benefit the forces of colonialism and imperialism.

Further reading & cited:
Weibel, Deana L., and Glen E. Swanson. 2006. “Malinowski In Orbit: ‘Magical Thinking’ in Human Spaceflight.” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 13 (3): 53–61.

Field Notes – September 8, 2016 (Cape Canaveral, Florida):

I see the light and smoke first. The radiant fuel pours out of the rocket’s engines and the glow is absolutely blinding—like the brilliant ball of light at the end of a welding tool. I have to squint and look away from the base of the rocket as if I am staring directly into the sun. Then the sound comes. Roaring ripples of sound, reflecting off the Banana River and ricocheting off of buildings before finally kicking me square in the chest. The reverberations rock through my body as this asteroid-interceptor spacecraft, nestled on top of a cylinder of explosives begins to pick up speed—punching through the thick atmosphere of our planet. Within a few seconds, it is nothing but a small point of light high in the eastern sky—in a few more seconds, it has vanished.

I walk down the observation gantry and sit in the cool grass while other spectators begin to file out of the enclosure. I look up into the reverent afterglow of the rocket’s exhaust—the contrails swirling and slithering into sublimely beautiful colored shapes in the high winds of the stratosphere.

A mother and her son walk by. The mother asks her child what he thought of the launch. Clutching a toy rocket, he looks up at his mother and replies unabashedly and honestly:

“I have never seen quite a beautiful sight.”

These were my initial thoughts and feelings while experiencing my first rocket launch last summer. I scribbled these words down quickly and haphazardly, like the furious sketches of an artist attempting to capture a street scene that is moving quicker than their hand ever could. My hurried writing defiantly disobeyed the straight lines in my notebook; I didn’t want to look away from the rocket’s splendor. This was the first time I felt I had participated in a magical or religious encounter. In this two-part post, I would like to engage with magic, witchcraft, and ritual in human spaceflight—not only in a reflexive manner from my own field experience (Part 1), but also by historically and anthropologically analyzing the recorded rituals of astronauts and cosmonauts (Part 2).

Before I get into that, however, I feel that it is important to disclose that the terms “magic” and “witchcraft” are loaded with colonial baggage, as well as Western suppositions about what these terms mean within the dominant Judeo-Christian theology. In these posts, I do not mean to appropriate or dilute the intensely real experiences that blossom out of what some anthropologists in the past labeled as magic and witchcraft (and sometimes these labels were accompanied by a skeptical sneer). In fact, I hope for the opposite: to show that even those steeped heavily in the scientific method—a perceived objective practice supposedly removed from magical actions—are participating in what anthropologists have outlined as ritualistic behavior.

But first—to the eastern coast of Florida in the beginning of September . . .

I watch as a bead of sweat slips slowly down off the tip of my nose and spirals wildly—its death throes—until the poor, salty little pearl impacts the ground. I stare down at its resting place among the wilted blades of grass in which I’m sitting cross-legged. God, it’s hot. Actually, as a native Arizonan, I’m used to the heat. It’s the damn humidity that’s the culprit. I feel like I’m encapsulated in cellophane. Like I have a plastic grocery bag over my head and tied around my neck—humidity’s executioner hood. After a big sigh, I squint painfully through the sting of sweat on my eyelids down the line. Next to me in the grass, stretching back hundreds of feet, are at least two hundred fellow space enthusiasts, waiting to board the buses to take us to the exclusive LC-39 Observation Gantry. Months prior, I sat at my computer, waiting for the LC-39 tickets to go on sale. The LC-39 site is the closest you can get to a rocket when it launches from Cape Canaveral—as such, the tickets are highly sought after. In fact, the tickets sold out in two hours, but I managed to secure one. However, the only thing that mattered now was that I get into that air-conditioned bus as fast as I could. As the line surged forward, my obsession to arrive early to everything paid off as I boarded the first bus and was greeted by that familiar blast of artificially cool air.

The bus surged forward after a few minutes. I began to listen to the conversations happening around me and I heard a variety of different languages and dialects of English: British, Australian, German, Dutch, Russian. Did they all come to the United States just for this rocket launch? Is this a technoscientific pilgrimage? I was sitting on a bus with 50 other people—behind us, there were five other buses to cart the rest of us—all to witness a fleeting moment of awe together.

The bus drove over the Banana River on human-made causeways built to support NASA’s infrastructure. It drove past the press areas with leering reporters scribbling in their notebooks and holding cameras with massive lenses. It drove past the enormous crawler-transporters that were used to carry the Saturn V moon rockets and Space Shuttles from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpads. Sitting behind barbed wire fences amidst piles of trash, these machines looked like sad, lethargic prisoners—colossal dormant monsters that may have made an admirable foe for Don Quixote before their imprisonment.

We finally reached the LC-39 Observation Gantry. We disembarked from the bus and were greeted with a large banner hanging down off of the gantry advertising SpaceX—the new gods, the new religion—as we walked into the exclusive area, the shrine we had all waited to get to. Inside, there was a feast for the hungry pilgrims—a spread of fruit, vegetables, hot dogs, hamburgers, sodas, water. I grabbed a bottle of water and skipped the food, opting to fast for this experience—my first time witnessing a rocket launch in person. I climbed the gantry and claimed my space on Level 3 in the stairwell. Straight ahead of me was the launch pad—wisps of water vapor streamed off the rocket like ghostly tendrils trying to cling to the thick air. My heart was racing.

A man set up his camera tripod next to me. He told me he lives nearby and tries to photograph every launch he can. I told him I’m a poor graduate student pilgrim here for my first launch. He didn’t seem to understand me and ordered his wife to fetch him several hot dogs—no ketchup. We cannot all be pious in the illustrative majesty of rocket technoscience.

Suddenly, I heard cries from down below.

“Here we go!”
“Quick! Look!”

Across the river, smoke and vapor began to erupt from the base of the rocket. The rocket started to rise from the ground atop a brilliant flame. Television cameras and photographs cannot capture the blinding brilliance of rocket’s fire. It hurt my eyes and I had to avert them from the rocket’s image—looking just the left or right of the tortured missile as it began to pick up speed. The pilgrims began cheering and clapping—the only noise that could be heard—we hadn’t been hit by the sound yet. Then the deafening roar of the rocket slams into us. The sound modulated as it bounced off the river and the buildings. It sounded like waves—deep and ripping, tearing the atmosphere apart. It only took half-a-minute for the rocket to become a point of light in the sky—the sound began to dampen.

Suddenly, I realized that my mouth was hanging open and I had tears in my eyes. I had transitioned beyond the limen; I was different from this experience, this ritual, this rite of passage. I never had a religious or spiritual experience before in my life, but I think that I had just experienced my first. I walked down from the gantry slowly, and watched everyone begin to line up to leave on the buses—the experience was over, now it was time to get back to the “real world.” Like the pilgrims shuffling back to their “real world,” Part 2 will take us away from my reflexive account of an uncrewed rocket launch and into the “real world” of crewed astronautics. In the next post, I will discuss some of the magical and ritualistic behaviors performed by astronauts, cosmonauts, and the scientific community.

Proceed to Part 2

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Martin Pfeiffer and Ryan Anderson for reading drafts of this two-parter and providing vital feedback. I would also like to thank Michael Oman-Reagan, Grant W. Trent, Lisa Messeri, Alice Gorman, Dick Powis and Bree Blakeman for the excellent Twitter brainstorming sessions that led me to some of my conclusions. My thanks also to Fritz Lampe for guiding me through the incredible world of the anthropologies of symbol, myth, and ritual.

This reader’s question raises several issues- about development, about witchcraft and about defining a research problem.   Responding to it provides an opportunity to practice demand driven anthropology- an underutilized potential of the blog format. As an anthropologist who works on development institutions, and on witchcraft in East Africa, this is my take on it.

Ideas about witches and violence directed against those who are thought to practice witchcraft , including women and children, remain socially significant in many countries in the world.  The negative social impacts of witchcraft make it a development issue in relation to human rights violations and its contribution to social exclusion. Moreover, representations of witchcraft in popular culture consistently situate what witches are alleged to do in direct contradiction of aspirations to achieve personal and national development.

Our reader asks whether the study of witchcraft is distinct from the kinds of research which would be relevant to development, and whether witchcraft and development are distinct domains of social practice which demand different sorts of analysis.   Should she aim to study witchcraft in the hope that it may have something to say about development or is there, as one professor working in development told her, `more useful work to be done around behavior change and water, sanitation and health than witchcraft’?

These questions are partly influenced by our reader’s current situation within development practice (she works in an NGO), hence the professor’s concern for prioritizing the understanding of behavior change that could prove useful for designing more effective interventions. But they are also informed by the ways that witchcraft has been addressed within contemporary anthropology as a field of symbolic practice.   The well known work of Jean and John Comaroff, for example, interprets witchcraft beliefs at least partially as a vehicle through which experiences of peripheralization, including global social relations, can be symbolically articulated (1999).

If witchcraft enables the articulation of an `occult economy’   it is at the same time materially grounded with effects in the real world (Moore & Sanders 2001). Witchcraft as a social institution frequently operates as a means through which human relations are restructured sustained by expanding economies of the occult comprising healers, unwitchers and diviners. It is often accompanied by violence.

The social inseparability of these two dimensions of witchcraft is the focus of ongoing ethnographic work by Isak Niehaus and Adam Ashforth. Both Niehaus and Ashforth have spent many years researching the everyday politics of witchcraft in South Africa. In the years immediately after the   ANC victory, witchcraft accusations, murder and expulsions were widespread in rural areas and townships as deadly weapons in local conflicts centered on political allegiance and access to resources.

Violent practices justified by witchcraft were an important part of the local political system, supported by vested interests. Accusations of witchcraft were invoked to escalate disputes with serious social consequences (Niehaus 1993; Ashforth 2005). Those affected by witchcraft include those who believe they are bewitched and those who find themselves accused of witchcraft . The personal experiences of the affected in South Africa are sensitively examined by both authors (Niehaus 2012; Ashforth 2000). A new book by James Howard Smith  and Ngeti Mwadime explores related issues in Kenya (2014).

Certain social categories can find themselves liable to accusation and the violence or expulsion which follow.   Attacks on older women accused of witchcraft in Western Tanzania have attracted international media attention since the 1990s (Mesaki 2009). More recently in Tanzania people with albinism, particularly children, have been at risk of murder by practitioners of witchcraft who seek to use their body parts to make powerful medicines (Bryceson et al 2010).

It is evident from these examples that practices related to witchcraft are strongly rooted in the ideas that people hold about witches and their powers. The tenacity of these ideas is not simply explained by what ideas about witches mean. It is equally a product of what Mary Douglas called `entrenchment’ (1991: 726) ; that is the actions people take which sustain ideas about witchcraft and the practices through which it is realized institutionally. In Western Tanzania, as in South Africa (Ashforth 2005 ), diviners play a crucial role in diagnosing witchcraft as the cause of personal misfortune and in identifying alleged witches, responding to demand to resolve personal and political differences through severing relations (e.g. Green 2009).

While what is categorized as the `traditional’ healing sector promoted through the political valorization of African medicine provides support for the institutional foundation for the sustained presence of witchcraft across the continent (Langwick 2011; Ashforth 2005) , sub disciplinary boundaries within anthropology have generally worked against the problematization of the institution of witchcraft , both within medical anthropology and in relation to the wider political economy. Consideration of witchcraft primarily in terms of the ontological deflects from the interrogation of   the economics which sustains it and creates lucrative small business opportunities for the countless individuals who set themselves up as herbalists, diviners and healers.

Anthropological uncertainty about the situation of witchcraft feeds into ways in which various state authorities, colonial and post colonial, have approached it and inadvertently promoted it. If witchcraft is understood as essentially a matter of culture and belief it can potentially be attacked through education and political campaigns, while legal sanctions are directed against those who practice witchcraft and against those seeking to make them knowable.

It is clear from recent media reports in a number of countries that neither approach is working. Evangelical Christian churches proliferating on the continent readily assume responsibility for addressing perceived witchcraft threats within and beyond their congregations (Meyer 2004; Hasu 2012). Social media fuels the extension of transnational economies founded on the occult, dispersing witchcraft through the diaspora while offering a means for those afflicted to address it.

If the transnational appeal of healers and preachers such as the hugely popular TB Joshua in Nigeria are testament to the enduring salience of notions about witchcraft, they are also indicators of the consistent imbrication of witchcraft with innovation and social transformation. Witchcraft is not , despite systematic condemnation by the governments seeking to prohibit it, a traditional and static social institution. It is a continually evolving assemblage.

The institution of witchcraft, wherever it occurs, is not only wholly implicated in modernity (Geschiere 1997). Those engaged with witchcraft either as purchasers of its powers, such as the miners of Western Tanzania, or the diviners offering protection from it consistently seek to adapt the ways in which they do so; through new forms of protective practice, changes in how clients seeking protection are dealt with or the contexts in which certain medicines come to be viewed as efficacious (e.g Green & Mesaki 2005; Englund 2007). It is not witchcraft in the abstract but the practice of it which in many settings is perceived to be antithetical to modernization and moving forwards. Personal ambition may be thwarted by witches whose jealousy prevents a person from getting ahead. Witchcraft as is therefore consistently viewed by those affected by it as getting in the way of development (Smith 2008).

Governments tend to claim that witchcraft related practices and ideas are backward and anti- development, a political position certainly, but one which borrows its legitimation from certain kinds of anthropology. In constituting witchcraft as a matter of culture anthropologists and African states fail to acknowledge the ways in which it comes to be institutionally entrenched in various settings.   The study of witchcraft is inherently entangled with development as ideology and in terms of the interventions at social reform undertaken by successive African governments.

The study of witchcraft , in Africa and elsewhere, demands some kind of engagement with the politics of development in various institutional forms. It is also important. However much we contribute to understanding witchcraft, however meaningful it may be, witchcraft as an institution amounts to symbolic, structural and actual violence. It causes significant social harm. If anthropologists can help unpick its institutional tenacity we will have made a useful contribution.

References Cited

Ashforth, Adam. Madumo, a man bewitched. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Ashforth, Adam. Witchcraft, violence, and democracy in South Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, Jesper Bosse Jønsson, and Richard Sherrington. “Miners’ magic: artisanal mining, the albino fetish and murder in Tanzania.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 48, no. 03, (2010): 353-382.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. “Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony.” American ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279-303.

Douglas, Mary. “Witchcraft and leprosy: two strategies of exclusion.” Man (1991): 723-736.

Englund, Harri. “Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 2 (2007): 295-311.

Geschiere, Peter The Modernity of Witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. University of Virginia Press, 1997.

Green, Maia, and Simeon Mesaki. “The birth of the “salon”: Poverty,“modernization,” and dealing with witchcraft in southern Tanzania.” American Ethnologist 32, no. 3 (2005): 371-388.

Green, Maia. “The social distribution of sanctioned harm.” Addison et al, Poverty Dynamics (2009): 309-327.

Hasu, Päivi. “Prosperity gospels and enchanted world views: Two responses to socio-economic transformation in Tanzanian Pentecostal Christianity.” Pentecostalism and Development: Churches, NGOs and Social Change in Africa 1 (2012): 67.

Langwick, Stacey Ann. Bodies, politics, and African healing: The matter of maladies in Tanzania. Indiana University Press, 2011.

Mesaki, Simeon. “The tragedy of ageing: Witch killings and poor governance among the Sukuma.” Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives. Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (2009): 72-90.

Meyer, Birgit. “Christianity in Africa: From African independent to Pentecostal-charismatic churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology (2004): 447-474.

Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. “Magical interpretations and material realities.” Magical interpretations, material realities: modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa (2001): 552-566.

Niehaus, Isak A. “Witch-hunting and political legitimacy: continuity and change in Green Valley, Lebowa, 1930–91.” Africa 63, no. 04 (1993): 498-530.

Niehaus, Isak. Witchcraft and a life in the new South Africa. Vol. 43. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Smith, James H., and Ngeti Mwadime. Email from Ngeti: An Ethnography of Sorcery, Redemption, and Friendship in Global Africa. Univ of California Press, 2014.

Smith, James Howard. Bewitching development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal Kenya. University of Chicago Press, 2008.