Lecture 20Witchcraft, social action and

morality

Kapferer: Rationality and creativity

• The analyst often imposes his or her own ‘rationality’

• Structural functionalist analysis – translating the irrational into the rational

John Middleton: Lugbara witchcraft

• Inherent power – evoked by jealousy or hostility

• Witchcraft vs. invocation of the ancestors

• Witchcraft follows the dynamics of social tensions

• Witchcraft is not ‘real’, but suspicions and accusations are

• Refusal to study local practice in its own terms.

Magic as a source of knowledge

• Need to ‘bracket off’ local practice from Western conceptions of rationality

• Creative - not part of a bounded, coherent system of knowledge

• Sorcery and witchcraft are ‘metacosmologies’

• Create new knowledge and understanding

• Address the pragmatic, immediately felt issues

Isak Niehaus: Zombies in South Africa

• Witchcraft and sorcery is deeply ambiguous

• Three aspects of witchcraft:– discourse or moral commentary – a mode of social action – subjective experience

Narratives of zombies as discourse

• Satire or commentary on the prevailing experience of domination

• Objectify power relations• Metaphorically witches possess the same

attributes as white employers • Imagery recalls the experience of slavery

and migrant labour• Reflects upon the dependence of

dominated persons

Accusations as social action

• The ambiguity of witchcraft

• In actuality those most often accused were subordinate, elderly, and poorer persons

• Accusers were primarily members of relatively better-off households

• Accusers feared witches would capture their descendents

• Explains how the poor managed to survive

The subjective reality of zombies

• Witches and zombies are omnipresent but unseen

• Constructed complex webs of evidence:• Dreams and hallucinations• Personal experience of death• Prophesy• Rumours

• Local cultural imagination

Indeterminacy

• Power and appeal of witchcraft

• Allows for inconsistencies and alternative interpretations

• No single hegemonic interpretation

Nils Bubant: Sorcery and corruption in Indonesia

• Ambivalance: – Both hidden and immoral– Simultaneously reprehensible and inescapable

• Success in democratic politics is itself magical

• Corruption or mutual help?

• Illegitimate knowledge or protective magic?

• Condemned but at the heart of one’s own practice