Ethnographic Sorcery Read Online Free PDF Page A

his face in his hands. Heshook his head. When he looked up, he revealed a smile. “The trouble is, mano, you’re trying to understand this thing scientifically. You can’t understand this scientifically.”
     
    “But you’re the one who . . . !”—so befuddled was I that I found myself unable to finish my sentence.
    “Vavi are vavi,” Marcos responded. “There is no sense to what they do.” He threw his hands up in the air with gleeful exasperation. “They don’t kill for wealth or power. They don’t want money or tractors or airplanes.”
    “What do they want?” I asked.
    “They crave human flesh. They can’t get enough of it. That’s what they want.”
    Marcos reminded me of what we had been told by Boaventura Makuka when we had asked him if a particular sorcerer—a man who, according to him, had made a lion to attack his own niece—had been motivated by envy (the “explanation” Muedans generally give for a sorcerer’s attack). “He must have been,” Makuka had answered, before adding, “although sometimes vavi attack because they decide that their victims have ‘good meat on their bones’—just like you or I would say about a goat we decided to slaughter.” Having invoked this image, Marcos now slumped back on the igoli. Following a pregnant pause, he looked at me and said, conclusively, “That’s uwavi. You can’t explain that scientifically!”

 
    B ELIEF AS M ETAPHOR
    “There’s no use trying,” [Alice] said: “one ca’n’t believe impossible things.”
    « LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass ([1871] 1998: 174) »
    When I returned to the United States in 1995 after completion of my dissertation fieldwork and told my anthropologist friends and colleagues about sorcery lions, they seemed to know better than to ask if I “believed in” such things. Which is not to say that they knew—or even thought they knew—whether or not I “believed”; rather, they avoided the question, it seemed to me, because they considered any answer—mine or theirs—“problematic.” Others with whom I shared accounts did not observe this disciplinary taboo. When I started to teach in 1997, undergraduate students asked with persistence if I “believed in” sorcery. My answers were often witty, and always cagey. Embracing and adapting Mark Rogers’s idea that one can “believe a little bit” (Rogers n.d.), 1 I often told people that I believed far more at night—when the distant grunts and snorts of lions could, indeed, be heard from some of the villages in which I slept—than I did in the light of day.
    Muedans themselves sometimes asked me, in reference to sorcery, “What do you think of all of this?” It seemed to me that they expected me to dismiss “it all” as nonsense, as hadmost Europeans they had known. When, during my first year in Mueda, Marcos asked me if I put stock in the power of the countersorcery “treatments” that we sometimes observed in healers’ compounds, I answered, cautiously, that if others believed in these treatments, “there must be something to them.” Clearly, I too found the question “problematic.”
     
    The question that I so assiduously avoided, however, stalked me from Mueda to the United States and the United Kingdom and back to Mueda again. In the dark of night, just outside the village of Diaca, as Marcos and I—in his nephew Nelito’s dilapidated pickup truck—gathered speed to ascend the plateau on our journey from Pemba to begin our stint of intensive research on sorcery in 1999, a sleek silhouette appeared in the dim headlights before us less than thirty meters away. As quickly as we saw it, it slipped off the road and into the bush, its tail raised like a cobra poised to strike. So close were we that I could not bring the vehicle to a halt quickly enough to peer into the bush after the creature.
    “Shuvi [leopard]?” I asked Marcos, “or ntumi [lion]?”
    “I don’t know,” he immediately responded, adding, without taking