Ethnographic Sorcery Read Online Free PDF

a breath, “a lioness, I think.”
    As we completed the trip in eerie silence, I wondered to myself if we had “seen the same thing” before us in the dim headlights, despite my certainty that we somehow shared the adventure. 2
    So what does the anthropologist make of it when told that people make, or make themselves into, lions? In talking about sorcery lions as symbols five years earlier in the ARPAC seminar room, I had attempted to steer a course between two hazards arising from such questions. The first of these hazards was epitomized for me by Sister Rosa Carla, an Italian nun who founded and ran a health clinic in Mwambula, the village adjacent to the Nang’ololo mission to which she was assigned after the Mozambican civil war ended in 1992. The sister dedicated herself tirelessly to the clinic, dispensing much-needed and much-sought-after medications in recycled plastic 35 mm photographic filmcanisters sent to her by friends and parishioners around the world. I respected her greatly and visited her from time to time. Once, when I was accompanied by Marcos and Tissa, she told me that she and her Toyota Hi-Lux had recently come upon a group of hunters from the village of Nshongwe who, only moments earlier, had killed a lion in the roadway. She obliged the villagers’ request to help them transport the lion to the village center and, while doing so, got an earful of stories about lion-people. “It’s all so unfortunate,” she told me, glancing occasionally at Marcos and Tissa, whom she seemed to chastise as she spoke. “These feiticeiros [Portuguese for “sorcerers”] that they summon to come and kill these so-called lion-people—they are the same ones to whom my patients go for cures to infections and venereal diseases and malaria.” Her voice was stern. “I treat people at my clinic in the morning, and they die at night in the feiticeiro’s house because they believe he can cure them. These feiticeiros do the most outrageous things. They poison people with their superstition.” She shook her head as she lamented, “There is so much ignorance here. I can scarcely keep up with it all.” 3
     
    To Sister Rosa Carla, I opposed in my mind Fernando Alves, a man of local legendry in Cabo Delgado. The son of mulatto parents, Alves lived in Pemba in the bairro cimento (the “concrete neighborhood,” composed mostly of houses built by Portuguese occupants in the colonial period). While he earned a living as a self-employed mechanic, Alves was, like his father, an avid big-game hunter. When local hunters, armed with bows and arrows, were unable to dispense with lions that menaced villages anywhere in the province, Alves was summoned by the provincial government to kill them. Curiously, according to the Makonde trackers employed by Alves, he was adept at recovering lyungo, the life substance Makonde say a predatory animal, such as a lion, vomits in the moments immediately before dying. Alves indeed attributed his success as a hunter to his ability to find and ingest lyungo, as Makonde hunters have long sought to do. But Alves was not Makonde; nor was he from Mueda. Evenhis African forebears were foreign to the region in which he hunted and to the Makonde “traditions” he invoked. His father’s mother—a Ronga woman—came from as far away as Maputo, in the southernmost province of the country. In other contexts, he traced his hunter’s pedigree to his Portuguese grandfather. Hearing of Alves’s deeds, and occasionally listening to his stories, I found myself at times wondering how genuine his convictions were—whether this urban-born-and-raised man of mixed European-African descent had somehow “gone (more) native” or merely played on his guides’ convictions to consolidate his status among them.
     
    In any case, in the ARPAC seminar room, talking about sorcery lions, I felt myself awkwardly positioned somewhere between Sister Rosa Carla and Senhor Alves. Thoughts of the sister’s dismissive