Ethnographic Sorcery (review)

Harry West has written a short reflective follow-up to his 2005 study Kupilikula, an important ethnography of sorcery practices in the Mueda plateau of northern Mozambique during its postsocialist liberalization period in the 1990s and early 2000s. Kupilikula, a Makonde-language verb meaning roughly "to invert," refers to the transcendent maneuvers of both destructive and constructive sorcerers of the Mueda plateau who create phantasms such as man-eating lions and make magical medicines in a never-ending game of one-upmanship. Where the eponymous monograph investigated kupilikula through the lens of contemporary local politics, Ethnographic Sorcery juxtaposes Muedan sorcery with the very ethnography that West himself carried out in Mozambique. Using Jose Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" as his prologue—a story where the protagonist realized he was "a mere simulacrum … a projection of another man's dreams"—West argues that the ethnographer also participated in never-ending transcendent maneuvers by attempting to gain an interpretive ascendancy over a confusing and hostile environment, only to become himself an object of the sorcerer's practice. This potentially glib proposition serves, fortunately, as a useful frame to speculate on the meanings of sorcery and participatory ethnographic fieldwork, as well as to consider the limits of symbolic anthropology.

Ethnographic Sorcery addresses several vital themes of contemporary Africanist witchcraft studies and has already attracted much scholarly attention, including a published roundtable discussion (in African Studies Review 51.3 [2008], 135–47). It is a short book comprised of very short chapters that trace the arc of one ethnographer's assumptions, experiences, and epiphanies. Having given up on a preliminary project to study Muedan conceptions of the future, West began to investigate sorcery practices in the 1990s by first seeking classical sociological patterns of accusations. Yet this strategy, itself representative of an earlier anthropological literature (a classic text being Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa [1963]), yielded no discernible patterns, leading the author to embrace a symbolic approach to gain his own "interpretive ascendancy" over the subject—an interpretive strategy that remains the prevailing approach in Africanist witchcraft studies. Speaking at a conference in Mozambique, West suggested that phantasmic man-eating lions were symbols of social predation but also of nobility and power, only to be corrected by a Muedan who objected, "they aren't symbols—they're real" (p. 5).

The book's great strength lies in its honest and thoughtful reckoning with this objection. West challenges anthropological strategies that interpret sorcery as metaphors for something else by countering, "whose metaphor is it?" Does the metaphor belong to the riddle-solving anthropologist who stands above the confusion and false consciousness of witchcraft believers by discerning internally coherent but objectively "wrong" social facts, or limning discursive structures otherwise invisible to Muedans who "mistook allegories for identities" (p. 38)? Uncomfortable with this conceit, West instead offers an analysis of metaphor by calling on the insights of anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers. He comes to endorse the perspective of phenomenologists, who assert that reality exists "only through its apperception" (p. 46), resulting in a "life-world" made out of the meanings people give to it. From this unconventional and often revealing discussion of metaphor, West invokes the conventional and quite durable ontology of coexisting visible and invisible realms, which he argues comprise the key dimensions of the Muedan "lifeworld." The interpretive shift from symbolic anthropology to a phenomenological approach coincides in the text with a serious illness West suffers during his fieldwork, after which his recovery comes to be understood by both himself and others "in Muedan terms." The adoption of this phenomenological approach—heralded by the frequent use of expressions such as "made world," "life-world," and "(re)making of the Muedan world"—has the advantage of taking seriously the experienced reality of sorcery discourse, but at the cost of dulling the riddle-solving impulse to offer up interpretations that risk being right or wrong. What can West or his Muedan interlocutors possibly get wrong interpretively if Muedan sorcery is to be...