Hunting the Ethical State: The Benkadi Movement of Côte d”Ivoire by Joseph Hellweg (review)

Joseph Hellweg’s monograph describing the dozos (magically endowed hunters) of Côte d’Ivoire and their relationship to the state at the end of the 1990s is full of lush ethnographic detail, historical transformations, and political interconnections. One of its strengths comes from an almost classical holistic focus that brings together micro-level analysis of ritual performance and social drama à la Victor Turner with domestic kin structures, national politics, a crime wave, and a transnational movement of hunters. The very fact that such diverse things could be connected is marvelous, and a lesson in itself for anthropology students who might read this book. The dozos wear mysterious awe-inspiring robes covered in occult objects, and their magical powers are renowned and feared in Côte d’Ivoire. They are first and foremost hunters, and their occult power springs from the original dozo Manimory, who sacrificed his family and eventually himself to the forest in order to protect dozos. Subsequently, dozos mimic this original human sacrifice through more benign subjects (such as chickens) in order to reproduce its power. They are shape-shifters capable of taking on animal and plant forms of the forest, making themselves doubles of their prey in order to approach without detection. Hellweg argues that it is precisely this mimetic logic that allowed dozos to adapt themselves like chameleons to their changing environment and become protectors of civil society, doubling the state and fighting against a crime wave that swept the country in the 1990s as the economy failed. This depiction of the development of a hunters’ organization into a parastatal security force first sanctioned and then rejected by a state in crisis will be of vital interest to scholars of African statecraft and conflict.

Hellweg uses mimesis as one of his key theoretical frames, arguing that not only were the dozos mimetic in their means of approaching the forest and society, but that President Bédié himself was copying his predecessor Houphouët-Boigny’s legitimate authority. Thus, “mimetic transformation became a shared means of adapting to life in post-Houphouet-Boigny Côte d’Ivoire. Far from proving an exception to Ivoirian statecraft, dozos’ mimetic aesthetic was a variation on this theme” (p. 104). Though my own research focuses on southern youth and urban crime in Côte d’Ivoire rather than northern hunters (Newell 2012), I also argue that mimesis is a central aspect of both social interaction and national identity. Remarkably, working independently in separate regions of the country, both Hellweg and I found that copies and originals seemed to fold into one another, undermining the very notion of inauthenticity. Given the disparate and yet convergent themes in our work, it would seem there are far more deep-rooted cultural connections among Ivoirians than recent political divides would indicate, and that the relationship between a cosmology of a doubled world and the practice of mimesis deserves further exploration.

Indeed, while the idea that the dozo organization Benkadi was copying the Ivoirian “state of exception” instituted by Bedié is intriguing, I found myself wanting to know more about the parallels and differentiation involved. If Bedié is copying Houphouët, did he succeed or was his imitation false? If the latter, what does that mean for the dozos’ true copy of a counterfeit state? In what ways might the dozos diverge from the original state, and which differences are accidental and which intentional? All of these queries are perhaps best summed up by the question “Since not all copies are equal, what are the criteria by which actors approach mimetic practices?”

For those interested in the political crisis that continues to grip Côte d’Ivoire, this book provides a clear and readable analysis of the historical underpinnings of the crisis...