Of Sorcery and State

Harry G. West, Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 336 pp.

In the Shimakonde language of northern Mozambique, kupilikula means to overturn, undo, or invert. One would— "pilikula" the sorcery of an opponent, thereby doing harm to the intending perpetrator of harm. In his book entitled Kupilikula, Harry West expands the definition of that word to include transformation of various sorts—of meaning, of power, and of neo-liberal governance. Sorcery, West argues, has played a significant, complex role in anti-colonial struggle, socialism, and in post-socialist reform on the Mueda planteau of Cabo Delgado Province. Indeed, Muedans have frequently found, in the invisible realm, the authority they lack in government and in the market. In mild tones, then, Kupilikula celebrates sorcery and redeems it from longstanding critiques.

West organizes Kupilikula as a series of encounters with alleged sorcerers and their alleged victims. Rather than advancing in article-length strides, his argument unfolds in the course of 28 vignettes. Readers learn of sorcerers who turn themselves into lions and devour their victims or who turn their victims into lions who are killed by people. Counter-sorcerers, who also number among West's friends and subjects, rescue victims and repel the sorcerer's charms. Can they do so without themselves knowing and practicing sorcery? With verve and insight, West conveys the atmosphere of suspicion, doubt, and ambiguity prevailing on the Mueda plateau. He is a skilled fieldworker; at one point he even secures the coy confession of a sorcerer. Students will find West's style engaging and the book extremely readable. Indeed, by acknowledging the role of his field assistant in nearly every interview, West does a great service to aspiring anthropologists: he subverts the myth of the lone ethnographer-cowboy.

At the same time, however, the density of vignettes and dialogues may detract from the potential value of Kupilikula. At the outset, West describes uwavi, the invisible realm, as a discourse or a language for expressing relationships, fortune, misfortune, power, and efficacy in the world. His conversations with and about sorcerers demonstrate that point amply. But those conversations occupy so much space in the book that one can hardly see past them. Is sorcery only an idiom? Do sorcerers practice sorcery in ways other than talking about it? One emerges unsure of how sorcery really occurs. Other idioms for understanding and explaining the world—notably, kinship—relate to categories of events in the visible world, such as, marriage and birth. What are the categories of events that animate the discourse of uwavi, and how does that discourse rise and fall in accordance with events? West's vignettes address and answer these questions situationally rather than systematically.

The main situations are political, related to the neo-liberal reforms beginning in earnest in 1994. Under structural adjustment and related programs, the Mozambican state privatized state-owned corporations, ceased to provide public services, and, in general, ceded vast swathes of its territory to private capital and/or to international development NGOs. Meanwhile, under the banner of decentralization, the state told rural residents, such as, those on the Mueda plateau, to elect their own leaders and provide services to themselves. Democracy and development had arrived! Thanks to uwavi discourse, Muedans saw through this charade almost immediately. The concepts of sorcery, West writes, functioned as "a sensory organ through which to perceive profound contradictions in the emerging neo-liberal order" (8). In the past, Muedans expected their leaders to ensure the community's physical well-being and to protect it from invisible malevolence. Under socialism, President Samora Machel had provided services for Mozambicans while unofficially indulging them in their belief that he and the ruling FRELIMO party practiced beneficial sorcery. Then, fifteen years of civil war made Mozambique the poorest nation in the world. Prostrate before international donors, the post-war state embraced structural adjustment. It divested itself of any economic responsibility for the people and, by extension, of...