No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Dangers of anonymity. Witchcraft, rumor, and modernity in Africa
Abstract
This article deals with a series of rumors that spread across West and Central Africa during the last two decades. These rumors of penis snatchers, of killer mobile phone numbers, and of deadly alms constitute a transnational genre that is characteristic of Africa's occult modernity. While the literature on the modernity of witchcraft has been criticized for its macrosociological orientation, the article strives to counterbalance this bias by drawing on microsociology in order to explore the interactional repertoires in which these new forms of the occult are grounded. It shows that they exploit anxieties born out of mundane situations: shaking hands with strangers, receiving unidentified phone calls, or accepting anonymous gifts. New forms of the occult thus focus on the dangers of anonymity and point to the risk of being forced into opaque interactions with unknown others. They draw on two different situations of anonymity, which can be connected to two distinctive repertoires of modernity. Face-to-face encounters with strangers are typical of - but not exclusive to - urban modernity, while mediated interactions with distant and often invisible agents are part and parcel of technological modernity. Therefore, insofar as modernity has extended the scope of human sociality in unprecedented ways, it has extended as well the scope of the occult. This article casts new light on witchcraft and the occult in contemporary Africa, and suggests new ways of tying together micro and macro levels of analysis, by grounding the wide-ranging dynamics of modernity in the minutiae of human interaction.
... It is about the real and the unreal, the dead and the undead. In particular, I emphasise demonic, vampiric, or zombie-like paradigms that reflect local interpretations of global flows of power and evil that echo findings elsewhere in Africa (Apter 2012;Bonhomme 2012;Niehaus 2005;Stewart and Strathern 2004;White 2000), particularly within the occult economies literature (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999;Geschiere 1997;Moore and Sanders 2001). ...
... Therefore this paper links Acholi demonic narratives to aspects of the occult economy, demonstrating that, at least partially, they are local manifestations of wider attempts to understand those mutually reinforcing processes known by such terms as colonialism, globalisation, or modernisation. However, as well as the usual economic analyses of African narratives about zombie workers and demon pacts, I highlight how local systems of meaning incorporate wider regional and global cosmological figures, practices, and understandings such as underwater demon worlds (Allen 2015;Apter 2012;Bonhomme 2012;De Boeck 2005;Eni 1987;Meyer 1995;Pype 2017;Victor 2019) or evangelical notions of spiritual warfare (Rio 2010;Robbins 2004). In this way, although I link local demonic narratives to global processes, my analysis goes beyond those studies that seem to begin and end with the occult economy or its material effects. ...
... It is also important to note that in many of its specific dimensions te pii is as much an old cultural and symbolic terrain as it is a new cosmo-ontological construct: it is old in a broader regional comparative sense in which, across Africa, large bodies of water are connected to powerful spiritual forces 6 (Evans-Pritchard 1956; Kenny 1977;Lienhardt 1954;Seligman and Seligman 1932). On the other hand, the exact dimensions of this specific manifestation of te pii are relatively new within the Acholi South Sudanese world-likely only since the conjoint experience of exile and evangelical Christianity from the late 1980s-although it is now somewhat standard across the wider region, especially among evangelicals (Allen 2015;Apter 2012;Bonhomme 2012;De Boeck 2005;Meyer 1995;Pype 2017;Victor 2019). ...
This paper recounts the autobiography of an evangelical South Sudanese pastor who has been under water to the land of demons, telling of cosmic flows of persons, power, and wealth between times, places, and dimensions. Although it builds on stories circulating across Africa since colonial times and emphasises paradigms found throughout the occult economies literature, what is significant about this autobiography is that it relates the narrator’s own experience. This is important because although these occult elements reference global processes, the narrative given is as much about the local as it is the global. Likewise, it as much spiritual as it is material or economic. My analysis thus goes beyond the occult economy or its material effects and instead demonstrates the ontological alterity and spiritual meaningfulness of such incursions and attempts to push the envelope of academic analyses and interpretations relating to the diverse complexity of religious experience, African or otherwise.
... People used to use witchcraft by practising exoteric rites with the assistance of hallucinogenic substances, "which are themselves basically forces of destruction" [73][74] [75][76]. Campbell [77] found that some Xhosa patients in South Africa who were diagnosed with schizophrenia attributed their mental illness to witchcraft and stated that they were possessed by an internal force, displaying a passive attitude and describing hallucinations [78] [79][80]. ...
... The above suggests that the Fang people today continue to believe in witchcraft as a causal mechanism for mental illness. In other sub-Saharan African cultures, witchcraft continues to be viewed as a causal force, although often with new symbols, new social identities and power relations] [82][83] and it suggest that new ways of practising witchcraft coexist with modernity and globalized imaginaries [78][79]. ...
In 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) included “culture-bound syndromes” in its classification of psychiatric disorders and associated them with disease processes that manifest in behavioural or thought disorders that develop within a given cultural context. This study examines the definitions, explanatory models, signs and symptoms, and healthcare-seeking behaviours common to Fang culture-bound syndromes (i.e., kong, eluma, witchcraft, mibili, mikug, and nsamadalu). The Fang ethnic group is the majority ethnic group in Equatorial Guinea. From September 2012 to January 2013, 45 key Fang informants were selected, including community leaders, tribal elders, healthcare workers, traditional healers, and non-Catholic pastors in 39 of 724 Fang tribal villages in 6 of 13 districts in the mainland region of Equatorial Guinea. An ethnographic approach with an emic-etic perspective was employed. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, participant observation and a questionnaire that included DHS6 key indicators. Interviews were designed based on the Cultural Formulation form in the DSM-5 and explored the definition of Fang cultural syndromes, symptoms, cultural perceptions of cause, and current help-seeking. Participants defined “Fang culture-bound syndromes" as those diseases that cannot be cured, treated, or diagnosed by science. Such syndromes present with the same signs and symptoms as diseases identified by Western medicine. However, they arise because of the actions of enemies, because of the actions of spirits or ancestors, as punishments for disregarding the law of God, because of the violation of sexual or dietary taboos, or because of the violation of a Fang rite of passage, the dzas, which is celebrated at birth. Six Fang culture-bound syndromes were included in the study: 1) Eluma, a disease that is targeted at the victim out of envy and starts out with sharp, intense, focussed pain and aggressiveness; 2) Witchcraft, characterized by isolation from the outside, socially maladaptive behaviour, and the use of hallucinogenic substances; 3) Kong, which is common among the wealthy class and manifests as a disconnection from the environment and a lack of vital energy; 4) Mibili, a possession by evil spirits that manifests through visual and auditory hallucinations; 5) Mikug, which appears after a person has had contact with human bones in a ritual; and 6) Nsamadalu, which emerges after a traumatic process caused by violating traditions through having sexual relations with one’s sister or brother. The therapeutic resources of choice for addressing Fang culture-bound syndromes were traditional Fang medicine and the religious practices of the Bethany and Pentecostal churches, among others. Among African ethnic groups, symbolism, the weight of tradition, and the principle of chance in health and disease are underlying factors in the presentation of certain diseases, which in ethno-psychiatry are now referred to as culture-bound syndromes. In this study, traditional healers, elders, healthcare professionals, religious figures, and leaders of the Fang community in Equatorial Guinea referred to six such cultural syndromes: eluma, witchcraft, kong, mibili, mikug, and nsamadalu. In the absence of a multidisciplinary approach to mental illness in the country, the Fang ethnic group seeks healthcare for culture-bound syndromes from traditional healing and religious rites in the Evangelical faiths.
... Technology figures prominently not only in my fieldnotes about my interactions with Fabrice but also in most of the contemporary witchcraft stories documented in ethnographies of African cities. Key elements of modernity such as the car, the airplane, and pharmaceutical drugs are integrated in the quest for success and power (Geschiere 1997;De Boeck 2005;Bonhomme 2012;Englund 2007). These objects are identified as carriers, tools, or vehicles used by bandoki (Sg. ...
... The man who saw my caller ID as "111111111" told me he had been afraid that this was a satanic phone call. Thus, in Kinshasa, although less prominently than in other sub-Saharan African countries (like Nigeria, Gabon, and Malawi, see Bonhomme 2012 andEnglund 2007), mobile phones are inserted into the occult economy. ...
Based on an exploration of how Branhamist Christians in Kinshasa represent and live with kindoki (sorcery/witchcraft), this article attempts to bring science and technology in the debate about witchcraft. The Branhamist Christian community is divided among groups who jettison information and communication technologies (ICT) outright, while others formulate a pedagogy of responsibility and awareness of the potentially immoral nature of ICT. The ethnographic material leads me to call for more attention to connectivity, or the accessibility to social and spiritual others, as an important mode in emic theories of witchcraft. Finally, in order to do justice to the heterogeneity of objects that can trigger kindoki—such as ancestral objects but also ICT goods—I propose the notion of “the witchcraft complex.”
... A negative mood also inflects contemporary studies of alterity and ambivalence. This includes recent works on mistrust (Carey 2017;Mühlfried 2019); mental opacity (Robbins and Rumsey 2008;Stasch 2008); suspicion (Archambault 2017;Bonhomme 2012); deception (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015;Smith 2007); conning (Newell 2012;Walsh 2009); envy (Hughes et al. 2019); difficult kinship (Peletz 2001;Lambek 2011); and disagreement (Elinoff 2021). While some of these authors could fit within the category of dark anthropology as Ortner has sketched it, we suggest that the overall thrust of their analysis is different. ...
... C'est précisément l'absence d'un dispositif d'ordonnancement impersonnel des conduites qui pourrait expliquer la peur voire la terreur que suscite, à intervalles réguliers, la coprésence étroite avec des étrangers dans certaines villes d'Afrique Centrale et d'Afrique de l'Ouest. Comme le montrent les rumeurs de crise qui conduisent des communautés à soupçonner certains étrangers de leur « voler leur sexe » ou de les ensorceler après un bref contact interactionnel, les relations avec des inconnus ne sont pas suffisamment réglées ou scénarisées pour calmer la « peur de l'étranger » (Bonhomme, 2012). ...
De nombreux postulats ontologiques et épistémologiques semblent opposer les sciences sociales et les sciences cognitives, même si elles prétendent toutes deux au statut de Sciences de l’Esprit. Ces divergences se retrouvent dans les débats sur la morale. Bien que les approches cognitives et sociales de la morale définissent d’un commun accord la morale comme un système d’évaluations qui permet de jauger les conduites en termes de bien ou de mal, de juste ou d’injuste, elles divergent sur l’étendue et la spécificité du domaine moral. Cet article montre que le désaccord des approches cognitives et sociales de la morale ne résulte pas seulement de leur enracinement ni de leurs présupposés disciplinaires ; il découle de la dualité cognitive et ontologique de “ ce que moral veut dire ”. C’est cette dualité et ses implications qui sont au coeur de cet article.
... Consequently, rather than a focus upon an otherworldliness of ordinary 'stuff', the examination of a spectral material culture entails analysing the 'micro-sociological' aspects of interactional situations and repertoires to engender minute connections between ritual spheres, creating spaces for the generative self and new forms of knowing/unknowing about misfortune (Neal & Murgi, 2015). It is to do justice to the more profoundly interstitial places and minute resistances where magic works as Bonhomme (2012) articulates when looking at the anonymity of habitus in urban Cameroon. It is to highlight what an interlocuter called 'know-how' -the dynamic interplay of the magical within and not by spectral forces who live outside of the everyday (Blanco del Pilar, 2010). ...
In 2020 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the top-10 most disabling diseases. Today, it is the fourth most common mental disorder in the United Kingdom. This research is based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 in Merseyside and Cheshire, UK, which re-imagines obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals among women who self-diagnosed as having ‘magical thinking OCD’. Referring to variations in the brain, OCD is often described as a type of neurodiversity. While, in popular culture, representations of OCD practices invariably invoke anthropological ideas of magical correspondence and animism as objects are assumed to possess an overpowering agency over the person who is supposed to master their possessions. This study aims to firmly place the notion of OCD in the realm of a spectral material culture and initiate a wider sociological conversation about the ‘haunting’ of a wide range of subject-objects. In doing so, I want to remove magic from the normative shadow of concepts such as the mysterious and the ghostly and instead employ the ordinary everyday as a sociological analytic for understanding the magic of mass-produced things and global processes of automation.
... As practices of truth-seeking beyond the official truth, popular narratives express social anxiety and a community's feeling of vulnerability or fragmentation (Douglas 1966) and are a privileged field where to access vernacular history (White 2001;Pratten 2007). Rumours may eventually shape patterns of accumulation and circulation (Geschiere 1995) or be formulated in relation to trans-local or global phenomena (Scheper-Hughes 1996;White 1997;Israel 2009;Bonhomme 2012). ...
Narrations on fragility and resilience in the Sahel paint a picture about the region’s inherent ungovernability that lead to consider an endless state- and peace-building process as the most feasible governance solution. Everyday practices of violent entrepreneurship, coalescing with inter-community and land-tenure conflicts, now inform social relations and are transforming moral economies around Lake Chad. While competition over territory suitable for farming, grazing and fishing has intensified, dispute-settlement practices organised by community-level authorities have proven ineffective and lacking the necessary means to respond to the encroachment of a wide range of interests claimed by increasingly powerful actors. Meanwhile, communities organised in self-defence militias are undergoing a process of progressive militarisation that tends to normalise violence and legitimise extra-judicial vigilante justice, further empowering capital-endowed arms suppliers gravitating in the jihadi galaxy, such as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
... One informant explained to me that the owner of these shops had invested their white fishing earnings in expanding and improving his businesses and bringing new products to sell in town (cf. Bonhomme, 2012). Upon reflection, I came to see the challenge in distinguishing White Fish income from other sources of income, since practices associated with the White Fish not only require a high level of secrecy, but other commercial activities may benefit indirectly from spending resultant from increased income. ...
Chocó is a remote and biodiverse region located on Colombia’s Northern Pacific Coast. The region is home to indigenous Embera and Afro-descendant communities. Both communities share and contest a legacy of colonisation, violence, dispossession and discrimination. This thesis explores the ways in which the local communities of Chocó challenge and transform the matters that concern them. It focuses on their concerns over the effects of biodiversity conservation, development, and drug trade on their communities. It first investigates the challenges associated with doing research concerning both global and local concerns. Then, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chocó, it develops a methodology to address environmental value conflicts over the use of Utría National Park, located in the region. Third, the thesis studies the social protest of both local communities for the construction of a small hydroelectric power plant inside the park, finding that this protest for electricity reflects a complex post-colonial politics complementary to the discourse concerning political resistance as expressed by local and indigenous communities protesting against development. Fourth, drift-cocaine has been arriving recently to the coastal region of Chocó as a side effect of the country’s war on drugs. In Chocó, this phenomenon is referred to as the White Fish and is investigated here by situating its associated practices and transformations within the local context. Fifth, Utría National Park is explored visually as a place of rhythms and temporalities. Lastly, it argues that the mechanisms, grounded in concepts of solidarity and co-existence, which are employed by the local communities in negotiating the matters that concern them, provide alternative narratives to the ones often used to described them as in “poverty” and in need of “development”.
... Crucially, they are also constitutive of modernity; they are what Todd Sanders (1999: 128) calls 'a metacommentary on the deeply ambivalent project of modernity'. This finding has since been specified and elaborated upon in contexts across the African continent, including, to name but a few examples, with reference to modalities of insecurity and state building in South Africa (Ashforth 2005;Niehaus 2005), neoliberalism in Tanzania (Sanders 2008), religious transformation in Ghana (Meyer 1999), Nigeria (Smith 2001) and Niger (Masquelier 2008), and modern communication technologies in West and Central Africa (Bonhomme 2012). For the Mozambican context, Harry West (2005) has argued that an upward trend in long-standing sorcery fears among Makonde residents of the Mueda Plateau in the 1990s was related to neoliberal reforms and the introduction of democracy, partly because of the deleterious effects these had on socio-economic equality, but also because commitments to liberal notions of individual freedom and human rights prevented local administrators from acting on sorcery accusations. ...
Urban migrants in Nampula City, northern Mozambique, perceive themselves to be living in an environment where they are particularly vulnerable to sorcery attacks. Key to this sense of vulnerability are Makhuwa notions of matrilineal descent and relatedness, which work to locate sorcery fears in the interstices of two kinds of proximity, namely social and physical. Accordingly, people fear the translocal reach of the ill will of kin residing in the countryside, with whose well-being they remain connected regardless of the physical distance. Simultaneously, there are threats posed by urban neighbours who, due to their proximity in physical terms but separation in social terms, are considered dangerous. This article analyses practices of conspicuous exchange as one of the strategies urban migrants employ in coping with these anxieties. Specifically, it draws on the life histories of two women in one neighbourhood of Nampula City to explore the challenges they experience in meeting demands for material assistance from rural kin and urban neighbours. The analysis shows that their accounts of sorcery are structured by the difficulty of balancing such demands in a setting of poverty and socio-economic inequality. This finding has implications for anthropological theories of sorcery, misfortune and urban migration.
... Anonymity stands out clearly as the most distinctive common denominator of these new forms of the occult, especially if contrasted with 'family witchcraft', which represents the archetypal form of witchcraft. (Bonhomme 2012) Many Nigerians have left their rural villages, coming to modern cities such as Lagos and Abuja in search of greener pastures. In these cities, they realize that the grass is much greener at home, yet they cannot return to the village emptyhanded. ...
Most of the academic literature on violence in Nigeria is qualitative. It rarely relies on quantitative data because police crime statistics are not reliable, or not available, or not even published. Moreover, the training of Nigerian social scientists often focuses on qualitative, cultural, and political issues. There is thus a need to bridge the qualitative and quantitative approaches of conflict studies. This book represents an innovation and fills a gap in this regard. It is the first to introduce a discussion on such issues in a coherent manner, relying on a database that fills the lacunae in data from the security forces. The authors underline the necessity of a trend analysis to decipher the patterns and the complexity of violence in very different fields: from oil production to cattle breeding, radical Islam to motor accidents, land conflicts to witchcraft, and so on. In addition, they argue for empirical investigation and a complementary approach using both qualitative and quantitative data. The book is therefore organized into two parts, with a focus first on statistical studies, then on fieldwork.
... A whole library of recent anthropological work documents the continent-wide surfacing of new witchcraft beliefs in the globalizing "modern" context of the urban arena. Much of this literature focuses on the intimate links between the notion of witchcraft and the concepts of modernity, governance and development (see Bonhomme 2012;Geschiere 1997Geschiere , 2010Nyamjoh 2001;Sanders 1999;Smith 2008;West 2005). 5 People indeed tend to instrumentalize witchcraft beliefs to acquire accumulative powers in spiritual, "nocturnal" or "occult economies" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999) by means of which they may access the fruits of modernity denied to them in daily life. ...
All over the world, new religious movements have become a highly visible part of the urban landscape. Taking Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a starting point this chapter analyzes new manifestations of the religious and the sacred in urban space, as well as the ways in which urban cultures and infrastructures mediate diverse practices, discourses, and affects in the various domains of the sacred. By investigating the alignments, collusions and collisions between the city and the sacred, this chapter intends to bridge between the anthropology of religion and an anthropology of the urban form and imagination.
... Information about potential danger is a central element in many rumors [1,2], and urban legends [3][4][5], but also of ritual prescriptions [6], religious prohibitions [7] or witchcraft crazes [8,9]. Some of this cultural information has important social consequences, as for instance in witchcraft accusations but also in rumors about the alleged dangers of vaccination or medication [10,11]. ...
Information about potential danger is a central component of many rumors, urban legends, ritual prescriptions, religious prohibitions and witchcraft crazes. We investigate a potential factor in the cultural success of such material, namely that a source of threat-related information may be intuitively judged as more competent than a source that does not convey such information. In five studies, we asked participants to judge which of two sources of information, only one of which conveyed threat-related information, was more knowledgeable. Results suggest that mention of potential danger makes a source appear more competent than others, that the effect is not due to a general negativity bias, and that it concerns competence rather than a more generally positive evaluation of the source.
... Moreover, the belief in sorcery seems to be strongest among the Mossi. Although they constitute the majority of people in all the different neighbourhoods visited, the presence of, for example, Muslim northerners and better educated neighbours – perceived among all the interviewees as not believing strongly in sorcery – apparently prevented sorcery taking root in Ouagadougou unlike other SSA cities (Bonhomme, 2012 ). This was often illustrated during the transect walks. ...
In recent research on rural-to-urban migration in sub Saharan Africa, a major point of discussion has been to what extent cities in this region are growing as fast as previously assumed and what role rural-to-urban migration plays in this process. Some of the literature suggests that the extent of rural-to-urban migration has been exaggerated and that some cities are even experiencing a migration reversal. A much used example of this ‘reversal’ is Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In this paper, we argue that most of the published literature regarding rural-to-urban migration in Burkina Faso relies on retrospective survey data covering the period prior to 2000 and that in fact little is known about migration trends in the last 15 years. Based on ethnographic field data, our results suggest that recent socio-political and environmental developments in Burkina Faso give rise to at least six distinct reasons for leaving the villages to settle in Ouagadougou. The paper therefore raises the question whether a rural-to-urban migration reversal is currently observed in Ouagadougou. Based on qualitative data no definite answer to this can be given in this paper but the results presented indicate that Ouagadougou might no longer be a good example of rural-to-urban migration reversal.
In this chapter, we focus on education, which is commonly regarded as the sine qua non of social change and economic development in Africa (e.g. Fichtner 2012; Stambach 2006), and which has opened up new opportunities for moral as well as political and market engagement by Christian and Muslim actors at all educational levels against the backdrop of liberalization and privatization since the 1990s (Dilger and Schulz 2013: 370). By means of a comparative ethnographic study of the missions of a range of Christian and Muslim educational institutions in urban Tanzania and Nigeria, we argue that in the context of compromised state education and inadequate infrastructure, religiously motivated initiatives provide youths with the tools and material spaces to negotiate the socio-moral unpredictability of urban living and to convert themselves into moral citizens according to the values of the religiously motivated organizations that run these institutions, as well as civic virtues.
In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret ‘African collections’ from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada. The result, Lost Bodies, critiques racist ideologies that justified presenting objects from colonised African peoples as evidence of ‘superstition’ or ‘witchcraft’ in early European museums. Fernandes redirects the deferential gestures of ballet, professionalised in Louis XIV’s court at the same moment of the objects’ collection, to reanimate and apologise to them. Considering Lost Bodies, I explore how it is possible to nuance Western museums’ public development narratives by engaging such artefacts without either ignoring their history or rejecting museums on account of their own.
Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods, ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, karma, and the violation of specific rules or ‘taboos’. In modern large‐scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, for example, accidents and assault. These responses may seem both disparate and puzzling, in the sense that the proposed accounts of untoward events provide no valuable information about their causes or the best way to prevent them. However, these responses make sense if we see them in an evolutionary context, where accidents, assault, and illness were common occurrences, the only palliative being social support to victims. This would create a context in which all members of a group might be (a) required to offer support, (b) willing to offer such support to maintain a reputation as co‐operators, and (c) desirous to limit that support because of its cost. In this context, recurrent explanations of misfortune would constitute strategic attempts to create and broadcast a specific description of the situation that concentrates responsibility and potential costs on a few individuals. This strategic model accounts for otherwise perplexing features of explanations based on mystical harm (ancestors, witchcraft, etc.), as well as the tendency to denigrate victims, and offers new predictions about those cultural phenomena. Perspectives : pourquoi nous faisons des reproches aux victimes, accusons les sorcières, inventons des tabous et invoquons les esprits : un modèle de réponses stratégiques à l'infortune Résumé Les explications de l'infortune alimentent de multiples discours culturels dans la plupart des sociétés humaines. L'intervention d'agents surhumains (dieux, ancêtres, etc.), la sorcellerie, le karma et la violation de règles ou « tabous » spécifiques en sont quelques thèmes récurrents. Dans les grandes sociétés modernes, on réagit souvent au malheur, par exemple aux accidents ou aux agressions, en critiquant ses victimes. Ces réactions peuvent sembler à la fois discordantes et intrigantes en cela que les récits proposés d’événements malencontreux n'apportent pas d'informations utiles sur leur cause ni sur le meilleur moyen de les éviter. Pourtant, elles ont un sens si nous les voyons dans le contexte de notre évolution, au cours de laquelle accidents, agressions et maladies étaient monnaie courante et la seule mesure palliative était le soutien du groupe aux victimes. Dans ce contexte, tous les membres d'un groupe pourraient être (a) appelés à apporter leur soutien, (b) disposés à offrir ce soutien afin de conserver leur réputation de coopérateurs et (c) désireux de limiter ce soutien à cause de son coût. Les explications récurrentes de l'infortune constitueraient dès lors des tentatives stratégiques de créer et de diffuser une description spécifique de la situation, qui en concentrerait la responsabilité et le coût potentiel sur quelques individus. Ce modèle stratégique rend compte des explications mettant en cause des entités mystiques malintentionnées (ancêtres, sorcellerie, etc.) qui laisseraient sinon perplexes, ainsi que la tendance à dénigrer les victimes. Il ouvre également de nouvelles perspectives sur ces phénomènes culturels.
Building on ethnographic research in Uganda, this paper discusses the mundane practice of rumour mongering and gossiping as anticipatory practices. Crude oil discovery in Uganda brought a small oil boom to the region endowed with the natural resource including some infrastructure development and the presence of foreign oil exploration and construction companies. With these companies came (young) men working for them or aspiring to get employed. However, as the development of the oil remained in a phase not-yet-ness, a temporal space opened for rumours about the oil and anyone involved with it to flourish in the oil region. Especially, since information on the (national) development of the oil project was scarce. The rumours used familiar tropes such as gender stereotypes or witchcraft to relate to the presence of foreign or at least non-local casual workers. Ugandans living in the oil region wondered what negative repercussions the boom might have for them and viewed the strangers with suspicion. During my fieldwork, I encountered rumours of wife-snatching, sexual harassment and even human sacrifice. This paper argues that these rumours can be understood as risks narratives or the sharing of anticipatory knowledge. The rumours were not only reflections of the past but were told in anticipation of the dark side of the future.
The riots of 2005 in Mocímboa da Praia and the current violent attacks in Cabo Delgado province have resulted in a range of unsettling rumors. This article revisits the riots and their aftermath to make sense of the rumors that have spread since then, fueling fears of violence and uncertainty. These disconcerting rumors are especially rich in what they tell us about the perception of the political Other and the narratives that materialize following violent events. The way in which rumors circulated and were believed or discarded draws a rough picture of the local political arena. This article discusses the elusive nature of trust following sudden violence and addresses the role and relevance of rumors as an obstacle to the creation of peaceful trust relationships.
This chapter analyzes instances of refusal to eat or drink due to the fear of poisoning and contamination amongst favela youth in Brazil. These particular occurrences of refusal shed light on refusal’s potency as a way of managing complex social entanglements and instrumental in asserting agency. Considering that interlocutors had come of age without many formal institutions present, they needed people. This artful skill had a flip side, for the proximity of people and the intensity of
relationships could at times drain them and their emotional, social and economic resources. Discourses around poison, bad hearts and vampires thus emerge as aids towards the regulation of
exchange involved in social relationships.
La crisis económica y las políticas de austeridad de la última década han transformado la gestión del patrimonio natural. Mientras las administraciones públicas han aplicado recortes presupuestarios y de personal que limitan su acción, han surgido nuevas estrategias procedentes de la sociedad civil, como colectivos locales, grupos ecologistas y empresas. De ahí que hoy nos encontremos ante un cambio de paradigma con importantes consecuencias socioambientales. Desde el enfoque metodológico propio de la antropología ambiental y el trabajo etnográfico, este libro plantea dos líneas de reflexión principales: por un lado, examina cómo este modelo descentralizado y descentralizador de la conservación se implementa en distintos contextos, observando particularidades y elementos comunes que ponen en evidencia una tendencia global. Por otro, ofrece un análisis crítico de lo que significa la gestión del patrimonio natural en sí misma desde el campo de las relaciones humano-ambientales y de la conservación, apostando por nuevas perspectivas que enriquecen la comprensión de estos cambios de modelo. Este recorrido por espacios naturales protegidos de Europa y Latinoamérica da las claves para repensar el presente del patrimonio natural y, sobre todo, para replantear el futuro.
A través de este capítulo, nos adentramos en un relato bastante extendido entre los ganaderos de un parque natural de la Sierra Morena andaluza acerca de una de sus iniciativas ambientales. Se trata de la reintroducción de una especie de mamífero carnívoro a la que los ganaderos responsabilizan de los crecientes ataques al ganado ovino. La inverosimilitud de ciertas versiones ha llevado a las autoridades ambientales a rechazar tales acusaciones con desdén y, en ocasiones, en tono de burla. Siguiendo el camino inverso, este capítulo parte de tomarse muy en serio un fenómeno discursivo que, no por rocambolesco, es menos generalizado. Con la ayuda de la perspectiva de Žižek sobre la ideología, el capítulo se interroga por la visión que dicho discurso encierra en torno al parque natural en tanto centro de poder. A partir de ahí, indaga en las posibles conexiones con sus prácticas políticas y propone una lectura del relato en términos de su funcionalidad para el enconado conflicto con la administración ambiental.
This chapter analyzes instances of refusal to eat or drink due to the fear of poisoning and contamination amongst favela youth in Brazil. These particular occurrences of refusal shed light on refusal’s potency as a way of managing complex social entanglements and instrumental in asserting agency. Considering that interlocutors had come of age without many formal institutions present, they needed people. This artful skill had a flip side, for the proximity of people and the intensity of relationships could at times drain them and their emotional, social and economic resources. Discourses around poison, bad hearts and vampires thus emerge as aids towards the regulation of exchange involved in social relationships.
Deception in Indian electronic media, especially television, has reached its zenith for several reasons in recent times. Due to increased competition among thousands and odd television channels, the media tended to adopt deception and connivance as strategies of survival. While deception subsumes a wide range of communication strategies, connivance is tinged with politics of various hues such as national politics, regionalism, casteism, and market driven economic considerations. The deception often transforms into a form that exhibits a tendency to create crisis by arousing passions of different sections of society towards a topical subject; later it attempts to diffuse the same crisis in connivance with political establishment. The present chapter not only highlights a few such important deceptive stories of television in Indian media in the recent past but also analyses the manner the Telugu media had created severe crisis with regard to demonetization in the twin Telugu states through creation of fake news.
In this article, the relationship between cosmology and financial transactions via the sacred and deeply secret discourses of West African traditional priests in Europe is explored, who believe that they can spiritually manipulate the monetary pricing of stocks and shares. Of particular interest is how West African witchcraft discourses, while still embedded in kinship relationships, become symbolically caught up in the economy and in the volatile movement of industrial commodity indexes. In analysing the financial imaginary and constant reconfiguration of the marketplace by different networks of stakeholders, Ghanaian fetish priests allow for a fiscal elasticity and material distorting of monetary flows such that the incoherence and uncertainty of global financial practices and the fictious pricing and purchase of unstable commodities are shaped and magnified through a thick Akan cosmology.
This article explores relations between ways of experiencing socio-economic disorder, strategies on how to deal with it, and monetary classifications that symbolize these ways and strategies. It assumes that we can learn something from the fact that the concept of pesa makech (‘bitter money’) has been replaced with the much more diffuse notion of pesa marach (‘bad money’) in Western Kenya during the last twenty-five years. This shift in how ‘negative forms’ of money are discursively marked indexes a change in the way in which the people of Kaleko, a small market centre in Western Kenya, conceptualize the disorder of their surroundings. Instead of interpreting disorder as an effect of events taking place inside their sphere of influence, residents of Kaleko now predominantly situate the cause of disorder in actions of external actors that are perceived as uncontrollable: the ‘economy’, money itself, politicians, members of other ethnic groups and untrustworthy Luo. This necessarily changes the ways in which disorder is tackled: while pesa makech ’s bitterness could be resolved by ‘sorting out’ ( rieyo ) the homestead's disorder, nowadays people employ other ways that aim at resolving disorder: upscaling rieyo ’s potential to the Kenyan nation; ‘struggling’ ( chandre ) through disorder; and relativizing rieyo ’s applicability.
In 2010, a strange rumor of "deadly alms" circulated in Senegal: a mysterious individual driving a SUV was said to distribute alms that killed all those who accepted them. The story made the headline news and several persons were accused of giving deadly alms and consequently beaten by crowds. In this article, we show that the rumor destabilizes the everyday routines of charity and the religious solidarity that underpins them. In the Muslim context of Senegal, the rumor thus exposes the ambiguities inherent in the moral economy of alms (sarax in Wolof). This paradigmatic case of poisoned gift indeed reveals a grey area between religion, magic and sorcery. It also worriedly questions the relation between gift and sacrifice, two classic concepts in anthropology since Marcel Mauss.
The Belgian anthropologist Pierre Smith was a perceptive ethnographer and a forward-thinking theorist whose insights provided the fertile ground out of which grew influential anthropological approaches to ritual, ritual efficacy, and art some 30 years later. In this article, I trace the genealogy of the ‘mind trap’, a key concept in Smith’s theoretical writing and a true analytical gem in itself. The appeal of Pierre Smith’s theory lies with how ritual action (or art) might produce such entrapment of the mind, and why this might be a key process in ritual (and art) efficacy, i.e. ‘operations’ liable to trigger a transformation. I then go on to review the many reverberations and ramifications of his concept as reflected in two recent theoretical approaches to ritual and ritual efficacy, as well as the possible connections between Smith’s ‘mind trap’ and certain aspects of Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art. Pierre Smith points ethnographers and ritual theorists in the right direction to answer questions about the transformational nature of many rituals (and art works) around the world. While mind traps cannot fully explain ritual efficacy, they can serve as a starting point for a strong and ethnographically-grounded theory of ritual efficacy.
Vaccinated like animals?How do individuals participate in a vaccination campaign when faced with an entirely new illness? This paper compares two groups involved in vaccination campaigns ordered by the State in 2009 : a medical centre working on A/H1N1 influenza, and a union of sheep farmers and veterinary surgeons fighting ovine catarrhal fever. Following the course of the rumours in these two "watchgroups", the study shows that vaccination calls into question the relations between individual and State and between humans and animals.
People seeking to understand the scope and scale of violence in the Central African Republic over the past two years have cited a variety of social grievances centring on the political manipulation of religion, belonging, and access to opportunities. Without denying that these factors have played a role, this article argues that the violence must be understood in the context of social practices of violence that long predate the war, especially in light of the diffuse and non-centralized mode of organization through which the ongoing war has played out. The article focuses on the prevalence of popular punishment and vengeance, which have long histories as elements of statecraft in the CAR and have become even more widespread amid the generalized insecurity and anomie that have set in over the past few decades. The article presents evidence of the workings of popular punishment from the intra-family level to that of the crowd and quartier, in both rural and urban locales. Though people have important reservations about popular punishment, they also see vengeance as an important tool for enforcing a circumscribed mode of empathy and a minimum set of standards for social behaviour. These experiences in the CAR suggest that those wishing to understand how wartime mobilization happens must consider not just fighters' grievances but also people's conceptions of the practical and symbolic efficacy of vengeance and popular punishment as elements of politics and the management of threats.
The main thrust of our research is to provide a cross-cultural definition of enchantment. Drawing on first-hand accounts of spirit possession in an Afro-Brazilian cult and on Dolphin encounters at sea, we compare the two settings to identify the common features in both people's experiences and the technologies of enchantment that make them possible. According to our findings, the main features of the experience of enchantment are: ontological uncertainty as to the entities involved and the experience itself; uncanny feelings; an attentional focus on inner bodily and mental states; dissociative and hypnoid states; and a shift in perceived agency. We define the technology of enchantment as an "in-between space of practice" (Belin 2002), neither totally material, nor totally subjective, which enables the merging of unusual bodily states with imagination and culturally prepared expectations. Such merging is possible only if the individual is immersed in a sensorily organized environment (sensescape), made up of distributed perceptual saliences, and if a relation based on trust and benevolence is achieved.
Reading African cities into contemporary theory—reprint of a richly illustrated reference work
In their internationally acclaimed publication Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart provide a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality that Kinshasa presents today, but also of a second, invisible city as it exists in the mind and imagination of its inhabitants. They bring to light a mirroring reality lurking underneath the surface of the visible world and explore the constant transactions that take place between these two levels in Kinshasa’s urban scape.
Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa By Adam Ashforth. Chicago and New York. University of Chicago Press. 2005.
On the basis of field research in Soweto, South Africa, since 1990, this paper reports that witchcraft is commonly thought to be increasing as a direct result of the transition to democracy. This paper begins an examination of the question of witchcraft, violence, and democracy in Soweto by presenting three dialogues on witchcraft and the state: with a man afflicted by witchcraft, a traditional healer, and the mayor of Soweto. Its aim is to uncovered the structure of plausibility within which questions concerning the purpose of power in a democratic state are being framed and answered in a context where witches are a vital and terrifying feature of everyday life.
In recent years, it has become common for academic writers to use ‘the occult’ as an analytical category to which are assigned various types of mystical belief and activity that are quite widespread in Africa, including those often described as ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’. It is notable that all these concepts generally go undefined. The present article argues that much of the current academic vocabulary used to describe and analyse the invisible world that many Africans believe to exist is tainted by an intellectual history associated with colonialism. Instead, we propose that much African thought and action related to the invisible world should be considered in terms of religion, with the latter being defined contextually as a belief in the existence of an invisible world, distinct but not separate from the visible one, that is home to spiritual beings with effective powers over the material world.
Bhats are a caste of low-status performers from the Indian state of Rajasthan. Bhat patrons, following deaths in their families, distribute ‘alms’ (dan) to Bhats who work as their genealogists and praise-singers. Though their patrons are generous on these occasions, Bhats typically must be coerced into taking these offerings, which they consider dangerous and even lethal. The ‘poison’ of Hindu transactions such as these is usually attributed to a fear of impure or inauspicious substances passed between persons during exchange. Bhat explanations, however, reveal a danger linked to ambiguities created by death related to property rights and exchange obligations. These ambiguities, according to Bhats, precipitate disputes between patrons, ritual intermediaries, and spirits. Such conflict translates into a perception of danger to one’s person. Based on Bhat accounts, I suggest there may be a variety of distinctive ‘poisons’ associated with Hindu alms. I further argue that the Bhat sense of danger, which emerges from the fluid give and take of social relations rather than a fear of contagion, is heightened by this community’s position as marginalized bards.
Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from "ritual murder," the sale of body parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramid schemes and other financial scams. And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation—mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings "the global" and "the local"— treated here as analytic constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities—into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an "awkward" scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there,
What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modern Africans? How are so-called "traditional" cultural forms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where "modernity" has failed to deliver on its promises? Some of the essays in Modernity and Its Malcontents address familiar anthropological issuesâlike witchcraft, myth, and the politics of reproductionâbut treat them in fresh ways, situating them amidst the polyphonies of contemporary Africa. Others explore distinctly nontraditional subjectsâamong them the Nigerian popular press and soul-eating in Nigerâin such a way as to confront the conceptual limits of Western social science. Together they demonstrate how ritual may be powerfuly mobilized in the making of history, present, and future. Addressing challenges posed by contemporary African realities, the authors subject such concepts as modernity, ritual, power, and history to renewed critical scrutiny. Writing about a variety of phenomena, they are united by a wish to preserve the diversity and historical specificity of local signs and practices, voices and perspectives. Their work makes a substantial and original contribution toward the historical anthropology of Africa. The contributors, all from the Africanist circle at the University of Chicago, are Adeline Masquelier, Deborah Kaspin, J. Lorand Matory, Ralph A. Austen, Andrew Apter, Misty L. Bastian, Mark Auslander, and Pamela G. Schmoll.
Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time-space compression, commodification, individualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This article shows how an underlying meta-narrative preempts social scientific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural, as in the alleged need to "situate" the particular in "wider" contexts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique in the ethnographic method-its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to support this argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in white people, money, and consumption and the other from Africa on born-again Christianity and individuality. The article ends by reflecting not only on the limits of metropolitan meta-narratives in returning relevance to anthropology but also on the contemporary conditions of academic work that undermine the knowledge practices of ethnography and render such meta-narratives plausible.
'We cannot imagine life now without a mobile phone' is a frequent comment when Africans are asked about mobile phones. They have become part and parcel of the communication landscape in many urban and rural areas of Africa and the growth of mobile telephony is amazing: from 1 in 50 people being users in 2000 to 1 in 3 in 2008. Such growth is impressive but it does not even begin to tell us about the many ways in which mobile phones are being appropriated by Africans and how they are transforming or are being transformed by society in Africa. This volume ventures into such appropriation and mutual shaping. Rich in theoretical innovation and empirical substantiation, it brings together reflections on developments around the mobile phone by scholars of six African countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Sudan and Tanzania) who explore the economic, social and cultural contexts in which the mobile phone is being adopted, adapted and harnessed by mobile Africa.
Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip combines two classic topics in social anthropology in a new synthesis: the study of witchcraft and sorcery and the study of rumours and gossip. It shows how rumour and gossip are invariably important as catalysts for accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, and demonstrates the role of rumour and gossip in the genesis of social and political violence, as in the case of both peasant rebellions and witch-hunts. Examples supporting the argument are drawn from Africa, Europe, India, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. They include discussions of witchcraft trials in Essex, England in the seventeenth century, witch-hunts and vampire narratives in colonial and contemporary Africa, millenarian movements in New Guinea, the Indian Mutiny in nineteenth-century Uttar Pradesh, and rumours of construction sacrifice in Indonesia.
This volume deals with the way in which money is symbolically represented in a range of different cultures, from South and South-east Asia, Africa and South America. It is also concerned with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges as against exchanges of other kinds. The essays cast radical doubt on many Western assumptions about money: that it is the acid which corrodes community, depersonalises human relationships, and reduces differences of quality to those of mere quantity; that it is the instrument of man's freedom, and so on. Rather than supporting the proposition that money produces easily specifiable changes in world view, the emphasis here is on the way in which existing world views and economic systems give rise to particular ways of representing money. But this highly relativistic conclusion is qualified once we shift the focus from money to the system of exchange as a whole. One rather general pattern that then begins to emerge is of two separate but related transactional orders, the majority of systems making some ideological space for relatively impersonal, competitive and individual acquisitive activity. This implies that even in a non-monetary economy these features are likely to exist within a certain sphere of activity, and that it is therefore misleading to attribute them to money. By so doing, a contrast within cultures is turned into a contrast between cultures, thereby reinforcing the notion that money itself has the power to transform the nature of social relationships.
Relates various and somewhat ambiguous notions of mystical danger to the principles of wealth and political power in Cameroon. Aruges that in a setting where the State claims to encapsulate the "authoritarian power of command', hierarchical ordering is rendered enigmatic by the association of the exercise of coercive power with sorcery. In a structure where obedience is not willingly given and moral virtue flows from the legitimacy of communal life, various diffuse and a-political practices operate to promote personal and group achievement and to resist state domination. -Authors
Erving Goffman was a master of the long essay, a genre comparatively rare in contemporary sociological and anthropological writing. While there is a steadily expanding secondary literature on Goffman, few of his commentators have provided close readings of individual essays. This article offers close readings of ‘Where the action is’ and ‘Normal appearances’ to demonstrate the potential of this approach to the analysis of Goffman's oeuvre.
Erving Goffman était un maître de l’essai long, genre relativement peu répandu dans l’écriture sociologique et anthropologique contemporaine. Bien que de nouvelles publications lui soient régulièrement consacrées, rares sont, parmi ses commentateurs, ceux qui ont donné une lecture détaillée de ses différents essais. L’auteur propose ici une lecture attentive de Where the action is et Normal appearances, dans le but de démontrer l’intérêt potentiel de cette approche dans l’analyse de l’œuvre de Goffman.
Au Nigéria, il existe peu (ou pas) d'innovations technologiques ces dernières décennies qui aient produit des conséquences sociales et culturelles aussi immédiates et d'une envergure aussi grande que celles crées par les téléphones portables. Cet article examine la nature des changements généres par la prolifération massive de la technologie des téléphones portables. Il examine la manière dont l'utilisation massive des portables a accentué la dynamique culturelle déjà en place, de même que la manière dont ces portables ont intensifié le mécontentement populaire, résultat de l'inégalité dans le Nigéria contemporain. D'une certaine manière, le nombre de portables a grandement élargi une sorte d'égalité de la consommation, offrant à des millions de Nigérians la possibilité d'être propriétaire d'une technologie, jusque là réservée seulement aux plus hauts échelons de l'élite sociale. Mais, cette nouvelle technologie a davantage exposé les profondes disparités de la société nigériane, contribuant ainsi aux préoccupations populaires quant au statut social qui font que les aspirations frustrées font autant partie de l'histoire que les opportunités élargies à un plus grand nombre.
Cet article est une lecture critique de l'article (publie dans le meme numero de la revue) de Jean Comaroff et John L. Comaroff sur les economies occultes et la violence de l'abstraction dans la Republique d'Afrique du Sud pendant la periode post-coloniale. Cette etude analysait les mecanismes par lesquels un contexte local est mondialise par les representations sociales et les pratiques relatives a la modernite. Le liberalisme economique, la recente democratisation en Republique d'Afrique du Sud s'accompagnent d'une montee de la violence liee aux accusations de sorcellerie, aux meurtres rituels, aux croyances surnaturelles ; tous ces temoignages sur la violence expriment une peur face a la liberte de la speculation economique, l'accumulation materielle et la consommation. La violence ne revele pas une position ideologique singuliere ou un programme politique affirme mais plutot une expression collective face a un systeme economique peu solide et a des valeurs sociales et culturelles nouvelles.
Les saints de la confrérie mouride sont habituellement décrits, par les observateurs extérieurs, comme une aristocratie d'élus auxquels l'exploitation économique d'environ un demi-million de disciples, paysans pauvres, procure d'importants privilèges matériels.
The American Diabetes Association currently recommends that all youth with type 1 diabetes over the age of 7 years follow a plan of intensive management. The purpose of this study was to describe stressors and self-care challenges reported by adolescents with type 1 diabetes who were undergoing initiation of intensive management. Subjects described initiation of intensive management as complicating the dilemmas they faced. The importance of individualized and nonjudgmental care from parents and health care providers was stressed. This study supports development of health care relationships and environments that are teen focused not merely disease-centered and embrace exploring options with the teen that will enhance positive outcomes.
L'article est consacré au " vol de sexe ", une rumeur de sorcellerie qui a touché à plusieurs reprises une vingtaine de pays d'Afrique subsaharienne depuis les années 1970. Il montre que la rumeur est moins une anecdote prêtant à rire qu'une affaire exemplaire permettant de comprendre l'Afrique urbaine contemporaine, les formes de sociabilité et les modes de communication qu'elle suppose. L'article met en valeur ce qui en fait une histoire particulièrement " bonne à penser " et " bonne à raconter " et peut ainsi expliquer sa diffusion géographique à une si vaste échelle et sa récurrence sur plusieurs décennies. En jouant sur des sauts d'échelle, l'analyse articule vue d'ensemble et vue de détail afin de rendre compte tant de la propagation internationale de la rumeur que des conditions singulières des accusations au niveau local. En étant attentif aux détails des situations, de ce que les gens font et disent, l'article s'attache ainsi à dégager de l'intérieur les enjeux autour desquels se focalisent les rumeurs de vol de sexe.
In his review article, Terence Ranger raises two major issues. First, he is concerned about the relation between exoticizing ideas about an 'African occult' in Western societies (for example, Scotland Yard investigations, media reports, etc.) and Africanist work on this topic. This is a pertinent issue. Pointing out worrisome overlaps between popular ideas about bloodthirsty ritual practices and scholarly research, Ranger urges us to reflect more deeply about the political field into which the knowledge we produce about 'occult matters' is being launched. Second, Ranger critiques a certain type of study – especially work on 'occult economies' and 'the modernity of witchcraft' – for inventing an 'aggregated African occult' that is too generalizing and present-centred to achieve real insight into the modes through which different African societies grapple with questions of evil. Instead, he advocates a historically grounded, ethnographically specific perspective. Both issues raised by Ranger are central to Africanist scholarship, and need our utmost attention. Therefore it is laudable that Africa is creating space for further debate.
There is a tension in Ranger's argument. For even the position of 'splitter' rather than 'lumper' (2007: 277) is predicated on acknowledging a broader category such as that of the 'occult' (a notion which Ranger clearly uses with unease). This tension can in my view not be resolved by retreating into the study of the particular, but needs to be acknowledged as intrinsic to our scholarship. Even though I have great sympathy for detailed studies (and if pressed would certainly side with the 'splitters'), I consider it unproductive to play off the level of the particular (or local) against that of the general (or global). At least in my understanding, the notion of 'occult economy' and the framework of the 'modernity of witchcraft' (interestingly, Ranger as well as ter Haar and Ellis, notwithstanding major differences, converge in their critique of the Comaroffs) may well be employed for the sake of detailed research. Highly diverse societies may still face similar challenges. As I have also tried to show in my own work, attention paid to modernity and globalization does not necessarily imply a disregard for local specificities, but may, on the contrary, entice a historical and ethnographic study of how the aggregation of the occult occurs in particular settings. Examples that come to my mind are missionary demonizations of local religious traditions, or Nigerian films of the Nollywood type that excel in visualizing witchcraft, revenge ghosts, ritual murder and the like, and which certainly enhance prejudices about Nigerians as 'occultist' throughout Africa. Remarkable figures such as Credo Mutwa – 'this old charlatan' (ibid.: 274) – also partake in practices of aggregating an African occult, suggesting spectacular links between Zulu visionary practices and Hollywood movies such as Spielberg's ET. In my view, such phenomena require more than unmasking them as inauthentic. They call us to pay detailed attention to actual practices of aggregation that mobilize resources from far away and close by. It goes without saying that such research requires historical and ethnographic specificity. At the same time we need to keep on reflecting on the very notions and concepts we employ to make sense of what we find 'on the ground'.
How far is the proposition made by Gerrie ter Haar and Stephen Ellis useful in this endeavour? Their main point is that Ranger, notwithstanding his plea for a more specific approach, still mobilizes a broad notion of 'the occult', and thus takes part in the very project he critiques. Explaining that they do not use the notion of the 'occult' in their own work at all (hence they feel misinterpreted by Ranger, who charges them with being party to the project of 'aggregating the occult'), these authors advocate discarding this notion altogether. As an alternative, they introduce religion as a more 'neutral', 'value free' and more encompassing term (p. 400). They argue that a Christian, moralistic understanding of religion as 'whatever is good and life-affirming' underpins the work of Ranger and other Africanists. This needs to be replaced by a focus on spiritual powers that act both constructively and destructively, depending on context. This shift, they argue, would allow scholars to get beyond a dualist opposition of the occult (understood as evil...
On 19 September 2003, mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria took the unprecedented step of switching off their handsets en masse. The subscribers took this symbolic step in protest against perceived exploitation by the existing mobile phone companies. Among other things, they were angered by allegedly exorbitant tariffs, poor reception, frequent and unfavourable changes in contract terms, and arbitrary reduction of credits. Among other critical questions, the protest helped bring into focus the following: How is (mobile) technology shaping the democratic momentum in Nigeria? How useful is technology as a mechanism for socio-economic empowerment? Using the boycott as backdrop, this paper provides some tentative answers. It is argued that the boycott ought to be appraised, first, in the context of existing mistrust between citizens and transnational big business in Nigeria; and second, against the background of difficult state-society intercourse which has mostly been characterised by the latter’s suspicion of the state’s connivance with the corporate establishment. Furthermore, because it gives ‘civil society’ a combined cause and instrument of protest, mobile phones in the Nigerian context appear to presage the emergence of a new social space of politics and agitation. The paper underscores an ordinarily subsumed ‘class’ dimension to the protest, illustrating how a struggle about the interests of a section of ‘civil society’ may have a potential for enlarging the larger ‘political space’.
In the Sherlock Holmes stories Scotland Yard famously does not deploy science or make use of all those studies of blood and ash and bone which Holmes himself had pioneered. But the Yard is never so clumsy as when the occult seems to be involved – with suspected vampires, spectral dogs, tribal fetishes. The Yard's combination of ignorance, scepticism and credulity is shown to be the very worst of all attitudes to adopt. How much things have changed in one way and how little in another. Scotland Yard is now incredibly scientific. The assumed ritual murder of ‘Adam’, the African boy whose torso was found in the Thames, has allowed a dazzling exhibition of what scientific method can now achieve. On the other hand police interpretations of the African occult still combine ignorance, scepticism and credulity.
This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small-scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to theorize how in this imagination witches mediate sociality as the unrecognized third parties who give rise to recognized social relationships of varying scale. The ethnography of witchcraft discourses in radio broadcasting and an impoverished peri-urban area demonstrates not only their relevance to apparently disparate contexts but also their potential to exceed the impact of the mass media. The case of a violent conflict involving Pentecostal Christians, South Asian entrepreneurs, Muslims, and members of a secret society provides an example of how arguments about witchcraft had a greater impact on the popular imagination than a mass-mediated report of the same conflict. The article concludes by arguing that witchcraft discourses should be accorded weight equal to the mass media in theorizing the imagination.
African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static but are highly flexible and deeply attuned to the conundrums of our contemporary world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch provide commentaries on the meaning and merit of modernity as experienced in different historical and cultural settings. By exploring one particular type of witchcraft —that involving rain—amongst the lhanzu of Tanzania, this article suggests instead that some forms of witchcraft may be more pertinent to understanding local notions of "tradition" than "modernity." It is argued that the process of identifying rain witches provides lhanzu men and women with a way to circumscribe, contemplate, and, ultimately, reassert the veracity and significance of a conceptual category they call "tradition." The article concludes by critiquing the homogenizing effects of terms like the African witch and African witchcraft, compelling us to think in terms of pluralities rather than singulars. [Keywords: witchcraft, modernity, tradition, rainmaking, anthropological theory]
First published in 1974, this collection of classic case studies in the ethnography of speaking had a formative influence on the field. No other volume has so successfully provided a broad, cross-cultural survey of the use, role and function of language and speech in social life. The essays deal with traditional societies in Native North, Middle, and South America, Africa, and Oceania, as well as English, French, and Yiddish speaking communities in Europe and North America and Afro-American communities in North America and the Caribbean. Now reissued, the collection includes a key introduction by the editors that traces the subsequent development of the ethnography of speaking and indicates directions for future research. The theoretical and methodological concepts and perspectives that illuminated the first edition are recognized anon and valued by many disciplines beyond that of linguistic anthropology. Scholars and students whose backgrounds may be in literature, speech communication, performance studies or ethnomusicology will equally welcome this edition.
In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern. [mobile phones, text messaging, globalization, Kenya, witchcraft, language ideology, code switching]
Tuareg men must frequently travel into the wilderness of the western Sahara. The stakes are high in encounters. The desert is vast and threatening; the solitary traveler is continuously reminded of man's—and his own—insignificance. The camel is the “ship of the desert,” and the sighting far off of another rider engenders tensions similar to those experienced by seafaring travelers in the days of ships of sail, viz, is the unknown stranger friend or foe? News and companionship are highly valued in the wilderness, but strangers may be or become enemies. Sensitivity to cues of identity has high survival value; adult males must also learn complex rules for the interpretation of verbal and other behaviors in the accomplishment of greetings and information exchange. Analogs to encounters and greetings in other settings are adduced. A concluding section propounds some tentative universals on the (1) form, (2) function, (3) conditions for, and (4) constraints on, encounters and greetings.
This article explores the practice of “beeping” or “missed calling” between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile’s owner can pick up the call. Most beeps are requests to call back immediately, but they can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as “pick me up now” or a relational sign, such as “I’m thinking of you.” The practice itself is old, with roots in landline behaviors, but it has grown tremendously, particularly in the developing world. Based on interviews with small business owners and university students in Rwanda, the article identifies three kinds of beeps (callback, pre-negotiated instrumental, and relational) and the norms governing their use. It then assesses the significance of the practice using adaptive structuration theory. In concluding, the article contrasts beeping with SMS/text messaging, discusses its implications for increasing access to telecommunications services, and suggests paths for future research.
The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the "purity" of the Brahman priest and the "temporal power" of the dominant caste or the king.
This article describes a phenomenon known all over Africa, for which there is no really satisfactory term in English but which is summed up in the French term 'radio trottoir', literally 'pavement radio'. It may be defined as the popular and unofficial discussion of current affairs in Africa, particularly in towns. Unlike the press, television or radio, pavement radio is not controlled by any identifiable individual, institution or group of people. An examination of the social role and pedigree of pavement radio reveals it to be qualitatively different from either rumour or gossip and to have a quite different social and political function from its counterpart in Europe. It is also different from mere rumour in its choice of subject, often discussing matters of public interest or importance which have been the subject of no official announcement. Pavement radio should be seen in the light of oral tradition and treated as a descendant of the more formal oral histories associated with ruling dynasties and national rituals. Notes, ref
Witches In Witchcraft and sorcery: Selected readings
- Philip Mayer
Mayer, Philip. 1970. " Witches. " In Witchcraft and sorcery: Selected readings,
edited by Max Marwick, 45–64. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Les numéros de téléphone portable qui tuent: Epidémiologie culturelle d'une rumeur transnationale
---. 2011. "Les numéros de téléphone portable qui tuent: Epidémiologie
culturelle d'une rumeur transnationale." Tracés 21: 125-50.
Fires, tricksters and poisoned medicines: Popular cultures of rumor in Onitsha, Nigeria and its markets
- Misty Bastian
Bastian, Misty. 1998. "Fires, tricksters and poisoned medicines: Popular cultures
of rumor in Onitsha, Nigeria and its markets." Etnofoor 11 (2): 111-32.