(Theoretical Perspectives - week 3) Witchcraft

Question to the room: What is withcraft not?
answers included: sleeping, politics (c.f. Azande), stewardship (caring for the self, others and environment), science, sorcery (taken to mean creation (conjuring) and manipulation)

witchcraft did not disappear, but did diminish, with the domination of Christianity; nor did it disappear with the advent of rationality or technology. Today it is rising in popularity, though often taken negatively. Very few populations regard witchcraft positively, including people in the UK and USA.

The history of theories of magic and witchchraft in 5 1/2 chapters:
1. Sir James George Frazer: an evolutionist, believe that people are curious to know the answers, the causality and reasons of stuff, and magic is one set of answers for these questions, coming about sympathetically (relating like with like. Magic is science, only wrong.
2. Émile Durkheim: magic is not religion because it is not socially organised, there are no set institutions, but it provides a rationale for people and they adhere to its "teachings". Magic is religion, only wrong.
3.Max Weber: in the same sense as laws of science explaining cause and effect etc., magic is taken as a law for what cannot be seen. Magic is law, only wrong.
4. Evans-Pritchard: the aristocracy are never accused of witchcraft because it is likely to jeopardise your social standing; they are in the position to manipulate how you are treated in society, what favours may be granted to you should you need help and their counteracting bewitchers or unwitchers are more powerful than whatever magic you can muster. Magic is politics, only wrong.
5. Several anthropologists of and from African countries questioned why witchcraft prevailed after "modernity", technological advances, and national independence had been established. They suggested that magic was the language used to discuss capitalism and how liberal, free markets have made most people poor. Magic is capitalism, only wrong. (The Modernity of Witchcraft by Geschiere)
5 1/2. Jeanne Favret-Saada: magic is discourse, so how is it possible for it to be wrong?

Discourse is:
- a conversation, debate or discussion (regular dictionary definition)
- a way of describing the world (modernism)
- a system of meaning and signification that structures or codifies thought (structuralism)
- ‘Systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’ – Iara Lessa on Foucault (postmodernism, obviously!)


re: Deadly Worlds - Witchcraft in the Bocage
If you speak of witchcraft, you must either be bewitched, a witch or an 'unwitcher'. Otherwise witchcraft does not exist. A person does not believe in witchcraft until it catches them. Witchcraft and un-witchcraft are skills taught through the generations. Bewitching can occur as simply as a pat on the back, a handshake, eye contact or planting something near the victim's property.
Favret-Saada arrived in the village wanting to study witchcraft. Asking questions and wanting to talk and learn about witchcraft gave the people the impression that she was bewitched, so they pointed her towards un-witchers. After her discussions with them, she felt obliged to pay them as informants, and this gave them the impression that she was an un-witcher, especially since she was healthy and her and her relatives were not suffering (no witch attacks had been made on her), so they eventually accused her of being a witch.
 
‘The social sciences aim to account for cultural differences. But can this be achieved by postulating the existence of a peasant who is denied all reality save that he is the mirror-image of an academic?’ Jeanna Favret-Saada

Life-Histories by Crapanzano

The life history is often a memorial to an informant-become-(distant-)friend, a commemoration of a field experience, and an expiation for abstraction and depersonalisation - for ruthless departure. It is seen as "portraying" or "illustrating" culture or some aspect of it. To have value as such it must be truthful and come from a "typical" individual - one, at least, who can be socially located..

The life history is the result of a self-constituting negotiation. It is the product, at least from the subject's point of view, of an arbitrary and peculiar demans from another - the anthropologist. Although, at some level, the anthropologist's demand is always a response to the informant. They are asked to review their life and possibly even expose themselves. They may not understand the anthropologist's demand and may searh for an "equivalent" model in their culture, one that the anthropologist searching for a life story may reject. Foucault (198) says that since the Middle Ages we in the West have become "a singularly confessing society". As members of such, we may demand something very alien to the people we study, and we, despite ourselves, "torture" them to that end.

When we analyse a life story, we are analysing a text, not social reality, and this text is itself the product of a complex collaboration

Ethnography as Learning by Whitaker

A constructionist position is one which assumes that all human meaning and knowledge is constructed in some way by people themselves. Marcus and Fischer presuppose this in their book not only because it is the position held for the most part (though often unreflectively) by interpretivist school of anthropology from which the "critiques" they were considering issued, but because it is consistent with the deflationary claims of their project.

It is undeniable that one of the clubs with which Western imperialists most liked to thump impudent anticolonial challengers was their "epistemological privilege" - the claim, that is, that Western scientific objectivity provided descriptions of the world (including the social world) that were beyond challenge except in their own terms. However, stated so vaguely, Marcus and Fischer's constructionist stance left them open, on the one hand, to misinterpretation and, on the other, to outright attack.

The only way ethnography can avoid the twin evils of "positivism" (read epistemological privilege) and "imperialism" is to engage in a "poetics" that "evokes" rather than describes.

We experience critical ethnography open to the suspicion, on the one hand, that all representation is repressive and, on the other, that being political and critical at the same time may be incoherent. My own feeling is that anthropologists make their work both less readable and less clearly political out of a background of fear that one or both of these suspicions may be right.

Between Biography and Ethnography

by Michael D Jackson

- One read about "the" Trobriand Islanders as tho a people living in the same place, participating in the same economy, and having roughly similar view about boat building or begetting... and only changed their ways of thinking and acting when the outside world forced itself upon them.

- Anthropologists like Raymond Firth showed that structure does not preclude the exercise choice in the organisation of everyday life

- Few anthropologists reflected on what "we" might have in common with "them", or how "they" might differ amongst themselves.

- Exoticising terms served mainly to distance the rational subject - the anthropologist - from the supposedly irrational other - the object of his/her observations

- societies differ not in their essences but in the ways in which they manage universally identical existential issues; variations on ubiquitous themes that are grounded in the evolutionary history of our species

- Hannah Arendt: human beings are distinctive but none is absolutely other, for we share the same capacity for interacting and communicating with one another, based on a common evolutionary heritage and vague perception of a common humanity

- to make a person other, one arrogates Being entirely to oneself, and makes of the other a mere object of one's actions, one's judgment, one's compassion or one's theorising

- focus on differences; advent of structuralism and sociobiology brought universals back into vogue

A suggestion for a way in which the antinomy between the particular and the universal

- Sartre's "singular universal" + Michael Herzfeld's "ethnographic biography

= individual lives and cultural circumstances are neither ontologised, nor polarised, but seen as mutually arising and contrapuntal aspects of our continually shifting sense of ourselves as being both uniquely a "you" or a "me" and members of a class or a culture, as in "We, the Tikopia"

- Winnicott: culture is a "common pool ... into which indiciduals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find."

- figurative language is a way of retrospectively and selectively acknowledging those experiences of a relationship that have confirmed a moral ideal

- William James: "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process; the process of verifying itself."

- Accordingly, "natural" symbols such as blood and bone, or "moral" terms such as amity and love are not axioms; they are what we talk about when we talk about life. They are ways we express our sense of depth, intensity and binding power of what emerges in the course of any intimate relationship that weathers life's vicissitudes over time. In truth, what we call moral bonds are often habits we have formed by living with others; but the virtue we assign to familiar routines and our attachment to significant others is largely a way of dignifying relationships that simple grew - possessing a life and inertia that was greater than the work we actively put into them.

- Although, at any given moment, we have a fair idea as to who we are and what we have become, we tend to be blind to who we are for others and to the many unknown forces that may bear upon our fate.

- Accused of sorcery, this alternative form of power suddenly presents itself to Noah as another way of seeing himself - an analogue as Sartre calls it, because this new identity is initially mere potentiality, an object that is still absent and irreal. In beginning to imagine he might actively become the person that he has been accused of being, he turns a stigmatising identification to his own advantage, liberates himself from the humiliating position of existing in his brother's shadow, and acquires powers that, while marginal, nonetheless have a legitimate place in the social order

The "struggle for being": the largely pre-reflective and amorphous desire, yearning or will to be present-in-the-world, not as an object that simply suffers the actions of others but as an acting subject whose existence is recognised by others, and makes a difference to their existence

- In Kalauna (PNG), every lineage possess its own corpus of myths (neinya). These myths enable their custodians to simultaneously express and legitimise both collective values and personal preoccupations. When Young first sat down with Iyahalina and asked for "the story" of his life, not a single autobiographic detail was discerned from the soliloquy: seemingly a sequence of familiar myths interspersed with details about Iyahalina's duties as a "ritual expert". Men like Iyahalina both introject the dramatic structure of the myth and project their personal preoccupations into it.

- the Kodi of Sumba (Eastern Indonesia) give oblique expression to their biographies through valued personal possessions. That objects are surrogates for people, metaphors for social relationships, and serve as objective correlatives of subjective moods and states, may, Hoskins suggests, have a lot to do with the fact that in Kodi ritual life, objects often substitute for persons.

It is our Eurocentric bias that leads us to foreground and publicise what is, in the cultures we study, often kept in the background and unspoken. But the aim of anthropology is not to represent the other solely from his or her own point of view, but rather to problematise all points of view, including the ethnographer's, and show that every dominant leitmotif in any culture coexists with sub-dominant themes that, on certain occasions, or in certain persons, come into focus.

Rather than simplify the general conditions governing the possibility of a particular human relationship, or risk reducing the complexities of lived relationships to determinate causes, cultural rules, or classificatory categories, one seeks to explore the experiences that transpire in the transitional spaces of intersubjectivity - experiences that often confound our formal descriptions and overflow our conceptual frameworks. Whereas the classical empiricist approaches human bonds with an eye to underlying patterns and explanatory principles, the radical empiricist shares with the creative writer a fascination for the mysterious, emergent, and conflicted character of all human relationships.

One can invoke no hierarchy of values that implies that the life of one of these individuals can be set unequivocally above the others. Life confounds reason and is refractory to explanation. Our relationship with ourselves burs into relationships with significant others.

Luria's approach to neuropsychology was informed by the conviction "that even the most elemental functions of brain and mind were not wholly biological in nature but conditioned by the experiences, the interactions, the culture, of the individual." All human beings, in all societies, experience existence as a struggle between limitations and expectations.

To understand in depth and detail what transpires within intersubjectivity we draw upon work by social scientists, psychologists and ethologists to be sure, but it is to the work of artists, fiction writers, and biographers that we turn for techniques that help us do greatest justice to lived experience. In venturing beyond the borders of orthodox science, we may be accused of departing from empirical truth or worse, of pure invention and wild surmise. But there may be middle ground, where anecdote and biography enrich rather than invalidate our work.

By locating oneself in the borderland between conventional certainties and vigorous innovation, a writer may be taken to task for playing fast and loose with the facts - as Melville was - when, in fact, truth itself is mercurial in this domain where what rings true to experience or works in practice may be scientifically unproven, and what is empirically true falls short of what we ned to believe if we are to live.

Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade

by David G. Anderson (2000)

he argues that Tsarist and Soviet state ethnographers did not comprehend the complex relationship between Evenki, tundra and reindeer which focused on 'knowing' how to seize opportunities offered by animals and lands which are 'aware' of the activities of hunters and herders. According to Anderson, Evenki herders believe that non-verbal demonstration of such knowledge 'entitles' Evenki hunters/herders (tundraviki) to use the land

- the terms 'identity' and 'ecology' in the title suggest a broad sense of being and doing

- throughout the book Anderson tacks back and forth between the ethnographer's and the native's analyses of the places, people, practices, and culture of Evenkis in the lower Yensei Valley 

- he argues that the concept of 'belonging' is close to vernacular Evenki approaches to identity. the local categories of 'knowing' and 'belonging' are juxtaposed with state categories of economy and ethnicity throughout the book.
- the tundra and the nonhuman persons inhabiting it are not generous; hunting is not receiving gifts but taking opportunities that are created by the knowing human person

- 1992-3, Khantaika state farm, Taimyr Peninsula, northern Siberia

- following local recommendations, he joined the Number One brigade of herders to learn 'how people came to "know reindeer"'. This brigade was reqputed to be the 'most Evenki' not only in terms of official ethnicity of the individuals but in their pragmatics of living in the tundra. Anderson came to understand Evenki ways of "knowing" the hard way - through observation, participation, and quiet (or not so quiet) criticism and correction

- while the land is populated with people, animals and spirits, all requiring respect and providing oppostunities for the taking, the state has imposed political 

- Soviet ethnographers attempted to distinguish northern Siberian aboriginal groups in terms of origin, culture, and territory. These distinctions became the basis of bounded territories and nationalities during the 1930s, as traditional occupations were adapted to the institutional framework of collective and state farms

- a kollektive was an occupational group whose members shared formal training with colleagues 

- in 1969 Soviet officials resettled Mountain Evenkis and Dolgans at Khantaika in order to increase the efficiency of the state farm. The assumption of key management positions by Dolgans was resented by resident Evenkis

- mapping ethnic identity nto specially designated districts provides a discrete and homogenised set of identities that contradict the complex and shifting use of identities by real people

- Soviet institutions strongly influenced the identities of Evenkis who came to see themselves as 'belonging' to the state farm, a kollektive, and a nationality. An inflation in the importance of nationality and people's daily lives and their own construction of reality occurred as a result.

- nationalities and kollektives were associated with different levels of kul'tura, a combination of 'refined high culture' and physical amenities

- Evenki tundraviki are seen as lacking kul'tura, especially by young Evenki women who prefer the amenities of the settlement to life with a reindeer brigade on the tundra. Consequently, many young reindeer-breeders are unmarried.

- when Anderson was in Khantaika, heavy metal pollution from Noril'sk (a mining-smelting centre) had forced reindeer-breeders to drive their herds to areas beyond state farm boundaries. This pollution was also believed to cause increasingly erratic behvaiour among huge herds of wild reindeer in Taimyr.

- attempts by the post-Soviet state to privatise the Khantaika state farm were resisted because native producers felt that a consolidated territory was necessary for their future 'as a nation'.

- Evenki 'nationalists' felt that Evenkis were collectively entitled to control state farm territory. This created tension between Dolgans and Evenkis which worsened as salaries went unpaid, and as goods and services became scarce.

- in 1998, the Khantaika farm was heavily in debt and lacked markets for its products. Appeals for state assistance on the basis of the formerly privileged status of Evenkis and Dolgans as 'sparse nationalities' were no longer effective wih a state committed to private ownership and the free market

- Anderson suggests that Evenkis, Dolgans and other Northern aboriginal groups could 'advertise their sense of entitlement' by mounting an international appeal to save 'wild' environments, endangered species, and endangered aboriginal peoples. However, his work seems to suggest that the tensions between Khantaika Evenkis and Dolgans precludes any sort of political alliance, thus limiting the chances for success of such an appeal