Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West Read Free Book Online Page B

to make sense of the ethnographic data I had been given by Kalamatatu, Mandia, and others but also to make sense of my own experiences of illness and recovery. In the sense I made of uwavi (sorcery), kulaula (healing), and vantumi va nkaja (sorcery lions), however, my audience heard nonsense.
    Andras Sandor has suggested that, notwithstanding good intentions, anthropologists deploying the symbolist approach “[assimilate] other people’s ‘facts’ to [their] idea of ‘meaningful fiction’” (1986: 102). 1 Luise White has warned that metaphor is often interpreted as a “polite academic term for false” (2000: 42). 2 Why might this be so? To appreciate why Lazaro Mmala took my assertion that sorcery lions were symbols (or metaphors) as a statement that they were not “real,” we must, I subsequently came to think, more closely examine how metaphor is defined, how it works, and to what ends it may be used.
    James Fernandez has written, “However men may analyze their experiences in any domain, they inevitably know and understand them best by referring them to other domains forelucidation” (1972: 58). Through metaphoric reference, according to Fernandez, people suggest that “something much more concrete and graspable—a rolling stone, a bird in the hand—is equivalent to the essential elements in another situation we have difficulty grasping” (43-44). Through such “predication upon an inchoate situation” (43), Fernandez has suggested, people are able to clarify an otherwise incomprehensible world.
     
    The essential point here is that metaphor refers people to a semantic domain that is separate from the one they seek to understand. The most celebrated examples of metaphor are ones in which it is clear to all concerned—speaker and listeners—that the metaphoric predicate and the subject to which it is applied inhabit distinct domains. An active person is not actually a rolling stone, nor is an immediate opportunity actually a bird in a hand. Such metaphors work, David Sapir has explained, by making us “aware of the simultaneous likeness and unlikeness of the two terms” (1977: 9, emphasis added) 3 and then asking us to imagine, knowing it to be untrue, that the two terms are alike in more ways than immediately apparent. The case he used to illustrate his point is delightfully convenient. The assertion that “George is a lion,” he has written, “allows us . . . to assume for a moment that although George is ‘really’ like a lion only in certain specific ways [both are mammals, for example], he might be a lot more like a lion than in just those ways [for example, George is fierce]” (9). According to Sapir, the metaphor works not only because it links two separate semantic domains—the animal kingdom and George’s social milieu—but also because it calls attention to the chasm between the domains that it bridges. George’s lion-like fierceness makes him an unusual human because humans, after all, are not really animals. “Metaphor,” Sandor has said, in support of Sapir’s point, “cannot come about unless it is reflected upon” in this way (1986: 113).
    So what, then, is to be made of the statement, proffered in a Muedan village, that a fellow—call him Imbwambwe—periodically transformed himself into a lion and menaced his neighbors? Imbwambwe—and, more importantly, the lion that hebecame—inhabited the same domain as Imbwambwe’s neighbors. As Lazaro Mmala reminded me, the lion, Imbwambwe, bared teeth and claws with which he drew blood and tore the flesh of his victims. 4 His “reality” to them—his copresence in their ontological domain—was a matter of life and death, for he left in his wake mauled bodies and terrorized witnesses. 5 When neighbors saw Imbwambwe, the lion, in the village, they took refuge inside their homes. Once a countersorcerer was summoned to provide the requisite medicinal substances to protect them and to render the lion vulnerable, they hunted it