Defying the gaze: Exodelics for the bewitched in Sukumaland and beyond

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 26, Issue 3-4, 2001, Pages 285-309

  Stroeken, Koen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52549121445     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: 15730786     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1021214732741     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. Jean Baudrillard, A l'Ombre du Millenaire ou le Suspens de l'An 2000 (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 1998), 97.
2. Here I refer to Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993).
3. Lorraine Nencel and Peter Pels, eds., Constructing Knowledge: Authority and Critique in Social Science (London: Sage, 1991).
4. Per Brandström, "Seeds and Soil: The Quest for Life and the Domestication of Fertility in Sukuma Thought and Reality," in Anita Jacobson-Widding and Walter van Beek, eds., The creative Communion: African Folk Models of Fertility and the Regeneration of Life (Uppsala: Alqvist & Wiksell, 1990).
5. Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6.
6. Similar reconsiderations of Mauss' theory on the gift and Lévi-Strauss on alliance, can be found in Maurice Godelier and Jacques Hassoun, eds., Meurtre du Père/Sacrifice de la Sexualité: Approches Anthropologiques et Psychanalytiques (Strasbourg: Arcanes, 1996).
7. Such an old conception of socialization does not limit itself to adepts of Foucault, Heidegger and Nietzsche, which was claimed by Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiii. It is still present in postmodern thought or in holistic efforts when these tend to shy away from cultural distinctions such as inside/outside, home/forest, male/female. In their reaction the same assumption may be recognized, namely unwittingly treating distinctions as dichotomies (each of the two terms is assumed to be an absolute entity with fixed content) instead of relative, codic operators of cultural practice.
8. For a list of medical recepies combining shingila and curative plants, see Hans Cory, "The Ingredients of Magic Medicines," in Africa, vol. 19, no. 1 (1949), 13-32.
9. Ray Abrahams, The Nyamwezi Today: a Tanzanian People in the 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 54-57.
10. Ray Abrahams, "Sungusungu: Village Vigilante Groups in Tanzania," in African Affairs, vol. 86, no. 343, 194-195.
11. Read chapter 3 in Per Brandström, Boundless Universe: the Culture of Expansion among the Sukuma-Nyamwezi People (Uppsala University: doctoral dissertation, 1991).
12. Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (London: Heinemann, 1980).
13. Ray Abrahams notes that already in the mid seventies at the moment of migrating into compact settlements the fear of increased witchcraft was expressed among the Nyamwezi; Ray Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania (Cambridge: African Studies Centre, 1994), 13. For an account of contemporary witch-hunts in Sukumaland I refer to this monograph.
14. The distinction between witchcraft and sorcery as introduced by Evans-Pritchard's study of the Azande does not apply to Sukuma culture; E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracle and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 226-227. The Sukuma believe in the conscious and hidden usage of aggressive medicine causing affliction and death. Adopting Evans-Pritchard's distinction I should only employ the term 'sorcery'. Yet, english-speaking Sukuma translate their word nogi by 'witch'. To speak of a witch-hunt sounds indeed better than to impose consistency on our vocabulary and create the word 'sorcerer-hunt'. In my study on Sukuma culture both terms refer to the same figure and they will be applied interchangeably, yet the one more emphasizing the use of lethal magic (sorcerer), the other emphasizing the intimate relationship between victim and secret aggressor (witch). The term 'witch' connotes the impact which the alleged aggressor has on the victim's imagination, emotions and sense of self.
15. Roscoe E. Tanner, "The Sorcerer in northern Sukumaland, Tanganyika," in Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 12 (1954), 437-443;
16. also Roscoe E. Tanner, The Witch Murders in Sukumaland - A Sociological Commentary (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1970).
17. Simeon Mesaki, "Witch-Killing in Sukumaland," in Ray Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania (Cambridge: African Studies Centre, 1994), 55-56.
18. Abrahams, Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania ibid., 1994, 15-17.
19. Tanner, ibid., 1970.
20. I roughly apply the term 'gaze' in reference to Foucault's panopticism and to Lacan's antinomic relation between the (intransparent) gaze of the Other and the eye of the subject; see Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XI: les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse, 1964 (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 101ff. However, I conceive of the 'gaze' as only being experienced on specific occasions related to existential fear, crisis or affliction.
21. Here I apply the general formulas proposed by Ian Richardson, The Role of Tone in the Structure of Sukuma (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1959), 9;
22. and by Herman Batibo, Le Kesukuma: Phonologie, Morphologie (Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1985), 166, 171.
23. Elisabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: a Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), 42.
24. Jacques Godbout, L'Esprit du Don (Paris: La découverte, 1992), 188, 15.
25. Here I refer to Horton's tension-reduction thesis according to which 'the primary function of alcoholic beverages in all societies is the reduction of anxiety', which anthropologists, as Heath points out, often tacitly take to be axiomatic in their studies of anomie and social conflict; see Mary Douglas, ed., Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 39. From the data of my paper one could indeed argue that, first of all, the communal aspect of sharing the drink plays a major role in attracting the Sukuma (Otherwise, individual withdrawal into alcoholism or drug-abuse would have been equally valid alternatives). Secondly, Horton's thesis taken at face value disregards the element of competition, which is so central in the drinking parties which I refer to. Bateson, for instance, has shown how a kind of competitive 'symmetry' dominates in alcoholism and how the AA treatment aims at converting this state of mind into a complementary view on one's relationship to others and the universe;
26. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1990 [1972]), 326.
27. Ivan Karp, "Beer Drinking and Social Experience in an African Society," in I. Karp and C. Bird, eds., Explorations in African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 108.
28. Explorations in African Systems of Thought Ibid., 113.