Free Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West Page B

the night before as I watched Chofer’s troupe perform.
    “You see the way they eat human flesh?!” he asked me, genuinely scandalized.
    “But surely they are just acting out what they imagine sorcerers do?” I responded.
    “Exactly,” the man replied, as if my words proved his point.
    I looked at him with confusion.
    “Who can imagine such a thing without doing it?!” he asked me, clinching his case.
    What we witnessed, my fellow observer insisted, were sorcerers at work. What is more, he assured me, the message these “players” transmitted to their audience was precisely this: that they were capable sorcerers, to be respected and feared. 13
    I now pondered the idea that, even as Muedans imagined sorcery, they experienced these imaginings as real. Sorcery’s reality lay neither in a mask that might be removed nor, somehow, behind a mask—neither “onstage” nor “offstage”—but rather was instantiated through its masking(s). In the moment of performative representation, the realities of the performance and the performed coexisted within one another. 14
    I turned to Chofer and asked him bluntly if my fellow observer had been correct in interpreting the performance we witnessed as sorcery.
    “Perhaps,” he answered.
    I realized at once that I had backed Chofer into a corner and wondered if he was giving ground to avoid confrontation with me. “But you aren’t sorcerers, are you?” I asked, rhetorically, hoping to alleviate the tension produced by my secondhand accusation.
    To my surprise, Chofer looked at me pensively, though apparently unperturbed and unoffended. “I don’t know,” he answered, earnestly. 15

 
    A RTICULATED V ISIONS
    Whereas all Muedans with whom we worked were susceptible to being accused of sorcery, few, if any, publicly claimed to be sorcerers. 1 Even as we made sorcery the explicit object of my ethnographic investigations, we encountered no one who openly asserted that he or she was a sorcerer. We nonetheless attended with great frequency conversations about the occurrence of sorcery. We participated in fireside chats where people made sense of illness or the death of a family member by reference to sorcery. We heard people accuse others of sorcery—sometimes in their presence, although generally not. We heard others deny accusations leveled against them. We heard second-, third-, and fourthhand rumors, and layer upon layer of innuendo.
    Notwithstanding the ubiquity of witchcraft discourse (i.e., talk about witches and witchcraft) among Azande, Evans-Pritchard confidently asserted that “witches, as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist” ([1937] 1976: 18). 2 Following this, I might attempt to distinguish between sorcery and sorcery discourse, concluding that the former did not exist and that the latter—despite its status as a corpus of accessible “social facts”—existed only as a set of, albeit logical, untruths. Sorcery lions, I might conclude, were made, not by sorcerers in an invisible realm, but instead by ordinary, self-deceived Muedans. Assuch, I might conclude, they were not flesh and blood and teeth and claws but rather mere verbal constructs, and ultimately false ones at that.
     
    Jeanne Favret-Saada, who studied witchcraft in the Bocage region in rural western France, has suggested, however, that it is virtually impossible to disentangle witchcraft from the words through which people speak of it. One cannot speak sensibly about witchcraft, she has argued, without entering into the social relations and verbal exchanges that constitute witchcraft (1980: 10). The reality of witchcraft, she has asserted, is discursive (9). What Favret-Saada has argued in relation to witchcraft in the Bocage may also be said of sorcery in Mueda. Muedans, like me, engaged with the world of sorcery in a discursive field to which they themselves made substantial contributions. Not only did they, like me, experience sorcery’s reality through its verbal constructs, but