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Authors: Harry G. West
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perspective, people do not merely make meaning; in the process of making meaning, they also make the worlds they imbue with it. As they do so through various and diverse languages and symbolic repertoires, phenomenologists have asserted, people create different—albeit potentially interpenetrating, or intersubjective—realities. In the words of the linguist Edward Sapir, upon whose work phenomenologists have drawn, “the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” ([1929] 1949: 162). 2
Building upon the phenomenological tradition, Greg Urban has asserted: “If truth is carried in discourse, and if discourse is completely embedded in the human populations in which it circulates, then to study the nature of truth and knowledge, we need to study the ways in which discourse—and hence truth—varies from one part of our globe to the next” (1996: xi). In recent years, anthropologists around the globe have taken a phenomenological approach to discursive formations reproduced within the rubric of occult cosmologies, including witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, and spirit possession (e.g., Csordas 1994a, 1994b, 1997; Good 1994; Jackson 1989; Kapferer 1997; Stoller 1995). 3 Viewed in this way, “sorcery practices are more than a representation,” according to Bruce Kapferer, “they are exercises in the construction and destruction of the psychosocial realities that human beings live and share. Their potency as representations results from this” (1997: 301–302); he has concluded, “sorcery highlights that truly extraordinary capacity of human beings to create and destroy the circumstances of their existence” (xi). 4 A phenomenological approach encourages us to ask what sort of world—or, to use the phenomenological term, “life-world” ( Lebenswelt )—Muedans make and engage with through sorcery discourse. In other words, it prompts us to ask, not if Muedan sorcerers and the lions that they make (or that they become) are “real” or “illusory,” but instead to what kind of reality they belong.
In seeking to answer this question, ironically, we discover that the life-world Muedans make through sorcery discourse comprises two domains : one visible, the other invisible. 5 According to those with whom we spoke, sorcerers used a medicinal substance called shikupi to render themselves invisible. Invisibility allowed them to escape the strictures and constraints of the visible world, to get “outside” or “beyond” the world experienced by ordinary Muedans. Having transcended the visible realm, sorcerers were able to see it without being seen and hence to act decisively upon it. Indeed, through their collective acts, sorcerers produced and sustained an invisible realm that afforded them powerful perspective on the world inhabited by their potential victims—a platform from which to mount their ghastly forays. Sorcerers thus remade the world in accordance with their destructive visions of a world transformed to their benefit.
Such “sorcerers of ruin” ( vavi va lwanongo ) , as Muedans called them, were not alone in their use of shikupi— not alone in their ability to render themselves invisible. Beneficent authorities, including healers, settlement heads (in days of old), and village authorities (more recently), were said to challenge destructive sorcerers by themselves entering into the invisible realm, wherein they monitored, controlled, and even unmade sorcery of ruin by inverting, overturning, reversing, negating, or annulling it (all glossed by the Shimakonde verb kupilikula ). To achieve this, they were required to further transcend the world known to ordinary Muedans—to “move beyond” the world of destructive
Building upon the phenomenological tradition, Greg Urban has asserted: “If truth is carried in discourse, and if discourse is completely embedded in the human populations in which it circulates, then to study the nature of truth and knowledge, we need to study the ways in which discourse—and hence truth—varies from one part of our globe to the next” (1996: xi). In recent years, anthropologists around the globe have taken a phenomenological approach to discursive formations reproduced within the rubric of occult cosmologies, including witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, and spirit possession (e.g., Csordas 1994a, 1994b, 1997; Good 1994; Jackson 1989; Kapferer 1997; Stoller 1995). 3 Viewed in this way, “sorcery practices are more than a representation,” according to Bruce Kapferer, “they are exercises in the construction and destruction of the psychosocial realities that human beings live and share. Their potency as representations results from this” (1997: 301–302); he has concluded, “sorcery highlights that truly extraordinary capacity of human beings to create and destroy the circumstances of their existence” (xi). 4 A phenomenological approach encourages us to ask what sort of world—or, to use the phenomenological term, “life-world” ( Lebenswelt )—Muedans make and engage with through sorcery discourse. In other words, it prompts us to ask, not if Muedan sorcerers and the lions that they make (or that they become) are “real” or “illusory,” but instead to what kind of reality they belong.
In seeking to answer this question, ironically, we discover that the life-world Muedans make through sorcery discourse comprises two domains : one visible, the other invisible. 5 According to those with whom we spoke, sorcerers used a medicinal substance called shikupi to render themselves invisible. Invisibility allowed them to escape the strictures and constraints of the visible world, to get “outside” or “beyond” the world experienced by ordinary Muedans. Having transcended the visible realm, sorcerers were able to see it without being seen and hence to act decisively upon it. Indeed, through their collective acts, sorcerers produced and sustained an invisible realm that afforded them powerful perspective on the world inhabited by their potential victims—a platform from which to mount their ghastly forays. Sorcerers thus remade the world in accordance with their destructive visions of a world transformed to their benefit.
Such “sorcerers of ruin” ( vavi va lwanongo ) , as Muedans called them, were not alone in their use of shikupi— not alone in their ability to render themselves invisible. Beneficent authorities, including healers, settlement heads (in days of old), and village authorities (more recently), were said to challenge destructive sorcerers by themselves entering into the invisible realm, wherein they monitored, controlled, and even unmade sorcery of ruin by inverting, overturning, reversing, negating, or annulling it (all glossed by the Shimakonde verb kupilikula ). To achieve this, they were required to further transcend the world known to ordinary Muedans—to “move beyond” the world of destructive
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