Moral Power by Koen Stroeken

Author:Koen Stroeken [Stroeken, Koen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medical, Alternative & Complementary Medicine, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781845457358
Google: pbA5LbM8lmQC
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2010-01-15T05:21:23+00:00

Figure 5.1: Sukuma concepts of states of the world

Culture and Experience

Chapter 3 introduced the ‘cool’ balance between gift and sacrifice, exemplified by initiations and by the magical potions drawn from the forest. Here we move on to the discursive register of ‘heat’, which is opposed to ‘coolness’ and in this sense is implied by it, albeit negatively. The witch is ‘hot’ because she perverts the exchange between inside and outside. The use of local terminology and of interview fragments might reinforce the impression that we are approximating the local perspective, people’s ‘philosophy of life’ so to speak. But local opinions and local terms offer no guarantee for understanding their meaning. Remember my neighbour talking of levelling pressures and of something quite different as well: his defiance of these pressures. Why would it seem to us that he is contradicting himself? A decisive moment in my analysis is to face the danger of a legalistic concept of culture. Take the example of ihane novices. They were said to make themselves ‘hot’. Since they were intruders, becoming ‘a forest from within the home’ and entitled to carry the magical bundle bu ya mu kaya, our analysis would lead us to infer that they became witches. However, they were not, as I demonstrated, because something external and variable mediated the meaning of culture, its practices and beliefs. It is called experience.

Social scientists are classically inclined to a legalistic understanding of culture. They treat culture as an internalized programme, a set of dispositions or ‘habitus’ (however ‘dynamic’ and ‘versatile’) on the basis of which individuals act, for example in interaction with the environment and ‘social field’ (see Bourdieu 1980). From the data we should more or less predict what ‘the Sukuma’ will experience and do. The trouble with this view of culture is that it conflates experiencing and doing, as if the only interaction that students of culture should consider is the social one between an individual’s dispositions to act and the changing environment. Experience, a structuring of the world, comes in between. Culture determines experience. But the inverse influence is true as well. This means that we must be willing to consider the part in experience that is independent from culture; or, better still, the part that determines culture rather than is determined by culture. Why are the intruders who bring the ‘forest’ within the ‘home’ not witches? The answer is the experiential structure of initiation. Its tenor is flexible and reciprocal. In a frame of experience that is rigid and intrusive, the novices would come across as witches. Within that frame, people with certain features (such as ‘red eyes’, ‘elderly’ and ‘female’, to name a few of the traits often selected) will always be suspect. Like the bewitched, students of culture are at risk from applying this rigid and intrusive frame.

How come anthropologists tend to neglect the role of experiential shifts when they determine the meaning of cultural data? How come, for example, they treat witchcraft as a practice and the witch

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