Walter Benjamin's Grave by Michael Taussig

Author:Michael Taussig [Taussig, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226790046
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2006-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Now, witch-doctors are those persons, generally male, whose task it is to divine the presence and identity of a witch in this witch-infested Zande land and heal the sicknesses arising therefrom. They belong to corporations with group secrets. Initiation into the group is long and arduous. These secrets are the knowledge of medicines together with what EP calls their “tricks of the trade,” principal of which is the actual extraction by hand or mouth of objects such as bits of charcoal, splinters, black beetles, or worms from the body of the victim of witchcraft. There are plenty of other tricks too, such as vomiting blood, extracting worms from one’s own person, resting heavy weights on one’s chest, and shooting black beetles and bits of charcoal from one’s leg into the body of somebody else, even over large distances. But no trick is as secretly guarded, in EP’s narrative, as that of extracting the witchcraft object from the body of the sick. Whether we are to call these tricks or techniques, I for the moment leave for you to decide. (That is pretty much an EP sort of sentence, in both senses of the word.)

The doctors would not divulge their secrets to EP. He in turn decided that entering into the corporation himself would be counterproductive and so instead paid for his Zande servant, Kamanga, to undergo initiation in order to “to learn all about the techniques of witchdoctors.” Kamanga, we are told, was a gullible man with profound faith in witch-doctors.59

EP was able to learn even more by using the secrets elicited by Kamanga to play on rivalries between doctors. But he felt sure that certain things, notably the extraction of witchcraft objects, would not be told to Kamanga because he had been “straightforward,” as he says, in telling the doctors that he expected Kamanga to pass on all he had learned. “In the long run, however,” EP adds, striking a militant note, “an ethnographer is bound to triumph. Armed with preliminary knowledge nothing can prevent him from driving a deeper and deeper wedge if he is interested and persistent.”60

We seem a long way from Nietzsche’s gay science, in which “We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn. . . . What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance.”61 But like most of us, EP just has to get to the bottom with his wedge driving deeper and deeper—his aim is to expose the exposure of the witchcraft object extracted through the surface, the fold, the skin, as if penetrated by surgical incision.

What’s more, his obsessive search for truth seems to share a good deal with the doctors whose secrets he is intent on uncovering. Like them he uses artifice and like them he extracts worms, or their equivalent: “It would,” he declares, “have been possible by using every artifice to have eventually wormed out all their secrets, but this would have meant bringing undue pressure on people to divulge what they wished to hide.

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