Stroeken, Koenraad

Africa

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KOEN STROEKEN

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PETER GESCHIERE, Witchcraft, Intimacy &amp; Trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press (hb $75 – 978 0 22604 758 4; pb $25 – 978 0 22604 761 4). 2013, 312 pp.

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

:LWFKFUDIW,QWLPDF\	DPS7UXVW$IULFDLQFRPSDULVRQE\3HWHU*HVFKLHUHUHYLHZ.RHQ6WURHNHQAfrica: The Journal of the International African Institute, Volume 85,Number 1, February 2015, pp. 173-175 (Review)3XEOLVKHGE\&DPEULGJH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVVDOI: 10.1353/afr.2015.0013For additional information about this article                                                       Access provided by Universiteit Gent (20 May 2015 18:52 GMT)http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/afr/summary/v085/85.1.stroeken.htmlThe book is therefore valuable for people interested in race and ethnicity inSouthern Africa. Its greatest value in this respect may be in the merciless analysisof British racism in the Eastern Cape: ‘The reasons for the prejudice of the Britonswent beyond the inherent racism of their nineteenth century compatriots through-out the world … They believed or at least wanted to believe, both that the blackrace would melt away in the face of the white and that Britons had been brought tothe Cape, in particular the Eastern Cape, by divine providence’ (p. 134). To thisreader, the book documents particularly well how racism is rooted in jealousyand resentment. British settlers were not particularly successful farmers and there-fore jealous of the land occupied by the Khoekhoe. There was more immediateﬁnancial gain for them in supplying British troops and therefore they had an inter-est in war.The force of jealousy emerges powerfully in the account of T. J. Biddulph, whowas appointed superintendent of the Kat River Settlement in 1847. He was abankrupt farmer and depicted the settlement as a messy agricultural failure dueto the Khoekhoes’ laziness and indolence. Yet the evidence to the contrary is over-whelming. The new governor, Sir Harry Smith, exclaimed in 1847 while visitingthe settlement and seeing the ﬁrst harvest after the War of the Axe: ‘If this is afailure then the whole world is a failure!’ (p. 172). Biddulph was sacked, butthis did not lead to an improvement in the situation. Racism triumphed whenthe Khoekhoe were given no time to recover after war had destroyed their liveli-hoods and driven them into commando duties serving the settlers. The result wasthat many turned against the British government and most of them joined theXhosa in a rebellion that meant the end for the settlement.This review unavoidably simpliﬁes the complications in this very nuanced book.I have, however, tried to bring out how the book may be a major inspiration forhistorians as well as social scientists to look at Southern Africa. Robert Rosshas a sharp eye for agency. We meet in the book a number of ﬁgures, such asHerman Matroos, James Read and Sir Andries Stockenstrom, who defy easy cat-egorization, and they reveal the intricate patterns involved in the social construc-tion of reality. Such considerations are, however, secondary in recommending thisbook: it is a masterpiece and a good read.JAN KEES VAN DONGEUniversity of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresbyvandongejankees@gmail.comdoi:10.1017/S0001972014000862PETER GESCHIERE, Witchcraft, Intimacy & Trust: Africa in comparison.Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press (hb $75 – 978 0 22604 758 4; pb$25 – 978 0 22604 761 4). 2013, 312 pp.The latest book by Geschiere, an authority on witchcraft studies since his 1997classic The Modernity of Witchcraft, is commendable as a unique work ofcomparison. He manages to encompass three continents under one theme: thechanging relationship between witchcraft, intimacy and trust. In six engagingchapters, relying mostly on historical evidence, the author contrasts the gruesomesuspicions of present-day witchcraft in the intimacy of the household in Cameroonand Nigeria with, on the one hand, the carnal, liberating possession cults ofCandomblé in Brazil and, on the other, the state-oriented, sexually discipliningwitch-hunts of medieval Europe. The chapters are interlaced with further173BOOK REVIEWScross-cultural comparisons such as an interlude on Siegel’s account of witch-huntsin Indonesia.One of the book’s main tenets posits that colonization and subsequent decolon-ization have made witchcraft-related practices in Africa illicit and have de-territorialized these uncanny forces, which are now bewitching the Africandiaspora in Europe, while the opposite course has been observed in LatinAmerica. There, the once forbidden fetish cults have grown into respected, terri-torially established or ‘emplaced’ religions such as Candomblé, which claimsauthenticity through purity of belief and (African) origin. Key to this process,Geschiere suggests, is that the cults provide a basis for trust after the loss offamily during the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. The book holdsthe promise of a sequel, in which the author describes how both sides of theAtlantic have been equally affected by the current Pentecostal wave that centreson monopolizing people’s trust by undermining their allegiance to traditionalspiritual practices, equating these with the work of the devil.A brief review such as this can never do justice to the wide span of insightsand statements in this book. But all-encompassing as the study is – as well aspolemically phrased in its discussion of relevant, ‘competing’ literature – itinvites thorough scrutiny. For one thing, this reader was left pondering whatGeschiere’s cross-cultural comparison would have looked like had it consideredmedico-anthropological accounts of how healers and their patients talk aboutwitchcraft, and how, in the intimacy of the home, these accounts give rise to theﬁgure of the witch and to the development of protective medicine to counterblack magic. If ethnography on healing cults in Africa has revealed anything, itis that there exist intricate relationships between witchcraft suspicions, oracles,spirit possessions, state formation and collective witch-hunts, reproducingwithin any one community the aforementioned contrast between carnallyliberating and sexually disciplining experiences.As the subtitle indicates, this book intends to be comparative. Yet, it does notspecify the grounds on which a locally rooted occult practice could be likenedto one in some other community. The author’s constant emphasis on theﬂuidity of ideas only begs the question of how comparisons can be made. Onwhat basis can he characterize ‘the’ healer in Africa (pp. 73, 88)? Why shouldhe locate Candomblé’s origins in Africa’s fetishes and occult practices, ratherthan in Africa’s spirit cults, which it always resembled (pp. 144–63)? The authorrejects the common Africanist distinction between healer and witch since thehealer uses black magic too and is in some cases known to sacriﬁce kin inreturn for magical power (passim). But can the two be compared? True, a userof white magic and a user of black magic are comparable. They can be inter-changeable, as in the author’s discussion of Favret-Saada’s study in France(pp. 124–30). But African informants talking about their witches seem to experi-ence a different (third) ﬁgure, one that inhabits their imaginary before identiﬁ-cation processes such as divination transform this ﬁgure into yet another user of(black or white) magic. In fact, Favret-Saada’s informants also experienced ‘thewitch’ quite differently at ﬁrst (as Geschiere himself remarks), before localhealers made them focus their suspicions on neighbours instead of kin. It seemsto me that anthropologists would be inadvertently performing a similar manipu-lative act if they took into account only this social construction of witchcraft thathas been agreed upon publicly or after divination. The experiential processundergone by the bewitched should be part of the cultural comparison.Since the 1990s, a number of psychoanalytically inspired Africanists suchas Devisch (in Congo) and Pradelles de Latour (in Cameroon) and gift theoristssuch as Godbout and Godelier have begun to integrate experiential processes174 BOOK REVIEWSby literally bringing home the bewitching ‘danger within’ of kinship. Some haverelated witchcraft to the ‘uncanny’ in Freud’s sense of the familiar turnedagainst itself. That line of study precedes Geschiere’s work but is missing in thisbook. The suggestion by some of their followers (including this reviewer) is thatexperiential shifts go beyond the functionalist characterizations of the witch byMarwick, Middleton and the like. Instead, such shifts shed light on existentialissues including social exchange, indebtedness and certain kinship positions,which capture the experience of bewitchment through a structure that representsthe aforementioned ‘danger within’.Even so, the main merit of Witchcraft, Intimacy & Trust lies in the fact that itdoes what anthropology was meant for and what no qualitative sociology ofnon-Western societies would dare embark on: the exercise of cultural comparison.Geschiere has to be applauded for resuscitating, along the way, just about everydebate our discipline has tried to bury. Personally, the book confronted meagain with the need for ethnography to be a tool that experientially groundssocial anthropology. Such experiential anthropology could help us see witchcraftbeliefs not primarily as independent variables causing social havoc, or asengrained ideas that no religious or educational crusade could stamp out(p. 211), but as a cultural system that arises time and again from situated experi-ences and thus expresses human relations, cultural changes or social problems. Forsome readers, the book’s consideration of a didactique contre la sorcellerie in theﬁnal pages, which blames people’s beliefs, may therefore be missing the point –shooting the messenger – because constructs of ‘the witch’ actually communicateexperienced problems. But most readers will greatly appreciate Geschiere’s com-parative exercise for underlining the challenge that lies ahead for anthropology.KOEN STROEKENGhent UniversityKoen.Stroeken@UGent.bedoi:10.1017/S0001972014000874JULIE LIVINGSTON, Improvising Medicine: an African oncology ward in an emer-ging cancer epidemic. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press (hb £64– 978 0 82235 327 0; pb £15.99 – 978 0 82235 342 3). 2012, 248 pp.The starkly visible interplay between infectious and non-communicable disease isa hallmark of a range of emerging threats to human health in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The recent prominence of cancers as an object of epidemiologicaland social concern warrants precisely the keen, detailed scholarly focus offered inthis remarkable book, skilfully blending historical and ethnographic modes ofenquiry and presentation. Julie Livingston reﬂects on the experience of carers,clinicians, communities and patients grappling with cancer at a hospital inBotswana’s capital, Gaborone, in the wake of the country’s destabilizing HIVepidemic and the consequent resource crisis in universal healthcare provision.Livingston reminds us that ill and debilitated Batswana, at home and asmigrants, inhabit a curious juncture amid southern African histories of stateracism and the post-independence promises of the Botswana state, centred on uni-versal rights vested in citizenship. This juncture conditions both the phenomenol-ogy of pain and the expectation of palliation, which converge in the hospital locusof Livingston’s ethnographic work. The oncology ward of Gaborone’s principalreferral hospital draws together clinical and nursing expertise from acrossthe globe in a new techno-scientiﬁc venture. German, Egyptian, Batswana,175BOOK REVIEWS

Witchcraft, intimacy & trust by Peter Geschiere (review)

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Witchcraft, intimacy & trust by Peter Geschiere (review)

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