Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West

down with bow and arrow. Their success in the hunt meant that Imbwambwe, the man, would die. Failing in the hunt, they may have directly sought out Imbwambwe, the man, and lynched him. In any case, if, when they spoke of Imbwambwe, the lion, Muedans did not think themselves to be making reference to a separate and distinct domain to express something about the character and behavior of Imbwambwe, the man (if they did not consider themselves to be “predicating upon an inchoate subject” but, instead, to be describing a “real and present danger”), can we call Imbwambwe, the lion, a metaphor? 6
     
    Beattie himself posed the question, “[I]n what sense, if any, can we say that people’s institutionalized behaviour is symbolic if, as may well be the case, they themselves do not seem to know [here, I would substitute “do not think”] that it is?” (1966: 66). 7 According to Sandor, “no metaphor occurs where none is recognized” (1986: 103). 8 Yet Turner would not let us be dissuaded. In the essay that I shared with my ARPAC colleagues, Turner posed a similar question: “[I]f Ndembu do not recognize the discrepancy between their interpretation of the milk tree symbolism and their behavior in connection with it, does this mean that the discrepancy has no relevance for the social anthropologist?” (1967: 26). Answering his own query, Turner confidently asserted, “Here the important question must be asked, ‘meaning for whom?’” (25–26); in other words, he suggested, symbols may lie not in the eyes of their producers but, instead, in the eyes of their anthropologist beholders. 9
     
    Still, Turner’s logic (not lost on Lazaro Mmala) left me in a different place than I had intended when I entered the seminar room at ARPAC. For, in the end, Turner’s position, as applied to my case—that Muedans failed to recognize their own symbols (or metaphors); that they mistook allegories for identities (a charge, incidentally, commonly leveled against conspiracy theorists; see Sanders and West 2003)—had me asserting, with echoes of colonial condescension, that Muedans’ deceived themselves; had me arguing, in the tone of revolutionary socialism, that their understanding of the world in which they lived was a form of “false consciousness.”

 
    P OWERS OF P ERSPECTIVE AND P ERSUASION
    According to plan, in the dry season of 1999, Marcos and I conducted research in villages we knew well, but we focused, this time, on healers and healing practices, including, of course, countersorcery. Midway through our research, as previously arranged, we were joined by Tissa. Together, we spent time with more than a hundred different healers, ultimately concentrating on the dozen or so with whom we were best able to work.
    Ironically, while the Mozambican state now demonstrated greater official tolerance for traditional healers and—backed by foreign researchers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—even celebrated “traditional healing” in some contexts, healers themselves enthusiastically embraced emergent opportunities to incorporate new techniques into their healing repertoires. The eclecticism of Muedan healers challenged the definitional boundaries of “traditional healing” in myriad ways (West and Luedke 2005). Whereas some healers adopted “modern” or “official” healing methods or both, others borrowed “traditions” from other times and places. Some, it seemed, invented healing “traditions” from scratch (West 2005b).
     
    One healer, in particular, frustrated my attempts to understand by what criteria Muedans themselves judged the legitimacy of a healer’s practice. In the village of Namande, Julia Nkataje healed her clients by scribbling indecipherable figures on bits of paper, boiling the paper in water, and offering the water to her patients to drink three times daily (West 2005b). “Voices” instructed her to write, she told us, and while her scribblings “meant something,” she admitted