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Spirited encounters: Notes on the politics and poetics of representing the uncanny in anthropology
Gillian Goslinga Anthropological Theory 2012 12: 386 DOI: 10.1177/1463499613479266 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/12/4/386

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Spirited encounters: Notes on the politics and poetics of representing the uncanny in anthropology
Gillian Goslinga
Wesleyan University, USA

Anthropological Theory 12(4) 386406 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1463499613479266 ant.sagepub.com

Abstract This essay returns to two foundational ethnographies in the anthropology of spirit phenomena by E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Vincent Crapanzano, as well as Jean Rouchs tres Fous, to problematize the ongoing and subtle ways in which controversial Les Ma cultural relativism and its subsequent critiques reproduce disengagement from and disavowal of the uncanny metaphysics of others, even while we anthropologists represent them. Arguing that the stakes of what gets to count as real in anthropology have had and continue to have profound consequences for how we imagine sociality as well as practice encounter across ontological difference, I trace, with Marily Strathern, James Clifford, and Michel de Certeaus help primarily, how incommensurability with uncanny phenomena is both created and sustained at three points in the anthropological project: fieldwork, the writing of ethnography, and the reception of ethnography. I close by advocating that we risk opening ourselves to the ontologies of others. Keywords tres Fous, political Cultural, difference, epistemology, ethnography, history, Les Ma ontology, relativism, representation, spirit possession, the uncanny

To see the myth in the natural and the real in magic, to demythologize history and to re-enchant its reied representation; that is a rst step. Michael Taussig

Corresponding author: Gillian Goslinga, Wesleyan University, 281 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA. Email: [email protected]

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In 1954, the French ethnographer and lmmaker Jean Rouch screened a rough cut of Les Matres Fous to a select group of anthropologists and African intellectuals at e de LHomme in Paris. Les Matres Fous, or The Crazy Masters as it is the Muse translated in English, grew out of Rouchs earlier work on the life of Songhay migrants in the colonial Gold coast of Africa. The half hour rough-cut documented ance of violent Hauka spirit possession. The Hauka, spirits in vivid detail a se whom the Songhay themselves think crazy because of their erratic and violent behavior, arrived in the Songhay in 1925 at the height of colonial resistance: they mimic through their mediums French and British colonialists, especially the military, or so the footage showed. Attired with ries and pith helmets, the possessed, an eclectic group of Songhay and Zerma migrants (a town clerk, an army private, bottle washers, ditchdiggers and pickpockets), foam at the mouth and torch themselves to prove the presence of the powerful Hauka. Eyes bulging and rolled up, they sacrice a dog, drink its blood and, cooking it in a pot of boiling water, help themselves barehand to its scalding meat. They rejoice, proclaiming the event a success. Rouch famously juxtaposed these images with footage of a military parade in the capital, scenes from the city of Accra where the participants live, and closed his controversial lm with live snapshots of each medium back at work the next day, smiling and relaxed. The rough-cut he showed was soundless; Jean Rouch narrated from the back of the room. I rst saw Les Matres Fous 38 years later in 1992 as a graduate teaching assistant for an Introduction to Culture through Film class oered at a major American university. From its controversial beginnings, Rouchs lm had gone on to become an award-winning classic of the ethnographic genre and a staple lm in anthropology. While critics and supporters unanimously agreed that the lm suered from a lack of historical and cultural contextualization, I have found teaching this lm that with or without contextualization its raw images fascinate and confuse. Paul Stoller, who is an expert on the Hauka and who can contextualize Les Matres Fous better than most, reports that at each of his more than 50 classroom screenings of Les Matres Fous one student at least has vomited (quoted in Taussig 1993). Contextualization as a remedy for culture shock and racist gut reactions simply fails. If Jean Rouchs images scream a need for context to the anthropologically minded, they do so because they emasculate anthropological discourse where it claims to be most powerful: in its humanist power to explain dierence. Jean Rouchs run-away images speak of ontological dierences that simply refuse capture by a familiarizing EuroAmerican-centric discourse. In this visual encounter with the incredible, the unthinkable (Stoller 1992: 160), we are confronted with the canny question: what if the Hauka were real? Paul Stoller has rightly argued the unexplicated scenes [from Les Matres Fous] challenge us to decolonize our thinking, to decolonize ourselves (1992: 160). This essay takes up this challenge anew by returning critically to the politics and poetics of encounter between anthropological discourse and the uncanny in Les Matres Fous and two foundational ethnographies of the uncanny: Edward Evans-Pritchards

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Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande and Vincent Crapanzanos Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. I am interested in how all three ethnographers stage the presentation of the uncanny to their publics in such a way, in the candid words of Crapanzano, as to wittingly or unwittingly . . . cause the dierences to disappear in the act of translation (1980: 8). To remedy this sleight of hand, Crapanzano proposes adopting a position of extreme cultural relativism, arguing that dierences between more or less successful ways of constituting reality are rooted in dierent cultural assumptions about the nature of things. In what follows and with the help of Marilyn Stratherns brilliant deconstruction of the trope of the context, James Cliords reections on the habitus of the eldworker, and a little known essay by Michel de Certeau, I trace how Crapanzanos conceptual attribution of the nature of dierence to cultural dierence formally reproduces earlier attributions in EvansPritchard of the dierence of witchcraft to social structure and in Jean Rouch of spirit possession to historical experience. More to the point, I suggest they share a manner of disciplinary meaning-making that still endures, where concretes are causally accounted for by abstract elsewheres and these mixtures of concretes and abstractions are posited as universal ontology when they ought to be more properly recognized as the methodological legacy of European modernity (Chakrabarty 2007; Latour 1993). I intend this essay as a contribution to what I can only describe as an ontological turn underway among anthropologists (for example, de La Cadena 2010; Engelke 2007; Taussig 1993; Weiner 2007), science studies scholars (Barad 2003; Stengers 1995; Verran 2001), and postcolonial scholars (Chakrabarty 1997) who from their disciplinary locations are troubling inherited ontological assumptions about the metaphysics of the real, though arguably the question of ontological dierence has been at the heart of European knowledge ever since its professional beginnings in the 19th century. In returning to two early classics in the anthropology of the uncanny as well as Jean Rouchs controversial Les Matres Fous, my goal is to contribute to this turn and to Paul Stollers broader call to decolonize our thinking by unraveling, through a textual performance of sorts a family of conceptual moves that de-ontologize the reals of others. As practices of thinking, these conceptual moves are bound up not to a politics of epistemology as these earlier scholars contended, but to a more pernicious politics of metaphysics, whose stakes are, I would wager, civilizational in the old 19th-century sense. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) speaks of these stakes in the context of Australian settler society relations with Aboriginals as the cunning of recognition. For even as the concept of culture is hybridized, pluralized and historicized and so conceptually made more commensurate with what we take in our epoch to be the materiality of human life, recourse to the elsewhere of cultural knowledge to render uncanny phenomena recognizable at all betrays a stubborn refusal to encounter this phenomena at face value for what it might say back to us about the facts of life or, for that matter, of history.

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tres Fous confounds Out of context: The knowledge Les Ma

Marilyn Strathern has shown how context has been a persuasive trope of anthropology ever since Malinowski. Malinowskis genius, she proposes, was to produce a new primitivism by which the dierence between others and ourselves was one of perspective, where they did not use the same frames as we do through which to visualize the world (1987: 259). The anthropologist stepped in to mediate this dierence of frames, translating the perceived savagery of the other into an ordinary that was, once properly contextualized, meant to be not so unlike our own. Following Cliord and Marcus (1986), she suggests that Malinowski accomplished this invention through the literary devices of the monograph:
the eldwork experience was reconstructed in the monograph in such a way as to become an organizing device for the monograph as such. Malinowski was able to create a context for new ideas by making much of the social and cultural context in which individual ideas were found. [. . .] Ethnocentrism was invented both as a theoretical principle and as an organizing framework for writing. (Strathern 1987: 260)

The theoretical success of the monograph rested on its ability to write the Other as inhabiting a single ethnocentric culture so that the translation of the savage into the ordinary that would be its tour de force would be thoroughly persuasive. Ideas and behaviors that appeared bizarre to us were in fact ordinary for them, and presenting the cultural context for these bizarre behaviors enabled the shift in perspective. Strathern notes that Malinowski inverted the literary strategies of the Frazerian anthropology he wrote against: if Frazer as an evolutionist liberally sampled irrational beliefs and behaviors across cultures to show the savagery still evident in civilizations everywhere in a mode akin to biblical exegesis, Malinowski endeavored to show the civilization inherent in individually considered cases of pure savagery (1987: 257). Erecting a staunch dichotomy between us and them was a vital part of his intellectual strategy and the separation produced was naturalized in the monograph as growing out of the eldwork experience itself. But Malinowskis strategic objectication of the other into a domestic and sui genesis space of society or culture, Strathern insists, was a product of a positioning of the anthropologists own ideas (analytical frames) against those attributed to his other subjects (1987: 260, emphasis added). Malinowskis monograph reorganized the relationship between writer, reader, and subject of study, establishing distances between them by manipulating ones own concepts to conceptualize ones constructed as alien (1987: 261). Strathern is thus careful not to naturalize the reied idea of context to grow out of the eldwork experience as written through the monograph. For such naturalizing locates strangeness outside the boundary of [culture or society] and [renders it] identiable only in contextcrossing (1987: 260). In other words, what Strathern persuasively shows is that the play of dierences and sameness between us and them is the outcome of the

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conceptual methodology of anthropological discourse, in which the notion of context plays a pivotal textual and organizing role. Jean Rouchs Les Matres Fous dees this tacit topography, its rules for locating and domesticating strangeness, ironically by crossing context in an unexpected direction. In the lms most famous and controversial edit, Rouch cut from the exotic image of a Hauka medium cracking an egg on a pith-helmet-shaped anthill, the symbol of the most powerful of Hauka spirits the Governor-General to a top view of the white and yellow plumed casque of the actual Governor-General of West Niger, sitting erect on a horse in resplendent military regalia, overlooking the marching troops of his native black army in the capital of Accra. In the cut, the egg oering takes on a satirical lucidity dicult to misrecognize. The real GovernorGeneral, symbol of colonial authority, in contrast, takes on the avor of the bizarre and the exotic, and the out of place. The primitivism within modernism is allowed to ower, wrote Michael Taussig of this moment (1993: 242). Who is reading whom here? The ction of two private cultures each responsible for its own ordinary collapses in Rouchs cut: the two cultures miscegenate and the resulting hybrid was to be explosive for EuroAmerican audiences accustomed to the distancing work of an ethnocentric imagination of culture. The Hauka suddenly confront the lms metropolitan publics from within a shared and lived historical immediacy, a confrontation colonial authorities in the region understood well and moved to repress with great brutality from the start (Stoller 1992: 99101). The theoretical import of Jean Rouchs montage is that the Hauka can no longer be contained in an othered space of culture for the lms European publics, but instead seem to confront within a common historical context colonial relations that encompasses both subject and audience. In the cut, Jean Rouch restores an historical parity that is revealed, persuasively, to have always been there. Jean Rouch threw his audiences out of context so to speak and into paroxysm: ge . (I address Rouchs Marcel Griaule, as noted, would be furious at his prote African publics later.) From the vantage point of intellectual work, Rouchs tour de force was, to bring Strathern back, a product of a positioning of the anthropologists own ideas (analytical frames) against those attributed to his other subjects, except in this case his other subjects were his European publics. If the vehicle that enabled Malinowskis context crossing was a concept of culture as bounded and self-referential, Rouch crossed contexts in an opposite direction, through the gure of history, in eect enlarging the contextual frame to an encompassing historical and pitting this enlarged view against the tacit and provincial evolutionist understandings of his audiences. But Rouchs real tour de force, augmented by the immediacy of lm as medium, is how this ash reorganization of knowledge so thoroughly persuades: the vivid impression is that we are restored to a truer view of the whole picture, to an actual historical coevalness with this African Other, despite obvious and profound cultural dierences. As Paul Henley (2010: 128) in his remarkable re-analysis of Les Matres Fous also notes, one of the consequences of this persuasive horizon for knowledge has been that the Hauka, and other spirits and their mediums, have

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been caught for the most part in an interpretive paradigm of colonial mimesis and resistance ever since. In a series of vignettes akin to portraits at the close of the lm, Rouch shows the Hauka mediums back in their everyday lives the next morning, relaxed, joyful, hard ance is a masterful at work, and comments in his narration that, if anything, the se way of coping with the tensions of survival under colonialism. (Paul Henley highlights other details in the lm that suggest a therapeutics of another kind.) I understand this gesture towards the private therapeutics of possession to be the inverse of the enlargement of the frame of analysis to the historical, training an audiences eye on what it would take self-evidently to be the personal node of historical processes, the psychological subject. But Rouchs proposed therapeutics strain this commonsense on the heels of the images of the taut bodies of the mediums during the ritual, the violent staccato of their gaits, the foaming of mouths, the veins protruding from esh, the eyes bulging out of sockets. The preternatural bodies of the Hauka mediums turned well overnight provocatively upstage the norms of civility and composure Rouch invokes, psychological or mimetic. Their excess leaves intact the sense of witnessing a primitive, mute, irrational and terrifying savagery, which Jean Rouchs African and African diaspora audiences at once understood and loudly protested. From my point of view, whether we zoom into individual psychology or telescope out to witness the oppressive histories in which we all nd ourselves as psychological subjects positioned, the sheer physicality and force of Hauka possession beckon another horizon of knowledge, demanding that we slow down our reasoning (Stengers 2005). How does one account for the physical feats of the possessed the unscathed skin of hands dipped into boiling water or of chests burnt by torches that prove the presence of the uncanny Hauka? What language do these surreal deeds, so vividly and ontologically excessive, speak?

The management of excess: Disciplining body-to-body contact criture through civilizing e

My intent in dwelling on Les Matres Fous has been to set the stage for an ontological and political disruption of anthropologys discursive strategies for managing otherness. Following Strathern, I have argued that Les Matres Fous operates both in and out of context, rst by destabilizing the othering dichotomy between us and them built into anthropologys project of translating the strange into a common-sense ordinary, secondly by reorienting audiences to the historical context of colonial relations and their locus in psychological beings and, thirdly, by still escaping our explanatory frameworks. But if Marilyn Strathern brought our attention to the textual production of otherness and its translation through the trope of context, James Cliord (1997) reminds us that the very practices of eldwork are also implicated in this cross-context othering. Provocatively, Cliord draws our attention to a normalizing (and highly unstable) discretion drawn at some point during eldwork between physical and hermeneutic acts of connection (1997: 76). Professional eldworkers, he

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points out, do not try to disappear into the eld by indulging in supercial travel practices of masquerade [or in messy sexual and other entanglements]. Their embodied distinction suggest[s] connections at deeper, hermeneutic levels, understandings forged through language, co-residence, and cultural knowledge (1997: 74, emphasis in the original). To illustrate this point, Cliord recounts an anecdote vi-Strausss Tristes Tropiques (1977). Le vi-Strauss, while visiting a in Claude Le Buddhist shrine, decides not to prostrate before the altar, as does his companion. He explains:
I did so less through self-consciousness than discretion: he knew that I did not share his beliefs, and I would have been afraid of debasing the ritual gestures by letting him think I considered them as mere conventions, but for once, I would have felt no embarrassment in performing them. Between this form of religion and myself, there was no likelihood of misunderstanding. It was not a question of bowing down in front of idols or of adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society that created his legend, had evolved twenty-ve centuries before and to which my civilization could contribute only by conrming it. (1977: 41011)

The anthropologists authentic bow to Buddhism is a mental one, reects vi-Strauss] marks a line at the physical act of prostration. The line Cliord, [Le expresses a specic discretion, that of a visitor who looks beyond mere conventions or going along with appearances to a deeper level of respect based on historical knowledge and cultural comprehension (1997: 75, transposed). The mental bow serves to distinguish the anthropologist from the crude excesses of the cosmopolitan traveler or the tourist but also, at once un-self-consciously and self-righteously, translates a body-to-body contact (de Certeau 1988) into a mindto-mind contact, or more accurately, a contact between the mind of the anthropologist and a cultural knowledge-made-abstract. Cliords interest is with making explicit the politics of the ungendered, unraced, sexually inactive body of the eldworker and the eclipsing of its historical determinations, including those of travel against which anthropologists have dened their science of dwelling. But his analysis of the eldwork habitus powerfully brings into relief a structure of encounter at once idealized, represented and embodied in a set of practices as an encounter between concepts (a connection at the hermeneutic level). The excesses of body-to-body contact are, at least in theory if not always so easily in actual experience, puried into concepts through the dicult work of keeping a mental discretion operant in the eld (Latour 1993). His analysis conjoins with Stratherns, supporting her claim that what anthropologists mediate are ideas. But what Cliord adds is the embodied aspect of this mediation: the concept of culture emerges, quite literally, as the mind-place where contact is discretely made in the eld. The embodied practices of recognizing culture in the eld (having natives inform on their cultural mores, learning the language, participating but not to the point of sexual relationships, etc.) and the

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abstract construction of culture thus circularly reinforce each other during eldwork in a awless tautology. Furthermore, by bringing our attention to the unmarked body of the eldworker and the work done to produce this unmarking, Cliord also draws our attention to the over-marked body of the other. This is a body made to signify so prolically, a body so culturally and historically saturated that it anticipates the reading expertise of the anthropologist. His analysis raises, I think, the much more provocative insight that the same habitus that disciplines the body of the eldworker also disciplines the body of the Other into speaking the common idea of culture (or history). If, as I am proposing, the phenomenon of spirit possession poses a challenge to the ontological assumptions that make this kind of anthropological discourse possible, this last disciplining of the other into a semiotically readable cultural text has profound consequences for knowledge and power as well as the politics of our encounters with our others. For we can speak of an ontologically evacuation in this move. Michel de Certeau makes the same point in an important but little ry known essay, Ethno-graphy, Speech or the Space of the Other: Jean de Le (1988), where he suggestively, and ironically for my purposes, compares a gure he argues is prototypical of the anthropologist, the explorer-missionary of the 16th century, with his compatriot at home, the exorcist (1988: 233). Both these gures, de Certeau asserts, assign to themselves the task of expelling witches, those unruly beings who consort with spirit(s), the one from foreign lands, the other from the countryside at home. Both nd this dicult to do: the Sabbath world of witches and natives festive, prohibited, threatening, in other words, full of spirit/s and carnivalesque disturbs proper (bourgeois, Protestant) discourse even as it tantalizes and seduces. De Certeau contends that the ethnological project has its origins in these eorts at domesticating this unruly, grotesque other. The domesticating means is ecriture, the instrument of writing:
. . . the decisive element [was] the possession or privation of an instrument that can at ry would remark) and stretch all the same time keep things in all their purity (as Le the way to the other end of the world. In combining the power to keep the past (while the primitive fable forgets and loses its origin) with that of indenitely conquering distance (while the primitive voice is limited to the vanishing circle of its auditors), writing produces history. (1988: 215, emphasis in the original)

Writing civilizes because it enables the expansionist labor of knowledge that is history from a center which itself does not travel the author. This labor takes the ry conquers and converts the alterity of things (the form of the crusade: de Le fantastical ora, fauna and humans) by translating this alterity into the discourse of an eectivity, that is, into a sign. Explains de Certeau, What separates the Western world from the [Tupi] world is no longer an array of [fantastical] things [or behaviors], but their appearance essentially a foreign language. From stated dierence there only remains a language to be translated (1988: 223, emphasis in rys text: a massive the original). This conversion plays out literally in de Le

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dictionary of the Tupi language inaugurates his journey home in the second half of his Histoire, concrete evidence that a conversion has been accomplished. As de rys text are Certeau maps them out, the theoretical moves that operate in de Le thoroughly modern: a spatiality between us and them is produced by literary means; this spatiality conjures an enigma in the form of a rift between an aestheticized exteriority and a meaningful interiority. Textuality becomes the space of this production and language itself moves from the armation of a conviction to a position of knowledge (1988: 225). Concludes de Certeau: Here is a discourse that comprehends the world which lets primitive reality pass into Western discourse (1988: 2245, emphasis in the original). The uncanny other is exorcized by means of circum-scription, a civilizing, historicizing discourse that comprehends the world. De Certeau, however, is more interested, as am I, in what does not get captured rys 16th-century civilizing ecriture is as yet tenuous and by this staging. Jean de Le unstable (as is Rouchs historicism in 1953). The missionary recognizes that something escapes his instrument of writing: he is ravished by the ecstatic moans and joyful screams of the Tupi while they feast. De Certeau explains: Whereas the object beheld can be written made homogeneous with the linearities of stated meaning and constructed space the voice can create an aparte, opening a breach in the text and restoring a contact of body to body (1988: 235). Voice enchants while speech civilizes. Voice is speech without writing, pleasure. But de Certeaus point is even more astute. He proposes that the very pleasure in the breach between ecriture and voice produces an erotics of the other that relentlessly drives the anthropological project: The savage becomes a senseless speech ravishing Western discourse, but one which, because of that very fact, generates a productive science of meaning and objects that endlessly writes (1988: 236, emphasis added). Whereas body-to-body contact could produce a knowing a relating of another order, de Certeau remarks that visible marks of alterity [in fact] do not posit other truths or another discourse but found a language upon its operative capacity for bringing this foreign exteriority back to sameness (1988: 227, emphasis added). In other words, the other is ontologically evacuated, covered over (Dussel 1995) through re-inscription into a fetishized abstract space of signication, a discourse, which has the distinct advantage of traveling (multiplying cultures or historicities) without ever leaving the center (the anthropologists discourse and ideas, the world of authors) (see also Asad 1993: 5579). The paradox, then, is that this excess of body-to-body contact is necessary for the discourse of an eectivity to successfully operate its trick of converting voice into true speech. This means that the space of the other must by necessity be rendered as unstable, on the one hand, and, on the other, vigilantly managed discursively, to ensure that it stabilizes as the right kind of enigma for modern knowledge. When the alterity of the other is taken outright to posit other truths or other discourses, as for example was the case of Carlos Castanedas work with a Yaqui shaman in the 1960s or more recently Edith Turners work with ritual healers (1994, 2005), the discipline publicly objects or theoretically dismisses.

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I turn next to Evans-Pritchards and Crapanzanos classic texts in the anthropology of spirit phenomena which I dene broadly as phenomena that presuppose the existence of nonhuman agents (spirits, witchcraft force, ancestors, ghosts, and so on) and trace the ways in which these ground-breaking ethnographers managed ontological risk and body-to-body excess in their eldwork. I also want to show how this excess nonetheless escapes, in their very texts, their discursive strategies. We need to note that each text proposed a novel frame of analysis in its day rys utility to de Certeau, Evans-Pritchard and Crapanzano and so, like Jean de Le help me see these as yet forming conceptual strategies. Evans-Pritchards Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1976 [1931]) intended to demonstrate that the dierence between the civilized and the primitive lay not in a vy-Bruhl had argued, but rather in pre-logical mentality, as his interlocutor Le dierences in the social context of their intellectual analysis (Luhrmann 1989: 347). The persuasiveness of Evans-Pritchards work lay in the richness of his ethnographic descriptions and the logical acuity with which he wove them into a theory of Azande social structure. In other words, Evans-Pritchard was instrumental in laying out not only a theory of social structure but also an ontology of the social, in that the social under his pen accrued a visible and intelligible empiricity corroborated by ethnographic detail. My second case study, Crapanzanos Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), openly struggles, as we shall see, with the conceptual and practical legacies of this earlier social ontology but does not fully break from it. De Certeau might say that, as ethnography, it cannot.

Evans-Pritchard spots a witchcraft light

There is actually not much ontological risk evident in Evans-Pritchards masterfully written Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. His one account of personal contact with witchcraft happens in his introduction and serves, as I read it, to demarcate his expert authority. He writes, and I quote at length:
I have only once seen witchcraft on its path. I had been sitting in my hut writing notes. About midnight, before retiring, I took a spear and went for my usual nocturnal stroll. I was walking in the garden at the back of my hut, amongst banana trees, when I noticed a bright light passing at the back of my servants huts towards the homestead of a man called Tupoi. As this seemed worth investigation I followed its passage until a grass screen obscured the view. I ran quickly through my hut to the other side in order to see where the light was going to, but did not regain sight of it. I knew that only one man, a member of my household, had a lamp that might have given o so bright a light, but next morning he told me that he had neither been out late at night nor had he used his lamp. There did not lack ready informants to tell me that what I had seen was witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, on the same morning, an old relative of Tupoi and an inmate of his homestead died. This event fully explained the light I had seen. I never discovered its real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate, but the coincidence of the direction along which the

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light moved and the subsequent death accorded well with Zande ideas. (1976: 11; emphasis added)

This passage is noteworthy for the repertoire of gures that it uses to negotiate the enigma of a spirit phenomenon: we have the industrious eldworker, working on eld notes late into the night; the well-adjusted eldworker, taking his presumably Azande spear for his nightly walk and living like the natives in a homestead; the unafraid rationalist no Azande would dream of taking a walk at night we are told earlier, as witches are most active at night; the thorough scientist as this seemed worthy of investigation and the ever skeptical empiricist I never discovered its real origin. Each of these images establishes the unquestionable authority and integrity of Evans-Pritchard-the-social-scientist. His alternative hypothesis, that the light might possibly be accounted for by a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate, produces a comical eect of catachresis: if you can forgive the crude language, the hullabaloo might have been all about shit! The paragraph nonetheless plays the enigma of witchcraft beautifully, masterfully poised on the tightrope between belief and dis-belief, where naive belief is humorously, but perhaps not so innocently, qualied by an association with feces. The natives are either simpletons mistaking a commonplace light for witchcraft or there may be some empirical veracity to their accounts of witchcraft: the sighting in fact accords with their beliefs. The natives Evans-Pritchard goes on to show are in fact not simpletons at all, even if they are unscientic, but for reasons they themselves are not conscious of. At the conclusion of the book, he lists 22 reasons why Azande magic forms a logical belief system, explaining every ambiguity and contradiction in belief through particular details of Azande social practices (1976: 2014). The Azande, for their part, are not aware of these ambiguities or contradictions because they are unable to abstract across contexts: they do not generalize their observations (1976: 202). In fact, they shouldnt, because widespread fear of witchcraft has a necessary social function: it reinforces local hierarchies and customs as violations are believed to cause witchcraft attacks (1976: 200). Evans-Pritchard answers the enigma of witchcraft through an analytical construction that has the force of empirical fact: Azande beliefs are literally the glue that holds Azande social structure together (subconsciously for them) while the hidden Azande social structure is the glue by way of function that holds their belief system together, in a awless circular logic. This circularity, I would argue, only clear to the anthropologist, reinforces the theorys truth-claim. In this construction, the substantive alterity of the witchcraft light is translated into the conceptual problem of how a groups beliefs function within a given social world. The usefulness of Evans-Pritchards social structure is that it resolves the problem by serving both as an instance of and a general and universal empirical principle (see Verran 2001; Chakrabarty 1997). Unlike the Azande, EvansPritchard can generalize that is, think across contexts, and this hermeneutic ability enables him (and his publics) to visualize the relationship between pattern and function through concrete examples. This double work of social structure is

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what enables him to repatriate Azande alterity into a semiotic ecriture without engaging with this alterity in the least. The ontological real of the Azande becomes discursive ction (beliefs), the discourse of an eectivity, in de Certeaus language, waiting to be deciphered by the author-anthropologist. And, although it is beyond the scope of this short essay to show how, anthropologists often do knowledge as Evans-Pritchard did, by substituting in lieu of social structure any number of empirically appearing schemas that resolve the ontological enigmas so frequently occasioned by the reals of others. Evans-Pritchards genius lay in the protean possibilities for anthropologists of a metaphysics of the social simultaneously generalizable and particularizable, one in which the ethnographer never had to leave the center of his own discursive world. Practicing ethnography, though, does periodically threaten the conceptual boundary between what the eldworker understands to be cultural belief and what he knows to be empirically real, the context in Evans-Pritchards case, social structure that conditions these beliefs. Evans-Pritchard concedes that a sensitive, polite eldworker will end up at least half-believing while in the eld, caught up as he must become in the lives of his subjects. A very real tension thus emerges in the practice of eldwork, like the voice/speech aparte de Certeau theorizes. If the belief/social structure must hold, this tension in turns threatens beliefs at home with relativism as well, a dilemma Evans-Pritchard was well aware of:
We do not think that witchcraft exists, but we have been taught that God does, so we do not here feel that we have to account for an illusion. We have only to describe how a people think of what we both regard as a reality and how in various ways the belief inuences their lives. The atheist, however, is faced with the same problem as with witchcraft and feels the need to account for an illusion by various psychological or sociological hypotheses. I admit that this is a very dicult philosophical question, for it might reasonably be asked why, other than in faith, should one accept God and not witchcraft, since it could be held, as many anthropologists do, that the evidence for the one is no greater than for the other. (1976: 246)

I would like to suggest that this very dicult philosophical question grows out of the conceptual apparatus that Evans Pritchard sets up as the nature of belief, and not, as he posits above, out of the ambiguous nature of belief itself (see Engelke 2002: 8). In this passage, Evans-Pritchard naturalizes his own theoretical assumption that belief is a socially organized surface standing in for a deeper and more binding hence more real structural empiricity. His experiential knowledge in the eld where acting as if leads to a knowing of a particular kind, even for a person conditioned as himself to believe otherwise butts up against his theoretical position. To remain faithful to his sociological empiricism, Evans-Pritchard can only resort to the defense that his own cultural conditioning will naturally be more binding than his eld experience for having grown up in it. Cultural relativism steps in, but precariously, to conserve his theory of social

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structure that the excess of his eld experience threatens to rattle, even while this very excess is what generates and invites both the theory and its contestation. It is interesting how the whole proposition is at once fragile and robust. What accounts for its strength is its very fragility. The concept of culture as belief works to de-realize the excesses of eldwork by transforming them into productive theoretical problems for anthropology to solve: more thinking and more writing. Thus, cultural relativism as interpretive method patrols the boundary that the idea of culture naturalizes between us and them by maintaining a conceptual symmetry (we all live within social structures). Not unlike the historical parity Jean Rouch restored with his mimetic cut in Les Matres Fous, the democratic valence (here same as there) adds to the truth-value of the proposition. Turning to Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, we shall see that Vincent Crapanzano nds himself caught in a more serious version of Evans-Pritchards confrontation with excess because, in part, his subject is a person. I oer a close reading of his text to show how he also works his way out of the challenge.

Vincent Crapanzanos Tuhami: Excess that wont be managed away

Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, written in 1980, is a deeply moving account of Vincent Crapanzanos relationship with one of his informants during his eld research of the Hamadsha possession cults of Morocco. The book announced the crisis of representation in anthropology (Cliord and Marcus 1986) precisely for how it irted with dierential ontology, the theoretical problem the book centrally sets out to resolve. Crapanzanos informant Tuhami is married to the camel-footed demoness Aisha Qandisha, who plays an important role in the cults he is studying. The book chronicles with stunning honesty and vulnerability, and enacts in its literary choices, the anthropologists failure to elicit from Tuhami a coherent life history that might provide the clues that would contextualize the old mans life-long possession. Crapanzanos eorts to make sense of this possessed person through psychoanalytical and semiotic frames strain and eventually unravel. The anthropologist (and his readers) becomes more and more aware that neither he nor the theories he tries out on Tuhami can contain this mans fantastical narrative, let alone his complex humanity. Tuhami and Aisha Qandisha escape him both. Faced with dierence that does not resolve formally, Crapanzano speaks of an epistemological vertigo where the very constitution of reality is at stake (1980: 8), but he refuses to cause the dierences to disappear in the act of translation. The result is a groundbreaking text about the realist pretenses of anthropology, one of the rst of its kind. Crapanzano is disconcertingly honest about the asymmetries that exist between himself and his subject Tuhami. Obscured by the translation work and time lag of

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ethnographic writing, these asymmetries, he astutely remarks, are defensive maneuvers that slip in to protect his own sense of the real:
Even today, as I write, such defensive maneuvers come into play. Indeed, at some level, my literary enterprise must be conceived in such terms. I have diculty, both stylistically and psychologically, in distinguishing the time of encounter from the time of writing. For Tuhami, I have my notes; for myself, I have only my memory. (1980: 139)

With this disclosure, Crapanzano (unlike Evans-Pritchard) seriously undermines his authority to explicate Tuhami. Tuhamis unhappy possession by Aisha remains an inscrutable, indomitable enigma which he admits he cannot entirely crack. The epistemological vertigo produced, he argues, demands a position of extreme cultural relativism (1980: 8). By refusing to write over inscrutable dierences, Crapanzano can now recognize that Tuhamis tale is ontologically dierent from the subject of those tales with which we in the West are familiar (1980: 7, emphasis added). The untranslatable dierence between Tuhami and us is that, for Tuhami and Moroccans, Aisha Qandisha is real. To look at the saint and the jinniyya as simply symbols, of whatever status, explains Crapanzano, is to lose sight of their most important feature for the Moroccan: their facticity, their givenness in and for themselves (1980: 75). Unlike Evans-Pritchard, who 40 years earlier nds it not too dicult to dismiss the witchcraft lights that the Azande see, Crapanzano, writing at a dierent moment in history, cannot in good conscience write away the givenness of demons for Moroccans. Crapanzano brushes up with startling honesty against the alterity of the other on its own terms and not as it is construed after this alterity has been transmuted into an eect of some deeper meaning or structure. However, no sooner than he does, another defensive maneuver occurs, for Crapanzano at once transmutes this ontological dierence into an epistemological one. The authentic problem, he proposes, is that our Western understanding of the real collapses into the true (1980: 9). If we were to give up our pretension of collapsing the real and the true, he argues, Tuhamis fantastic, exotic tale can be real without having to be true. The givenness of saints and jnunn would constitute Tuhamis cultural idiom, just as in our own culture schizophrenia may be the idiom with which we explain such a fantastical state of being. Both states of being are real, but both are also not true, in the sense that their idioms are metaphorical, cultural: The Other [the radically other spirit] may very well be the empty space of desire that can be described only metaphorically (1980: 9). Schizophrenic visions and spirits alike must be understood as explanatory concepts in the dialectics of identity formation. He concludes that the dierence is perhaps simply that in the one instance the Westerner is willing to accept the conspiratorial reication that provides him with a satisfying explanation, but in the other he is unwilling to enter the conspiracy (1980: 22). Culture as the (psychoanalytically construed) unconscious matrix of identity everywhere enables such local conspiratorial reications and a multiplication of truths.

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By admitting that Tuhami remains an enigma, Crapanzano advances the simple relativism of Evans-Pritchard that ties public beliefs to a culturally private social structure. But rather than critically evaluating the stakes of this received wisdom as a package, Crapanzano retains the boundary that simultaneously separates us from them and accounts for this dierence through the trope of the context. In eect, he relativizes twice over, compounding Evans-Pritchards simple relativism. What allows him to do this without experiencing too much cognitive dissonance is that this twice-over relativizing maintains the perfect symmetry between us and them. If simple cultural relativism contains at its heart what Evans-Pritchard rightly recognized as a very dicult philosophical question, namely, why our belief in God would be dierent from their belief in spirits, Crapanzanos compounded cultural relativism does away with this problem by asserting that both our and their beliefs are metaphorical constructs and the nature of belief is such that belief itself ontologically constitutes reality through culturally shared conspirational reications. In the end we are just like them, once more, or they are just like us, but in this instance with respect to how belief functions culturally. By inverting EvansPritchards logic (reality produces cultural belief to cultural belief produces reality) and swapping social structure with conceptual reications while retaining the formers metaphysical function (the real ground of meaning), what is held constant between the two is the empty trope of context or culture but now persuasively scaled out to encompass both Tuhami and Crapanzano in its workings. Crapanzano can thus do away with the dizziness of ontological vertigos where two true reals might vie with each other. Make both of them untrue reals for the same reason and the problem more or less goes away. One might have to acquiesce to the failure of anthropology to bridge these two untrue reals, but this failure is an honest and very poignant one because it is the inevitable result of the way in which the very nature of the real operates everywhere (i.e. belief structures ontology). A new universal is re-inscribed and naturalized and, once again, the social anthropologist need not heed the ontology of his informants but retains his position of cultural broker, albeit now a profoundly melancholic one. There is irony here. The one statement Crapanzano repeatedly can make about the givenness of Tuhamis saints and jnuns is that, in the dialectics of identity formation, their givenness means that an individual is not accountable for his aective world or his actions. He explains:
The conict between adequacy and inadequacy, potency and impotence, superiority and inferiority, aggressiveness and passivity, maleness and femaleness, animus and anima it matters little what idiom we use here is expressed and resolved on a stage external to the individual. This symbolic expression and resolution of conict has the singular advantage of shifting responsibility from self to saint and demon, who resonate with feelings and sentiments grounded within the personal history of the individual (1980: 76).

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The irony is that this shifting of responsibility is not so dierent from the shifting of responsibility that operates in Crapanzanos text and thinking when he displaces Tuhamis enigma unto a newly conceptualized meta-level of his own discourse, which equally appears to him as also having an existence exterior to his own self. This isomorphism reinforces Crapanzanos point, in awless tautological fashion: we are all caught up in this fundamental human defensive maneuver, anthropologist as well as informant. Crapanzano and Tuhami pass each other by as two ships in the dark night of extreme cultural relativism. My argument is that this restored symmetry, however politically proper for the post-colonial epoch, is a trompe-loeil, the outcome of a twice-over application of the cultural relativism move, itself the outcome of a historical discursive strategy whose initial aim was to realize the real in such a way as to retain the authoritative privilege of an expert intellectual at a proper remove from the uncanny ontologies of others (Favret-Saada 1980). Crapanzano de-realizes this real with a candor that has greatly beneted anthropology since Tuhami, but he does so in the direction of a re-materialization. The shadows in Platos cave dance a little more vigorously, and have more dened outlines, after Crapanzano and the literary turn in anthropology. The authority of the anthropologist is undermined, to be sure, but not the discursive strategies through which the anthropologist locates and explicates the real, whether its the true real or the untrue. Anthropologists, texts, and publics now see through empirical universals: culture as human process. Universalist ontologist claims indeed pepper Crapanzanos text, such as the boundaries of self, of inner and outer life, and the source and location of motivation or desire, as the word I prefer must be recognized as essentially metaphorical (1980: 21). The real may not be as solidly empirical as he (or functionalist-structuralists) once imagined; however, this de-materialized real remains a foundational ground of meaning. His notion of culture appeals to a compelling humanist universalism, much as Jean Rouchs therapeutics of possession do in Les Matres Fous, reinforcing their ubiquitous naturalness. All one has to do is change the analytical frame, but the center doesnt move. The ontological possibilities Crapanzano opens by acknowledging the givenness of the demoness are in the very same moment foreclosed to knowledge, much as the ontological possibilities of the witchcraft light were in Evans-Pritchards text or the feats of Hauka bodies in Les Matres Fous.

A crack in the fetishized surface of Crapanzanos extreme culture relativism

Tuhami frames itself candidly as an encounter between an anthropologist and an informant. Progressively, the anthropologist becomes self-conscious of himself as the representative of a discipline and of his informant as a person endowed with a humanity he cannot ignore. The politics of this encounter are brilliantly articulated and deconstructed in Crapanzanos text. I have so far objected to their resolution into a perfect symmetry; this symmetry is discursively produced and rests on the

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continued silence/silencing of Tuhamis possessed being. In other words, Tuhamis possession is an enigma that still cannot speak for itself. Though Crapanzanos text appears uneven he refuses closure, interrupts and undermines his authority his text nonetheless reassembles itself almost eortlessly into theoretical coherence (a broadening of the frame of analysis) where all is a negotiation of cultural idioms in the universal human work of identity formation. And yet there is a crack in this restored veneer, one that would suggest an equivalence (Stengers 2005) between Crapanzano and Tuhami of an order dierent than extreme cultural relativism. This crack I found in a footnote, towards the end of the book. Crapanzano has explained, powerfully, that to experience the Other as a subject through the full range of his emotions is not an act of passive cognition, but this mandate also plunges the anthropologist into a dilemma of intentionality, for the anthropologist must retain his ethnographic distance in order to do science. As soon as Tuhami comes to matter to Crapanzano as a person, Crapanzano nds he can no longer do science (1981: 1412). This realization crystallizes just before he is to leave the eld. Tuhami shares a series of dreams that, in Crapanzanos psychoanalytical register, betray that his informant has grown attached. Again reaching for symmetry, Crapanzano regrets that he has no exact record of his own dreams of that time, since his dreams might reciprocally evidence that Tuhami mattered also to him. He vaguely recalls a dream fragment he had in Paris, after he had left, in which Tuhami, from the courtyard of a saints tomb, smiles at him. This dream prompts the memory of another, which he footnotes:
I should point out that in Paris, several weeks before my arrival in Morocco, I dreamed anxiously that I was trapped in a saints tomb it was white and damp like clay and that I was rescued by a womans brown hand that pulled me through a slit-like window. When I rst came to Meknes, several Hamadsha [men from the cult of saints/jnuns that he came to study], who were still suspicious of me, asked if I had ever dreamed about Morocco. I told them the dream, and they said that it meant that Aisha Qandisha had sent for me. One of them, a muqaddim, began to call me Tahush the name of an important jinn, he explained, laughing. My relations with the Hamadsha improved immensely thereafter. (1981: 142)

Bracketing for a moment Crapanzanos assumptions that his anxiety about eldwork caused the dream and that its value was to serendipitously build rapport with his informants, the interpretation that remains, as the Hamadsha decide, is that Aisha Qandisha herself authorized the anthropologists eldwork. Looking at the encounter this way, from the perspective of the Moroccans taken at face value, Crapanzano is interpellated into the ontology of his informants. Furthermore, this ontology is not neatly demarcated geographically or culturally, as cultural relativism in all its guises would have it, for Crapanzano is an American and he dreams of Aisha in Paris before he begins eldwork. In Crapanzanos own interpretation, everything refers back to himself. He is the referent of his own reality and he projects that other realities have other human beings as their referents also. From

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the perspective of the Moroccans, one could say that reality does not exclusively attach itself to human beings culturally, nor does it emerge out of the gure of the human and certainly not out of the humanist subject in full possession of himself. If one foregrounds body-to-body contact, this dream marginalized in a footnote reveals how the elegant symmetries professed by Crapanzanos theory of extreme cultural relativism are not fully bi-lateral. From the perspective of the Moroccans, the boundary between cultures does not fall in the same place (a national or cultural frontier), nor is it organized by the same ontological investments and commitments. These two worlds do miss each other as ships in the night, but not for the reasons Crapanzano imagines. I wonder what kind of eldwork Crapanzano would have done if his dream had mattered in ways other than for a privatized subject. For the privatized subject, the dream has no theoretical value, except for its utility in gaining access or as an expression of a private psyche. But what if Crapanzano had introduced this dream into his encounter with Tuhami? Might it not have fundamentally upset the power balance between the two men, creating a parity of another order between them? What other understandings of the real might have emerged if they had encountered each other as ontological equals, dreaming in the same idiom? I think culture would then don a fantastical elasticity, particular to each encounter and saturated with a roomy historicity, and the real of ethnographic writing might then genuinely express the specicities of place, time, and history.

Conclusion: The value of partial connections

Crapanzanos account resolves in a failure, a failure he attributes to the doomed project of anthropology. Though he came close, Evans-Pritchard was blind to this same failure in his account of Azande witchcraft because of his unshakeable faith in the binding ontology of social structure. While Jean Rouchs vivid images of Hauka possession exceed explanatory frameworks, they easily default in a 19th-century imaginary of savagery and primitivism. Rouch can only cast failure as the failed humanism of Europe. The dream I rescue from Crapanzanos footnote is indeed a small crack in the veneer of a tenacious cultural relativism more properly understood as a political and intellectual project with deep roots in Europes civilizational ambitions. Even today, in our post-reexive and post-humanist moment, writing against culture (Abu-Lughod 1991) is a more daunting task than is assumed. The magical force of culture conceived as context its power to give us what Marilyn Strathern describes as a numerical vision of life (1995: 53) is truly protean, transposing again and again and in toto what it encounters into more of itself and more for itself. The thinking practices of the discipline remain beholden to context as circumscription; the center (the thinking anthropologist) holds steady; only the scope and scale of analytical frames shape-shift (Strathern 2002). Concretes mingle with abstractions that in turn persuasively appear as deeper empirical materialities. Thus Peter Geschiere (1997) can consider witchcraft solely as a way to understand the

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contradictions of Cameroonian modernity and James Smith (2008) as a way to understand development discourses in Kenya, while occult economies (e.g. Comaro 1993) reveal the perpetual undead of capital and zar spirits (e.g. Boddy 1989) are at bottom about gender oppression. Even these most sensitive and ethnographically rich readings of the uncanny transpose as their rst and last analytical move the ontology of their subjects onto their theoretical constructs as if these theoretical constructs have the same ontological make up as spirits, or the same origins and histories (cf. de La Cadena 2010). The question of ontological dierence is rarely posed. More recently, the turn to global health as a way to frame the therapeutics of spirit possession unfortunately returns us to a barely disguised evolutionist-cum-relativist metaphysics where biomedicine confronts spirit possession as dierent historical choices on a contemporary menu. The trope of medical pluralism recognizes and documents dierence but lters this dierence through the numerical vision of a world already domained by the anthropologist. When anthropologists do foreground these other ontologies in their texts, coevally, in dialogical encounter, they often nd themselves caught in a dangerous crossing full of professional risk (for example Favret-Saada 1980: 7). How, then, might we make dierence count for an understanding of power and knowledge that does not exile our others lived ontologies or our own? That might restore coeval dialogue as opposed to monologue (Bird Rose 2004: 28)?. Marilyn Strathern asks us to restore the strong presence of others in anthropology. She muses, with some irony I think: To be able to conceive of persons as more than atomistic individuals but less than subscribers to a holistic community of shared meaning would be of immediate interest for comparative analysis (1995: 52). Michel de Certeau puts his hopes in the metaphorical power of voice, the very ruse that subverts the word. He muses:
Through these metaphorical eruptions of fable and these lapses of meaning, voice, exiled to the distant shores of discourse, would ow back, and with it would come the murmurs and noises so distinct from scriptural reproduction. Thus an exteriority, with neither beginning nor truth, would return to visit discourse. (1987: 236, emphasis added)

The Songhay are less heady about this dilemma and more pragmatic. One of their proverbs suggests, The uninitiated cannot join the circle of possession dancers (quoted in Stoller 1992: 161). Without practicing something oneself, there is little to know. My own modest suggestion is to remain attentive, as a matter of course, to both the intellectual histories of our thinking practices and the delightfully heterogeneous materialities of our worlds. Acknowledgements
James Cliord, Donna Haraway, Triloki Pandey and Lisa Rofel were instrumental at the genesis of this essay and I extend my sincere thanks to them for their tutelage and for

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inspiring my thinking. Gelya Frank and Janet Hoskins oered important suggestions as I was revising, as did Margot Weiss, who also helped with the onerous task of cutting the original much longer draft down to the required word count. Finally, I owe a great debt to Paul Stoller both for his incisive comments on a near nal draft and for his openness to the world, and to my work. All interpretive and factual errors are my own.

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Gillian Goslinga is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science in Society at Wesleyan University. She researches social and physical phenomena that vex modern and postmodern metaphysics and knowledge classications. Her current book project, Virgin Birth in South India: The Order of Things and the Making of Life, is about contemporary virgin birth beliefs (births without biological causality) at a famous Tamil temple during the years Tamil Nadu was opening its markets to the new reproductive technologies in the 2000s. Goslinga is also an ethnographic lmmaker. Her latest lm, The Poojaris Daughter (DER, 2010), is about a Tamil goat sacricial ritual ociated unusually by a woman priest.