"No man dies without a reason"

"No man dies without a reason"

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Module 4, Week 1, Lectures 1
Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 410
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
October 21, 2019
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2019/4.1.1

A death in the village

• Wailing
• The haus krai
• Speaking to the dead

A question

If you were raised in a society in which mourning is not practiced in this way, you might ask “Why do those people have to do this? Why do they have to register so clearly to everyone that someone else's death affects them?” I would like you to ask a different question: Why doesn't your society compel you to see that you are involved in other people's deaths?

"Magical" explanations of misfortune

Many cultures throughout the world find invisible causes for otherwise material, physical events, like illness, death and misfortune. Let's call any kind of belief of this nature magic.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, an anthropologist who studied the people who live in what is today South Sudan, has been very influential in helping anthropologists think about magic in social terms.

Evans-Pritchard's distinction between witchcraft and sorcery

For Azande, there is an important distinction in forms of magic:

• Sorcery is a skill one learns and uses to attack and harm or kill a person.
• Witchcraft is an “inherent quality” (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 1). Witches are people who possess this substance in them. A person's witchcraft leaves their body and hurts other people invisibly, and often this happens without the witch's knowledge, or at least in complete secrecy (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 56-57).

Key points about witchcraft and sorcery

Some key points:

• Witchcraft is mentioned every day, and invoked to explain any number of bad things, from minor incidents to death. “Witchcraft is not less anticipated than adultery” (which is also common) (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 19).
• Witchcraft belief coexists with reason and logic. When the granary collapsed on top of a person, and people saw that termites had eaten away the posts, they reasoned that termites made the granary fall, but a witch made sure it fell on that person at that time (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 22).
• Witchcraft doesn't explain everything: when people commit certain acts, like lying and adultery, they cannot claim that they have been bewitched (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 26). Similarly, sickness that results from breaking a taboo is not caused by a witch (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 28).
• “Azande say, 'Death always has a cause, and no man dies without a reason'” (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 51). Specifically, people's death is always the result of a latent or overt conflict. The witch is always motivated by this conflict.
• If someone's witchcraft causes death, then the witch is killed in vengence (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 5).

Witchcraft and sorcery beliefs are common

Many societies have very similar beliefs. We can speak of these beliefs as forming a package, because they often go together too.

Some key variations:

• Is the witch an “insider” or an “outsider”?
• Is the witch typically male or female?
• Is witchcraft always unintented or just covert?

Witchcraft beliefs are not superstitions; they are functional components of social systems

Evans-Pritchard's work had an influence on an emerging new school of thought in anthropology. He argued that it was wrong to view people's ideas about witchcraft as a sign of irrationality.

Other scholars coming later took a similar, but more specific perspective. Their core assumption was:

• Patterns of behavior, institutional rules, and people's collective representations exist because they are functionally connected to other patterns, rules, and ideas, and together they serve to maintain society as a whole.

Because they wanted to understand the functional role of specific institutions and rules, this meant that they would not look for explanations by looking for

• the historical origins of a practice or custom
• the mentality of the people of a society, i.e. whether they were scientific, rational, or educated
• the personal meaning for individuals of a practice
• the practical benefits of a practice

To emphasize that they wanted to look for how things functioned to maintain social structure, this school called itself structural-functionalism.

Quiz: Where does a functionalist perspective take you?

To say that an instituted pattern functions is to say that it fits together with other institutions like the gears in a machine, and the replication of one social pattern in turn maintains the others to which it is connected, and the whole social machine. This kind of theory leads one to draw certain kinds of conclusions. Which of the statements in the quiz question are most consistent with the idea that society is a functionally-integrated system?

Go to Canvas and take Quiz no. 18: What kind of theory is functionalist? The code will be announced in class.

Functionalist explanations of society—You're soaking in them!

You have already encountered explanations of cultural practices in terms of their function to maintain society.

• The ways Utku people raise their children function to maintain a pattern of relationships among adults based on autonomy.
• The expectations of preparing particular kinds of school lunches function to reinforce cultural expectations for women as members of nuclear families.
• The competitive reciprocal exchanges between big men function to support a distinct system of leadership based on big men's networks of followers.

In each case, we did not consider what the purpose of these practices were. “Function” is not “purpose.” Rather we examined how they fit together with other patterns to create a coherent system.

The function of witchcraft

Social anthropologists loved talking about witchcraft and sorcery. It seemed a perfect test case for their ideas about social function:

• Witchcraft and sorcery function in relation to a society's egalitarian ideology. People bewitch their social equals out of jealousy that they might be gaining prestige and authority (Fortune 1932).
• Witchcraft is a way of mediating social conflicts (Nadel 1952).
• Witchcraft is a collective representation of deviance itself, the “standardized nightmare” of the society (Wilson 1951: 313).

Witchcraft exist in an equilibrium, and is part of a process of maintaining social equilibrium.

Witchcraft has not gone away

People have long debated the persistence and growth of these beliefs in the postcolonial period.

Some, like Comaroff and Comaroff (1999), argue that they are not a belief in magic at all, but a diagnosis of the real workings of neoliberal global capitalism in Africa.

References

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1999. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–303. doi:10.1525/ae.1999.26.2.279.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937) 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Abridged edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fortune, R. F. (1932) 2013. Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.

Nadel, S. F. 1952. “Witchcraft in Four African Societies: An Essay in Comparison.” American Anthropologist 54 (1): 18–29. doi:10.1525/aa.1952.54.1.02a00040.

Wilson, Monica Hunter. 1951. “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 56 (4): 307–13.