In 1937, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard published ‘Witchcraft, Oracles and the Azande’, an ethnography of the Azande people of the upper Nile. Witchcraft was pervasive in Zande society, with the role of witches, and the practice of witchcraft weaved into the very fabric of everyday life. To be a ‘witch’ is to be classified, and it is the relationship between classifications and the classified that underpin Ian Hacking’s paper entitled ‘making up people’. Hacking asks how ‘we change in virtue of being classified, and how the ways in which we change have a feedback effect on our systems for classifying themselves’.
Evans-Pritchard argues that ‘witches, as the Zande conceive them, clearly cannot exist’, and yet they were ubiquitous in Zande society, perceived not as supranatural beings but as an ordinary part of everyday life. To be a member of Zande society was to believe that some people were witches and that they could ‘injure in virtue of an inherent quality’. That quality was believed to be both hereditary and physical, however, the act of witchcraft was a dynamic, psychic one, with no real material existence. It is this incorporeal quality that underpinned the mysticism of Zande beliefs and customs.
Hacking’s philosophical notion of dynamic nominalism argues that ‘classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on’. He suggests that ‘humans are not just responsible for producing categories; humans also seem to be responsible in some sense for making categories to be what they are’[3]. The ‘label’ and the ‘labelled’ dance in concert within the system in which they dwell.
To the Zande, witchcraft and misfortune are synonymous, existing as two sides of the same coin. To speak of one without the other is to ignore a core Zande belief. This belief does not ‘seek to discredit empirical cause and effect of misfortunes’[1] but rather explains why two unrelated chains of causation collide at a particular point in time. Why did the wall collapse at the exact moment that little boy was standing beneath it? Witchcraft affords the Zande a means through which they can make sense of such misfortunes.
Witchcraft, to the Zande, is an unconscious activity. Man does not know that he has bewitched another … but, at the same time, he believes firmly in the existence of witchcraft and in the accuracy of the [accusations]’[1]. The Zande frequently believe in the moral guilt of others and the innocence of self. However, despite ‘knowing’ that they have not consciously bewitched another, or assisted other witches in their crimes, they also know that they would be wise to accept custom and behave as it demanded when accused.
Behaving as custom requires reinforces the classification of both the witch, and the witch doctor, whose verdict is then believed evidenced. The response of the classified reinforces the classification. And that reinforced classification, in turn, influences the behaviour of the classified. Feel like you’re going in circles? That’s because you are in a feedback loop.
As social beings, we perceive our identities through the lens of the societies in which we live. This social reality is described by Hacking as ‘conditioned, stabilized, or even created by the labels we apply to people, actions and communities’. Categories create order in an otherwise chaotic world. Their use is not ‘always nefarious or counterproductive as we need them to make sense of things.
Zande witchcraft was underpinned by beliefs which ‘every individual unconsciously accepted as … pervasive influences exercised by society’[1]. It would make sense to then ask if ‘making up people’ is a form of social control. Rayback argues that ‘one of the functions of labelling individuals is to increase the predictability of social life’, particularly during periods of social upheaval.
‘This social need to label creates ‘many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it … and suddenly elude his condition.’ Jean-Paul Satre
Zande lay the blame for witchcraft contradictions at the feet of specific practitioners. Evans-Pritchard’s servant believed his sublime faith in witchcraft to be sound by convincing himself that the specific witchdoctors who employed fakery were exceptions to the rule. This secondary reasoning is an example of how Zande witchcraft’s mystical, incorporeal quality enabled the explaining away of contradictions as a means of reinforcing primary beliefs.
‘People living in a community in which the facts of witchcraft are never doubted may convince themselves that they possess the power with which others credit them’[1]. Societal customs and beliefs can see them doubt themselves, asking: ‘maybe I am a witch?’. And when accused, they might even become conscious of their powers and start to use them, with malice. The looped relationship between the classification and the classified begins to empower the individual and see him behave as though a conscious agent.
At the time of Evans-Pritchard’s study, Zande society was in the throes of radical societal change. The existence of classifications served a purpose beyond that of individual-to-individual relations with witches, and their practice, inextricably linked to the societal norms and customs specific to place and time. MacIntosh supports this view arguing that ‘anthropological evidence shows that particular roles do not exist in all societies, and where they do it is not always the same as in modern western societies’.
Evans-Pritchard notes that this ‘period quiescence and resurgence of witchcraft beliefs in relation to cycles of economic prosperity and depression’ is alluded to by Hacking through the story of Satre’s antihero, the Garcon de Café, in which he suggests that specific classifications are only possible at a certain time, in a certain place, in a certain social setting’. To ascribe the label of ‘witch’ to an individual in another place, time and social setting, would be to ascribe an entirely different meaning, or to even suggest an impossibility. Zande witches, and the practice of witchcraft, as described by Evans-Pritchard, were a product of the place and time within which they existed. They were, as was the original title of Ian Hacking’s paper ‘moving targets’ that adapted to the particular socio-cultural dynamic in which they found themselves.
The symbiotic relationship between the Zande classification of ‘witches’ and those classified is a sound illustration of the philosophical notion of dynamic nominalism. As the classification and classified conspire ‘to emerge hand in hand’ a feedback loop is created, born from both solitary and societal thinking. Witches and the practice of witchcraft were both a product of and a creator of, custom, particularly during times of social upheaval. They were, when viewed through the eyes of Ian Hacking, ‘made up people’.
Who are we now ‘making up’ in these times of social upheaval? Who are we blaming for our misfortunes?
Image: Oleg Sergeichik
References:
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1976, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, Oxford University Press, UK.
Gracia, J. E., 2001, ‘Are Categories Invented or Discovered? A Response to Foucault’, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Sep 2001), pp. 3-20
Hacking, I, 2004, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, USA.
MacIntosh, M, October 1968, ‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems, Vol. 16, Issue. 2, p182-192
Raybeck, Douglas, Dec 1988, ‘Anthropology and Labeling Theory: A Constructive Critique’, Ethos, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 371-397