Somatosphere - Anti-Witch Book Forum

Somatosphere Presents a book forum on

Jeanne Favret-Saada’s

The Anti-Witch

translated by Matthew Carey

contributions from

Richard Baxstrom University of Edinburgh

Pamela Reynolds Johns Hopkins University

Nancy Rose Hunt University of Michigan

Jeanne Favret-Saada Favret-Saada École Pratique Des Hautes Études

Tanya Luhrmann Stanford University

Edited by

Eugene Raikhel University of Chicago

Somatosphere Presents A Book Forum on

The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada HAU Books, University of Chicago Press 2015, 232 pages Contributions from:

Richard Baxtrom University of Edinburgh

Nancy Rose Hunt University of Michigan

Tanya Luhrmann Stanford University

Pamela Reynolds Johns Hopkins University

Jeanne Favret-Saada, trans. Todd Todd Meyers École Pratique Des Hautes Études Edited by

Eugene Raikhel University of Chicago In The Anti-Witch , Jeanne Favret-Saada revisits fieldwork she first described in her classic Deadly Words: Witchcraft Witchcraft in the Bocage in a more reflective mode and conceptually ambitious mode. Made available as an open-access monograph by HAU Books, Books, this translation introduces English-language readers to Favret-Saada’s encounters with the “dewitcher” Madame Flora and outlines the foundations for an anthropology of therapy. We hope you enjoy these commentaries on The Anti-Witch .

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2016/05/book-forum-jeanne-favret-saadas-the-anti-witch

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Response to Jeanne Favret-Saada’s The Anti-Witch RICHARD BAXSTROM Lecturer, Social Anthropology, A nthropology, University Univ ersity of Edinburgh

First to be hanged, and then to confess; confess; I tremble at it. – Shakespeare, Othello (IV i, 38-39)

STANLEY CAVELL ENDS The Claim to Reason on an impassioned note with a brief discussion d iscussion of Othello and of the witch. For a book ostensibly concerned with Wittgenstein’s theories of ordinary language, skepticism, and ethical life, Cavell’s sudden veer into such dangerous territory may seem shocking and out of place. This is decidedly not so. Cavell’s desire is to propose an ethics in spite of all and in the face of the “horror” felt in our “lack of certain access to other minds.” In fact, proposing an ethics shorn of the “crazed logic” stoking Othello’s “rage for proof” when confronted with an Other quite logically leads us to the witch as a kind of “limit-case” (495-496). Cavell implies that, if we can accept even the witch into the fold, we have some slim shot at overcoming our “poisonous” skepticism of others and can live better as a result. Easier said than done. Jeanne Favret-Saada’s The Anti-Witch powerfully suggests scepticism in ordinary life exists as a pharmakon rather than as a simple poison. The Anti-Witch details the occult work of dewitchers within farm communities in the Bocage region of rural northwest France. At the time of her fieldwork (1969-1972) life here remained marked by the existence of a mysterious force that “moves along ordinary channels of human communication” (16) and was held to be “inconceivable,” resisting all attempts to t o name or speak it. This force, however, could be possessed and it was primarily witches who possessed it. “Bewitching is the enactment of this inconceivable force,” Favret-Saada writes, with the witch and dewitcher accessing this same inconceivable force within their deadly struggle (16). The work of the dewitcher in Favret-Saada’s account must be understood in relation to farming as a form of life. In this context, only the (male) heads of the household are targeted in attacks, mirroring their status as the sole legal subject associated with a farm who is clearly marked. It is therefore always a loss or gain of force in reference to the farm itself , conflated with the head of household, that provided evidence of an attack. Mimicking their ambiguous and structurally silent positions in ordinary life, the other o ther members of a farm family were neither the targets of bewitchings nor directly able to combat c ombat the witch themselves. And yet it was the wife who most often drove the counterattack. c ounterattack. In collaboration

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

3 with a dewitcher such as Madame Flora, the “star” “ star” of Favret-Saada’s narrative, it is the structurally silent wife who first suspects, and eventually speaks, the name of the witch that sets the counterattack in motion. Using a verbal technique via the reading of tarot cards that the author designates as “the violence shifter” (5), the dewitcher d ewitcher generates the possibility of this naming and provides “collective family therapy” (10) in identifying and combating the witch. This dewitching, a technique that neutralizes and exteriorizes venomous self-doubt, in turn allows the farm to continue as a form of life in the face of violence, isolation, and the structural silence faced by the wives and other ot her family members. Notice here, notwithstanding Madame Flora’s complex ritual discourse with the cards, that the poisonous scepticism of others pales in comparison with the impossible demand to openly discharge the poison within what we know of ourselves. Favret-Saada makes it clear that self-knowledge in this instance is impossible to face as knowledge and demonstrates how Madame Flora’s violence shifting tarot techniques generate a necessary “rage for proof” that displaces self-suspicion on to a dangerous, occult other. It is for this reason that FavretSaada deems the techniques of the dewitcher as therapeutic . So, yes, it is possible to meet an aspect of Cavell’s challenge – even without welcome, the witch can be brought into the fold. In fact, just as the witches of the sixteenth century ultimately served as a strong proof of an otherwise absent God’s existence, so too do the witches of the Bocage provide the farmers f armers with evidence fundamental to their being that they require. Having proof of witches confirmed the (displaced) suspicions of the victims, allowed them to counterattack, and ultimately enabled Favret-Saada’s interlocutors to make “a life” within the broader form of life available to them. Understood in this way, The Anti-Witch strikes me above all as an important contribution to an ethical debate. Given the text’s own silences s ilences and criticisms, I am undoubtedly aware that Prof Favret-Saada may likely be surprised by, or even object to, this association. Such are the workings of our own violence shifters in the course of their deployments.

Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/response-to-jeanne-favret-saadas-the-anti-witch Richard Baxstrom's research research interests include art, cinema, and popular culture, everyday life in urban settings, Malaysia and Southeast Southeast Asia, the history of ideas ideas in anthropology and the human sciences, and the anthropology of Native American art, objects, and markets in the Southwestern region of the United States. His first book, Houses book, Houses in Motion: The Experience Experience of Place and the Problem Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia was Malaysia was published by Stanford University Press in 2008. Richard also co-edited with Todd Meyers (New York University - Shanghai) a volume and DVD entitled anthropologies anthropologies that that was released the same year. His latest book, b ook, written with Todd Meyers, Realizing Meyers, Realizing the Witch: Science, Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible , Invisible , was published by Fordham University University Press in 2016 and concerns Benjamin Christensen's Christensen's notorious 1922 film Häxan. Richard is also co-editor of the Routledge journal Visual Culture in Britain. Britain . Somatosphere | May 2016


4

On Opacity, through Sallies NANCY ROSE HUNT Professor, History, Histo ry, University of Michig an

THE TONE IS CHARMING. So are the tarot t arot cards. A chapter with historical comparisons illuminates, as do the many perceptive gender and household readings. Mischievous is the endeavor as a whole. After all, it seeks to remake anthropologies of witchcraft and popular religion almost as much as ethnographies of mental health and therapeutic process. FavretSaada goes far toward defining a new field in The Anti-Witch: an anthropology of therapies highlighting methods required with an openness to affect. She denigrates participant observation and empathy (as distance) along with their attention to representations and ritual, while instead promoting an ethnographic practice that involves digging in, merging with, and accepting forms of unknowing. The perspective on Africanist witchcraft studies provided here may be dated, t hough in a felicitous way, reflecting back on how her work first began in relation to a detour toward this more “primitive” fold as opposed to a France where witchcraft was supposed to be long dead. Many Africanists have moved, of course, c ourse, beyond witchcraft accusations alone, while being busy sensing the politics, secrecies, and psychic suffering involved among Africans in Africa and among Africans as immigrants in Europe and beyond. Consider the work of Adam Ashforth, Peter Geschiere, Simona Taliani, Roberto Beneduce. The list could go on and on. What is most compelling about this book and its methodological reflections? The ways all ends with opacity: with what the anthropologist cannot know, perhaps only sense and feel, because enwrapped in affects impervious to one and all. The Western counterpart is the unconscious. Invoking this psychoanalytic word, Favret-Saada F avret-Saada makes explicit in her final paragraphs a parallel that bubbles to the surface more than once in this book’s pages. Fascinating is how throughout her proposal—the urgency of new anthropologies of therapeutic process—she repeatedly suggests that de-witching and psychoanalysis constitute a fruitful pair, one that she lived (and felt, sensed?) as akin to each other during the time of her Bocage fieldwork. I would love to read her ethnography of the other side of this double. d ouble. Instead (or until), let’s ask: What are implications of this suggested therapeutic counterpoint, one that bundles together opacity and inarticulable affects for ethnographies of therapy elsewhere, whether in Europe, Africa, or beyond? Favret-Saada suggests several s everal methodological dimensions: key is total immersion in an affective practice, an absorption that does not try to reveal or represent but rather senses and works through images and the visceral.



5 Arresting in her writing is the bucolic wit and playful tonality, referencing sallies of diverse sorts. That these strokes are mixed with identifying housework as a key modality by which gender relations are worked out not only in everyday life but also in imaginations social and psychic, all this makes the book an invaluable detour for gender historians of 20th century lives. That they will find witchcraft and nightmares beside farming will surprise few anthropologists of religion and psychiatry. Those scholars who are over-invested o ver-invested in the legibilities of the affective may be those who stand to learn the most from this book’s exquisite registers of opacity.

Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/on-opacity-through-sallies

Nancy Rose Hunt is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. A specialist of history and anthropology in Africa, she focuses on matters medical, therapeutic, and gender, while paying attention to material objects, everyday technologies, visual culture, and violence. Her first book, an ethnographic history set in the Belgian Congo and then t hen Zaire, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work, Medicalization, and Mobility (Duke, 1999), received the Herskovits Book Prize P rize in 2000. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke, forthcoming) analyses two intertwined domains--the securitization of therapeutic insurgency, and the medicalization of infertility--in a part of the Belgian Congo (1908-60), which became iconic as a zone of rubber rubb er extraction, war, and horrific violence in the period when Congo was King Leopold’s Free State (1885-1908).



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Comment on The Anti-Witch TANYA LUHRMANN Professor, Anthropology, Ant hropology, Stanford Stanfor d University

I WAS UTTERLY DELIGHTED to read Jeanne Favret-Saada’s account of the tarot cards used by dewitchers like Madame Flora to understand her clients more deeply and to give t hem good advice. I, too, in my early work with British witches and magicians, watched many tarot card readings. I learned to read tarot cards myself and did so, not only for others, but to gain insight into my life. My experience with the cards is very close to what Favret-Saada describes, even though in her case the cards are read for f or different purposes and even the cards themselves—to judge by the pictures—seem to be distinct. For both Favret-Saada and myself, the cards c ards are both internal and external to the reader. On the one hand, the cards are like a private language of drenched symbols. Each reader develops his or her own sense of the significance of o f individual cards. Each card “speaks” to the reader and conveys one of a range of possible meanings, far broader than the picture on the card would seem to suggest. s uggest. The “tower” card of the standard tarot deck can mean destruction (there’s an image of a tower struck by lightning, imploding) but it can also mean new beginnings. And yet the meaning cannot be arbitrary, freely chosen by the reader. The lightning struck tower can’t mean wisdom. It has to have something to do with change. That is the card’s externality. The card is external also because the reader does not pick it. The card is chosen by the one being read for, and that person believes the reading (if he or she believes) precisely because the reader does not control which cards are read. It is this duality, as Favret-Saada suggests, that makes the cards so therapeutic. They are, indeed, therapeutic. The cards stand at the center of the therapeutic action FavretSaada describes in the Bocage, and they were understood to be therapeutic for the magicians I knew. Therapy is a process in which a suffering individual uses an external structure of symbols to reorganize a pattern of emotion response (broadly conceived). The standard anthropological model of symbolic healing, spelled out by Claude Levi-Strauss in “The efficacy of symbols” and later, in American Anthropologist , by James Dow (1986: 56), is this: 1. the experiences of the healer and healed are generalized with culture-specific symbols in cultural myth; 2. a suffering patient comes to a healer who persuades the patient that t hat the problem can be defined in terms of the myth;



7 3. the healer attaches the patient’s emotions to transactional symbols particularized from the general myth; 4. the healer manipulates the transactional symbols to help the patient transact his or her own emotions. The primary intervention is to make an externally given symbol feel emotionally real to the patient—and then to manipulate the symbol, to alter the patient’s emotions. What I want to suggest here is that what makes a tarot card reading compelling, and makes symbolic healing possible, is the vividness of the attachment of the external symbol to the internal experience. I’ve spent my career exploring the ways in which an external symbol becomes more internally meaningful and present. But it is also true that humans are able to manage their emotional lives because they already presume a mapping relationship between mind and world, whether they think it is supernatural, whether they acknowledge it exists. A magician maps outward. The magician focuses foc uses his or her mind to alter the external world. A therapeutic subject maps inward. The subject goes to a therapist to use the therapist’s words to shift the responses of her inner life. What mediates this relationship? The way we learn to think about minds: as bounded from the world or open to it, as intrinsically important or as ignorable, with an imagination which is an escape from this world below, or one that opens into the real.

Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/comment-on-favret-saadas-the-anti-witch

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft , (Harvard, 1989); The Good Parsi (Harvard 1996); Of Two Minds (Knopf 2000) and When God Talks Back (Knopf 2012). In general, her work focuses on the way that ideas ideas held in the mind come to seem externally real to people, people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. One of her recent projects compares the experience of hearing distressing voices in India and in the United States.



8

Eating a burning ice cream in Zimbabwe PAMELA REYNOLDS Professor Emerita, Emerit a, Anthropology, Johns Jo hns Hopkins University Univer sity

IT IS A BONUS to have another book, The Anti-Witch, from Jeanne Favret-Saada on witchcraft in the Bocage. She brings, once more, her courage, c ourage, insight and dramatic descriptive abilities to the ethnographic task. In this confined space I can only pick up two lines in her writing: her description of the methods she used in coming c oming to understand witchcraft and her depiction of those used by Anglo-American anthropologists in Africa drawn from writings published in the 1960s and 1970s. Both in relation to what she calls the oxymoron, that is, “participant observation”. She describes the methods she used in studying witchcraft in the Bocage. She carried out fieldwork from 1969–1972 and lived part of the time in the area until 1975, then published two books (one with Josée Contreras) based on her work. In the second year of fieldwork she met Madame Flora with whom she worked closely and who became her dewitcher; it is Madame Flora’s therapeutic treatment that Favret-Saada intricately analyses. She acquired a vast amount of documents including notebooks; she attended two hundred séances, taped thirty of them and compiled a thousand pages of transcriptions; she kept a field journal that recorded her own bewitchment and her experience of therapy with Madame Flora. In 1981, Josée Contreras and Favret-Saada wrote a chronological acco unt of the meetings and collective sessions and carried out a textual analysis of the material. The depth, coverage, minute detail and observation over time are impressive. The most striking aspect of her field work is the nature of her participation in witchcraft. Her bravery in allowing herself to be “caught up” in chains of bewitchment is admirable (30). There is ambiguity in her references to having been caught. She says, “I, myself, wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was bewitched” although she experienced “uncontrollable reactions” that showed that she “had been affected by the real (and often devastating) effects of particular words or ritual acts” act s” (101-102). Some people took her to be a dewitcher while others said she was bewitched. Being aware that “participation” can cause the intellectual project to disintegrate she undertook “to make ‘participation’ an instrument of knowledge” in discovering the positional system that constitutes witchcraft by “staking my own self in the process” (102). How she s he did so lies at the centre of the book. It is a salutary experience to read her prescription for understanding a dewitcher’s craft: it can be described and understood only “if we are prepared to run the risk of ‘participating’, of being affected by it” (107).



9 Favret-Sadaa says, “French peasant witchcraft is, in fact, highly variable and adaptable” (98). And so is witchcraft on the African continent. Her depiction of the publications in the 1960s and 1970s produced by Anglo-American anthropologists who detoured through Africa is fierce. She states that “their analysis of witchcraft was reduced to to that of accusations, because, they t hey said, those were the only ‘facts’ an ethnographer could observe.” For these anthropologists accusation was “the principle form of behaviour present in witchcraft (its archetypal action), as it was the only one that could empirically be proven to exist. The rest was little more than native error and imagination… These anthropologists gave clear answers to one question and one question only, ‘In a given society, who accuses whom of witchcraft?’” They, she says, disregarded almost all other questions including ideas, experiences, and practices of the bewitched and of witches. The anthropologists quoted require no defense from me. It would be of great interest if the author brought to bear more recent examinations of witchcraft studied by people in Africa outside that ambit. Her critique of that body of work leads Favret-Sadaa to dismiss the practice of participant observation as a fertile ethnographic method. As a practice it is “about as straightforward as eating a burning hot ice cream,” she says (98). She delineates concise lines within which ethnographers should operate in order to “understand” witchcraft. Her method was “neither participant participant observation, nor above above all, empathy” (98). “When two people are affected, things pass between them that are inaccessible to the ethnographer; people speak of things that ethnographers do not address…” (104). The ethnographic literature on witchcraft, both French and Anglo-Saxon, did not allow her to figure the positional system that constitutes witchcraft. Instead, I nstead, she discovered this system by staking her own self in the process (102). She found her experiences in the dewitching séances she attended as a bewitched woman “all but unintelligible” (103). There is, she says, a gulf between her findings and those in studies of rural French witchcraft and earlier folklorists and the reason, she believes, is because she allowed herself to be “caught up” (30) which opened up the possibility of a specific s pecific form of communication devoid of intentionality, and one that may not be verbal (104). For two years, 1982 and 1983, I was in the “field” working with n’anga among the Zezuru people of Zimbabwe who play the role, or part of the role, that dewitchers perform in the Bocage. I had no particular interest in the “one question only” and neither did I accord accusations heard differently from other kinds of locutionary information, no doubt, because my work had as its focus foc us the treatment by n’anga (the term used by Zezuru people in Zimbabwe for indigenous healers) of children as patients and as acolytes as well as their experiences learning to be n’anga. I lay no claim to deep understanding of witchcraft though many anthropologists in Africa can. I have worked, too, with healers among Tonga people in the Zambezi Valley and Xhosa people in South Africa. Favret-Saada might ask what do you mean by “work”? In each of these projects I participated only in as much as I lived among those with whom I worked in a tin shack in a squatter camp; in an abandoned servant’s room behind a bar in a village; and on a pole and daub house on stilts in a valley; but I did not do Somatosphere | May 2016


10 the work that my neighbours did. I observed for years on end. Observation entailed many dialogues; attendance at rituals; listening to accounts–unsolicited by me–of people’s encounters with witchcraft; creating a variety of formal f ormal methods of measurement, for example, of children’s knowledge of plants used in medicaments, and s o on. I did not study witches, however I interacted with people named by others as witches. I was not “caught” although during a ritual to call out the spirits maddening his client, a n’anga warned her, when she tried to escape the rondavel, saying, “There “ There is a white witch standing at the door.” do or.” Zezuru, Tonga and Xhosa healers informed me that I was possessed by healing spirits. I understood their diagnoses as saying that my interest in their work was acknowledged as serious and as an invitation to work with them on those interests. This sketch prefaces an outline of what I learned about healers (some of them, some of the time). I came to admire their penetrative insights into character; their reach for self-mastery; their cognizance of living on the knife edge of good and evil; their vulnerability to accusations of the use of evil force or malpractice; their training that often entailed immersion, risk and the need to confront the power of spirits; concern for clients; the handing on of knowledge to young acolytes; the acknowledgement of power/force even in some young children; the assumption of the burden of n’anga ( in in Zimbabwe) in dealing with the pain of people’s betrayal of one another during the liberation war and their search for recompense; and, in sum, their vast cultural undertaking. To some degree, I thought t hought that I had come to understand the complexity of the healers’ role. I was not bewitched and I did not train as a n’anga. Was I qualified to “understand”? Perhaps Favret-Saada is right. Anthropological use of participant observation leads to scant understanding. Perhaps the term is a cover story, a misnomer. Perhaps anthropologists do something different or many things differently. Perhaps they are historians of the moment and as liable as are historians to misrepresent matters. Perhaps it is only those with talents and insights similar to Favret-Saada’s who can be caught up in chains of bewitchment and arrive at an understanding that can be shared in print and contribute to anthropological theory of witchcraft. Favret-Saada’s strictures on the labour of anthropologists serves to t o impress on us the challenges of the discipline.

Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/eating-a-burning-ice-cream-in-zimbabwe Pamela Reynolds is Professor Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. University. She is writing a book based on fieldwork undertaken from 1996 to 2000 on “An Ethnographic Study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the Role of Youth”. She is involved in the SSRC and UNO Research Project on Children in Armed Conflict that has just secured two major grants. With Lori Leonard and Veena Das, Reynolds is is working with adolescent girls who have have HIV in a four city project. She continues continues to work with ex-activists in the Western Western Cape.



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A Reply JEANNE FAVRET-SAADA École Pratique Des De s Hautes Études

THANK YOU to Richard Baxstrom, Nancy Rose Hunt, Tanya Luhrmann, and Pamela Reynolds, for taking the trouble to read and to comment on The Anti-Witch . I felt great pleasure in the idea that Matthew Carey had managed to recreate for you not only my work, but also life in the Bocage, with its tragedies, its flavor, and sometimes its humor. Your texts made me realize my naïveté: I thought I had contributed co ntributed to “universal science,” yet without knowing it, I had written for a French public, speaking to the implicit assumptions of that audience. I will therefore try to appeal to those of you who have astonished me the most. In The Anti-Witch, I do not intend to proclaim a new method for anthropology–or for an anthropology of therapy, or even to that of witchcraft–nor to stick to one possibility, to bury all others, and to allow the miraculous power of affect to replace everything that my predecessors have ever attempted. I’m just trying, starting from the very particular problems that I faced in the field, to say how I resolved to consider the methodology of our discipline, and to highlight some dimensions that our discipline massively ignores. I dealt with a very particular system of magic, and through its access, was subjected to drastic conditions–accepted “being caught”–which had hitherto discouraged French specialists of witchcraft, no doubt as it would have been necessary to derogate from the t he intellectual status of the Enlightenment. My predecessors had thoroughly expounded on the erroneous beliefs of these peasants, and some of them t hem had even mentioned a few unwitchers (désorceleurs), glimpsing them from a distance, inevitably alcoholics and marked by primitiveness. None of them had suspected that the Bocage (as all regions of France where witchcraft occurs) was actually dotted with the nuclei of sociability of a very particular kind–individual un-witchers and their clients, who attempt to manage certain perils of agrarian life. After several months of presence in the field, trying to enter relationships with people who themselves struggled with witchcraft, and familiarizing myself with the language specific to these situations, someone previously bewitched decided that I, too, was “caught,” and sent me to his own un-witcher, Madam Flora. After I accepted this situation without knowing where it would lead me, my “scientific” field f ield activity consisted of carefully noting events, day after day, allowing situations to develop outside of my control. The three books I wrote later on Bocage witchcraft are from these field journals. Ernest Gellner and his British colleagues introduced me to anthropology, and I had great respect for them. (Lévi-Strauss, the figure of the great scientist for our generation, had



12 directed us each month to read two thousand pages of Anglo-American anthropology, in order to think about things.) However, when I compared c ompared their work on witchcraft with the realities that I met in the field, and when I spoke directly with Evans-Pritchard and Lucy Mair, I was amazed to see that in their eyes, this Bocage witchcraft simply could not exist. Thus are my reflections, which seem to have you beaten, and sometimes scandalized, in The Anti-Witch. Several reported that since the 1970s, the anthropology of sorcery, particularly in Africa, has changed considerably, and I quite agree: Ashforth’s work, Geschiere, Taliani, Beneduce, and also Reynolds and others, are known to me and I do not place them within the scope of this critique. c ritique. Similarly, to my questioning of “participant observation”: I just wanted to highlight the fact that this term actually confuses two operations of knowledge, incompatible with each other at the same time, and that the reader of an ethnography has the right to know precisely in what the researcher has “participated,” or what she has “seen,” and what else she did–whatever name we give to this activity. Now, in ethnographies, the report of “participation” is rarely exhaustive (for fear of deviating from the ideal of “objective science”), and it tends to disappear in favor of a vague and agreed reference to “observation.” In short, I’m just trying to t o reflect on the operations I performed in the field, by comparing them with those that my colleagues were attempting to accomplish. And I do not attribute to mine, chère Pamela Reynolds, the virtue to “understand” the spirit of my Bocage interlocutors with a depth that no ethnographer could have ever reached with her interviewees: I use the term in its common meaning–a routine ( banale) ability for me to represent their possible mental states (contenus mentaux) through my relationship with them. Simply, the experience in question has the peculiarity that I have “been “ been caught”: it does not render me particularly intelligent, nor particularly truthful, it is just another point of view from which I speak. Similarly, some of you seem to consider my remarks on the epistemic modality of “being affected” as to remove and to t o replace old ethnographies of representations. Of course not, if only for one reason: to think thus would equivalently renew a dualism between affect and representation that, for my part, I never cease to challenge, even when I encounter such stupéfaite) when considerable authors as Freud or Lévi-Strauss. In this regard, I was amazed ( stupéfaite Tanya Luhrmann writes that Levi-Strauss, in “The Efficacy of Symbols,” would lay down “the standard anthropological model of symbolic healing.” How can an ethnographer and therapist as fine as Luhrmann imagine such a thing? Reread the text: Levi-Strauss did not attend the cure of which he speaks. Moreover, it is not said that the informant, Cuna–whose text the French ethnologist analyzes long later– himself ever attended a cure of this kind: he merely transcribes a shamanic song. For LeviStrauss, since the song ends with an episode of healing the sick, the conclusion c onclusion is simple: the shaman cured the body of the sick. What optimism! But how then could a text that so obviously contravenes the rules of the scientific method (causality affirmed without proof), become a classic of the social sciences? To me it is because he says with extraordinary Somatosphere | May 2016


13 aplomb exactly what the amateur psychoanalysis buff imagines to be a psychic cure: an external, “ symbolic ”, ”, word which calls to order a mind-body shaken by inarticulable affects. Read it and you will see that Levi-Strauss is content to assert the supremacy of speech/of representation/of the symbolic/of order/of bodily harmony/of affect/of non-representable pain/of disorder. Somehow, Tanya Luhrmann thinks exactly as Lévi-Strauss : see her opposition of an internal register (the individual psyche, agitated by messy emotions), and an external register mobilized by the therapist (from symbols that may reorder the patient’s emotions). While I do not doubt the effectiveness of therapeutic practice of Luhrmann (I read her texts on the subject, which are very convincing), I note that she explains the subject in the way Molière’s doctor spoke of the “sleepy virtue of opium” (vertu dormitive de l’opium). Finally. No, Richard Baxstrom, I am not shocked or even surprised at the idea that my book can contribute to an ethical debate. Frequenting the bewitched and their un-witchers means speaking about good and evil all the day d ay long (since it is impossible to cure c ure without switching to a position of indirect violence); and this is also the case when we speak of peasant witchcraft with people who are not “caught,” whether Bocage residents or Parisians (their moral judgment being always adverse on those bewitched who accuse innocent people). I have not stressed this in my book precisely because it was the only question that my readers had in mind: those bewitched, who clutch with such energy the violence that Madame Flora puts at their disposal, are they t hey good, are they villainous? At the end of my time in the field, I substituted this question with another, inspired by the overall logic of the institution of witchcraft. In fact, in the Bocage, nobody ever casts spells on somebody, but some are accused of having done it. So, at any time in the area, you can find a number of people who are accused of being sorcerers, and know they are accused, since the accusers behave in a very coded manner. These “sorcerers” can choose between two strategies. Either they refuse sorcery outright, and take their accuser for a fool or backwards, but it is better for them that their words should be confirmed by the sustainable, s ustainable, bio-economic welfare of their farm. Or, if they give credence to witchcraft, they can think they themselves are victims of a miscarriage of justice. Provided they t hey experience repeated misfortunes, they will find it urgent to divert the effects of this unjust accusation (in particular the fact that they could be attacked by a un-witcher). Some people panic and collapse mentally and physically–but I have just encountered a single case that could be interpreted in that sense. Most take a long-term strategy, which I have provided examples in Deadly Words: they wait enough time in repeated misfortunes and they seek un-witching, carefully concealing that they have been previously accused. Since the magician knows as well as I the structural constraints of the system, he is not fooled by this concealing, but he prefers to take the consultant as it presents (an unfortunate plagued by repeated misfortunes), and he is careful not to push the investigation to a probable previous charge. The injustice of accusing the innocent then appears less revolting because it is evenly distributed throughout the Bocage. Being accused of witchcraft becomes the equivalent of a Somatosphere | May 2016


14 mundane misfortune that can strike anyone, as would a traffic accident, or being struck by an inevitable infirmary (born lame or blind). Thanks to the existence of un-witcher, anybody eventually finds a way to get by. Translated from the French by Todd Meyers (NYU-Shanghai). Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/a-reply

Jeanne Favret-Saada is an anthropologist anthropologist and author of Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1977, Gallimard; English translation, Deadly words: Witchcraft in the Bocage , translated by Catherine Cullen, Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Corps pour corps. Enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1981, Gallimard, co-authored with Josée Contreras). She has since published numerous other works, including Le Christianisme et ses juifs: 1800-2000 (Le Seuil, 2004), once more in collaboration with Josée Contreras, Contreras, Algérie 1962-1964: essais d‘anthropologie politique (Bouchene, 2005), Désorceler (Editions de L‘Olivier, 2009) and Jeux d‘ombres sur la scène de l‘ONU. Droits humains et laïcité (Editions de L‘Olivier, 2010).



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