From sickness to history: evil spirits, memory and responsibility in an Ethiopian market village

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses contemporary anxieties aboutbudaspirit attacks around a marketplace in Amhara region, Ethiopia. It asks how we get from the immediate experience of abudaattack – an emotionally intense scene of sickness, fear and uncertainty – to a reflexive situation in whichbudabecomes a vehicle for discussing and understanding deep historic concerns about market exchange. I make two main arguments: first, that apparent connections between spiritual attack and the spread of capitalism in fact reflect a deeper-lying opposition, on the part of landed elites, between moral hospitality and immoral exchange. Second, I show how this historical consciousness develops from processes of verification and questioning through which immediate experiences of sickness and fear become interpretable asbudaattacks associated with particular human agents and historical relationships. It is only by following this local epistemological work that we can understand how spirits become identifiable as historical agents within a web of other social relations.