Modernity through the Eyes of Witchcraft: A Radical Critique of Categorisation

Abstract

The Enlightenment has come to dominate global discourse. In so many ways it has disseminated, often through imperial/colonial actions, a knowledge system which has prioritised objectivity and rationality and excluded as superfluous or vacuous entire cultures of knowing and perceiving. That most important of Enlightenment concepts, progress, is, itself, built on replacing indigenous knowledge systems with sound scientific thinking – of transforming from traditional to modern. However, this progress has stuttered. Modernity has not replaced all tradition, and traditional ways of knowing and perceiving and the place of humans in it continue to be the basis of human experience. Many core Enlightenment tenets have faced stern opposition both, within Western society, by a plethora of anti-foundationalist philosophers, and, beyond Western society, by, for example, the East Asian contributors to the Asian values debate. The universality of rights, the objectivity of science and the merits of modern technology have all faced intense academic and popular scrutiny. However, there are examples of cultural opposition to such tenets which have been often overlooked and which, if given suitable attention, would enable us to explain and understand the distinctive ways in which Enlightenment has the potential to injure human beings. In this essay, I shall seek to illustrate the rich way in which a particular cultural tradition can articulate key deficits in the Enlightenment project. The tradition to which I refer is witchcraft in Africa. While my focus in this essay lies in the African incarnation, belief in witchcraft, as a power which operates within an occult or spiritual dimension on reality, is not limited to the continent. It exists, or has existed, in most parts of the world (Moore and Sanders 2001: 11). In its African form, it has developed a series of important responses to modernity which, as I shall argue, highlight some core internal contradictions within Enlightenment. I come to dissect and explain the ways in which witchcraft highlights these contradictions in the following manner. First, I discuss some of the most explicit issues with modernity in (without wishing to appear tautological) the contemporary period. I then introduce the response of witchcraft to these issues. Finally, I employ the civilisational categorisations of Cox (2000) to explain the foundations of the critical response of witchcraft traditions to modernity. I argue that divergent notions of time and space, the tension between the individual and community, and contradictory understandings of matter and spirit in spirituality and cosmology, enable people operating within the paradigm of witchcraft in Africa to produce a distinctive critique of modernity. I begin by discussing some explicit issues with modernity and the strident and uncritical way in which these are reproduced in the African context. Socially, modernity is about hope and guilt; psychologically, it is about identity (Bauman 1998: 23). In an extremely unequal world, modernity is