The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power

Abstract

The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. BRUCE KAPFERER Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 367 pp. Bruce Kapferer presents a provocative existential and phenomenological analysis of Sri Lankan Sinhala sorcery, showing how Sinhala sorcery strikes at the heart (p. 86) of what it means to be human. Sinhala sorcery, he argues, denies its victims their agency and capacity for action (their intentionality), crushing them into the anguish of existential annihilation: as victims of an agencythreatening power, they are alienated from the very means of self, other, and world-construction that action - human being - generates. Kapferer constructs his argument against familiar anthropological approaches that reduce sorcery to epiphenomena, such as a representation of social conflict, an alternative logic to science, or a cathartic release of emotional stress. After a thorough introductory review of the anthropology of sorcery, Kapferer constructs the core of his existential argument in three interpretive chapters on Suniyama, an anti-sorcery exorcism ritual performed by expert sorcerer/healers called aduras. Here, Kapferer effectively weaves myth and ethnographic description into an evocative exposition of the Suniyama. He begins by elucidating, through the myths of Suniyama, the originary paradox of sorcery. Sorcery is understood as a byproduct, a negative and socially destructive residue, of the social formation of a Buddhist moral order. Banished to society's exterior, sorcery nevertheless persists, ever ready to transgress boundaries -- between exterior and interior, impurity and purity, immorality and morality - and to penetrate into regenerative root of being (p. 71). Sorcery's transgressive nature is depicted in myth and symbol as a rape that takes place in the most central and intimate interior of the Buddhist moral order: the king's bedchamber, the queen's body. Sorcery in everyday life displaces its victims into the exterior, transgressive world of negative, life-annihilating power. The Suniyama ritual moves the victim from this exterior, back to the interior and generative moral center of the universe conceived in a Buddhist idiom. Slowly, over the course of an entire night, the victim slowly progresses up the body of a snake, drawn on the ground. The snake extends from the outer edge to the interior of the ritual space at the center of which sits a constructed king's palace, which represents -- which effectively is - the generative center of the Buddhist moral order. As the exorcist helps the victim regain agentive centrality, he simultaneously expunges the negative forces of sorcery from both the victim and the local community. Hence, Suniyama exteriorizes evils that while it reestablishes (dharmic) social and moral interiors of person and community. One important aspect of Kapferer's analysis of Suniyama is his reevaluation of Mauss's dictum on the gift, namely, the obligation to return. In Suniyama gifts play a double role: some gifts serve to rearticulate the victim's social relations (to gods, sorcerers, community); other gifts serve to destroy the evils that sorcery brings into the community. These latter gifts, of course, must never be returned, for it is their function to destroy evils and exteriorize sorcery. Rather, these gifts are obliterated through potlatch type destruction. Kapferer's analysis here fits well with other recent work on Indian Hindu gifts by Jonathan Parry and Gloria Raheja work of which Kapferer seems unaware. Both Parry and Raheja also counter Mauss's analysis of Brahminic gifts. From them, Kapferer might have taken some cues, for they show that it is not the spirit - a phrase Kapferer retains from Mauss but rather the materiality of the Indian gift that makes it a potential vehicle for exteriorizing evil in Hindu contexts. Parry and Raheja also both distinguish what Kapferer continues to conflate, namely impurity and evil. …