Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa Michael Lambek Adam Ashforth . Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xx + 396 pp. Ill. $62.50 (cloth, 0-226-02973-5), $25.00 (paperbound, 0-226-02974-3). Adam Ashforth has written a compelling book about life in an urban society in which witchcraft is rampant. Not quite the masterpiece that Madumo1 is, it complements that previous work by supplying a good deal of the social context and consequences and the academic references that were missing there. More scholarly than Madumo, this book too is written with great ease and is a pleasure to read. It also raises many provocative issues that readers will be eager to debate with the author. Having lived extensively in Soweto, Ashforth is convinced of the depth, salience, and prevalence—the social reality—of witchcraft. While critical of earlier anthropological accounts that have seen witchcraft as symbolic or indexical of social conflict, Ashforth builds his case around what he calls "spiritual insecurity." This is a cagey term, insofar as it can be read both literally—a worry about spirit attack—and figuratively, as a condensation of all the woes of postapartheid South Africa: daily economic hardship and disillusionment; envy at the success of neighbors, and the pervasive evidence of class polarization in the black community; increasing deaths from AIDS (he does not discuss the stress of caring for the sick); poor medical services; loss of a common goal and enemy; breakdown of descent groups, families, and paternal strength; disruption of traditions that maintained protective relations between the living and the ancestors; and high rates of alcohol abuse, traffic fatalities, and violent crime. Ashforth is at his best in describing life "in a world with witches." The social correlate of witchcraft is pointedly phrased as "the presumption of malice." Ashforth works through questions of gossip, secrecy, and confession and provides a useful update of Evans-Pritchard's arguments about rationality for the modern urban context. Although witchcraft operates "within a paradigm of communication rather than one of mechanism" (p. 119), the task is no longer to translate between cultures or systems of belief, but to show how witchcraft might be plausible to anyone. Sowetans struggle against believing in witchcraft, or attempt to remove themselves from it under the protection of the Christian churches. Most saliently, Ashforth asks: "How can one represent the 'beliefs' of people who do not know what to believe? How can one represent the 'culture' of people who are ignorant of 'their' culture?" (p. 130). In fact, this is followed by a very competent and comprehensive but quite traditional review of beliefs and practices, punctuated by occasional poignant ethnographic vignettes. The explanatory question is really why a life crowded with spiritual beings necessarily results in insecurity. Ashforth makes the telling point that people no longer have "access to ancestral forces powerful enough to meet the challenges of large-scale suffering" (p. 206). The most original contribution here concerns the role of the state in addressing the insecurity of its citizens. To what degree can or should the modern liberal [End Page 682] state intervene in issues of social justice raised and exacerbated by witchcraft? How can it protect human rights without being perceived as protecting witches, and thereby becoming witchlike itself? Ashforth demonstrates the conundrums involved in bringing witchcraft under the regime of law. Here he might have distinguished ritual murders for body parts, where objective evidence is present and the perpetrators are all too real, from the majority of cases that are based on allusion and persuasion. He also reviews difficulties in the bureaucratic rationalization of healing or valuation of "traditional knowledge," such as the fact that healers are a diverse lot, hardly self-regulated by ancestral tradition, and including now vast numbers of prophets in the African Initiated Churches and other charismatic congregations. In effect the question is how, and whether, to take a figurative world literally. Ashforth implies that in order to address spiritual insecurity the government must acknowledge the prevalence of witchcraft. Yet the fact that he problematizes all means by which it might do so suggests that it could do better...