‘Exposed being’, and the
‘augmented self’:
Apotropaic magic
and the sangoma’s patient in the southern African healer’s practice
The following is a brief presentation of a work-in-progress of the above title. This is to be presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, "MOBILITY, MIGRATION AND FLOWS, November 21-24, 2013, at the Marriott Baltimore Waterfront Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
I
propose here the term ‘exposed being’ as a label for a regionally specific
concept of the person in southern African understandings of illness and
disease. The ‘exposed being’— an existential condition of personhood—is
vulnerable unless protected from illness, witchcraft, and misfortune. Under
this concept, all persons are well unless protection fails. Person-like agents
cause illness, but not all agents of this sort are human, and not all are
tangible; thus, their agency can be given a ‘social’ account in all cases. By
contrast, most current theory focuses on the agency of witches as ‘social
causes’ of illness. . My argument seeks to go beyond ‘social causes of illness’
paradigm. This helps us to understand the pragmatic efficacy of logically
incompatible medical beliefs under conditions of medical pluralism. These
concepts—‘exposed being’, ‘protection’, ‘(in)tangible persons’—also helps to
explain the relative non-specificity or generic quality of most traditional
‘therapies’ since they are understood less as specific treatments of disease
(therapy), and more as protection from illness and misfortune, that is, as
apotropaic magic. In protecting the
patient, the healer effectively seeks to add something to the person of the sufferer/patient. Rather than seeking to therapeutically adjust
some internal system of the patient, the southern African healer augments the
person of the sufferer to prevent further attack. In contrast to the ‘exposed being’, and the
suffering patient, then, the sangoma attempts to create the ‘augmented self’. Ethnographic support for these arguments
derives primarily from long-term research work in eastern Mpumalanga, South
Africa.
Much has been written about so-called ‘traditional healers’
in southern African societies. Once
called ‘rainmakers’ (Moffat 1842; Moffat and Schapera 1951), or witchdoctors (Livingstone
1857)
especially by nineteenth-century missionaries, these designation continue to
cast a shadow of misunderstanding and stigma on its practitioners, and on the
people they treat: their patients. The
‘rainmaker’ moniker is still used in the work of many contemporary
archaeologists and historians (Huffman 2007), while ‘witchdoctor’
continues to be used in the popular press and imagination, and especially by
Christians. The term shaman has also been used in reference
to the distinctive practices of the southern African healer, especially in the
work of David Lewis-Williams (1996;
2012; 1981)
and his students (for example Clottes and
Lewis-Williams 1996; Dowson, et
al. 1994)
in the study of rock art. In general and
anthropological literature, the sangomas is often called a ‘traditional
healer’, but this also is misleading.
The sangomas does many things.
While ‘healing’ is certainly part of the sangoma’s activities,
supporting other healers through drumming, dancing, knowledge exchange and
travel often consumes more time than actual healing of patients. The sangoma spends a good deal of time, too,
collecting and preparing muti,
‘medicine’—vegetable, animal and mineral substances—from the bush or from
markets and other healers. In this it is
possible to see the sangomas as a contemporary hunter-gatherer. In fact, they share many aspects of healing
practice with the ‘classic’ hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, the Bushmen,
or San, including trance, trance dance, and use of magic from the ‘bush’ that
is collected and hunted.
Thus, it is not entirely correct to call sangomas
‘healers’. Nor, are they particularly
‘traditional’. They absorb and adapt to
the many ideas that are around them.
They are one aspect of the medical pluralism that characterises the
southern African cultures of health, wellness, and healing.
They refer to themselves as ‘sangoma’ in English, Afrikaans,
and in South African indigenous languages—Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Tsonga, Sotho,
Tswana, Venda—using some declension of this linguistic form. This is word that I use and that should be
used for this group of ‘traditional healers’.
The word sangoma derives
from an ancient Bantu word, current across most of Africa where this family of
languages is spoken. The root, -ngoma, refers broadly to ‘drum’,
‘song’, ‘music’, and ‘dance’, or rather, to the social institution that
includes all of these as a mode of knowledge-practice.
The connection between drums and drumming,
song and dancing is pretty clear. It is not ‘entertainment’, but reflect a kind
of poetic construction of language, music, knowledge, and above all altered
consciousness. Across the Bantu-speaking
region it refers to—or rather evokes in sensory and emotional terms as well—a kind
of gnosis that can be termed ‘trance’ or trance-knowledge. It is akin to dreams, and the knowledge of
dreams, and especially to deep social insight experienced while in the
dissociated state. The sangoma in
southern Africa, then, is a practitioner of a specialised knowledge-practice,
and one who is initiated into a guild, ‘college’, or ‘secret society’ of other
healers.
While virtually all southern Africans accord them some
respect for many reasons, there is also widespread fear and scepticism about
them. The South African government
continues to attempt to bring them into formal government-regulated
organisations, but most healers who are serious about their art and practice
continue to resist this. While their
public rituals of dancing and drumming are generally well known, especially in
the townships of small and rural towns in southern Africa, their peculiar dress
styles, hairstyles, and some aspects of their practices are often recognised by
most South Africans. In other words, the
figure of the ‘traditional healer’, shaman, sangomas, ‘rainmaker’,
‘witchdoctor’ is reasonably well known and well documented, at least in its
more public aspects, especially those performed for clients. The characteristics of the clientele of
traditional healers is much less known.
This discussion is concerned with the ways in which the
sangomas themselves understand their clientele.
Since all sangomas have also been clientele of some other sangomas, this
‘clientele’ also includes all sangomas.
One outstanding element of belief that is attributed to the
practice of bungoma, and the art of the sangomas, is the notion of witches and
witchcraft. ‘Witchcraft’, ubuthakathi, or ‘sorcery’, and the idea
of the ‘witch’, umthakathi or umloyi
[isiZulu; also ubutsakatsi, mtsakatsi (siSwati), boloyi, moloi (Sotho/Tswana)], is more or less universally understood and
feared among virtually all South Africans. Different degrees of knowledge, scepticism and
belief exist across all southern African people of all races and ethnicities,
however. Although the depth of
commitment to such beliefs cannot in fact be inferred from race, skin colour or
ethnicity, most South Africans believe that this is an element of an ancient
African cultural heritage. Witchcraft
accusations are prohibited by law—a legal intervention inspired primarily by
South Africans of European ancestry—but is also discouraged by all practicing
sangomas that I have spoken with.
Nevertheless, the practice of witchcraft and the existence of witches is
held to be a fact of South African life (see especially (Ashforth 2005; Geschiere 1997; Niehaus 2005; Niehaus 1998; Niehaus, et al. 2001).
These authors seek to understand the
political and economic contexts and causes of witchcraft accusations. Niehaus remarks that while it is “essential
to interpret occult beliefs in
the framework of political-economic changes” (2005:206), it is not sufficient to do so
because of the multidimensionality of meanings, practices and subjective
experience associated with them. All
agree, more or less, that witchcraft can be understood in terms of the social
causation of illness model, in which broadly social causes—political change,
social stress, globalization, capitalism, and social change—create the context
in which believers-in-witches interpret their misfortune in these terms. In other words, the figure of the witch as
social imaginary, and discursively-determined subjective experience, is the
central concern.
I will argue here, somewhat to the contrary, that the
primary issue is not (necessarily) the existence (or non-existence) of witches
and witchcraft, or even the subjective experience that is labelled and
translated as ‘witchcraft’, in healing practices and concepts of health and
luck in southern Africa. Rather, it is
the nature of the person, or personhood
of the patient in southern African health beliefs that deserves attention. I wish to focus attention on the cultural
understanding of the person who suffers, in other words, not the social
imaginary of the cause of suffering.
Paradoxically, both healer and client are effectively ‘patients’ in this
system, since the healer feels, smells, or otherwise receives a diagnosis by
experiencing the pain of the patient.
Healer and patient are co-sufferers.
To a degree, the person of the sangomas has already been
characterised in terms of Carl Jung’s notion of the ‘wounded healer’, as
archetype of the healer, especially the psychologist or psychiatrist. But the southern African healer might better
be characterised as the patient-healer or healer-patient, in that the healer’s
By taking the personhood
of the sufferer as the primary anthropological issue, we are able to ask
useful empirical questions about the nature of healing and protective magic or
muti that is used to protect against witchcraft and to heal those who believe
themselves to be suffering from sorcery or witchcraft. Asking questions about the ‘existence’ of
witches or witchcraft is misleading since this cannot ever be a valid empirical
question. By exploring concepts of
personhood, however, we are able to ask useful—that is answerable—questions
about the cultural construction of the person who is vulnerable to and can
suffer from witches and witchcraft.
This intellectual strategy shifts attention away from
evaluative questions about why ‘Africans’ believe in witches (which don’t
exist), and towards the phenomenology of personhood, that is, towards an
enquiry into the kind of person that is vulnerable and suffers. This is a valid question in medical
anthropology, whereas the question of witches is not. It also allows us to account for the
similarity of effect attributed to ‘ancestors’, ‘spirits’, ‘medicine’/muti, and
magic/sorcery. In other words, it is not the unseen ‘cause’ that is in
question, but the visible effect on actual people that is my focus.
I use the term ‘exposed
being’ as a label the person who is vulnerable to witches, and also to
other intangible but similarly socially
constituted forces. I understand the role of healing in the
southern African cultural systems as a way of protecting the exposed being—the vulnerable person, as
culturally constructed—from the range of threats that such a person
experiences. The ritual and practical
processes of protection constitute a type of ‘magic’, that is, ‘symbolic’
interventions that are primarily intended to protect the
person-as-exposed-being. This form of
‘healing’ can be called apotropaic magic, that is, magic that is intended to
ward off, or turn away bad influences or causes of illness, ill-luck and
disease. These interventions are often
realised through ritual means, but also through use of materials and objects
such as beads, amulets, ingested substances, scarification, or other forms of
injection (enema, rubbing into cuts, vaginal insertions, etc.), but can also be
accomplished through invocation, song, prayers, and other linguistic or
conceptual means.
The aim of most of this magic is to strengthen the exposed
being, or suffering, vulnerable person.
This is often talked about today in terms of strengthening the ‘immune
system’, increasing the ‘energy’ of the patient, or simply as ‘protection’. In
all cases, this involves adding
something to the sufferer to make the patient ‘strong’ and able to resist, or
‘battle’ against the witch, illness, disease or misfortune. I propose to call the patient so protected
the augmented person. The augmented person is able to be strong,
and to resist the witch, or even turn the attack against the attacker. The return of the attack will cause the
witch, the sorcerer, or even the ancestor, or the spirit, to suffer their own
malevolence. The augmented person is
therefore the exposed being who has been strengthened in a way that allows
their ‘immune system’ to repel the evil influence that has afflicted them.
Thus, the healing cultures of southern Africa are primarily
concerned with protecting the suffering person, the exposed being, by
augmenting the person in a way that allows them to resist. The central concepts of the person then are
the vulnerable person as exposed, and
the healed person as augmented.
The work of the sangomas, then, is not primarily therapeutic, but protective, that
is, apotropaic. Through healing, the sangoma attempts to
create an augmented person, the ‘augmented self’.
