The Challenge of Studying Witchcraft
Studying witchcraft is an intractable endeavor. Raised in a secular humanist tradition, I have little background to help me come to grips with the ideas and reported realities of witchcraft.10 Like Ashforth, I am not predisposed to find higher or hidden meaning or purpose in the workings of the world (Ashforth 2000, 249). Yet witchcraft is nonetheless a meaningful category of thought and action to Kuria and many other peoples of the world.
Scholarship on this topic has a very long history in anthropology. E. E. Evans-Pritchard proposed that if one assumes unseen forces exist in the world and nothing happens to people by accident, then beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft (as well as magic and oracles) are rational (1937). Beliefs and practices resembling Azande witchcraft in southern Sudan, where Evans-Pritchard studied, are found in many societies, and a great deal of work has been done to identify patterns and underlying meanings of witchcraft accusations (see, e.g., Stewart and Strathern 2004; Fisiy and Geschiere 1996; Green 1997, 2003).
How do we understand witchcraft in the context of a circumcision celebration in Nyankare village in Kenya? Currently, a commonplace position of academics is that witchcraft is an idiom through which other realities, such as misfortunes, social stress, strain, unemployment, and capitalist globalization, to mention a few, are expressed (Ashforth 2000, 245). A study in postcolonial Africa in recent decades has recognized that local discourses on witchcraft and sorcery have always centered on power and inequality, on the tension between individual ambition and communitarian control. Fisiy and Geschiere (1996, 194) argue that these conceptions are invoked more often and more openly to interpret new inequalities. In the case of Cameroon, they argue that witchcraft discourses offer the idiom of choice for trying to understand and control modern changes. In some cases, witchcraft discourses pose obstacles to change, while in other contexts, they intertwine easily with new developments, with the form “modernity” takes. Sanders (1999) makes a similar point for rural north-central Tanzania. He shows that older notions of Ihanzu witchcraft—which are and always have been linked to material wealth and its accumulation and destruction—have been redefined and redeployed in more contemporary settings, and that “African witchcraft can be properly understood only as an historically conditioned phenomenon that is itself eminently modern” (127–28). Further, he proposes that though African witches represent an attempt to demystify modernity and its perverse inequities, currencies, and pieties, and its threat to the viability of known social worlds, witchcraft also critiques local forms of “tradition” by pointing up the moral and economic difficulties associated with a conceptually closed, finite-good economy. As Adam Ashforth discusses in his work in South Africa, people living in a paradigm of witchcraft seek meaning for misfortune in the actions of ill-disposed people nearby (2000, 253). And if nothing else, as one of a variety of interpretive schemes available through numerous agents, including doctors, traditional healers, missionaries, and ministers, witchcraft offers one way of deciphering signs of invisible power that shape the texture of everyday life.
Witchcraft ideas in contemporary Africa have become a prominent way of conceptualizing, coping with, and criticizing the very “modernity” that was supposed to have done away with them (Stewart and Strathern 2004, 5). James Smith (2008) elaborates the case for witchcraft as a tool to interpret new inequalities arising in Taita social life in Kenya. Smith’s detailed exegesis argues that witchcraft beliefs demonstrate how people conceptualize social boundaries (where threats to order and the good life emanate from), and how to shore up those boundaries against malicious forces (91). While teasing out Taita understandings of witchcraft, Smith highlights the ambivalent and relative nature of power and the perceived importance of creating and maintaining spatial and temporal boundaries in a reality where domains are also selectively permeable. He finds that witchcraft represents the dark antithesis of everything that Taita felt modernity should be. Different forms of witchcraft reference and represent different social dangers. In Smith’s assessment, witchcraft is a synonym for breached boundaries (93). Further, witchcraft draws attention away from structural issues by blaming evil individuals whose actions can be believed to affect structures (115). Ideas about witchcraft are intimately connected to more general notions about morality, sociality, and humanity (Green 2003, 124). Witches are people who are excessively greedy and antisocial, to the point where they quite literally embody the inversion of normal human attributes. The core antisocial quality of witches is their inability to eat with people (125).
The Kenyan Context
Seeing witchcraft through this lens makes one wonder what Kuria were so anxious about as they prepared for initiation season. The community was on edge. In Kenya, the 1990s were a difficult period of enormous political and economic uncertainty. A relatively stable democracy since independence in 1963, Kenya’s political changes, including the organization of a multiparty political system and accelerating incorporation of the economic spheres into the neoliberal global economic order, were leading to greater tolerance of dissent (Booth 2004, 16). By 1997, President Moi and his party no longer held the unquestioned support that had characterized the sociopolitical and economic character of the 1980s. On the economic front, Moi repeatedly failed to implement the structural adjustment programs that were imposed and reimposed on the country by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which resulted in the cancellation of monetary aid and loans from multilateral and bilateral agencies supported by North American and European governments. Newspaper and radio reports showcasing Moi’s attempts to blame “western imperialism” for the country’s increasingly severe economic crisis contributed to an atmosphere of tension, confusion, fear, and uncertainty. Moreover, open discussion of the rapidly growing HIV epidemic fanned tensions, as did the hugely unequal distribution of income and land, especially evident in rural areas (14).
Economic prosperity declined sharply as a consequence of complex, interacting influences. These included rapid population growth, punitive measures imposed by multinational donors, declining revenues from tourism and agricultural production, the Structural Adjustment Program, the effects of incorporation into the global economic system as a peripheral state, corruption, and mismanagement (House-Midamba 1996, 291; NCPD, CBS, and MI 1999, 2; Turner 2002, 982). Decades of economic decline culminated in 2000 when Kenya’s economy reached its lowest GDP growth level in history (about 0.2 percent), reflecting the deterioration in well-being that most of the Kenyan population was experiencing. One correlate of chronically weakening economic performance was the inability to create jobs at a rate that matched the growing labor force (CBS, MOH, and ORCM 2004, 2).
Moreover, the institutions and practices that had shaped Kenyan political life for at least a generation became unhinged during the 1990s. Political dissent broadened while government coffers dwindled, disabling the fulfillment of policy and future development visions. As Smith notes, “The state appeared hopelessly segmented, each nominal part seemingly pitted against the other, as the promise of the developmental state became the object of national ridicule” (2008, 179). With the state apparatus in retreat, foreign aid began to be channeled through a panoply of national and international NGOs, which became a new locus in the struggle for politics and patronage. Civilian members of the population could appropriate government roles by accessing and controlling money from NGOs for programs in the community. Through this process, localized social conflicts, such as those that pertained to the domestic sphere (gendered and generational conflicts with a long history), acquired public prominence, at the same time as the terms of public political debate (progress, development, transparency) permeated domestic group discourses and relationships.
These macro-level changes created significant new influences for individuals to negotiate on a daily basis. As neoliberal economics and globalization penetrated localities, people saw new channels to meet their household needs, while economic deregulation threatened the ability of local communities to retain established