Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa
7. The virtual village: Two recent discourses on witchcraft and healing
7.1. Introduction
For my third case study, I contrast two
excellent recent papers by my long-standing colleagues and
friends Peter Geschiere and Matthew Schoffeleers.42 Geschiere's
paper offers a convincing example of virtuality in the context of
globalisation, with special application to present-day African
religion. Matthew Schoffeleers' paper provides the perspective
from which I can focus on Geschiere's.
Geschiere's paper is only the introductory chapter of a beautiful
and thoughtful book,43 which has been widely acclaimed in its
French version and whose forthcoming English version will no
doubt play a major role in the current revival of the study of
occult forces in a context of globalisation. I have read the book
in the form of a personal copy donated to me as, in the author's
own words, 'le grand sorcier de l'anthropologie hollandaise';44
so even if Geschiere wittily states that 'On ne se remercie pas
dans le monde de la sorcellerie',45 and even if there are
indications that he is right, there are obvious limitations to
the kind of comment I can present here. At the same time, the
most appropriate way to show appreciation for a scholar's work is
to critically review his work in detail. But let me stress from
the outset that my focus here is not so much on Geschiere's book
as such but on the way it illustrates problems of virtuality.
7.2. A recent healing movement in Malawi
Schoffeleers, on his part, deals with a recent
and short-lived healing cult in Malawi, around the healer Billy
Goodson Chisupe.46 During a few months in 1995 - grabbing a rare
opportunity which fell away with the aged protagonist's death -
tens of thousands of people flocked to his village home in order
to obtain the cure for AIDS which had been shown to him - an
ordinary villager until then - in a dream only a few months
earlier.
In terms of the story of the prophet's calling, and the massive
pilgrimage to his rural dwelling, the cult replays a scenario
that is familiar to students of popular religion in South Central
Africa in the twentieth century CE, from the prophet Mupumani who
appeared in the midst of drought and effective colonial
penetration in the 1910s, to the prophetess Lenshina in the 1950s
and '60s.47 In the most admirable and convincing way,
Schoffeleers situates the brief contemporaneous history of the
cult both within the time-honoured cosmology of the Malawi
countryside of which he has become the principal living
ethnographer;48 and within the national political and social
developments in Malawi during the 1980s and early '90s. Much like
other religious movements in South Central Africa, Chisupe's cult
is interpreted, beyond its therapeutic ineffectiveness against
AIDS, as an attempt to revitalise the country.
Of course Schoffeleers realises that the central concept of
mchape which - contrary to the healer's own choice of words - has
been imposed, by the Malawian public and the media, to denote the
herbal solution dispensed by the healer, while retaining its
basic meaning of 'ablution', in the colonial history of Malawi
and other parts of South Central Africa has acquired a more
specific reference: to the young men, often returning migrants,
who would come to the villages forcing people to surrender their
witchcraft materials and to be cleansed.49 However, in the
context of Chisupe's cult, references to witchcraft have been so
minimal that Schoffeleers sees no reason to refer to them.
7.3. The status of 'witchcraft' as an analytical term
Before I proceed, a few words are in order
about the term 'witchcraft'. I dislike the term and prefer to use
'sorcery' instead, but like Geschiere I do not think that we
should waste time over terminological issues before we have
considered the actual language usages of the people we write
about. In his recent work, as well as in his earlier book on the
Maka of Cameroon, Geschiere proposes to use a term which he
suggests to be more neutral, 'occult forces'.50
Employing standard anthropological instruments such as cultural
relativism and the distinction between emic (actors') and etic
(analytical) models, we may be tempted to distinguish at least
four different contexts where terms designating such 'occult
forces' are coined:
the village and the local language
prevailing there,
the popular culture of the town with its oscillation
between local African languages, and an international language,
the national elite and its preferred international
language, or
the domain of international scholarship.
Geschiere's argument now claims - and that is
an important aspect of its unique quality - that these four
contexts are intimately interrelated and even overlapping in the
case of contemporary Cameroonian beliefs and practices relating
to witchcraft. At this point in my argument this may justify us
to employ the term 'witchcraft', if only as a blanket descriptive
term.
In Geschiere's argument witchcraft is the central issue, and he
clearly and convincingly sees no option but to confirm the image
well-known from the literature written by missionaries and
colonial administrators of a much earlier vintage:51 an Africa
which is truly the abode of witchcraft. But, contrary to the
expectation of these early European observers and actors on the
African scene, he proceeds to demonstrate that witchcraft has not
disappeared under the onslaught of modernity, but has installed
itself within the very heart of modernity: it is the dominant
discourse concerning power in the post-colonial state, and
concerning the acquisition and use of modern consumer goods.
7.4. The absence of witchcraft in Chisupe's movement
In Schoffeleers' argument, by contrast, the witchcraft element is absent, 52 and I am inclined to think that this is a valid rendering of the actual situation. Not so much because Schoffeleers is the Malawi specialist (his data in this case are not of standard quality, deriving from newspaper clippings, personal correspondence and unedited video recordings taken by an anthropological colleague, - he has not even been on the spot), not even because of corroborating evidence from Probst, van Dijk and other local ethnographers, but because the extensive research on religious transformations in South Central Africa in the course of the last few centuries - the massive research output over the past three decades, which has owed so much to Terence Ranger - certainly has revealed the existence of a limited number of options besides witchcraft.
Witchcraft was the main issue in some religious
expressions which, having become fashionable, swept as cults
across the region - but not in all. Ironically, witchcraft
eradication movements do not constitute the crucial limiting case
their name would suggest, for the active confrontation of the
witchcraft in others presupposes, not a interpretative
alternative, but a firm belief in witchcraft as the central
explanatory factor in evil. The prophetic idiom represented by
Mupumani addressed an ecological or productive concern, for rain
and vegetation. Cults of affliction, which have formed the major
religious expression in western central Zambia during much of the
twentieth century, represented the African actors' radical
departure from the theory of witchcraft as an explanation of
evil: not human malice, but capricious non-human alien spirits,
were cited as the cause of illness and distress, and these
spirits were reputed to emulate the spatial displacement, to
travel the very roads, of regional population movements,
long-distance trade, labour migration, colonial penetration and
mass consumption of foreign-produced manufactured goods.
Christian churches, to cite another major alternative to
witchcraft as a religious idiom, has operated a theory of evil
which not so much accepts witchcraft as a mode of explanation,
but offers an alternative explanation in terms of sin and
salvation, and by doing so provides a shelter for many of those
fearing the witchcraft of others as well as the witchcraft inside
themselves. All this does not mean that the people practising
cults of affliction or Christianity entirely ceased believing in
witchcraft or engaging in witchcraft practices - but at least
they had access to a religious variant where witchcraft was not
the all-overriding mode of explanation.53
7.5. The construction of a discursive context for analysis: (a) the village as the dominant locus of cosmological reference
A crucial difference between the arguments of
Geschiere and Schoffeleers lies in the way in which each
constructs a discursive context for his analysis.
For Schoffeleers this is a regionally embedded context: without
saying so explicitly, the argument moves back and forth between,
on the one hand, post-colonial Malawi, whose socio-cultural and
political outlines we need to know in order to understand the
story - and on the other hand some generalised Malawian village
environment, which constitutes the setting for cosmological
notions around trees and their healing power, and for the typical
biography (including temporary death, a visit to the underworld
or heaven, and rebirth on earth) of the prophet and the healer,54
- in other words, the village is the very place where ancestors
dressed in bark-cloth may yet appear in dreams. Meaning is
implied at the level of the actors, and interpretation is
rendered possible at the level of the academic writer and reader,
by Schoffeleers' dextrous juggling between these two regionally
nested sets of references. Much of the argument is by imputation:
the two spheres are suggested, in some implicit way whose
implications for method and interpretation remains un-argued, to
be distinct yet continuous and interconnected, so that meanings
and conditions applying to one sphere can be carried over to the
other. Is not the crux of the healers' oneiric message that there
is a cure for every ailment? Schoffeleers data may not be in the
classic anthropological tradition of participant observation, but
his argument, as well as his empirical method, is certainly in
the line of inspired socio-religious history for which Terence
Ranger set the examples. In fact, no piece by Schoffeleers has
reminded me more strongly of the best work by Ranger - for
instance the latter's masterly short study of the witch-finder
Tomo Nyirenda, also known as Mwana Lesa, a piece which, when I
read it in draft in 1972, made a more profound impression on me
than almost any contemporary scholarly text, provided me with a
splendid model to emulate, and committed me overnight to the
study of Central African religious history.55
7.6. The construction of a discursive context for analysis: (b) leaving the village and its cosmology behind, and opting for a globalising perspective
Geschiere as an author can be seen to struggle
with the same problem as Schoffeleers does: where can we find a
locus of meaning and reference, for the African actors, as well
as for the academic discourse about their witchcraft beliefs and
practices?
Both our authors derive their inspiration and their analytical
confidence, rightly, from their years of participant observation
at the village level. But for Geschiere the village and its
cosmology is no longer a dominant reference.
Which village, and which region, anyway? Geographically, some of
the data which he presents as having triggered his analytical
curiosity may derive from a Cameroonian village, but on closer
inspection his corpus highlights the discourse and practices
among African elites and middle-classes, and between
anthropologists and selected individual Africans who, as employed
anthropological assistants, may be characterised - with some
stretch of the imagination - as practical or temporary members of
the middle class. I deliberately used the word corpus, whose
textual and finite nature, with its sense of procedural
appropriation rather than humble and defenceless immersion,
differs so very much from the standard anthropological material
based on participant observation over a prolonged period. The
last thing I want to do here is criticising Geschiere for
methodological procedures which, far from being defective,
constitute deliberate and strategic choices on his part. Having
done his bit on occult forces at the village level, in his Maka
book and a number of shorter pieces, he emphatically and
justifiably seeks to move away from the village setting - which
anthropologists may be tempted to construct as being unique -
among the Maka. He wishes to explore how witchcraft operates in a
context of 'modernity': the state, the district capital, the
city, modern consumption, elite behaviour.
These choices are strategic and commendable, not only in view of
the time pressures an anthropological field-worker experiences
if, like Geschiere, he is at the same time a successful leading
academic in his distant home country - but also in view of the
already vast literature on witchcraft in a great number of
African village settings.
All the same these choices direct the research, however timely it
may be, to contexts both geographically dispersed and endowed
with such social power that they can effectively impede
participant observation by an anthropologist. This would be so
for any topic, but all the more so for the topic of witchcraft,
where sinister threats and counter threats, and occasional
confrontations with the very real powers of witchcraft
specialists to harm and kill people, create a field-work setting
well comparable to that of a front-line position in guerrilla
warfare.
The latter is no facile rhetoric. Having from 1972 frequented a village environment in Kaoma district, western central Zambia, where witchcraft was and has been the dominant discourse for discussing interpersonal relations, both within the family and at the local royal court, I became interested, in the early 1990s, in studying the activities of the witch-finder Tetangimbo. He was reputed to be active around Mangango, a thriving rural centre at the other end of the district, at some 120 km distance. The case has interesting parallels with that of Mwana Lesa referred to above.56 Surrounded by a considerable number of locally recruited assistants, drawing his clientele from all over Kaoma district, and relying not on the traditional alkaloid bark poison (mwathe, mwave) but on absolutely lethal agricultural poison which left the accused no chance whatsoever of escaping with his life, the witch-finder is alleged to have killed a considerable number of people in the latter days of the Kaunda administration and right up to 1992. A criminal investigation was subsequently initiated, but the accused fled to Namibia, the case was never brought to trial, the police records are nowhere to be traced, and some key witnesses are reputed to have been killed. Noticing that my own scholarly interest in the case was interpreted by some of the administrators and by the population at the district capital as an attempt to establish myself as Tetangimbo's successor (!), in a context where local actors had difficulty distinguishing between my Botswana-derived spirit mediumship and the more sinister forms of occult practice as common in western central Zambia, I realised (and was explicitly warned) that further insistence would be inviting violence of either an occult or a physical nature; and I have effectively given up the project. One of the lessons I have learned in the process is this: to appreciate the amazing difference between
the relatively open discourse on
witchcraft and on specialist occult powers in the village
environment, where even the most terrible suspicions cannot take
away - in fact, presuppose - the fact that everyone is personally
acquainted and engages in public sociability, as against
the anonymous, fragmented, veiled and basically secret
discourse on witchcraft in even a small urban centre like a
Zambian district capital.57
It is not only the choice for a national or
even international level of variety and comparison, impossible to
cover by any one investigator's participant observation, that
gives the specific flavour of displacement, of operating in an
uncharted no man's land, to Geschiere's discourse on witchcraft
in modern Africa. Having studied the village and written his
monograph, he is now operating at a level where the meaning which
actors' attribute to their witchcraft practices is no longer
informed by the cosmology of some original village environment.
Or is it? When we compare Geschiere's approach to that of
Schoffeleers, the difference may be tentatively expressed thus:
Schoffeleers has access to the village
cosmology and appeals to it to partially explain the meaning of
contemporary events at the national level, even if he does not
argue in detail the interrelations between town and country and
the interpenetration of rival cosmologies in Malawi today;
Geschiere on the other hand ignores the village cosmology
and therefore, despite the close attention - throughout his
published work - for the interpenetration between the village and
the wider national political and economic scene particularly in
contemporary Cameroon, is at a loss to identify (or rather, is no
longer interested in identifying) the locus where witchcraft
beliefs and practices take shape and meaning; his approach to
witchcraft is essentially de-contextualised.
From a classic anthropological point of view,
such a characterisation of Geschiere's work would amount to
severe criticism. Yet it is this particular orientation of his
work on witchcraft which allows him to capture an important
aspect of contemporary African life: the extent to which the
village is no longer the norm, no longer a coherent and
consistent point of reference and meaning. In other words,
Geschiere's approach may be de-contextualised, only to the extent
to which also the actors' conceptualisation is de-contextualised.
But before I elaborate this point, let us explore what could have
been gained, in the Cameroonian case, from a closer attention for
the rural cosmology of witchcraft.
7.7. The possible lessons from a rural-orientated cosmological perspective on witchcraft
Might not some greater explicit attention for
rural-based cosmology, and for the relevant literature in so far
as it illuminates the cosmological position of witchcraft, have
helped solve a number of dilemmas which now remain in Geschiere's
argument? The answer is a qualified yes, yet we shall see that
the great value of Geschiere's argument lies in the fact that yet
he dared steer away from the village.
Much of that literature is cited by Geschiere;58 but, like we all
do as authors, he interprets it in a personal way. Thus, I find
it hard to understand Geschiere's claim that this older
anthropological discourse on witchcraft is so very moralistic in
the sense that it can only present witchcraft as something bad,
and does not realise that in the African experience it is
ambivalent, also capable of inspiring excitement, admiration, a
positive sense of power; in fact, the realisation that his
African companions could be positively fascinated by witchcraft
is presented as a serendipity.
In my opinion Geschiere falls victim here to his tendency to
overlook the place of witchcraft in African rural cosmologies.
Whatever the difference between acephalous societies and those
with centralised political leadership, and whatever the
variations across the continent, African cosmologies tend to
converge on this point, that they have important moral
implications, defining witchcraft as transgressing the moral
boundaries defined in those cosmologies. As a statement about the
land, which in many parts of Africa is the ultimate economic as
well as ontological and moral reality, these cosmologies tend to
stipulate a morality which makes the absence of murder, incest
and witchcraft a precondition for the fertility of the land.59
This does not mean that these moral boundaries
can never be transgressed; such transgression is in fact a
precondition for the construction and legitimation of forms of
identity which go beyond the scope of the ordinary human being
inhabiting the standard village: the identities of ruler,
diviner-priest, monopolistic trader, blacksmith, bard. The
morality implied in witchcraft beliefs therefore particularly
informs, and is informed by, the dynamics of face-to-face
interaction within commoner villages as standard contexts of
production and reproduction, and tends to be suspended or
challenged in the context of other modes of production including
royal courts.60
Geschiere's central point about the moral ambiguity implied in
African witchcraft is very well taken, and I could not agree more
when he claims that it is this ambiguity which allows witchcraft
to insert itself in the heart of African modernity. Such
ambiguity however, contrary to what he claims, does not at all
explode the moral overtones which the concept carries, in the
view of many Africans and of many well-informed anthropologists.
Nor can it entirely be relegated to some universal, innate
quality of the sacred to be both benevolent and destructive, as
stressed by Durkheim and Otto.61 That ambiguity largely reflects
the material contradictions between the various modes of
production involved in African rural social formations, and the
ideological and symbolic expressions of those contradictions. Nor
is this a feature particular to Africa, as an analysis, along
similar theoretical lines, of witchcraft and other forms of magic
in the Ancient Near East may show.62 Because these modes of
production ultimately revolve on the appropriation of nature, we
can understand why the fundamental distinction, in so many
African cosmologies, between the ordered human space ('village')
and the forces of the wild ('forest', 'bush'), particularly
empowers roles situated at the boundary between these domains:
the hunter, the musician, the healer.
Meanwhile, the amazing point is not so much variation across the
African continent, but convergence. The 'new' idiom of witchcraft
which Geschiere describes for Cameroon, in terms of victims being
in some occult way captured and made to work as zombies, I also
encountered during field-work in both Zambia and Guinea-Bissau
(but so far not in urban Botswana). The South-east Cameroonian
jambe as a personalised occult force demanding sacrifices of
close kin (the 'old' witchcraft idiom) would appear to be closely
equivalent - in belief, practice and even etymology - to the
Zambian concept of the chilombe or mulombe, a snake with a human
head which is secretly bred near the river, first on a diet of
eggs and chicks, later demanding that his male counterpart
nominates close kin for sacrifice in exchange for unrivalled
powers and success.63 What however seems to be absent from the
Cameroonian scene is the concept as enshrined in the widespread
Bantu root -rozi, -lothi, -loi, with connotations of moral
transgression, malice, murder, incest, not exclusively through
the use of familiar spirits but also, or especially, relying on
materia magica: herbs, roots, parts of human or animal bodies.
Extremely widespread64 is the belief (fully understandable on the
basis of the cosmological principle cited) that for any type of
excessive, transgressive success - attaining and maintaining the
status of ruler, diviner-priest or monopolist trader - a close
kinsman has to be sacrificed or to be nominated as victim of the
occult forces.
7.8. The felicitous addressing of virtuality
These are the sort of insights one can pick up
at the village level - as Geschiere himself has done in his
earlier work. Perhaps he should have tried harder to bring these
insights to bear on his supra-local, non-rural argument. But his
insistence to explore Cameroonian social and political life
beyond the village enables Geschiere in the end to do something
truly unique and impressive. He refuses to make his discourse on
witchcraft ultimately dependent upon some local village scene.
Rather, he describes witchcraft as part of today's national
culture of Cameroon, much in the way as one might describe, for
instance, qualified sexual permissiveness as part of the national
culture of The Netherlands today. He realises that the village
context may once have engendered or incubated the witchcraft
beliefs and practices which today have such an impact on
middle-class and elite life in Cameroon and throughout Africa,
but he seems convinced that today such a rural reference is no
longer a determining factor for the actors. We are left with a
situation which may not at all satisfy the theoretical
assumptions of the anthropologist who only feels truly at home in
the African village context, but which for those who know African
urban life today is utterly convincing: witchcraft beliefs which
are suspended in the air, which are not endowed with meaning by
their reference to some actual, concrete practice of production
and reproduction within the horizon of social experience of the
actors carrying such beliefs, but whose conceptual and social
basis is fragmented and eroded, a loose bricolage of broken myths
and ill-understood rumours about power and transgression, fed on
one side by the faint echoes of a rural discourse and practice,
but on the other by the selective recycling of detached,
de-contextualised images of African life, including witchcraft,
as produced by Europeans (anthropologist, missionaries, colonial
civil servants) as well as by African elite and middle-class
actors, and subsequently recycled even wider in present-day
African national societies.
In this way, Geschiere beautifully captures the virtuality which
is such an essential aspect of the modern African condition. The
beliefs and practices clearly have the formal characteristics
that one would associate with the counterpart, in African
cultural production, of the virtual reality of electronic media
and games. They lack precision and detail, and neither reveal nor
claim profound cultural competence. Despite an element of
regional variation (which Geschiere lists, beside the kinship
link and the ambiguity, among the three major features on
witchcraft beliefs in Cameroon today, and of which he shows the
potential for ethnic articulation) these beliefs and practices
tend to blend into broad blanket concepts, situating themselves
in some sort of national or international lingua franca of
concepts, ideas and rumours which (also because of the effect of
the recycling of North Atlantic reformulations) can hardly be
traced back to any specific regional or ethnic rural source of
conceptualisation and meaning. Most significantly, Geschiere
tells us that actors (for reasons which he does not go into, but
which revolve on the virtuality which I have pinpointed) often
prefer to discuss witchcraft matters not in any of the
Cameroonian languages but in French or English!
Recent media research65 has stressed the fact that contemporary
forms of art and the consumption of images derive their impact
particularly from a transformation of the temporal basic
structure of human perception. In the creation of virtuality,
time plays a key role, as I began to realise as soon as I
stumbled into the massive field of the social science and the
philosophy of time.66 Witchcraft beliefs and practices in
contemporary Africa provide an example of this time dimension of
virtuality. Geschiere's discussion carries the strong suggestion
that these beliefs are situated in some sort of detached
no-man's-land, and do no longer directly refer to the village -
they are no longer rooted in the productive and reproductive
processes there, and the attending cosmology. Part of that
cosmology, fragmented, disintegrated, ill-understood, and exposed
to vaguely similar globalising influences from elsewhere, has
been exported to function, more or less, outside the village.
Middle classes and elite use English or French to discuss its
blurred and collapsed notions. But if that transformed,
virtualised cosmology still retains its social and symbolic
potency (and that it does so is very clear from Geschiere's
argument) this is, among other factors, because it does contain
an oblique reference to the village and its intact moral
cosmology, in which the witch has for centuries, probably
millennia, occupied a central place. So in a way the village is
still part of witchcraft beliefs and practices in Africa, even if
these are situated among the elite and at state courts of law,
usually at considerable spatial and social distance from
villages. Yet the fundamental manipulation here is not in terms
of space, but of time: as if the primordial time of the village
(of the self-evident competence of the way of life it
represented, of its cosmology which could defeat the witches or
at least keep them at bay) had somehow - as in a daydream
momentarily flashing by - been restored. It is the same play at
temporal virtuality which empowers the South African Zulu-based
Inkatha violence through dreams of a an acutely reviving past, in
which obsolete principles of a heroic regimental order flash back
to life.
Geschiere's argument also shows signs of such a play with virtual
time. For if the 'new' forms of witchcraft in the 1980s-90s use
the idiom of the slave trade which has been extinct for almost a
century, than this is an anachronism - even if the slave trade
belongs to a more recent history than e.g. the establishment of
ancestral cults. In other words, the reference to earlier forms
of globalisation (slave trade) is now used in order to express
and contest, in a witchcraft idiom, newer forms of globalisation,
such as the differential access to consumer goods and
post-colonial state power. This is comparable to the processes of
selective borrowing between time frames which I tried to capture
in my analysis of South Central African cults of affliction,
which I also interpreted as referring to a period of
long-distance trade, i.e. the nineteenth century.67
I must leave it for some other occasion to discuss the details of
the interconnections and variations which Geschiere discovered on
this intermediate, virtual plane, which for us village-trained
anthropologists is so difficult to conceptualise and which is yet
the scene at which much of the symbolic life of African today
take place. My aim here has not been to do full justice to his
book, but to show how it is an excellent example of virtuality
and its analytical potential.
7.9. Conclusion: The rural-orientated perspective on witchcraft and healing as an anthropological trap?
Finally, we should not miss the opportunity of
going full circle and assess what these achievements on
Geschiere's part mean in terms of a possible re-assessment of
Schoffeleers' picture of the Chisupe movement.
Schoffeleers helped us to pinpoint what could have been learned
from a rural-inspired reading of the distant, Cameroonian data,
while taking for granted that this perspective was eminently
applicable to the Malawian healing movement's discourse. But were
the Malawian actors involved really prepared for such a reading,
and did they have the symbolic baggage to make such a reading at
all relevant to their situation? Does Schoffeleers' reliance on
such rural insight as prolonged participant observation at the
village level accords one, yield insight in present-day Malawian
actors' conscious interpretations of the problem of evil as
expressed in Chisupe's mass movement, or does it merely reveal
the historical antecedents of such interpretations - a background
which has gone lost to the actors themselves? Does the analytical
return to the village - and I myself have made my own instinctive
enthusiasm for such a reading abundantly clear in the preceding
pages - amount to valid and standard anthropological
hermeneutics, or is it merely a form of spurious anthropologising
which denies present-day Malawians the right to the same
detachment from historic, particularistic, rural roots which many
North Atlantic Africanists very much take for granted in their
own personal lives? It is this very detachment, this lack of
connectivity - a break in the chain of semantic and symbolic
concatenation -, which the concept of virtuality seeks to
capture.
On this point the recent work of Rijk van Dijk68 is relevant, and
revealing. In the Ph.D. thesis which he wrote under supervision
of Matthew Schoffeleers and Bonno Thoden van Velzen, the
assertive puritanism of young preachers in urban Malawi is set
against the background of the preceding century of religious
change in South Central Africa and of the interpretations of
these processes as advanced in the 1970s and 1980s. Here the
urban discourse on witchcraft already appears as 'virtual'
(although that word is not yet used), in the sense that the
urbanites' use of the concept is seen as detached from direct
references to the rural cosmology and conceptualisations of
interpersonal power. Similarly, the events around Chisupe may be
interpreted not as an application or partial revival of
time-honoured rural cosmological notions, but as an aspect of
what Van Dijk describes as the emphatic moral re-orientation in
which Malawi, under the instigation of the new president Mr
Muluzi, was involved at the eve of the 1994 elections, and in the
face of the AIDS epidemic.69
(c) 1997, 1999 W.M.J. van Binsbergen
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