Decolonising the imagined geographies of ‘witchcraft’

Abstract

Turning my frame of inquiry toward academia, I analyse academic presentations on topics of ‘witchcraft’ conveyed to majority-geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of ‘witchcraft’ have been central to colonial Othering; (b) ‘witchcraft’ is often relegated to the academic periphery; (c) ‘witchcraft’ ontologies are plural, fluid and ambiguous and (d) ‘witchcraft’ is often defiant of academicisations. Given this milieu, scholars risk reproducing a ‘witchcraft’ that is Othering, even when/if the scholarship has an anti-colonial orientation. I call for greater attention to the broadening of academic conference exchanges to allow space for pluriform knowledges.

Keywords:

• Witchcraft
• development
• epistemicide
• Othering
• decolonizing
• spiritual geographies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the attendees of the 11th Annual Critical Geographies Conference at the University of Washington for their willingness to open up the space of the conference to a brief discussion of their own imagined geographies of ‘witchcraft’. This article and this part of my intellectual journey would have been impossible without the emboldening critiques of Derogy Ndewa.

Notes

1. For readings of witchcraft, the occult, ritual, capitalist accumulation and modernity in African contexts see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents, 1993; Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 1997; Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, Magical Interpretations, Material Realities, 2001.

2. Shaw, “The Production of Witchcraft”; White, Speaking with Vampires.

3. Earlier geographers, indeed the earliest geographers, centred spirituality in their work, often ‘plac[ing] great emphasis on mapping the advance of Christianity around the world, [being] mission-oriented, and … strongly assisted by the Christian Church’ (Park, Sacred Worlds, 9). For more on the historical roots of the geographical interest in religion and ‘sacred geography’ see Chris Park, Sacred Worlds, 2002; Zur Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds, 2012; David Livingstone, “Science, magic, and religion,” 1988; David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 1992; David Matless, “Nature, the modern and the mystic,” 1991. Contemporary human geographers are, again, increasingly considering the role of the sacred, the spiritual and the paranormal in place-making. These serial rediscoveries of topics within and across disciplines in the social science has been termed ‘the fractal cycle’ by Andrew Abbot (2001) in his Chaos of Disciplines.

4. The colonial matrix of power is a ‘racial system of social classification that invented Occidentalism … that created the conditions for Orientalism … remapped the world as first, second and third …’ (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience,” 3).

5. I use this term, employed throughout francophone regions of Cameroon, ‘la sorcellerie’, when referring to popular epistemologies of sorcery, magic, the occult in Cameroon. Against the standard practice in the social sciences, I do not italicise words in languages other than English as doing so effects a linguistic and symbolic Othering.

6. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience.”

7. I explicitly avoid the term ‘non-Western’ here, which connotes both ‘a conceptual space defined by negation, inversion, deficiency, absence’ (Comaroff and Commaroff, “Introduction,” xii) as well as an artificial binary (West/the rest) that reaffirms the West and whiteness as the centre of being-in-the-world and knowing-the-world.

8. Postcolonial geographers have critiqued a larger trend within the discipline to posit geography’s knowledge from the position of a universal ‘we’ centered in the ‘EuroAmerican heartlands’, a positioning that is implicitly Eurocentric (see Jazeel, “Between Area and Discipline,” 649; see also Sidaway, “Geography, Globalization”).

9. Federici demonstrates that witch-hunts were foundational to the plunder of early capitalism, wherein women’s bodies were controlled to ensure the reproduction and accumulation of labour. (Federici, Caliban and the Witch. See also Federici, “The Great Caliban.”).

10. Grosfoguel demonstrates this through his theorisation of the logic of genocide/epistemicide. For examinations of the persecution of women as ‘witches’ and primitive accumulation in Europe and colonial America, see Frederici, Caliban and the Witch and Carol F. Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman.

11. de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South.

12. Nyamnjoh, “From Quibbles to Substance.”

13. Grosfoguel, “Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities.”

14. Fredman and Bartlett, The Making of Europe.

15. Freedman, 21.

16. Freedman, 18 and 7.

17. Boria, Imaginary Animals.

18. Freedman, “The Medieval Other.” 3.

19. Greta Austin, “The Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East,” 26.

20. Wariboko, 13.

21. Maluleke, “African Traditional Religions in Christian,” 121.

22. See AnaLouise Keating, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Activism,” 54.

23. Keating, 55.

24. James Howard Smith’s Betwitching Development is a good example of this work. There is a considerable body of literature in related topics and fields, including the scholarships on ‘witchcraft’ and social change (see Footnote 1) as well as that on the relationships between ‘witchcraft’ and resource extraction (including Judy Nash’s We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman’s ‘Elves and Witches,’ Stephen P. Reyna’s ‘Constituting Domination/Constructing Monsters’ and Deborah Fahy Bryceson et al.’s “Miner’s Magic,” to name a few).

25. See, e.g. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power”; Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs; Escobar, “Beyond the Third World.”

26. Murrey, “Invisible Power, Visible Dispossession.”

27. The Nobel Savage was revived in James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster film, Avatar, which is the highest grossing film ever produced. See Schuller, “Avatar and Necolonial Sentimental Cinema.”

28. Murrey, Lifescapes of a Pipedream. Murrey, “Witchcraft of a Subterranean Pipeline”; Murrey, “Slow Dissent and the Emotional Geographies of Resistance.”

29. Murrey, “Witchcraft of Subterranean Pipeline.”

30. Reyna, “Constituting Domination/Constructing Monsters.”

31. Murrey, “Invisible Power, Visible Dispossession.”

32. For more on Biya’s absentee leadership see Murrey, “Thoughts on 30 Years of Biya Power in Cameroon,” 2012. Pambazuka News. https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/thoughts-30-years-biya-power-cameroon

33. See Jackson, “The Spectacle of Neoclassical Economics,” for an analysis of the role of spectacle in deflecting attention from exploitation ‘on the ground’ in neoliberal extraction projects like the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline.

34. Wolfensohn, “Foreward,” vii.

35. For an analysis of the World Bank’s knowledge projects along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, see Murrey, “Imperial Knowledge, Decolonial Geographies.”

36. IK Notes 30735, “Local Pathways to Global Development,” 177, 244 and 256.

37. Ibid., 40, 41 and 53.

38. Briggs and Sharp, “Indigenous Knowledges and Development.”

39. Ibid.

40. Grovogui and Leonard, “Oiling Tyranny?” 48, 49.

41. Gould and Winters, “An Obsolescing Bargain in Chad,” 14.

42. Timothy R. Smith “Anthropologist Ellen P. Brown Helped Exxon Mobil Preserve African Customs,” 2010. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/26/AR2010062603963.html

43. Ken Silverstein, “Pipeline’s Profits May Bypass Africans.” The Los Angeles Times, 2003. http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jun/17/nation/na-pipeline17/2

44. Peter Geschiere journeyed to Cameroon to study politics and was initially resistant to studying witchcraft, although it emerged repeatedly in his discussions. Paul Stoller describes his total of preparedness with the Songhay world of magic in Niger, ‘all of my assumptions about the world were uprooted from their foundation of the plain of Western metaphysics. Nothing that I had learned or could learn from within the parameters of anthropological theory could have prepared me’.

45. Federici, “Women, Witch-Hunting and Enclosures,” 11.

46. Olabimtan, “‘Is Africa Incurably Religious?’ A Response,” 322.

47. Ibid.

48. Nyamnjoh, “Delusions of Development.”

49. Pels, 206, emphasis added.

50. For example, when practices and procedures of witchcraft are necessarily enveloped in secret and obscured. This protection of knowledge might reflect divine authority given to a select few, as in the case with the Ejagham people of south-western Cameroon, where the unique form of ideographic writing (one that communicates the knowledge of nsibidi, ‘signs embodying many powers, including the essence of all that is valiant, just, and ordered’) was perfected by titled elders. See Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 227.

51. Tomaselli, “Virtual Religion, the Fantastic,” 111.

52. Grosfoguel, “Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities,” 74.

53. Consider, e.g. W. Ashby’s concession, ‘If consciousness is the most fundamental fact of all, why is it not used [by scientists]? The answer, in my opinion, is that Science deals, and can deal, only with what one man can demonstrate to another. Vivid though consciousness may be to its possessor, there is as yet no method known by which he can demonstrate his experience to another. And until such a method, or its equivalent, is found, the facts of consciousness cannot be used in scientific method’. Ashby, Design for a Brain, 12.

54. Escobar, “Anthropology & Development.”

55. L. R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence, 64.

56. I work from both postcolonial and geographical scholarship on ‘imagined geographies’ as the production/maintenance of meanings/ideas of places. Jen Jack Gieseking explains, ‘It is a personal, sometimes shared, portrayal of both imagined and real spaces and places that encompass the logic, emotion, power dynamics, and meaning of spaces in their specific time and era. It is consciously and unconsciously produced, reproduced, and reworked by the individual or social group through reiterated actions within the cultural, economic, political, and historical context of that person or group, and, in doing so, this process is formed by and forms individuals and shared identities’. http://jgieseking.org/understanding-the-geographical-imagination/

57. Federici, “Great Caliban … the Rebel Body.”

58. Frederici, Caliban and the Witch.

59. Jensen, The Path of the Devil.

60. Thorburn, “Local Going Global,” 153.

61. Globalized symbols are appropriated and (re)incorporated locally. See Thorburn, “Local Going Global,” for a comparison between US-Hollywood and Nigerian-Nollywood films on the supernatural.

62. Despite an inclination to assert the novelty or the growing prominence of phenomena in the social world, the popular fascination with magic, miracles and the occult is not new and is probably not growing (although the proliferation of pop cultural symbols via technological development is).

63. Tomaselli, “Virtual Religion.”

64. See Abbot, Chaos of Disciplines.

65. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 315.

66. Fanon, “Culture and Racism,” n.p, emphasis added.

67. Said, Orientalism, 72.

68. Freedman, 12.

69. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 315, emphasis original.

70. Pieterse, White on Black, 12.

71. Freedman, 8.

72. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 315.

73. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 315.

74. Colorful cloth sold by the yard and tailored for women’s garments in West and Central Africa.

75. ‘That, then… is really bad luck’ he says.

76. ‘Magical airplanes’.

77. ‘My friend, they sold you in the village or what?’

78. ‘Ugh, friend, he is almost died’. (Possible implication: does he want to die? Does someone else control his physical being?).

79. ‘As the nephew dreamed in his house, in Etoi-Meki [a neighborhood of Yaoundé]’.

80. ‘But the uncle walked in Mbandjock [another village] – what!’.

81. ‘En mbeng’ is Camfranglais for the frontlines as in, where war is waged and one must struggle against a system to earn money, i.e. Europe and North America.

82. ‘Tchop’ is Kamtok (i.e. Cameroon Pidgin English) for eat (also used in Camfranglais).

83. ‘Ndjeum’ is Camfranglais for fat or heavy.

84. ‘Pickins’ is Kamtok for children.

85. ‘Gingiru’ is a Camfranglais term for an albino person. ‘Gingiru ratée’ is an insult of a white person as a ‘broken or failed albino’.

86. ‘Albinos’ is French for albino. See previous footnote.

87. ‘Quelle chercheuse’ is French for ‘what researcher?’ Used here sardonically.

88. There are problematics of evoking the term ‘decolonisation’ outside of the formalised return of land to Indigenous people; see Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor”. At the risk of being merely metaphorical, I endeavour to use the term forcefully here to critique coloniality and to push myself to create in anti-colonial, anti-racist scholarship that continues the ongoing moves to end colonial ways of knowing and being (including what Tuck and Yang, echoing Malwhinney, call ‘colonial moves to innocence’).

89. Pels, 206, emphasis added.

90. Nganang, Elobi.