Coincidence? I think not!

Witchcraft, for the Azande, does not replace science. One example that Pritchard gives is of the collapse of an old granary. The Azande know, practically, that when an old granary collapses due to termites in the wood, it is just that: termites. It is natural and no one is to blame. However, if there are people resting in the building that are caught in the collapse, it was collapsed via witchcraft as a grudge against one of those people. Sure there are scientific explanations for both the people seeking shade from the hot sun and the building collapsing that the Azande recognize, but that doesn’t explain why the building collapsed precisely at the time it did, when people were underneath it to be injured and those people had not done anything morally wrong.

Magic explains the coincidences, as American society would call them, which occur when you have repeated an action often and nothing bad has come of it, but this time, something bad did happen.

This makes the most sense to me out of all the things I have read about Azande magic. This is the only part that my scientific side did not try to dispute and reject. (Which, I do believe that being scientifically minded is part of living in U.S. culture) I think this is because I actually have no explanation to offer for coincidence and I don’t think science does either. It also gives an answer to the old “why me” question: why you is because someone has some sort of grudge against you.

While it’s kind of creepy to think that bad coincidences are because someone holds a grudge, it does offer some explanation. And a lot of the time, it just feels better to have some explanation for bad things in life.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon P: Oxford. Print.

Chase, Oscar G. "The Lesson of the Azande". Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context. NYU Press: New York. 2005. pp. 15-29.

Physically Speaking...

The Azande believe that mangu (magic) is a physical force inside one’s body.

When I say force, I mean both in the physical body and the two separate souls (Soul I will touch on in a later entry). When Azande speak of magic, they are talking about an actual witchcraft-substance in the body, which has actually been found in autopsies performed post mortem. It is found just beneath the xiphoid cartilage, attached to the liver. Anthropologist Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard believes that this magic substance is simply “the small intestine in certain digestive periods” (2), but to an Azande person, it is evidence of witchcraft. This witchcraft-substance resides in any witch’s body (witch referring to both male and female witchcraft carriers).

I’m not so sure what to make of this. My rational mind is telling me that it is pure coincidence that there is a physical substance because Evans-Pritchard says it is a natural thing of digestion. Science is battling with my sense of wonder in this case. For an Azande person, where science is mainly limited to what a person can observe and infer in day to day life (that termites deteriorate wood, for example), this substance which has no physical explanation could be the physical manifestation of witchcraft sense it does not appear in every body. (If it is not found post-mortem, then the recently departed was not a witch) However for myself, I instantly tried to find the rationale behind it, provided in short by Evans-Pritchard.

However, this evidence of witchcraft makes me think that perhaps their belief in magic is not just a supernatural, mystic belief, but also a practical, naturalistic belief system. They believe that magic is something natural and integral to their world, and thus it is an accepted part of their culture.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon P: Oxford. Print.

Evens, T.M.S. Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice. Berghahn Books: New York. 2008. pp. 200-213.

It's Everywhere!

Magic among the Azande is not a thing of awe, not something to marvel at when it occurs, but rather a normal happenstance in everyday life. It would be more unusual for an Azande not to expect some form or magic or sorcery on a day to day basis. This is because mangu, or magic, is something that every Azande is an authority on; even young children know all about witchcraft. It’s just commonsense. They could not imagine a world without witchcraft just as Europeans (and truly much of the rest of the world) cannot imagine a world with actual witchcraft in it.

As Oscar Chase eloquently puts it in his book Law, Culture and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context: “It was as hard for the Azande to understand how Europeans failed to see the witchcraft that is all around as for the Europeans to comprehend their belief in it” (18).

In my own culture, or really, just my own world view, nothing is as pervasive as witchcraft for the Azande. No sort of belief system feels that much like common sense in my culture other than empirical science. And yet no matter how prevalent witchcraft is to the Azande daily life, it doesn’t seem to be able to be proven (I will explore why in a later post about Poison Oracles). Some in my own culture would protest that their own particular god, in my case the Christian God, is an all encompassing force that cannot be proven. You know; he watches over all we do, knows the number of hairs placed on our heads even though you cannot see Him. But God, for me, is simply watching on the peripherals, just watching, not directly influencing. (This is my personal belief, not necessarily a general Christian perspective) For the Azande, magic is in everyday life, shaping coincidence and coming from people they know. It’s not some vague force.

So while Evans-Pritchard claims that witchcraft is a vague belief system (mysticism) among the Azande, it doesn’t feel much like my own far away, impersonal-feeling, overarching belief. It seems more like just a fact of life rather than something that you have to work at believing in.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon P: Oxford. Print.

Chase, Oscar G. "The Lesson of the Azande". Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context. NYU Press: New York. 2005. pp. 15-29.

Magic is Real...

When I was in middle school, my friends and I would go to the library every day after school. We would head straight for the comic book section, then sign up for an hour at the computer, and then head to the last aisle in the nonfiction section. This aisle contained books about palmistry, tea leaf reading, Wicca, magic spells, and sorcery of all kinds. My friends and I would check them out and try to learn the spells, thinking nothing of it. We would be “witches” casting magic spells to give us good luck by smashing different flowers together and chanting the spells while giggling fiercely. It was just fun and games then and for the most part, it still is now. Normally, I would never even imagine magic to be real. However recently, I learned that for some people it is.

For the African Azande people, magic is an everyday thing.

The Azande are a group of peoples residing in Sudan and portions of the Congo whose main distinguishing feature is their belief in Mangu, or Magic, that physically resides inside one’s body. It’s different from voodoo, a branch of magic more widely known throughout 1^st world countries, in the fact that it is not only malevolent or invoked by specialists. It just IS.

So for this blogging experience, I plan to attempt to make this concept of real magic make sense. I want to learn all about their magic, and hopefully then I will understand the logic behind their culture not just tolerate it as being strange but different.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon P: Oxford. Print.