Ethnographic Sorcery

Among the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers are believed to reshape reality by insisting that their own imagined versions of the world hold true. Anthropologist Harry G. West discovered that, to many of his hosts, his attempt to write an ethnographic account of their lives amounted to sorcery of its own kind. Ethnographic Sorcery follows the questions this comparison raises.

A central idea in West's study is that no sorcerer's claim goes unchallenged, since rival sorcerers can dispute or overturn it. West tried to read the Muedan belief that sorcerers conjure the lions roaming near their villages as a metaphor. His collaborators rejected that reading, and the disagreement led him to see how closely ethnography and sorcery resemble each other.

West does not give up on ethnography. He argues that anthropologists, like the people they study, cannot avoid interpreting the world around them, and that everyone is, unavoidably, an ethnographic sorcerer.