When Harry West carried out fieldwork on the Mueda plateau in rural Mozambique, both he and Muedans noticed the resonance between his research practice and the sorcery and countersorcery practices he was studying. Sorcerers cross over into the invisible world and become or create “sorcery lions” that bring ruin on individuals in the visible world. Countersorcerers, or healers, also cross over into the invisible world but attempt to undo –invert, overturn, negate, or annul—a sorcerer’s destructive work. Both sorcerers and countersorcerers, “by rendering themselves invisible, [transcend] the world inhabited by ordinary people, producing and inhabiting an invisible realm from which they gain a powerful perspective on the visible.”
As West became more conversant in the language of sorcery, he began to hear people say of him, “That one knows a little something!,” a euphemism that indicated he was a sorcerer or a countersorcerer. Muedans recognized that the tools of West’s trade—pen, notebook, recorder, and camera—were different but that he shared with them an urge to get outside their life-world in order to gain a perspective on it. They contested his versions of what they were doing in sorcery, but at the same time he and they came to see the resemblance between his stories and theories and theirs. He and they both were trying to gain interpretive ascendancy in and over the world around them through what West calls transcendent maneuvers. Muedans were making and remaking their world in line with their vision of the forces defining visible and invisible domains, and West was (re)making Muedens and their world in the terms of a vision of his own elaboration. When they saw “sorcery lions,” he saw “embodied (or literal) metaphors.”
Other anthropologists have noted the resemblance between their own interpretive practice and the story telling, sorcery, witchcraft, shamanistic, and religious practices of the people they study, but Harry West pushed his insight further than most, even calling his book Ethnographic Sorcery. Still many more anthropologists acknowledge—in fact it’s all but required—moments of perceptual crisis in which one inhabits the world from the point of view of another culture. In our writing, such moments are sometimes fraught, especially when we find ourselves entangled with, or “caught” in, practices and perceptions that we have been trained to think of as religious. On the one hand, we are discovering for ourselves anthropology’s founding principle of cultural relativism. On the other, we must take a step back; we may not “go native.” We must somehow disavow the cultural other’s point of view that we have just discovered to be equally “valid” as our own. Thus it becomes a moment of tender yet fierce secular subject making—anthropology’s contribution to secular modernity as a way of being in the world.
Although some anthropologists may think that a secular (aka scientific or “outside”) point of view is the only alternative to going “going native” after undergoing culturally relativizing ethnographic experiences, it is not. Nor did anthropologists invent what we now call fieldwork. According to Christopher Herbert, evangelical Protestant missionaries, among others, invented the practice, along with the contradictory subjectivity that emerged from it and “the culture doctrine,” in the course of living among and writing copiously about the natives of Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, and other islands of the South Pacific in the early 19th century. Decades later, anthropologists would name and codify the concept of culture and fieldwork as a research practice, but early missionaries in their writings had already revealed an awareness that they were “unfolding a new technique of scientific study—one that made at best an uneasy fit with their mission as evangelizers.” The technique also led them to an unstated awareness of “the homology” of native superstitions and their own Protestant beliefs, and, inadvertently, to undermine the very doctrine of innate sinfulness that had led them into their mission fields.
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