Naming the Witch

Citation preview

NAMING THE WITCH

4

Cultural Memory In

the Present

Mieke Bal and Rent de vries, Editors

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In memory ofBernardJ Siegel

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2006 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanfotd Junior University. All righ ts reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Libraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Siegel, James T., 1937Naming the witch! James Siegel. p. cm. - (Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8047-5194-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8047-5195-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Witchcraft. 2. Sorcery. 3. Witchcraft-Indonesia. 4. IndonesiaSocial conditions. 5· Levi-Strauss, Claude-Criticism and interpretation. 6. Evans-Prirchard, E. E. (Edward Evan), I902-I973-Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title. II. Series. GR530.S54 2005

398'·4'09598-dc22 20050I3566 Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: I5

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Prologue

In Banyuwangi, East Java, Indonesia, about 120 people accused of witchcraft were killed between December 1998 and the end of February 1999, just after President Suharto left office. Witch hunts continued in other parts of the country, notably in Sourh Malang, East Java. Here are the photographs of some of the survivors, along with their statements.

A woman with her mother and her niece from the Banyuwangi countryside. Here is part of her statement: Dad was accused of being a witch by the neighbors. He was a farmer and went to the fields every day. He wasn't a witch. He was just ordinary. Every day he would take part in the neighborhood gatherings [arisan], he would be with his friends

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Prologue

[silaturahmin, a word popular in the New Order, which means something like "forging the bonds of friendship"], and so on. Then the house was stoned. My brother was in Bali working. I waited till midnight for Dad to come home. Next morning, I went to where they had the neighborhood gathering. I saw blood. I followed the traces. I just followed them. Then I looked for him in the gardens and in the fields. Then, at five in the morning, on the edge of the road, covered with banana leaves, there he was. His leg was cut off. He was crushed in all over. His neck had a rope around it and his trunk

told us he regretted he was not there that night since he surely would have joined in. His own mother was ensorcelled by "Muki," one of the three accused sorcerers (the other two were Muki's wife and son; his daughter escaped). It was a sign of Muki's power that he was able to make this boy's mother ill at such a distance.

was cut almost all the way through. [She weeps.] I waited till nine to report to the village headman to tell the police, the doctor, and so on. Then he was brought home. He was bathed like an ordinary corpse. Why not; he was already a corpse. He was tortured. If you saw him, Mister, if you saw him, you would be afraid to look. There was no proof. What was the proof? The real proof. Where was it? Everyone has to die, Mister. But not tortured like that, Mister. They arrested four people. In fact, there were lots and lots of people who came to the house. I couldn't see them all. I was afraid. I couldn't look at them one by one. In fact, they threatened to whip me. They wouldn't believe Dad wasn't here. Really. They came into the house armed with whips, looking for Dad. They took lots. On top of everything else, they were thieves, too. Please have something to drink. They cut him up. Just cut him up.

This woman's daughter married Muki's son. Neither she nor her daughter wanted the marriage, but they were convinced that if they did not comply with Muki's wish they would fall ill. Mter the marriage she fell ill in any case. Her legs swelled to such an extent that she could ~ot urinate. The rest of her body was also swollen, to the point where she had to sleep sitting up. Her husband was also afflicted. Mter Muki was killed she got well. "Proof" [that Muki was a witch], she said. '

This boy's brother was arrested for the murder of three "witches." The boy himself lives in a village a few kilometers from the killings. He

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Prologue the attack. They refused. The man in the picture said it was because "they had to guard their good name. Ifsomeone is a witch, its better to kill them. But really, truly, they were not witches." When the mob came to get them, he tried to rush out of his house to protect them, but his wife and daughter sat on him to keep him safe.

One of the men arrested for the killing of Muki. His father, h~ t~ld us, had to urinate the whole day long and finally died dried out, a ViCtlm of Muki. He was released until his trial.

This man's father and brother, who were also his neighb~r~, w,ere killed as witches. The village headman asked them to move, antlClpatlng

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Contents

Introduction PART ONE: THE MAGIC WORD

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The Truth of Sorcery

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Voodoo Death

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3 Institutionalizing Accident

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PART TWO: WITCHES RESURRECTED

4 Suharto, Witches

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5 Menace from All Directions

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6 No Witch Appears

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7 Naming the Witch

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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NAMING THE WITCH

Introduction

C

Certain historians have studied the European witch hunts of the sixteenth century to show their destructive violence. For them, the witch hunt shows how some individuals and even groups can be placed outside the community, and how therefore they can be slain with the consent and the participation of the community to which they had belonged. By contrast, anthropologists have tended to minimize the violence of witchcraft, instead focusing on social tensions and their resolution through witchcraft accusations. Alternatively, witchcraft beliefs are shown as an effect of the force of beliefs. In the most striking of these cases, the bewitched person wastes away and dies. This, according to W Lloyd Warner, is the result of the operation of social norms themselves. It displays the strength of society as that strength is directed against one of its members who acquiesces in its judgment. By contrast, one could, as I try to show, see this as an example of the inability of socially determined thinking (not to use the word "rea$On") to comprehend certain situations. In anthropological views, the social itself explains witchcraft. The posing view looks for sources of violence that serves no social purpose d stem not from social realities but from points where no definition of °al reality can take place-where, therefore, phantasms and, often, vio-

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Introduction

lence occur, a violence that does not serve to construct new social forms or restore old ones. I will argue it is a violence that inheres in the social and that turns against it. I begin by looking at the formative anthropological studies of witchcraft, those that took the first point of view, to show that within them there is evidence of the second. My ambition is to contribute to the question of destructive violence and its provenance within anthropological study. One might grant that witchcraft resolves no issues and still believe that it contributes to the myth of the community. One might think that the murder of the witch, even if another soon takes his or her place, aids, perhaps even founds, the coherence of the community as it bases itself against an enemy-a structural precursor of the enemy as conceived by Carl Schmitt, but only a precursor since it exists before the political as the latter understood it. But I will claim that this is not the case. In the examples we look at, no political hierarchy forms itself against the witch. Were one to do so, one would have to ask if the word "witch" has changed its reference. Instead of referring to something sensed or suspected rather than known, "witch" would have a determined, locatable sense. Perhaps if one looked at witchcraft after reading Heidegger's Being and Time one might be helped to understand its nature, associated as it so often is with death and being as indefinable as the death that Heidegger describes. But the immersion of the community in everyday life as Heidegger describes it, holding onto normality and thus denying the menace of death and of the uncanny, draws a line between life and death that in many cultures is not clearly evident. The witch can be a part of normality, something one anticipates and even accepts. His identification can be the route to his acceptance. Here, however, acceptance, as I understand it, is incomplete and certainly reluctant. It can also happen that the definitions generated of the witch fail, and yet something occurs which seems to deserve the name, leaving "witch" as a concept without a content, producing consternation and instability. Moreover, an existential approach which sees the division between life and death as fundamental is difficult to apply to societies where the line between the two is fluid. Furthermore, when one approaches witchcraft from a quasi-linguistic point of view, as did Levi-Strauss when he analyzed witchcraft as an attempt to make expressible something which

ordinarily. could only be suspected, what it is that is suspected remains undetermmed, or so we shall argue. The menace of death I'n thO "If f1' IS context IS Itse an e fect ~f nammg the witch, rather than death being the reality counterposed agamst normality. Furthermore, the opposition between "death" and "normality" will not do once ~ne sees, ~s anthropologists studying Mrica in particular have seen, l' that d' Witchcraft IS not necessarily a local matte r an d t h us to b e exp ame m ter~s of the community against a force that threatens its coherenc~. When Witchcraft is set in the state, in the nation and in the intern~tlon~l economy, one needs to account for complex exogenous factors Still, b witchcraft fi "precedes . the state and the international economy an d h as. to. erst exammed m ItS local settings because it is there that the ideas of wltc~craft took shape, I will thus look at the studies where the basic ideas ~f wltchcra,ft were formulated before I describe a contemporary witch hunt m IndoneSia.

1. The Gift, Witches . ,On w~at,ba,sis can an anthropologist justify a view of witchcraft that wlthm the dlsClplme has been set aside if not exactly disavowed? In the fi lace b h' 'd [' rst P . ecause t ere IS eVI . e~ce lOr this view in the classic anthropological studies.. But also ,because It IS possible to think about th e relatlon ' b etween and Witchcraft by looking at the latter from th 'f th e SOCIal 11 ' , e perspective 0 t e we -exammed Idea of the gift as it was formulated by Marcel Mauss and passed t~rough the thinking of Georges Bataille and, most recently of Jacques Dernda. ' For ~ataille, in "archaic" societies (we would today call them societies b;ed on ~Ift exch~nge), exchange had a characteristic lost in later historic evolutIOn. Ba~allle took Mauss's description of the potlatch and noted that t~e economies of the societies who practiced it were based on consumptIOn and therefore on loss. In the potlatch, as Mauss has not d h';:chy i, thtough the o",ntatiou, giving of gift