'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' part 2

Leonardi makes a really nice point here by stressing the fact that knowledge-dissemination is sometimes going to be perceived in a morally negative light. By which I mean: I get the impression that when it comes to magic practiced by colonised populations, the tendency is just to say that "magic = political resistance" (often with an implicit "and resistance to imperial authorities is always something that we as academics should sympathise with" tacked on). I think the 'magic as resistance' viewpoint is an interesting one, but it's an idea that needs to be developed a bit rather than just being the throwaway comment that it sometimes ends up being. In particular, we need to clarify what section of the colonised population is trying to use any particular type of magic to improve their position, and whether this is something which other sections of the colonised population approve of.

Caveat: off the top of my head, I can't think of any specific sources which I would say suffer from this problem, so I may be exaggerating the issue.

Leonardi argues that poisoning during the colonial period was something which may have been emically linked to colonialism (i.e., it sounds like the Kuku people of colonial-era Kajo Kaji may have seen poisonings as somehow being linked or similar to the disruptive practices of the colonial authorities). For example, she notes a 1939 case in which a poisoning attempt seems to have involved writing an Islamic charm on something, then washing the ink back into the ink bottle and painting it onto the body of a sleeping victim (p.44, 47). Leonardi argues that "the colonial economy was thus generating new opportunities for earning wealth, embodied in the new medium of cash, and which required and imparted new kinds of knowledge. The alleged poison in the ink bottle from the police station was a powerful symbol of such knowledge."

Leonardi also thinks that the problems which accompanied colonialism may have been emically interpreted as a type of poisoning. For example, it sounds like human and animal fertility rates may have fallen under colonialism, due to several colonial policies (in particular, the practice of relocating entire indigenous settlements in order to reduce the risk of sleeping sickness- but also other stuff like the economic changes which encouraged individual men to move away from their home settlements, increasing the chances that they would get STDs, etc.) (p.43, 46). In addition, the colonial authorities responded to outbreaks of sleeping sickness and meningitus with medical exams and treatments that were often very painful (e.g. lumbar punctures, or atoxyl injections- the latter carries a risk of blindness and death). Colonial sources from this period report that some members of the indigenous population linked these procedures to poison (p.43). Under these conditions of falling fertility, Leonardi thinks it's interesting that women who refused to inherit their mother's poisoning practices were said to be threatened with sterility (p.46). You could see this as an emic perception that as the community's overall fitness level falls, individual people will become more willing to be ruthless in pursuit of their own fertility (although I'm not sure if there's any data to support that idea).

I'd personally like a bit more information about the extent of our knowledge of emic attitudes from this period (e.g. do we know whether any Kuku explicitly linked the 1937 poisoning case to the idea that the poisoner had been influenced by his participation in the new wage-economy? Obviously there were space constraints on this essay, ) But it's an interesting counterpoint to the assumption that magical techniques must be age-old traditions (or at least represent a sort of resistance to modernity).

Another really interesting point made here by Leonardi is the stress on the fact that knowledge-dissemination is often going to be seen in a morally neutral light. She notes that knowledge "has been shown to be a key resource in older political economies of pre-colonial patronage and survival... [This risks treating] knowledge as a positive resource without exploring its moral ambiguity and the debates over its composition within a community" (p.36).

I'm reminded here of Barth's really great paper on the idea of 'gurus' and 'conjurers' as different models of knowledge acquisition*. He argues that, basically, there are some cultural contexts where knowledgeable people gain prestige by trying to disseminate their knowledge to anyone who will listen. This is the dominant model in the modern West, seen in various forms (like Christian preaching, academia, the mass media, etc). But there are other cultures which have traditionally been dominated by the conjurer model, where knowledgeable people gain prestige by hoarding their knowledge and only doling it out slowly to a select few students (who are often expected to endure difficult initiation rituals). If people from a guru-dominant culture run across people from a conjurer-dominant culture, then we can expect tensions (e.g. anthropologists persuade a local religious specialist to teach them the details of some secret rituals. The ritualist assumes that the anthropologist will automatically see the benefits of keeping this knowledge secret from all except a select few- when in fact, the action which benefits the anthropologist most is actually to run off and publish the ritual in order to demonstrate to their colleagues how learned they are).

From Leonardi's description (and the stuff which Evans-Pritchard wrote about Zande 'secret societies'), it sounds like pre-colonial Sudanese cultures probably leaned closer towards the 'conjurer' end of the scale with regards to poison and magic (but not as close as the New Guinean societies which Barth uses as his archetype of a conjurer-dominant culture). That is, magical knowledge was seen as something secretive which always carried a price, but that price was relatively low (i.e. it was something that people could buy relatively easily, without having to go through years of arduous study or multiple painful initiations- not if I'm remembering Evans-Pritchard right, anyway).

It sounds like this meant that specific poisons and magical techniques were in higher demand when they were known by fewer people. This then creates an incentive for people to import exotic new poisons from foreign cultures (p.37-8).

One question: if people were interested in importing foreign poisons, and believed that the colonial authorities were in some sense 'poisoning' the people of Kajo Kaji, then is it worth asking whether anyone tried to acquire the knowledge of British-style poison for themselves? For example, if British medical procedures were seen as potentially poisonous, did anyone try to appropriate these poisons for use against their enemies? Leonardi does mention that "an overturned fertilizer lorry has rendered one [Sudanese] village notorious for poisoning" (p.35).

A few other random interesting points:

• The idea of witch hunts as an 'irrational' response to community stress was an emic belief of the colonial officers, as well being as a popular etic theory today (p.43)

• There are some parallels between the Kuku fear of poisoners and the fear which other communities have experienced over cannibals (which was also present at Kajo Kaji, but not as strong). Leonardi speculates that this is because Kajo Kaji had experienced relatively few problems with slave traders- so their fear was less that people would be abducted and 'eaten', more that their young men would go away to earn a wage and come back with some sort of dangerous knowledge (like new poisons, or like the kind of skills which were in high demand from the colonial authorities and so could be used to displace the authority of people with traditionally high-prestige skillsets, like the rain priests) (p.46).

• The fact that the secular colonial authorities were unwilling to support the idea of poisonings (for fear of endorsing superstition and thereby causing mass hysteria) may have helped push some Kuku people towards Christianity- on the basis that many missionaries were at least willing to seriously engage with the idea of hidden evil lurking within communities (in the form of Satanic influence) (p.50).

*Barth, Fredrik, 1990, 'The Guru and the Conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia', Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653