Reading: 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' by Cherry Leonardi

Leonardi, Cherry, 2007, 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle: poison cases and the moral economy of knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan', Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:1, pp.34-56


This is a really interesting article, but it's a lot to assimilate at once (I think this is probably because it's from the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and so makes the reasonable assumption that people reading it already have a decent grasp of Eastern African history- that probably makes it easier to chunk the rest of the argument).

The article's a response to the body of work surrounding the idea that colonised peoples will often attempt to use magic as a means of political resistance. This is an interesting way to look at the issue, and Leonardi gets a lot of mileage out of it- but she also notes limitations in the way the idea is typically applied, and suggests a new angle we could consider.

Let's start off with Evans-Pritchard's witchcraft vs sorcery framework. Evans-Pritchard (also working in Sudan, though with different ethnic groups and time periods than Leonardi) argued that some cultures draw an important distinction between two kind of magic, which for convenience he labelled 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery'. He defined 'witchcraft' as being basically psychic-style powers which come from within the witch (e.g. the Azande, one of the ethnic groups he studied, held that certain people are born with a special organ inside them, and this gives them the ability to curse people). Conversely, he defined 'sorcery' as magical techniques which involve using tools or substances external to the individual (as with traditions like alchemy and herbalism). These definitions are an endless source of frustration to those of us sad people who grew up on stuff like Pratchett and Dungeons and Dragons (which define 'sorcery' as something very much internal to the individual and 'witchcraft' as something which usually benefits from external tools); but as academic terms they're a useful starting point.

Obviously, as with any other binary dichotomy in the social sciences, it's going to be more complicated than that in practice. For example, in Kajo Kaji (the part of Sudan Leonardi studied), people don't seem to have been very worried about Azande-style witchcraft (i.e., the idea that if someone feels resentful enough towards you, they can somehow cause you to suffer from bad luck even if they don't consciously choose to hurt you). Instead, they were concerned about poisoners: people who take some dangerous external substance and apply it to someone else's food or skin in order to kill them.

So, on the face of things, this seems to be a pretty straightforward case of 'sorcery'. But the waters are muddied by the fact that the local Kuku people apparently believed that the propensity to poison is to some extent inborn or fixed- that is, certain individuals or families just have a sort of inbuilt tendency to try to poison people. Such people were thought to be mostly women- so, while men were sometimes also accused of poisoning, it was believed "that certain women have, and pass on to their daughters, a propensity to poison which is inborn, involuntary and indiscriminate". Such women, however, were believed to require access to means and opportunity in order to satisfy this inbuilt tendency- one British DC reports that Kuku women learned to poison after hearing "tales about the Relli, a tribe away to the south,notorious for their poisonous sorceries" (p.37). Other reports state that knowledge of the art of nyanya poisoning was passed from mother to daughter, "with the threat that if a daughter refused to practise she would become infertile" (p.45).

This is interesting, and I'm wondering how this set of beliefs was perceived by the British (given that we're concerned with the 1930s, and so the idea that certain families or ethnic groups just had an inborn tendency towards malice was kind of a hot topic at the time). Leonardi reports that reports written by the colonisers "largely accepted that women at least intended to poison", even if they were sceptical that local poisoning techniques really worked (p.37). Leonardi goes on to say that this attitude "is unsurprising in the context of the belief among officials that native women were ‘whores at heart’ [...] Female poisoners were reported to poison only the ‘menfolk’, using this threat in the ‘battle of the sexes’. Officials puzzled by their apparent willingness to confess to poisoning recognised that, ‘the power wielded by a reputed poisoner is a bait she cannot resist’." (p.42)

Kuku poisoning cases are an ambiguous category in another way too- while they seem to fill pretty similar social niches as 'sorcery' (and to some extent 'witchcraft' as well), they're not always an overtly 'magical' thing. This made it difficult for the colonial legal system to work out how to deal with them. In the West, we're used to drawing the distinction between 'real' poisons (which can be recognised via forensic analysis) and 'magical' substances (which are said to harm people by means outside any known scientific principle). The legal system is very interested in accusations involving the former, not interested at all in accusations involving the latter. This distinction doesn't seem to have existed in traditional Kuku cultures. This created ambiguity over the role of the colonial courts.

Lots more stuff going on here, so I think I'll shunt responsibility onto my future self. Tune in for part 2!

Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' part 2: magicians, prophets and priests

The main reason I wanted to read this book (apart from wanting the opportunity to bitch about it on the internet) is Weber's description of a framework for categorising different kinds of religious specialist.

Systems of etic categorisation are always going to be a bit problematic in the social sciences. It doesn't take a genius to see that even in the best taxonomies there are going to be intermediate cases that don't quite fit into any category. This means that some people are inevitably going to start questioning the point of categorising the thing at all.

Every now and again you get arguments to the effect that human social constructs are inherently unclassifiable. This position generally seems to be adopted after someone has the startling revelation that People Are Complicated (this is a scientific fact). Maybe this is just me being anal-retentive and Teacherite at things, but I say suck it up, social sciences. Biologists seem able to cope with the level of complexity that comes with bog-standard taxonomy (God help them if the issue in question involves asexual species or anything at all to do with conservation). As long as people make an effort to flag up the fact that there are going to be ambiguous cases, a flawed typology is often going to be more useful than no typology at all, at least when it comes to the initial job of getting our heads around the problem.

Notice that I said 'often'.

I'm in two minds about Weber's framework. His main dichotomy is between priests and magicians, and as such is basically similar to the priest vs shaman distinction which you see in a bunch of other people's work*. There's also the 'prophet' category, which doesn't seem to have received much attention in anthropology (maybe because they seem to be world-changing figures who only come along every once in a while, and ethnography tends to be better suited to studying more routine aspects of religion).

This is Weber's framework, as I understand it:

Priests: people who are permanently employed by a large stable organisation which they are expected to support. They have professional qualifications which are earned by studying to become an expert on specialist knowledge (e.g. formal theology). They are also supposed to be experts on "the practical problems involved in the cure of souls" (p.30), which means general pastoral care and also whatever rituals are deemed necessary for salvation (e.g. confession, baptism, etc). In addition, priests worship gods (i.e. they adopt a relatively humble attitude towards supernatural beings which are seen as being worthy of respect). Oh, Weber also labels their training as "rational" (p.29)- as I said in last post, I have no idea what we're meant to assume that word means in this context.


Magicians: are generally "self-employed" (p.29), and tend to act alone in rituals which are not held according to any fixed schedule. Their qualifications are based entirely on personal charisma, which is made manifest through the ability to perform various types of magic. They're emically deemed to gain this charisma via a ritual rebirth plus training in "purely empirical lore" (p.29). Weber doesn't mention if he thinks they do pastoral/salvation work. They focus not on worshipping gods, but on coercing and charming demons. And yes, Weber has decided that the way they operate is in some sense "irrational" (p.29).


Prophets: a person who makes it their personal mission to spearhead a campaign for religious change (whether this is subsequently viewed as an attempt to start a new religion, or just to revitalise an old one). They may focus on preaching and giving advice on how people can live better lives (in which case Weber calls them 'ethical prophets'), or on just making themselves a paragon who others can try to emulate (in which case he calls them 'exemplary prophets'). They generally don't have steady jobs or live in a stable household; they may travel around a lot, beg or do a series of temporary jobs.


'Magicians' seem to be the least exclusive category in Weber's eyes. Priests may do magic (p.28)- e.g., given what Weber has to say about magicians and demon-coercion, I'd guess that Catholic exorcisms would count as 'magic' under this system. Successful prophets almost always do magic, or at least have magic attributed to them: they have so much charisma that people would tend to present them as BEST MAGICIAN EVER even if they tried to deny the title. I suspect Weber felt that Christ's resurrection may fall into this category (p.78).

I'm sure that there are going to be at least some things that don't fit into any of these categories, and the specific words 'priest' and 'magician' are probably unhelpful here (especially since, as is often the case with these issues, we start running into serious theoretical difficulties when we try to work the modern-day Pagan movement into the model). The question is, does this describe any sort of general tendency? For example, do people who have fulltime jobs as religious specialists have a greater tendency to present their supernatural patrons as uncoercable?

It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to systematically test that idea- sadly, since Weber isn't phrasing his ideas in terms of testable hypotheses, it sounds like it would be quite a lot of work.



*For those who care, I've so far seen a binary priest/shaman typology come up in: W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Zogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)

Victor Turner's essay 'Religious Specialists' (originally 1972, but republished in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural: fourth edition, 1997)

Morton Klass' Ordered Universes (1995)

A somewhat similar typology is proposed in Fredrik Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer' (1990, Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653). This article went on to inspire Harvey Whitehouse to write extensively on the same topic; I think his most persuasive article on the issue is still 'Memorable Religion' (1992, Man, 27, 3, pp.777-797), but if you don't have access to that journal then Arguments and Icons is probably the next best bet.