Somatosphere Presents

a book forum on

Jeanne Favret-Saadas

The Anti-Witch

translated by Matthew Carey

contributions from

Richard Baxstrom

Pamela Reynolds

University of Edinburgh

Johns Hopkins University

Nancy Rose Hunt

Jeanne Favret-Saada

University of Michigan

cole Pratique Des Hautes tudes

Tanya Luhrmann

Edited by

Stanford University

Eugene Raikhel
University of Chicago

Somatosphere Presents
A Book Forum on

The Anti-Witch
by Jeanne Favret-Saada
HAU Books, University of Chicago Press
2015, 232 pages
Contributions from:

Richard Baxtrom
University of Edinburgh

Nancy Rose Hunt

University of Michigan

Tanya Luhrmann
Stanford University

Pamela Reynolds
Johns Hopkins University

Jeanne Favret-Saada, trans. Todd Meyers

cole Pratique Des Hautes tudes
Edited by

Eugene Raikhel
University of Chicago
In The Anti-Witch, Jeanne Favret-Saada revisits fieldwork she first described in her classic
Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage in a more reflective mode and conceptually ambitious
mode. Made available as an open-access monograph by HAU Books, this translation
introduces English-language readers to Favret-Saadas encounters with the dewitcher
Madame Flora and outlines the foundations for an anthropology of therapy. We hope you
enjoy these commentaries on The Anti-Witch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://somatosphere.net/2016/05/book-forum-jeanne-favret-saadas-the-anti-witch

Response to Jeanne Favret-Saadas The Anti-Witch

RICHARD BAXSTROM
Lecturer, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh

First to be hanged, and then to confess; I tremble at it.

Shakespeare, Othello (IV i, 38-39)

STANLEY CAVELL ENDS The Claim to Reason on an impassioned note with a brief discussion of
Othello and of the witch. For a book ostensibly concerned with Wittgensteins theories of
ordinary language, skepticism, and ethical life, Cavells sudden veer into such dangerous
territory may seem shocking and out of place. This is decidedly not so. Cavells desire is to
propose an ethics in spite of all and in the face of the horror felt in our lack of certain
access to other minds. In fact, proposing an ethics shorn of the crazed logic stoking
Othellos rage for proof when confronted with an Other quite logically leads us to the
witch as a kind of limit-case (495-496). Cavell implies that, if we can accept even the witch
into the fold, we have some slim shot at overcoming our poisonous skepticism of others
and can live better as a result.
Easier said than done.
Jeanne Favret-Saadas The Anti-Witch powerfully suggests scepticism in ordinary life
exists as a pharmakon rather than as a simple poison. The Anti-Witch details the occult work of
dewitchers within farm communities in the Bocage region of rural northwest France. At the
time of her fieldwork (1969-1972) life here remained marked by the existence of a
mysterious force that moves along ordinary channels of human communication (16) and
was held to be inconceivable, resisting all attempts to name or speak it. This force,
however, could be possessed and it was primarily witches who possessed it. Bewitching is
the enactment of this inconceivable force, Favret-Saada writes, with the witch and
dewitcher accessing this same inconceivable force within their deadly struggle (16).
The work of the dewitcher in Favret-Saadas account must be understood in relation to
farming as a form of life. In this context, only the (male) heads of the household are targeted
in attacks, mirroring their status as the sole legal subject associated with a farm who is
clearly marked. It is therefore always a loss or gain of force in reference to the farm itself,
conflated with the head of household, that provided evidence of an attack. Mimicking their
ambiguous and structurally silent positions in ordinary life, the other members of a farm
family were neither the targets of bewitchings nor directly able to combat the witch
themselves. And yet it was the wife who most often drove the counterattack. In collaboration

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

with a dewitcher such as Madame Flora, the star of Favret-Saadas narrative, it is the
structurally silent wife who first suspects, and eventually speaks, the name of the witch that
sets the counterattack in motion. Using a verbal technique via the reading of tarot cards that
the author designates as the violence shifter (5), the dewitcher generates the possibility of
this naming and provides collective family therapy (10) in identifying and combating the
witch. This dewitching, a technique that neutralizes and exteriorizes venomous self-doubt,
in turn allows the farm to continue as a form of life in the face of violence, isolation, and the
structural silence faced by the wives and other family members.
Notice here, notwithstanding Madame Floras complex ritual discourse with the cards,
that the poisonous scepticism of others pales in comparison with the impossible demand to
openly discharge the poison within what we know of ourselves. Favret-Saada makes it clear
that self-knowledge in this instance is impossible to face as knowledge and demonstrates how
Madame Floras violence shifting tarot techniques generate a necessary rage for proof that
displaces self-suspicion on to a dangerous, occult other. It is for this reason that FavretSaada deems the techniques of the dewitcher as therapeutic.
So, yes, it is possible to meet an aspect of Cavells challenge even without welcome,
the witch can be brought into the fold. In fact, just as the witches of the sixteenth century
ultimately served as a strong proof of an otherwise absent Gods existence, so too do the
witches of the Bocage provide the farmers with evidence fundamental to their being that
they require. Having proof of witches confirmed the (displaced) suspicions of the victims,
allowed them to counterattack, and ultimately enabled Favret-Saadas interlocutors to make
a life within the broader form of life available to them.
Understood in this way, The Anti-Witch strikes me above all as an important
contribution to an ethical debate. Given the texts own silences and criticisms, I am
undoubtedly aware that Prof Favret-Saada may likely be surprised by, or even object to, this
association. Such are the workings of our own violence shifters in the course of their
deployments.
Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/response-to-jeanne-favret-saadas-the-anti-witch
Richard Baxstrom's research interests include art, cinema, and popular culture, everyday life in urban
settings, Malaysia and Southeast Asia, the history of ideas in anthropology and the human sciences,
and the anthropology of Native American art, objects, and markets in the Southwestern region of the
United States. His first book, Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in
Urban Malaysia was published by Stanford University Press in 2008. Richard also co-edited with Todd
Meyers (New York University - Shanghai) a volume and DVD entitled anthropologies that was released
the same year. His latest book, written with Todd Meyers, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and
the Mastery of the Invisible, was published by Fordham University Press in 2016 and concerns
Benjamin Christensen's notorious 1922 film Hxan. Richard is also co-editor of the Routledge journal
Visual Culture in Britain.
Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

On Opacity, through Sallies

NANCY ROSE HUNT
Professor, History, University of Michigan

THE TONE IS CHARMING. So are the tarot cards. A chapter with historical comparisons
illuminates, as do the many perceptive gender and household readings. Mischievous is the
endeavor as a whole. After all, it seeks to remake anthropologies of witchcraft and popular
religion almost as much as ethnographies of mental health and therapeutic process. FavretSaada goes far toward defining a new field in The Anti-Witch: an anthropology of therapies
highlighting methods required with an openness to affect. She denigrates participant
observation and empathy (as distance) along with their attention to representations and
ritual, while instead promoting an ethnographic practice that involves digging in, merging
with, and accepting forms of unknowing.
The perspective on Africanist witchcraft studies provided here may be dated, though in
a felicitous way, reflecting back on how her work first began in relation to a detour toward
this more primitive fold as opposed to a France where witchcraft was supposed to be long
dead. Many Africanists have moved, of course, beyond witchcraft accusations alone, while
being busy sensing the politics, secrecies, and psychic suffering involved among Africans in
Africa and among Africans as immigrants in Europe and beyond. Consider the work of Adam
Ashforth, Peter Geschiere, Simona Taliani, Roberto Beneduce. The list could go on and on.
What is most compelling about this book and its methodological reflections? The ways
all ends with opacity: with what the anthropologist cannot know, perhaps only sense and
feel, because enwrapped in affects impervious to one and all. The Western counterpart is the
unconscious. Invoking this psychoanalytic word, Favret-Saada makes explicit in her final
paragraphs a parallel that bubbles to the surface more than once in this books pages.
Fascinating is how throughout her proposalthe urgency of new anthropologies of
therapeutic processshe repeatedly suggests that de-witching and psychoanalysis
constitute a fruitful pair, one that she lived (and felt, sensed?) as akin to each other during
the time of her Bocage fieldwork.
I would love to read her ethnography of the other side of this double. Instead (or until),
lets ask: What are implications of this suggested therapeutic counterpoint, one that bundles
together opacity and inarticulable affects for ethnographies of therapy elsewhere, whether
in Europe, Africa, or beyond? Favret-Saada suggests several methodological dimensions: key
is total immersion in an affective practice, an absorption that does not try to reveal or
represent but rather senses and works through images and the visceral.

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

Arresting in her writing is the bucolic wit and playful tonality, referencing sallies of
diverse sorts. That these strokes are mixed with identifying housework as a key modality by
which gender relations are worked out not only in everyday life but also in imaginations
social and psychic, all this makes the book an invaluable detour for gender historians of 20th
century lives. That they will find witchcraft and nightmares beside farming will surprise few
anthropologists of religion and psychiatry. Those scholars who are over-invested in the
legibilities of the affective may be those who stand to learn the most from this books
exquisite registers of opacity.

Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/on-opacity-through-sallies

Nancy Rose Hunt is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. A specialist of history and
anthropology in Africa, she focuses on matters medical, therapeutic, and gender, while paying
attention to material objects, everyday technologies, visual culture, and violence. Her first book, an
ethnographic history set in the Belgian Congo and then Zaire, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work,
Medicalization, and Mobility (Duke, 1999), received the Herskovits Book Prize in 2000. A Nervous State:
Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke, forthcoming) analyses two intertwined
domains--the securitization of therapeutic insurgency, and the medicalization of infertility--in a part
of the Belgian Congo (1908-60), which became iconic as a zone of rubber extraction, war, and horrific
violence in the period when Congo was King Leopolds Free State (1885-1908).

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

Comment on The Anti-Witch

TANYA LUHRMANN
Professor, Anthropology, Stanford University

I WAS UTTERLY DELIGHTED to read Jeanne Favret-Saadas account of the tarot cards used by
dewitchers like Madame Flora to understand her clients more deeply and to give them good
advice. I, too, in my early work with British witches and magicians, watched many tarot card
readings. I learned to read tarot cards myself and did so, not only for others, but to gain
insight into my life. My experience with the cards is very close to what Favret-Saada
describes, even though in her case the cards are read for different purposes and even the
cards themselvesto judge by the picturesseem to be distinct.
For both Favret-Saada and myself, the cards are both internal and external to the
reader. On the one hand, the cards are like a private language of drenched symbols. Each
reader develops his or her own sense of the significance of individual cards. Each card
speaks to the reader and conveys one of a range of possible meanings, far broader than the
picture on the card would seem to suggest. The tower card of the standard tarot deck can
mean destruction (theres an image of a tower struck by lightning, imploding) but it can also
mean new beginnings. And yet the meaning cannot be arbitrary, freely chosen by the reader.
The lightning struck tower cant mean wisdom. It has to have something to do with change.
That is the cards externality. The card is external also because the reader does not pick it.
The card is chosen by the one being read for, and that person believes the reading (if he or
she believes) precisely because the reader does not control which cards are read.
It is this duality, as Favret-Saada suggests, that makes the cards so therapeutic. They
are, indeed, therapeutic. The cards stand at the center of the therapeutic action FavretSaada describes in the Bocage, and they were understood to be therapeutic for the magicians
I knew.
Therapy is a process in which a suffering individual uses an external structure of
symbols to reorganize a pattern of emotion response (broadly conceived). The standard
anthropological model of symbolic healing, spelled out by Claude Levi-Strauss in The
efficacy of symbols and later, in American Anthropologist, by James Dow (1986: 56), is this:
1. the experiences of the healer and healed are generalized with culture-specific
symbols in cultural myth;
2. a suffering patient comes to a healer who persuades the patient that the problem
can be defined in terms of the myth;

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

3. the healer attaches the patients emotions to transactional symbols particularized

from the general myth;
4. the healer manipulates the transactional symbols to help the patient transact his or
her own emotions.
The primary intervention is to make an externally given symbol feel emotionally real
to the patientand then to manipulate the symbol, to alter the patients emotions.
What I want to suggest here is that what makes a tarot card reading compelling, and
makes symbolic healing possible, is the vividness of the attachment of the external symbol
to the internal experience. Ive spent my career exploring the ways in which an external
symbol becomes more internally meaningful and present. But it is also true that humans are
able to manage their emotional lives because they already presume a mapping relationship
between mind and world, whether they think it is supernatural, whether they acknowledge
it exists. A magician maps outward. The magician focuses his or her mind to alter the
external world. A therapeutic subject maps inward. The subject goes to a therapist to use the
therapists words to shift the responses of her inner life.
What mediates this relationship? The way we learn to think about minds: as bounded
from the world or open to it, as intrinsically important or as ignorable, with an imagination
which is an escape from this world below, or one that opens into the real.

Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/comment-on-favret-saadas-the-anti-witch

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department.
Her books include Persuasions of the Witchs Craft, (Harvard, 1989); The Good Parsi (Harvard
1996); Of Two Minds (Knopf 2000) and When God Talks Back (Knopf 2012). In general, her work
focuses on the way that ideas held in the mind come to seem externally real to people, and the way
that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. One of her recent projects compares the
experience of hearing distressing voices in India and in the United States.

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

Eating a burning ice cream in Zimbabwe

PAMELA REYNOLDS
Professor Emerita, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

IT IS A BONUS to have another book, The Anti-Witch, from Jeanne Favret-Saada on witchcraft
in the Bocage. She brings, once more, her courage, insight and dramatic descriptive abilities
to the ethnographic task. In this confined space I can only pick up two lines in her writing:
her description of the methods she used in coming to understand witchcraft and her
depiction of those used by Anglo-American anthropologists in Africa drawn from writings
published in the 1960s and 1970s. Both in relation to what she calls the oxymoron, that is,
participant observation.
She describes the methods she used in studying witchcraft in the Bocage. She carried
out fieldwork from 19691972 and lived part of the time in the area until 1975, then
published two books (one with Jose Contreras) based on her work. In the second year of
fieldwork she met Madame Flora with whom she worked closely and who became her
dewitcher; it is Madame Floras therapeutic treatment that Favret-Saada intricately
analyses. She acquired a vast amount of documents including notebooks; she attended two
hundred sances, taped thirty of them and compiled a thousand pages of transcriptions; she
kept a field journal that recorded her own bewitchment and her experience of therapy with
Madame Flora. In 1981, Jose Contreras and Favret-Saada wrote a chronological account of
the meetings and collective sessions and carried out a textual analysis of the material. The
depth, coverage, minute detail and observation over time are impressive.
The most striking aspect of her field work is the nature of her participation in
witchcraft. Her bravery in allowing herself to be caught up in chains of bewitchment is
admirable (30). There is ambiguity in her references to having been caught. She says, I,
myself, wasnt quite sure whether or not I was bewitched although she experienced
uncontrollable reactions that showed that she had been affected by the real (and often
devastating) effects of particular words or ritual acts (101-102). Some people took her to be
a dewitcher while others said she was bewitched. Being aware that participation can cause
the intellectual project to disintegrate she undertook to make participation an instrument
of knowledge in discovering the positional system that constitutes witchcraft by staking
my own self in the process (102). How she did so lies at the centre of the book.
It is a salutary experience to read her prescription for understanding a dewitchers
craft: it can be described and understood only if we are prepared to run the risk of
participating, of being affected by it (107).

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

Favret-Sadaa says, French peasant witchcraft is, in fact, highly variable and
adaptable (98). And so is witchcraft on the African continent. Her depiction of the
publications in the 1960s and 1970s produced by Anglo-American anthropologists who
detoured through Africa is fierce. She states that their analysis of witchcraft was reduced to
that of accusations, because, they said, those were the only facts an ethnographer could
observe. For these anthropologists accusation was the principle form of behaviour present
in witchcraft (its archetypal action), as it was the only one that could empirically be proven
to exist. The rest was little more than native error and imagination These anthropologists
gave clear answers to one question and one question only, In a given society, who accuses
whom of witchcraft? They, she says, disregarded almost all other questions including
ideas, experiences, and practices of the bewitched and of witches. The anthropologists
quoted require no defense from me. It would be of great interest if the author brought to
bear more recent examinations of witchcraft studied by people in Africa outside that ambit.
Her critique of that body of work leads Favret-Sadaa to dismiss the practice of
participant observation as a fertile ethnographic method. As a practice it is about as
straightforward as eating a burning hot ice cream, she says (98). She delineates concise
lines within which ethnographers should operate in order to understand witchcraft. Her
method was neither participant observation, nor above all, empathy (98). When two
people are affected, things pass between them that are inaccessible to the ethnographer;
people speak of things that ethnographers do not address (104). The ethnographic
literature on witchcraft, both French and Anglo-Saxon, did not allow her to figure the
positional system that constitutes witchcraft. Instead, she discovered this system by staking
her own self in the process (102). She found her experiences in the dewitching sances she
attended as a bewitched woman all but unintelligible (103). There is, she says, a gulf
between her findings and those in studies of rural French witchcraft and earlier folklorists
and the reason, she believes, is because she allowed herself to be caught up (30) which
opened up the possibility of a specific form of communication devoid of intentionality, and
one that may not be verbal (104).
For two years, 1982 and 1983, I was in the field working with nanga among the
Zezuru people of Zimbabwe who play the role, or part of the role, that dewitchers perform in
the Bocage. I had no particular interest in the one question only and neither did I accord
accusations heard differently from other kinds of locutionary information, no doubt,
because my work had as its focus the treatment by nanga (the term used by Zezuru people in
Zimbabwe for indigenous healers) of children as patients and as acolytes as well as their
experiences learning to be nanga. I lay no claim to deep understanding of witchcraft though
many anthropologists in Africa can. I have worked, too, with healers among Tonga people in
the Zambezi Valley and Xhosa people in South Africa. Favret-Saada might ask what do you
mean by work? In each of these projects I participated only in as much as I lived among
those with whom I worked in a tin shack in a squatter camp; in an abandoned servants room
behind a bar in a village; and on a pole and daub house on stilts in a valley; but I did not do
Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

10

the work that my neighbours did. I observed for years on end. Observation entailed many
dialogues; attendance at rituals; listening to accountsunsolicited by meof peoples
encounters with witchcraft; creating a variety of formal methods of measurement, for
example, of childrens knowledge of plants used in medicaments, and so on. I did not study
witches, however I interacted with people named by others as witches. I was not caught
although during a ritual to call out the spirits maddening his client, a nanga warned her,
when she tried to escape the rondavel, saying, There is a white witch standing at the door.
Zezuru, Tonga and Xhosa healers informed me that I was possessed by healing spirits. I
understood their diagnoses as saying that my interest in their work was acknowledged as
serious and as an invitation to work with them on those interests. This sketch prefaces an
outline of what I learned about healers (some of them, some of the time). I came to admire
their penetrative insights into character; their reach for self-mastery; their cognizance of
living on the knife edge of good and evil; their vulnerability to accusations of the use of evil
force or malpractice; their training that often entailed immersion, risk and the need to
confront the power of spirits; concern for clients; the handing on of knowledge to young
acolytes; the acknowledgement of power/force even in some young children; the
assumption of the burden of nanga (in Zimbabwe) in dealing with the pain of peoples
betrayal of one another during the liberation war and their search for recompense; and, in
sum, their vast cultural undertaking. To some degree, I thought that I had come to
understand the complexity of the healers role. I was not bewitched and I did not train as a
nanga. Was I qualified to understand?
Perhaps Favret-Saada is right. Anthropological use of participant observation leads to
scant understanding. Perhaps the term is a cover story, a misnomer. Perhaps
anthropologists do something different or many things differently. Perhaps they are
historians of the moment and as liable as are historians to misrepresent matters. Perhaps it
is only those with talents and insights similar to Favret-Saadas who can be caught up in
chains of bewitchment and arrive at an understanding that can be shared in print and
contribute to anthropological theory of witchcraft.
Favret-Saadas strictures on the labour of anthropologists serves to impress on us the
challenges of the discipline.
Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/eating-a-burning-ice-cream-in-zimbabwe
Pamela Reynolds is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
She is writing a book based on fieldwork undertaken from 1996 to 2000 on An Ethnographic Study of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the Role of Youth. She is involved in the
SSRC and UNO Research Project on Children in Armed Conflict that has just secured two major
grants. With Lori Leonard and Veena Das, Reynolds is working with adolescent girls who have HIV in a
four city project. She continues to work with ex-activists in the Western Cape.

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

11

A Reply
JEANNE FAVRET-SAADA
cole Pratique Des Hautes tudes

THANK YOU to Richard Baxstrom, Nancy Rose Hunt, Tanya Luhrmann, and Pamela Reynolds,
for taking the trouble to read and to comment on The Anti-Witch. I felt great pleasure in the
idea that Matthew Carey had managed to recreate for you not only my work, but also life in
the Bocage, with its tragedies, its flavor, and sometimes its humor. Your texts made me
realize my navet: I thought I had contributed to universal science, yet without knowing
it, I had written for a French public, speaking to the implicit assumptions of that audience. I
will therefore try to appeal to those of you who have astonished me the most.
In The Anti-Witch, I do not intend to proclaim a new method for anthropologyor for an
anthropology of therapy, or even to that of witchcraftnor to stick to one possibility, to bury
all others, and to allow the miraculous power of affect to replace everything that my
predecessors have ever attempted. Im just trying, starting from the very particular
problems that I faced in the field, to say how I resolved to consider the methodology of our
discipline, and to highlight some dimensions that our discipline massively ignores.
I dealt with a very particular system of magic, and through its access, was subjected to
drastic conditionsaccepted being caughtwhich had hitherto discouraged French
specialists of witchcraft, no doubt as it would have been necessary to derogate from the
intellectual status of the Enlightenment. My predecessors had thoroughly expounded on the
erroneous beliefs of these peasants, and some of them had even mentioned a few unwitchers (dsorceleurs), glimpsing them from a distance, inevitably alcoholics and marked by
primitiveness. None of them had suspected that the Bocage (as all regions of France where
witchcraft occurs) was actually dotted with the nuclei of sociability of a very particular
kindindividual un-witchers and their clients, who attempt to manage certain perils of
agrarian life.
After several months of presence in the field, trying to enter relationships with people
who themselves struggled with witchcraft, and familiarizing myself with the language
specific to these situations, someone previously bewitched decided that I, too, was caught,
and sent me to his own un-witcher, Madam Flora. After I accepted this situation without
knowing where it would lead me, my scientific field activity consisted of carefully noting
events, day after day, allowing situations to develop outside of my control. The three books I
wrote later on Bocage witchcraft are from these field journals.
Ernest Gellner and his British colleagues introduced me to anthropology, and I had
great respect for them. (Lvi-Strauss, the figure of the great scientist for our generation, had

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

12

directed us each month to read two thousand pages of Anglo-American anthropology, in

order to think about things.) However, when I compared their work on witchcraft with the
realities that I met in the field, and when I spoke directly with Evans-Pritchard and Lucy
Mair, I was amazed to see that in their eyes, this Bocage witchcraft simply could not exist.
Thus are my reflections, which seem to have you beaten, and sometimes scandalized, in
The Anti-Witch. Several reported that since the 1970s, the anthropology of sorcery,
particularly in Africa, has changed considerably, and I quite agree: Ashforths work,
Geschiere, Taliani, Beneduce, and also Reynolds and others, are known to me and I do not
place them within the scope of this critique. Similarly, to my questioning of participant
observation: I just wanted to highlight the fact that this term actually confuses two
operations of knowledge, incompatible with each other at the same time, and that the
reader of an ethnography has the right to know precisely in what the researcher has
participated, or what she has seen, and what else she didwhatever name we give to this
activity. Now, in ethnographies, the report of participation is rarely exhaustive (for fear of
deviating from the ideal of objective science), and it tends to disappear in favor of a vague
and agreed reference to observation.
In short, Im just trying to reflect on the operations I performed in the field, by
comparing them with those that my colleagues were attempting to accomplish. And I do not
attribute to mine, chre Pamela Reynolds, the virtue to understand the spirit of my Bocage
interlocutors with a depth that no ethnographer could have ever reached with her
interviewees: I use the term in its common meaninga routine (banale) ability for me to
represent their possible mental states (contenus mentaux) through my relationship with
them. Simply, the experience in question has the peculiarity that I have been caught: it
does not render me particularly intelligent, nor particularly truthful, it is just another point
of view from which I speak.
Similarly, some of you seem to consider my remarks on the epistemic modality of
being affected as to remove and to replace old ethnographies of representations. Of course
not, if only for one reason: to think thus would equivalently renew a dualism between affect
and representation that, for my part, I never cease to challenge, even when I encounter such
considerable authors as Freud or Lvi-Strauss. In this regard, I was amazed (stupfaite) when
Tanya Luhrmann writes that Levi-Strauss, in The Efficacy of Symbols, would lay down the
standard anthropological model of symbolic healing. How can an ethnographer and
therapist as fine as Luhrmann imagine such a thing?
Reread the text: Levi-Strauss did not attend the cure of which he speaks. Moreover, it is
not said that the informant, Cunawhose text the French ethnologist analyzes long later
himself ever attended a cure of this kind: he merely transcribes a shamanic song. For LeviStrauss, since the song ends with an episode of healing the sick, the conclusion is simple: the
shaman cured the body of the sick. What optimism! But how then could a text that so
obviously contravenes the rules of the scientific method (causality affirmed without proof),
become a classic of the social sciences? To me it is because he says with extraordinary
Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

13

aplomb exactly what the amateur psychoanalysis buff imagines to be a psychic cure: an
external, symbolic, word which calls to order a mind-body shaken by inarticulable affects.
Read it and you will see that Levi-Strauss is content to assert the supremacy of speech/of
representation/of the symbolic/of order/of bodily harmony/of affect/of non-representable
pain/of disorder. Somehow, Tanya Luhrmann thinks exactly as Lvi-Strauss : see her
opposition of an internal register (the individual psyche, agitated by messy emotions), and an
external register mobilized by the therapist (from symbols that may reorder the patients
emotions). While I do not doubt the effectiveness of therapeutic practice of Luhrmann (I
read her texts on the subject, which are very convincing), I note that she explains the
subject in the way Molires doctor spoke of the sleepy virtue of opium (vertu dormitive de
lopium).
Finally. No, Richard Baxstrom, I am not shocked or even surprised at the idea that my
book can contribute to an ethical debate. Frequenting the bewitched and their un-witchers
means speaking about good and evil all the day long (since it is impossible to cure without
switching to a position of indirect violence); and this is also the case when we speak of
peasant witchcraft with people who are not caught, whether Bocage residents or Parisians
(their moral judgment being always adverse on those bewitched who accuse innocent
people). I have not stressed this in my book precisely because it was the only question that
my readers had in mind: those bewitched, who clutch with such energy the
violence that Madame Flora puts at their disposal, are they good, are they villainous?
At the end of my time in the field, I substituted this question with another, inspired by
the overall logic of the institution of witchcraft. In fact, in the Bocage, nobody ever casts
spells on somebody, but some are accused of having done it. So, at any time in the area, you
can find a number of people who are accused of being sorcerers, and know they are accused,
since the accusers behave in a very coded manner. These sorcerers can choose between
two strategies. Either they refuse sorcery outright, and take their accuser for a fool or
backwards, but it is better for them that their words should be confirmed by the sustainable,
bio-economic welfare of their farm. Or, if they give credence to witchcraft, they can think
they themselves are victims of a miscarriage of justice. Provided they experience repeated
misfortunes, they will find it urgent to divert the effects of this unjust accusation (in
particular the fact that they could be attacked by a un-witcher). Some people panic and
collapse mentally and physicallybut I have just encountered a single case that could be
interpreted in that sense. Most take a long-term strategy, which I have provided examples in
Deadly Words: they wait enough time in repeated misfortunes and they seek un-witching,
carefully concealing that they have been previously accused. Since the magician knows as
well as I the structural constraints of the system, he is not fooled by this concealing, but he
prefers to take the consultant as it presents (an unfortunate plagued by repeated
misfortunes), and he is careful not to push the investigation to a probable previous charge.
The injustice of accusing the innocent then appears less revolting because it is evenly
distributed throughout the Bocage. Being accused of witchcraft becomes the equivalent of a
Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada

14

mundane misfortune that can strike anyone, as would a traffic accident, or being struck by
an inevitable infirmary (born lame or blind). Thanks to the existence of un-witcher, anybody
eventually finds a way to get by.
Translated from the French by Todd Meyers (NYU-Shanghai).
Online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/a-reply

Jeanne Favret-Saada is an anthropologist and author of Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie
dans le Bocage (1977, Gallimard; English translation, Deadly words: Witchcraft in the Bocage,
translated by Catherine Cullen, Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Corps pour corps. Enqute
sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1981, Gallimard, co-authored with Jose Contreras). She has since
published numerous other works, including Le Christianisme et ses juifs: 1800-2000 (Le Seuil,
2004), once more in collaboration with Jose Contreras, Algrie 1962-1964: essais danthropologie
politique (Bouchene, 2005), Dsorceler (Editions de LOlivier, 2009) and Jeux dombres sur la scne
de lONU. Droits humains et lacit (Editions de LOlivier, 2010).

Somatosphere | May 2016

Book Forum: The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada