Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Reversing the Gaze: Constructing European Race Discourse as Modern Witchcraft Practice
Author(s): James W. Perkinson
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 603629
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005909
Accessed: 25-04-2016 18:14 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Oxford University Press, American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
_/\/jJn^ articles
Reversing the Gaze: Constructing
European Race Discourse as
Charles Long to develop a mode of postcolonial encounter that is a process of mutual hermeneusis, I am proposing in this article to think "race"
in terms of "indigenous ritual." At the very least it is an effort to relativize
the western scientific paradigm and the universalizing humanities discourses that have nestled close to that paradigm. It is not an attempt to
repudiate such an episteme but, rather - to borrow a jazz term - to
"swing" it, to put it in antiphonal and improvisational circulation. More
specifically, this article will trace a thought experiment, probing the historical emergence of white supremacist practice as a kind of modernist
embodiment of "witchcraft discourse," which functions - in the institu-
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
metaphysics. The overwhelming and irresistible epiphany of western commercial and cultural interests on indigenous practices not only shattered
native bodies in the wars and rapine of conquest but also ruptured the
entire cosmogram of native forms of intelligence in the drive to civilize
(Long 1986: 177). Where the western Christian "myth of origins" was maintained intact and even hyperfetishistically "confirmed" in the experience of
contact, in virtue of the ruthlessness of western domination, indigenous
myths of origin were utterly shattered (Long 1986: 193, 170).
For Long (1986: 123-125), that experience of overwhelming violence,
of a depth of dismemberment that cuts into not only bone but brain,
exploding not only the body but the birth memory, which cannot even be
"sited" in the mode of meaning making of local culture, is experienced in
those cultures as the kind of rupture that initially founds a "myth of origin"
in the first place. That is to say, indigenous culture was pushed, by contact, all the way back into its primordium, had its full universe exploded,
had to renegotiate its entire existence - and did so in the only mode capable of comprehending a cosmos: myth. Unlike for the West, for the rest,
the experience was irreducibly "religious" (Long 1986: 165). It required
dealing with contingency and terror on a cosmic scale. The result was the
Native American "Ghost Dance," African millenarian prophetism, Caribbean
vodun, Jamaican Rastafarianism, the black church in the United States,
and the cargo cult in the South Pacific (Long 1986: 166-167).
Long's project is to try to take seriously the conditions of the postcolony
in a manner that does not elide the depths and delirium of the rupture that
modernity has meant across the globe. Simply to advert to western scientific/humanitarian discourse to attempt even to perceive such - much less
explain it - is already to miss the meaning for presuming the superiority.
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
I choose to formalize the first part of the argument under the double
delineation of "craft work" to highlight the active prosecution of "world
construction" engaged in by both indigenous village cultures in Africa
and the globalizing nation-states of modern Europe. Fundamental to my
understanding is the perception of modernity as having, in some sense,
begun with the commercial enterprise of 1492, quickly finding its peculiarities of "production for exchange" ramified in the colonial competitions emerging among nation-states following the breakup of religious
Europe in the Reformation and gradually organizing its class priorities in
monopolistic enterprises pursuing their economic hegemony in successive regimes of political imperialism and slave trading (Dussel: 9-14).
Within the archives of these emergent European nationalisms are
records of the attempts of various colonial administrations to manage
their respective encounters with certain indigenous practices collectively
delineated, by way of supposed homology with European experience, as
"witchcraft." That such a homology organizes non-gender-specific native
practices into a gendered European category is not accidental to its power.
But these "official" struggles disclose a fundamental paradox: a domain
of indigenous practice is comprehended in post-Enlightenment European
discourses as largely superstitious and fictional, but it simultaneously
"Witchcraft" emerges in colonial perspective and practice as a structuring device that mediates meanings of "European order" and "indige-
creates the very thing it projects is not dissimilar to its power at the level
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
to suppress native practices demarcated as "witchcraft," in effect, accomplish the same kind of differentiation and explanation. The very charge of
craft and Otherness: A Philosophical and Theological Critique of Inter subjective Relations offers a self- reflective probe of such practices among the
not a new criticism.) Bongmba (xxii) seeks to take seriously - rather than
dismiss offhandedly or totalize morally - the idiom of witchcraft practice while still evaluating critically its negative manifestations and pursuits.
I seek rather to site western discourse inside such a craft and ask, Which is
really "witch"? But first we need a bit more (Geertzian) "thickness."
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Practice
witchcraft per se, nor the drama of hunting down witches and cleansing
the community of them" but, rather, display of the way "specific problems [are] perceived among Wimbum when charges and accusations are
made by one person against another" (20). It is a question of indigenous
articulations of "who is causing another to be ill" and how that "other"
perceives it (Bongmba: 20). In the process Bongmba distinguishes three
local terms for practices that could be comprehended as witchcraft-like
interventions into the social and natural orders in clarifying his choice
to focus on tfu. The latter is the most comprehensive historical term that
invokes local meanings of practices pursued "under cover of night," partaking of intimations of "darkness" and "secrecy," which usually carry
a tonality of malevolence and demand healing remedies or protective
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
space of tfu is expanded beyond the family, and at the same time
the practice is narrowed to a single transaction between otherwise unrelated "individuals" (Bongmba: 38). Either a gift or a loan, it is believed, is
sufficient to render one unwittingly vulnerable to "sacrifice" (Bongmba:
38). Structurally, this expansion of tfu suspicion is intimately linked to
the emergence of urban elites who "have inserted themselves into the
exploitative capitalist relations by pursuing an extravagant lifestyle"
(Bongmba: 39).
And even the academic enterprise becomes fodder for the mill of
accusation. Bongmba (53) himself sets the stage for my own deliberations
to come when he has the good graces to recount a playful challenge to
his construction of tfu by fellow African scholar Emmanuel Eze. Eze
acknowledges the maze of perplexity entertained in the scholarly attempt
to "read" tfu and then asks whether Bongmba does not himself "have
tfu," for he has argued that "only those who have the power know the
power" and he (Bongmba) has, in fact, been able to make that form of
knowledge convincingly clear (i.e., "known") in his writing (Bongmba:
53). Either that, Eze agues, or Bongmba should perhaps dispel the mystery once and for all and assert that no such knowledge really exists,
that it is all a ruse of power, holding generations in thrall to various configurations of domination and dissembling (Bongmba: 53). A third possibility - that tfu practitioners may perhaps be the promulgators of
powers and knowledge that they do not know they have - is also laid on
the table (Bongmba: 53). Bongmba (53) is uncompromising in asserting
that he does not have tfu but equally that he cannot just "write it off" as
ruse. He is also adamant that such powers are intentionally prosecuted
in practice and are not just lying there "dormant . . . waiting for the
researcher to awaken [them]" (53). But the great unaddressed possibility
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ceptibility. Whether such a construction would be at all useful in a general sense, my own project here does seek to specify that at least in the
case of explicitly "racializing" knowledges, as well as in the more implicitly
The Imagination
To recapitulate, the "tfu effects," mentioned at the end of the last section, characterizing the history of contact, are primarily those of finding
the realm of perception. In a culture of tfu suspicion and belief, the possibility is open to ongoing manipulation and brokerage.
And, of course, once the village is metabolized in the metropolitan
circuits of globalizing capital, it is not surprising in the least that tfu
is imagined behind a new kind of accumulation. Not only bad fortune
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Wealth accumulation is probatively imagined as the outcome of a similar mobilization of unseen powers, leveraged, in one way or another, by
the "sacrifice" of human flesh somewhere along the line (only now in a
"zombified" form of living death). Whether expressing misfortune or
metafortune, the condition to be explained is a perceived break in the
texture of mundane mutuality and reciprocity.
Tfu is thus simultaneously the perception and predication of a particular
kind of difference making, its coding and questioning as the knowledge of
a threat and the threat of a knowledge, which works at the depth level
where cultural symbolics and psychic investments intertwine and define
a world. It bifurcates the world into an in-group of tfu practitioners, who
are understood to sacrifice the "flesh" of outsiders to the group members,
effects. The former are understood more in terms of the covert use of a
power than overt discourse about a morality; the latter have as their only
protection (unless they secure the patronage of, or themselves employ, a
practitioner) the mobilization of talk about that power as a moral question.
his mother's arms with the shout, "Look Mama ... a Negro. . . . Look . . .
a Negro. . . . Mama, the [Negro] 's going to eat me up" (1 14).
MYTHIC BLACKNESS AND UNCONSCIOUS WHITENESS
When Europe began its conquest and colonization of the rest of the
globe in 1492, the colonial theater ultimately became the site of struggles
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Resource flows from the colonies were critical in underwriting intraEuropean conflict and increasingly became the focus of the ongoing
competition in the international slave trade and the control of colonial
lands that solidified into separate European identities (Dussel: 11-14).
To what degree, however, the practical "crafting" of the modern state can
also be understood as dialectically "colored" by the craft work of the
colonized remains an open question (Herskovitz: 8; Murphy: 115). The
historical process was inevitably complex, and the way of describing it
just ventured is only a gross caricature. But it does set the stage for the
question of import here.
European power, in effect, "ate" African substance in the slave trade
(as well as "native" substance in the colonial structures set up throughout
the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific). Whatever the discourse, the fact
of the effect is clear. A "witchery" of heretofore unimaginable potency
ravaged African and aboriginal cultures. The necessary reflexive consideration that must be probed in turn is the degree to which a fear of "being
Fanon's account centuries later is revealing. The great truism of modern white supremacy in America is the white male fear that black males
will attract and intermarry with white females and produce, in the words
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
genetics and symbolics. Genetically, white disappearance would obviously be disappearance back into the registers of melanin that "whiteness"
mutated out of in the first place (given our best understanding, to date,
of the evolutionary trajectory of Homo sapiens sapiens as having origin-
"color." Symbolically, I would suggest, the deep fear is then that of "being
eaten" by perceived difference. But the attempt to forestall such by mobilizing a practice of white supremacy masked in a discourse of black racializa-
constructs the very "difference" it fears in the first place. I would suggest
that one productive way of reading such a tactic is to consider it as a kind
of preemptive "first strike" - on the part of a profoundly prodigal witch-
A Genealogy of Supremacy
The last 500 years of modern geopolitical aggression and transnational economic domination, by which Europe transplanted itself around
the globe and took over, is more clearly organized in its basic life world
patterns and power privileges by the racial category of white/nonwhite than
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The claim runs something like this: White supremacy is the basic
structuring practice of the modern world system in terms of which
extraction, appropriation, production, and consumption of resources
are differentially organized. The race discourse mobilized by that practice has gone through continuous "development" that can be periodized
historically (Pagden: 1-2). It was first worked out as a theological discourse effecting a sharp divide of spiritual discernment between presumed "Christianity" and perceived infidelity and sorcery in the early
46; Omi and Winant: 63-64; Pagden: 1-2; West 1982: 47, 51). In
the United States in particular, in the 1960s, that discourse was contested
in the identity politics of black power activism, challenging the "assimi-
memberment in the "reform and co-opt" tactics of the state, it was emulated by other groups concerned to preserve other forms of identity from
depths of Christian symbolics, imagining a layer of deep liturgical "forgetting," is heuristic and provisional - a positing of denial in the very
act of probing it.
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
and whose blood is drunk "by their fellows" (Eze 1997: 131). Dead
ancestors are likewise conjured for assistance in powermongering and
indeed, in the "most fearful" moment of abomination, says Hegel, will
possess their priestly serviteurs and command "human sacrifice" (Eze
1997: 132). The sum of such, for him, is "the superstition of witchcraft,
whose terrible rule once prevailed in Europe too" (Eze 1997: 132). It
issues in a political order of tyranny - the fetishizing of a power of contempt for all that is human, the licensing of cannibalism, the normalizing
of the devouring of the human body as simply flesh "like all other
[animal] flesh" (Eze 1997: 134). But then Hegel waxes unwittingly revealing in his argument, saying more than he undoubtedly intended.
Such cannibalistic offerings of human flesh are not primarily for the
sake of food, says Hegel, but "for festivals" (Eze 1997: 134). After being
tortured and beheaded, for instance, the body parts of many hundreds of
sacrificed prisoners "are returned to those who took them prisoner so
that they may distribute the parts" (Eze 1997: 134). Hegel does not tell us
why. He only says, "In some places, it is true, human flesh has even been
seen on sale in the markets" (Eze 1997: 134). But in any case, "at the
death of a rich man, hundreds [of such prisoners] may well be slaughtered and devoured"; and "as a rule the victor consumes the heart of his
enemy," and "at magical ceremonies . . . the sorcerer will [kill] . . . and
divide [a] body among the crowd" (Eze 1997: 134).
And then, without any pause, Hegel immediately links this practice
with a rationale for slavery. "Since human beings are valued so cheaply,"
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
flesh.
states (Eze 1997: 135). Slavery, in this compass, is "a moment of transition" in the development of the Idea toward the historical achievement of
a "substantial ethical life of a rational state" in which slavery then ceases
to exist (Eze 1997: 135). Africa as a whole, for Hegel, remains enmeshed
in the "natural spirit" on the far side of the threshold of history: the necessary dialectical move of the African spirit is from "witchcraft" through
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
But it is not at all clear that Hegel's telos exists. What is clear in history is that European rapacity has eaten African substance unremittingly.
As noted above, in recent years Cameroonian culture has articulated a
new wrinkle in the practice of tfu: witchery leveraging wealth through
"the zombi." Flesh is devoured in modern mode, not so much in the
immediacy of death but, rather, in slow motion, through labor. Tfu sacri-
question about power: not "What" is wrong with me? but, rather,
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the work of an enemy, not the mysterious outcome of an arbitrarily discriminating "nature." European belief fetishizes subjectivity as an "object,"
explains social condition as individual choice, and reads the "slow death"
of impoverished unemployment and the "living death" of wage slavery as
the victim's own failure to compete. To grasp this wild efflorescence of
the impulse to fetishize, it is necessary to go back behind the Enlighten-
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
and denigration does not simply stay put on its object. Or at least that is
my argument. Reading the theological charge of sorcery from within the
idiom of projection itself yields an interesting comparison.
For instance, traditional African witchcraft discourse is a mode of
with an illicit domain of spirits whose character was presumed to be dangerous and aggressive (Bastide: 281).
In comparison with something like contemporary tfu discourse, however, early race discourse works surreptitiously. Rather than leveling a
charge of de facto aggression toward another, it operates its accusation by
way of a twofold implication: the imputation of a threat of aggression
toward another (i.e., the fear that African witchcraft would be turned on
European colonizers) and the imputation of a fact of aggression toward
oneself (the culpability implied in resisting God, signified in the darkness
that has taken over the bodily surface). Along these same lines witchcraft
discourse explicitly imagines (and witch "confessions" sometimes confirm) the use of a poison, charm, spell, and so on that effects the erosion
and disease that finally kills. It implies the mobilization of a materialized
form of curse that itself "causes" the cursedness to happen. Interestingly,
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
tion of a curse - in this case one that in fact does become explicitly
formalized as just that, in the "Curse of Ham" mythology that European
Christianity predicated as the theological explanation for the "darkness"
of African skin. But this was a curse with a difference. The predication of
implied blackness, in effect, materialized its spell not in an exterior object
(in slave and wage labor and the plundering of African resources).
The effect of such a predication is to lock Africans up in a domain of
"blackness eating itself" that displaces awareness of the real history of
consumption the projection underwrites and carries out in the first place.
It is even tempting to say that, in this complex projection of witchcraft,
whiteness bewitches itself, mislabeling the western metabolism of Africa
as "saving and civilizing" while mythologizing Africans under the cover
of a blackness that both hides and effects the "project of devouring" that
is the real meaning of whiteness. In this compass European liturgy and
African sorcery constitute a difference not in religious kind but in degree
of rapacity. The first frontier of historical encounter between Europe and
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
But another layer of this symbolic conflation of racialization and consumption becomes evident from a post-Enlightenment vantage point. As
Fanon's presence simply came clean with its most primal expression.
It was a fear of being eaten. European contact with African populations
throughout the modern era consistently demonstrates terror of miscegenation and mongrelization, as indicated above. Fear of being devoured
by blackness is a primary coordinate of the modern European psyche,
eating black saving body." The actual social process is European consumption of African substance in slavery.
The fundamental ambivalence emerging in the act of consuming the
other is interiorized and hidden. "Eating the other" has as its almost
inevitable reflex effect the terror of "being eaten by the other." The com-
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Whiteness, under the veneer of its "heavenly" pallor, is a great grinding witch tooth, sucking blood and tearing flesh without apology. It is
It is also possible to periodize the metaphor historically. Where indigenous practice of witchcraft is understood to involve the consumption of
"dead" flesh, the slavery of early modernity (1) opens a new "after-death"
prospect: the zombi state, the living cannibalization of commercial capital,
flesh not so much as food for thought as gold for trade. In the industrial
phase (2) whiteness shifts its modality of consumption to that of the machine:
flesh as "dead labor" in Marx's phrase, the zombi rendered bionic, the
massive and mysterious transubstantiation of laboring flesh into grinding metal. In so-called late capitalism (3) the move is to the modality of
information, the postmodern magic of transmogrifying flesh into digit.
But at heart the consumption continues to metabolize real muscle.
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
of discourse. Physical masticulation is supposedly overcome in metaphysical matriculation. What has really happened is merely patent: an
economy of flesh has been made the flesh of the economy.
EXCURSUS
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
scream from the cross: "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?"
[Mk. 15:33-39].) In the practice of a Christianity that was still outlawed
and persecuted prior to Constantine, the eucharistic symbolics would
perhaps have mediated something closer to the ambivalence Otto notes
in terms of (1) a subtext of God as the Great Precipitous Horror that
Devours, overlaid with (2) the open text of God as the Great Hero Who Is
Willing to Be Devoured:
The God Who Is Devoured in Jesus
"body and blood." There is no extant imagery for God grasped as "devourer"
that is iconically figured or ritually remembered in the Christian tradition of the scholastics or the reformers. Unlike, say, Hinduism's mother
figure, Kali, mainstream Roman and Protestant representations of God
present One who is unambiguously "good."
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
"Color, Racism, and Christianity." In White Racism: Its History, Pathology and Practice, 270-285.
Ed. by B. N. Schwartz and R. Disch. New York:
Dell Publishing Co.
African Witchcraft and Otherness: A Philosophical
and Theological Critique of Inter subjective Rela-
Dussel, Enrique
1995
Continuum.
Eze, Emmanuel
Chukwudi, ed.
1997
Fanon, Frantz
[1967] 1991
Fields, Karen
1985
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Gilroy, Paul
1993
Gramsci, Antonio
1992
Haymes, Stephen N.
1995
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University
Press.
York Press.
Herskovitz, Melville
1958
Press.
1991
Long, Charles
1983
1995
Mills, Charles
1997
Mudimbe, V. Y.
1988
Murphy, Joseph M.
[1988] 1993
1994
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Press, Inc.
Wessels, Anton
[1986] 1990
Images of Jesus: How Jesus Is Perceived and Portrayed in Non-European Cultures. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co.
West, Cornel
1982
Press.
1989
White, Hayden
1978
This content downloaded from 140.192.113.143 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:14:53 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms