John Beattie

Witchcraft and sorcery in East Africa

1. John Beattie Sorcery in Bunyoro 2. T.O. Beidelman Witchcraft in Ukaguru 3. Jean Buxton Mandari Witchcraft 4. Mary Douglas Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa 5. Robert F. Gray Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft 6. G.W.B. Huntingford Nandi Witchcraft 7. Jean La Fontaine Witchcraft in Bugisu 8. Robert A. LeVine Witchcraft and Sorcery in a Gusii community 9. John Middleton Witchcraft and Sorcery in Lugbara 10. E.H. Winter The Enemy Within: Amba Witchcraft and Sociological Theory

Aspects of Nyoro Symbolism

Like other African peoples, Banyoro have a rich and complex symbolism, and there are numerous references to aspects of this in both older and more recent writings about Nyoro traditional culture. But until the publication in a recent issue of this journal of a paper on the significance of right and left in Nyoro symbolic classification by my colleague Dr. Rodney Needham (Needham, 1967), no systematic analysis of Nyoro symbolic categories, or even of the more important of them, had yet been attempted. I hope myself to take up this theme in a forthcoming monograph on Nyoro ritual, though I believe that to do it justice will require some further detailed inquiry through the Runyoro language in Bunyoro itself. In the meantime Needhams interesting essay, based on most of the available written sources, is a significant contribution to the subject. There is certainly much research to be done on the symbolism of right and left and of other complementary oppositions in African cultures, and it is to be hoped that his pioneering efforts will stimulate further researches in these fields.

Nyoro Marriage and Affinity

Banyoro think that ideally marriage should involve the payment of mukaga and the establishment of enduring relations between a man and his wifes people. So they would on the whole accept the broad categorization I have just made. But we should be unwarrantably imposing our own categories on Nyoro social life if we were to use this classification as a basis for distinguishing real or proper marriages from other kinds of marriages or from concubinage. There are indeed distinctions in terms of prestige (for example in predominantly virilocal Bunyoro a man who marries kyeyombekeire--uxorilocally--is despised) and a man who has paid some hundreds of shillings for his wife is in a much stronger position with regard both to her and to her relatives than one who has paid nothing. But the latters wife is no less his mukazi than the formers and his children are no less legitimately members of his clan and lineage. (excerpt)

Right, left and the Banyoro

The collection of republished essays entitled Right and Left: Essays in Dual Symbolic Classification , edited and with a substantial introduction by Rodney Needham (the University of Chicago Press, 1973), has been long awaited. All of the essays are of great interest, and all are concerned with the binary mode of symbolic classification, something which appears to be found, in greater or lesser degree, in all human cultures. The work will no doubt be widely reviewed in the appropriate journals. What follows is not an attempt at an over-all review. It is rather a response to, and a critical examination of, some of the arguments Needham advances in his introduction to the book. As such, I hope that it may contribute, however modestly, to our understanding of some of the problems involved in the application of the ‘binary’ mode of structural analysis to ethnographic data. The context is the symbolism of the Banyoro of western Uganda.

Objectivity and Social Anthropology

This lecture is divided, roughly, into three parts. First, there is a general and perhaps rather simple-minded discussion of what are the ‘facts’ that social anthropologists study; is there anything special about these ‘facts’ which makes them different from other kinds of facts? It will be useful to start with the common-sense distinction between two kinds or, better, aspects of social facts; first—though neither is analytically prior to the other—and putting it very crudely, ‘what people do’, the aspect of social interaction, and second, ‘what—and how—people think’, the conceptual, classifying, cognitive component of human culture. Now in reality, of course (and perhaps not so ‘of course’; people do tend to think of them as separate ‘things’), these two aspects are inextricably intertwined. But it is essential to distinguish them analytically, because each aspect gives rise to quite different kinds of problems of understanding for the social anthropologist. We shall see that the problem of how to be ‘objective’, and so to avoid ethnographic error, arises in both contexts, but in rather different forms in each.

Nyoro Symbolism and Nyoro Ethnography: A Rejoinder

This paper attempts to clarify a little further certain of the symbolic categories of the Banyoro of western Uganda, and at the same time to refocus attention on some of the methodological difficulties involved in the analysis of ethnographic material through the framework of the binary mode of symbolic classification. This entails some consideration of a recent contribution to this journal by Professor Rodney Needham, in which he attempts to rebut my detailed criticisms of his version of some aspects of Nyoro symbolism (Needham 1976; Beattie 1968; see also Needham 1967; 1973; and Beattie 1976: 232 n. 4). In doing so he repeats certain of his earlier misrepresentations, as well as introducing some new ones. He also asserts, of a number of my own—and some other—publications on Nyoro ritual and symbolism, to which I had drawn attention, that ‘they were either not relevant to [his] train of argument or, in general, were redundant to [his] primary sources’ (Needham 1976: 237). These assertions must be very briefly considered before I go on to deal with the further arguments he now advances.

SPIRIT MEDIUMSHIP AS THEATRE

This paper, by the distinguished anthropologist. Dr. John Beattie was delivered at a Royal Anthropological Institute conference on Spirit Possession and Ecstatic Religion, on which a report by Rosemary Firth is printed immediately afterwards. Both the paper and the report are reprinted from the Royal Anthropological Institute News, June 1977 No. 20 with grateful acknowledgement.