Post #46

Самое трогательное и ободряющее: When I returned to the United States in 1995 after completion of my dissertation fieldwork and told my anthropologist friends and colleagues about sorcery lions, they seemed to know better than to ask if I “believed in” such things. Which is not to say that they knew — or even thought they knew — whether or not I “believed”; rather, they avoided the question, it seemed to me, because they considered any answer — mine or theirs — “problematic.” Others with whom I shared accounts did not observe this disciplinary taboo. When I started to teach in 1997, undergraduate students asked with persistence if I “believed in” sorcery. My answers were often witty, and always cagey. Embracing and adapting Mark Rogers’s idea that one can “believe a little bit” [Rogers, Mark. n.d. “I Believe a Little Bit”: Multiple Knowledges and the Politics of Medical Decisions in Ecuador. Unpublished paper.], I often told people that I believed far more at night — when the distant grunts and snorts of lions could, indeed, be heard from some of the villages in which I slept — than I did in the light of day. Harry G. West – Ethnographic Sorcery (2014), p. 19