Mechanisms of Harm-doing

Lese witches kill by using witch's medicines and eating their victims. Sorcerers only make people sick by using medicines, called aru , which means any substance that produces profound bodily effects, good or bad—a wide range that includes everything from herbs that may be used by infertile women to harm their fertile co-wives, to penicillin and chloraquine. These substances can be placed in a person's food or flicked on the path over which an intended victim will pass.

Since sorcerers do not ordinarily cause their victims to die, witchcraft is obviously the more dreaded; those who are singled out by witches nearly always die. Witches' medicines are stronger and can cause large-scale catastrophes. A Lese witch can do nearly everything the sorcerer does, only with greater force. One Lese man reported: "Witches have medicine [aru ] too. Only witches can know what kind of medicine it is. They kill at night or in the day. They can destroy a garden, and can call baboons to eat it, and can call wind and rain to destroy it." Witches will not, for example, destroy a garden by hand, but will instead manipulate the environment so that the crops fail. Both witches and sorcerers may act covertly, but witches are more dangerous because they kill at night, and because they can be seen only by other witches, or by the Efe. Sorcerers are simply human beings with bad intentions, and they will commit their crimes during the day and may not even attempt to hide their intentions. The mechanism by which sorcerer's medicine works upon the victims is supernatural, but the action of the sorcerer, unlike actions of witches, has an empirical status in the natural world. People actually attempt to harm others with medicines that can be bought and sold. Witchcraft, however, is something entirely supernatural, and the actions of a witch are never straightforward or completely understandable by human beings.

One of the most significant differences between sorcery and witchcraft is that sorcerers can harm anyone they have reason to harm, although their victims are usually members of villages other than their own. Witches, however, can harm only members of their own villages; hence the suspicion and fear attached to a death in the village. It is

believed that one or more witches can murder a victim, as he or she sleeps, in the supernatural world, before the person dies in the natural world. All witches take leave of their own human bodies at night so that they can kill the members of other houses, or so that they can walk, in spirit, from village to village in search of freshly killed villagers, leaving their human bodies asleep in their houses. If they intend to kill someone in their own village, they remove the victim from his or her house, and distribute body parts to the witches who have traveled from other villages. They eat, vomit, and piece the body back together, so that they can eat it again after burial. The victim will die within a few days or one week after such an attack. Sometimes witches kill their victims by shooting them with "witches arrows" and then eating them later. Witches, then, are both human and supernatural—ordinary human beings by day and witches at night. All witches know they are witches, and they know when the "witches inside of them" leave their bodies. Human beings and their witchcraft are thus both integrated and independent: witches are human victims who have become witches not out of their own doing but because they were at some time poisoned with witchcraft substance; at the same time, after becoming witches, they are in some sense lost to the ordinary human world and only by destroying them can the witchcraft be ended.

It will be seen that, because witches attack members of their own village, whereas sorcerers usually work their spells on members of different villages, the solidarity of different social units is differently altered. Witchcraft comes from the houses and threatens the unity of the clan, and in this sense witchcraft represents the consolidation and opposition of houses. Sorcery, which comes from outside and threatens harmonious relations between different villages, represents the consolidation and opposition of clans. One expression of this distinction is the common fear that sorcerers prefer above all to poison palm wine, one of the few foods shared among members of different clans.

There are several other important distinctions. First, because witches are invisible and will surely murder members of their own village, witchcraft is not controllable. Witch hunters may look for witches, and certain techniques may be used to frighten witches from committing murder, but witches can almost never be discovered, identified, and imprisoned or executed. Sorcerers, in contrast, are controllable in the sense that their actions are comprehensible, and they can be identified, apprehended, and imprisoned. Furthermore, sorcerers may act only once, and never again, but witches will kill until they and their human

bodies die. Second, while witch's motivations are never clear, witches must satisfy their desire for human meat. Therefore, they may kill anyone in their village, if only for the food. Sorcerers, however, are motivated principally by sexual and reproductive interests. They want to disrupt the marriages of their lovers or punish those who have refused to have sexual intercourse with them. Third, the most dangerous witches are old people, whereas the most dangerous sorcerers are young, sexually active men and women. When conflict motivates witches, it is usually conflict over access to food and material wealth, whereas sorcerers are motivated not by inequalities in goods but by unequal access to sex and children. For example, I recorded two cases, told to me by the victims, in which particularly fertile clans had been subject to a number of acts of sorcery.

Many of the differences between witchcraft and sorcery are subsumed by a general opposition between inhumanity and humanity. Witches represent inversions of the natural order of things. Like the witches of many other eastern and central African societies (Middleton

and Winter 1963), Lese witches eat human flesh, walk naked, travel at night, have a desire to fornicate with persons of an inappropriate age (for example, their classificatory grandparents or classificatory children), can change themselves into leopards, eat salt when they are thirsty, and regurgitate or vomit the meat they have eaten.

Another significant aspect of witchcraft is the way in which the distribution of meat among witches parallels and is differentiated from the distribution of meat in the human world. Witches and nonwitches alike follow the same normative standards of "dividing" (oki ) food, the division of meat being a symbol of unity and brotherhood. But there are two important differences; first, witches eat and distribute human meat, whereas nonwitches eat and distribute animal meat; second, whereas nonwitches distribute meat only within villages, witches distribute their human meat between villages. Every time a witch murders in a particular village, the witches of other villages wait nearby to claim the parts of the body they want to consume. The murderer is obliged to distribute the parts to the other witches: "Among witches, the butcher is the one in the family of the corpse. He gives permission for others to butcher it. Everybody calls out the part of the body they want to eat. Someone wants a hand, someone else a foot, someone else a shoulder" (interview with a noko todu [witch doctor], 1987). The distribution of meat between witches thus represents an inversion of meat distribution between nonwitches. The sharing of meat, and relations of meat debt, between the witches of different villages expresses their binding relationships to one another, and a witch's failure to repay a meat-sharing debt can result in his or her destruction at the hands of other witches.

A witch may want to kill someone because of craving for human meat or jealousy of kin, but a witch may also be obliged to kill a relative because of a meat debt to a witch of another village. A witch called upon by another witch to repay a debt must murder a member of his or her family. This echoes Winter's account of Amba witchcraft, "The Enemy Within":

The witches in various villages are bound together in a system of reciprocity. Thus if the witches in a particular village kill a person they invite the witches from another village to share the ensuing feast. At a later date, the witches of the second village must reciprocate by inviting their previous hosts to a feast at which they will serve the corpse of a victim from their own village. (1963:292)

Intervillage distributions of human meat carried out by witches result in potentially hostile debt relations between the witches of different vil-

lages. At two Lese funerals that I attended, mourners suggested that the deaths were the result of debts of limbs owed by members of their village to members of other villages.