ATS2371 Chap.7 Fieldwork with Sorcerers: Insider and Outsider
Fieldwork with Sorcerers: Insider and Outsider
Week 7 turns from what magic is to how anyone could study it. Sorcery is lodged inside webs of kinship and inside locally specific ideas about how a person ought to behave, and neither is something a visitor can simply walk into. Among the Azande, magic is applied at the messy points of social life, which is where an outsider is least welcome and least legible.
Evans-Pritchard met the problem by working through a Zande assistant, a device the unit notes would now raise ethical objections. Stoller went the other way, spending a long period among the Songhay of Niger and entering apprenticeship himself. The week is built to make you weigh scepticism against access, and belief against method, rather than choose a side in advance.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why sorcery resists outside study: it is embedded in kin relations and in the untidy parts of social life
- 02
The insider and outsider distinction, and what each position can and cannot see
- 03
Evans-Pritchard's arrangement with a Zande assistant, and the ethical objection the unit raises to it
- 04
Stoller among the Songhay of Niger, apprenticeship as method, and the vocabulary that comes with it
- 05
Does a researcher need to believe? The reported position of accepting the ideas inside the culture and rejecting them outside it
- 06
What anthropological convention permits, and how far a fieldworker may go before the discipline objects
Argue both sides of the apprenticeship question in four moves
- 1For, on access: practices embedded in social relations are shown to participants, not explained to observers, so apprenticeship reaches material interviewing cannot.
- 1For, on rapport: openly declared scepticism gives practitioners a reason not to teach, which limits what any sceptical outsider is shown.
- 1Against, on consent and harm: apprenticeship creates obligations to third parties who never agreed to be researched, and it can implicate the researcher in acts intended to affect them.
- 1State the criterion: not whether the researcher believes, but whether the people affected by the practice can be adequately protected under the arrangement.
Key terms
- Insider position
- The standpoint of someone inside the social relations being studied, which grants access to what is shown rather than explained but carries obligations that constrain the account.
- Outsider position
- The standpoint of the visiting researcher, which permits comparison and detachment while limiting what practitioners are willing to demonstrate.
- Apprenticeship
- Learning a practice by being taught it as a practitioner would be, used by Stoller among the Songhay as a research method rather than only as a personal step.
- Sohanci
- A Songhay sorcerer of the lineage tradition, one of the specialist roles named in the glossary the unit supplies for Stoller's memoir.
- Sorko
- A Songhay praise-singer to the spirits, a second specialist role distinguished from the sohanci in the same glossary.
- Cimikoy
- In the Songhay glossary, a sorcerer who scrupulously observes the traditions of his or her ancestors, literally a possessor of the truth.
Fieldwork with Sorcerers: Insider and Outsider FAQ
What are the readings for Week 7?
An excerpt from Evans-Pritchard on his fieldwork arrangements, and the opening sections of Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow, published in 1987, which records an apprenticeship served with Songhay practitioners in Niger. The unit also posts a glossary of Songhay terms used in the memoir, which is worth having open while you read.
Does the researcher have to believe in sorcery?
The material puts a more careful position than yes or no. Evans-Pritchard reported that inside Zande culture he accepted the ideas and outside it he rejected them, and that in a kind of way he believed them. The examinable point is that acceptance within a setting is a methodological stance, not a private conversion.
Why is Evans-Pritchard's use of an assistant flagged?
Because the arrangement placed a local person in the position of doing the research work with sorcerers on the ethnographer's behalf, absorbing the social risk that carried. The unit presents it as a field method devised to solve a real problem, and as one the discipline would now regard as unethical.
How is this week assessed?
Through the essay. One of the fourteen questions asks directly whether it is ethical for ethnographers to become apprentice sorcerers, and a second asks whether Songhay witchcraft and modern Western witchcraft belong in the same category, which needs this week's material to answer well.
Assessment move
Read the Stoller excerpt with the Songhay glossary beside you and write the specialist terms into your case bank as you meet them. The essay question on apprenticeship is answerable only if you can name what Stoller was actually taught, and the vocabulary is where that detail sits.
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