 Okay, what I'm going to do today is give you a short kind of taster version of a longer lecture that I often give to our first year undergraduate students. It's for a course called Voice in Place, and the intention of Voice in Place is to introduce students at a very early stage to contemporary practices and anthropology. And as a result of that, what I'll do is take three steps. I think we'll talk initially about what anthropology is, how we think about it these days. And then I'll give you a couple of examples of how that works using the topic of witchcraft, which is a classic topic in the discipline. And you'll see how it has, how our approach to it has kind of changed over time in the same way that our practices have changed over time. So with that in mind, I'll just begin by saying, by raising the question of what is anthropology, what anthropology is. And the first thing that we can say it is, is that it's a field, it's a field science. It's a field that has a discipline of literature and a history of its own. And it's also, in being a field science, by that I mean that it's an unlike laboratory science. It's a science where you have to be out in the world where a day is a day. You know, if you're in a laboratory and you're working with fruit flies or you're working with mice, a day in your life is like a multitude of days in the life of a fruit fly because their life cycle is so short. If you're in the field, you're dealing with a time scale that's the same as your human life, a day is a day. And other field sciences might be the ethology, observation of animals, geology, volcanology, the study of volcanoes. There are all situations in which a single human day and a single human life is a very small thing. And therefore the practice in the field takes a long time. It has a different method and it's very labor intensive. So this is anthropology. It's quite immersive. The anthropologists principle instrument is their own being. But what we're going to talk about today is the aspect of anthropology that's also a documentary art. Because once you've attained all this experience and you've been minding other people's business and asking them what they're eating and what they're doing and what they're thinking and all the things that we do as anthropologists, I like to think of it as really just a glorious way of professionalizing nosiness. You know, you have to be really nosy and really good at being nosy to get people to talk about themselves. But once you've done that, you have the task of explaining to others what it is you learned about the lives of those with whom you were living during the course of your fieldwork. Now my own fieldwork was in Central Africa. I was with a group of people called the TAWA, P-A-B-W-A, and they live along the lake region in Central Africa, along Lake Tanganyika and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was there for about four years. I worked with them on their approach to health and illness and medicine. And part of that process, as part of that process, I learned that people often used the same substances to cure bodily ills that they would use to cure ills in their lives, things that we would call bad luck. And on that basis, I began to question the distinction that we make not only between that we make in our own society between what goes on inside the body, the life in the body, and the life the body is in, but also all the other distinctions we make, the ways we get it wrong in terms of understanding what people are doing when they're thinking about things in terms of magic and in terms of knowledge. So that kind of underlay my interest, and this is what I bring to the first year, the voice and place course because I want students to become aware of this problem, this anthropological question at a very early stage. I also like to say that what happens in anthropology now is that we operate by asking two basic questions. And the first of these questions is how can this be? Be. And what I like about this question is that it means that we're not reliant on the fact that people are very exotic, or that they're somehow strange, we're not belittling other people's way of thinking because this is a question you can ask about any situation. You can sit at your dinner table or at your breakfast table at home, you can be among friends, you can be in the library, and you can suddenly look around you and you can say, how can this be? How is this happening? What's going on? And then that draws your attention to all the elements that makes the situation what it is. Everything that brought people there, everything that kind of makes up the set of circumstances in which they're living, everything that kind of underpins people's, what people normally take for granted. So it's a question that brings strange things closer, but also makes familiar things seem strange. And it's in that overlap between the strange and the familiar that anthropology is at its best. And that's what makes it a lot of fun. So that's what's great about the discipline. And no other discipline really lets you do that and feel justified. So that's our key question, how can this be? When you come to write it up as an anthropologist, you'll be trying to describe things in a different way. And you'll be asking yourself the question, what would the world have to be in order for this to be so? That's the question. So what you're doing there, I will just leave it like that. What would the world have to be in order for this to be so? So what you're doing when you're thinking in that way is that rather than saying this is weird or I don't like it or I don't understand it, you're thinking what is the logic? How are people, what is the life world in which I'm dwelling? And by life world, I really like that idea as well. There's a kind of, I'm going to put that on the board so we have that and see with that. In life world we mean not only the same shared space, but we also mean the kind of the world as it's inhabited by a living being. And that being can be human, most of the time in anthropology it is, but we also do primatology now, we do human and animal studies, and so life world also applies to other kinds of creature, not just human beings. And some of it has to do with perception, how we can perceive things, how human beings can only understand things from the point of view of primate senses. Our eyes only see three different basic color registers, other creatures see many more, the mantis shrimp sees nine, so it means that even though it's a gigantic shrimp living in the ocean, it sees many more colors than we see. I don't know what it does with that, it's very beautiful, it's also very deadly. You can look it up online under, just put mantis shrimp in and see what comes up, it's amazing. So anyway, the mantis shrimp, we can be in the same space as the mantis shrimp, but we're not in the same life world as the mantis shrimp because we perceive things differently and we're interested in different things. So when you're then an anthropologist, what we want to do in a less radical way, because you wouldn't be doing an ethnography of a mantis shrimp exactly, but with other human beings, we're really trying to find out what their life experience is, how they, the world that they live in, their life world. And you're trying to convey that in a language that's understood by people in our own, or whatever it is we mean by our own, in the culture from which you come. That's your job, you're translating. So what I want to do now, having kind of spoken very rapidly, if we were in a classroom together, I would pause and ask you, is that all right? I would ask you if you had any questions. I would give you the opportunity of thinking things through the things that I had just said in an abstract way and allowing them before I move on to specific examples. So if you want to pause for a moment and think you can do that, but I'll just keep talking as it is right now, then you can kind of resume whenever you're ready. So what I've chosen then as two examples of this kind of practice are two classic, two examples of studies of a classic topic and the discipline, which is witchcraft. And the first of these was done, and it's one of these ones that's such a classic that if you cannot call your sophomore anthropologist if you haven't heard of this example, it's like basic table manners in the discipline. And it was written by Evans Prichard, in case of my bad handwriting, Evans Prichard hyphenated name EE. And the title of the book is Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among Azandei. And there what he's doing is explaining the rationality that underlies witchcraft in Azandei experience. So he's saying, well, you might think that Azandei would be, you know, like our ancestors, our superstitious ancestors found witchcraft very frightening. They didn't really like it. Nobody actually really knew at that time what our superstitious ancestors actually did because they didn't write anything down. That's a whole other story. You can talk about that another time. But let's go with the flow for the moment. So he's saying, but actually Azandei are not like that. They are very rational. When witchcraft happens to them, they're indignant. They have a completely rational view of what they're doing. And I'm going to explain to you what it is. So the point that he makes is that when he uses what is called the, what anthropologists now think of as the granary example. So a granary is a big kind of clay structure that stands on wooden legs and Azandei grew millet at the time. And so they would store at the end of the growing season, they would fill the granary with millet that they would then use to eat during the dry season. The granaries stood on wooden legs. Termites would eat the wooden legs. But of course, if you've been around termites, you know that what they do is while they're eating, they put clay back in the space. So for a long time, the wood appears sound. But there will inevitably be a point at which it collapses. That's one line. The other line is that people sit under granaries because they like the shade, they socialize. The granary is a big structure. It's kind of crucial to every household. So people are always there of an afternoon. And it means that then now and then a granary will collapse while someone is sitting under it. So the point that he makes there is that this is the kind of moment at which, for Azandei, witchcraft has to be an operation. Because everybody knows that granaries collapse and everybody knows that people sit under them. But what you don't have is the coincidence of these two strands of interest happening at the same time. And that can only be in the Azandei view. That can only be motivated by someone's ill intent. Normally the world would be fine, but except for a human idiocy for which witchcraft cannot be used as an example. And he says that quite explicitly, if you're incompetent, you're incompetent. If you're lustful, you cannot blame your adultery on witchcraft. It's in your body, Azandei would say. So what he does is takes something, he takes this how can this be question? How can people live with this belief that would seem to us to be irrational? And then he gives us a description of the life world. So he tells us what the world would have to be in order for witchcraft to be plausible. And people also use oracles as a way of answering questions, deciding what they're going to do, deciding who might be a witch. And then if you think a person is a witch in Azandei land because it's something that comes out of people's bodies and they may not know that they're doing this, you politely go to them and say, oh, I'm so sorry, but your witchcraft has been messing with my stuff. So when I make pots or I make beer, things aren't working out for me the way they should. So I'm sure that you would really like to stop this. And then the other person who's been approached in this way would say, oh, I'm so sorry, I had no idea. And so it goes. Now the other thing he mentions in his book as a whole is that he ran his household according to Azandei rules. So in other words, rather than thinking of it as a strange notion in which he could not engage, one of the things that Evans Pritchard did was just use the same rules. And he discovered that it was just as good a way of making decisions and running his household as any others. So again, going back to what I was saying at the very beginning, it's quite an immersive process in anthropology. And you learn to think differently yourself. You become different. And I think this is one of the things that's really crucial to understand about human beings is that we're very labile. We're very changeable. We're adaptable. We're not as permanent as we think we are. And we need to just get used to it. We like to think we're really permanent, but we're not that permanent. So we need to think about that. So that's the 1937 example. And there, what we see is the use of an exotic culture as the medium for ethnographic thinking. And Evans Pritchard says, well, things like the principles that I'm outlining to you know Azandeh could tell you, but I can tell you because I'm the anthropologist. So his position is one of analytic superiority to his subject. But I want to bring us forward to my second and final example of this same process. And that's a book by Tanya Lerman. And let's see if I can get this spelled correctly here. H-R-M-A-N. And Tanya Lerman. And she actually still writes occasionally for the New York Times on religion. But her earlier study, and I think it was 1986, 87, something like that, she also studied witchcraft. But the people with whom she worked were a group of middle class university educated English people living in Islington in 1986. So you can see how her question, how can this be, was like a big question. How can people who are middle class, well educated, whatever it is we think of as being rational and part of the modern world, how can they be doing this practice? And that's what's so great about putting these two together. And so her ethnography is all about how people come to engage in these practices, how they're drawn in. And she uses the word that they use to refer to themselves, and of course it's not witches, they think of themselves as magicians. This is how they would characterize themselves in their practice. But they do do things there are, whereas with Evan's Pritchard's definition, witchcraft is something in your body, you know, using the azande model as something in your body of which you're unaware. With Lerman's things, it's practices, people engage in ritual and theatrical practices that make magic happen. Her conclusion at the end, when she comes to the description of the life world, she has, her book is called by the way, just so that in case you're interested, is Persuasions of the Witch's Craft. And that's still available. You can find it on Amazon, you know, and it's a lovely book really. Both of them are because both of them are actually very elegant writers. And that's another subject we can come to at a different point, is that much of this practice, much of what we do as anthropologists is very like what writers do in terms of finding a topic and exploring a topic, or what journalists do, with the exception that we try to draw out or we try to develop underlying principles as well as giving a good you are there kind of description. So if you read both of them, you'll feel very present in a situation. So Lerman at the end of her book has a lovely chapter called Interpretive Drift. And her point is that what happens is that as human beings we make a lot of underlying presumptions that allow us to interpret what's going happening with other people or what's happening with certain events and circumstances. And that what happens when people become drawn into magical practices is that they gradually begin to interpret events in the world very differently. They see objects differently. They begin to interpret outcomes of events very differently. And she says it's like there's no big epiphanal moment where you suddenly go, now I'm a magician. It's just that things start happening in a certain way and what she does in a manner that's very similar to Evan's picture but is more, in fact, even more embodied is give descriptions of what happened to her as she was going through this process of studying magicians for a year. She gives examples of how she had various things that were coinciding with bodily sensations that were part of the practice that seemed to also coincide with outside events. She stayed slightly removed from going native, so to speak and becoming a magician by her really clinging to the anthropological method and to her status as an anthropologist. So it's a very interesting chapter at the end of a very interesting book. From our point of view, in terms of introducing you and as I would introduce first year students to the practice of anthropology, both of these books give you, first of all, insight into classic problems but you can also see insight into the anthropological method and anthropological practices. And there are other parts of this that we can talk about but now if we were all in a room together I would be asking you if you have further questions.