Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique

Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique

West, Harry G.

Paperback

African HistoryAnthropology

ISBN10: 0226894053
ISBN13: 9780226894058
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Sep 1 2005
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.85 Width: 6.08 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
On the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers are said to feed on their victims, sometimes making lions or transforming into lions to literally devour their flesh. When the ruling FRELIMO party subscribed to socialism, it condemned sorcery beliefs and counter-sorcery practices as false consciousness, but since undertaking neoliberal reform, the party--still in power after three electoral cycles--has tolerated tradition, leaving villagers to interpret and engage with events in the idiom of sorcery. Now, when the lions prowl plateau villages, suspected sorcerers are often lynched.

In this historical ethnography of sorcery, Harry G. West draws on a decade of fieldwork and combines the perspectives of anthropology and political science to reveal how Muedans expect responsible authorities to monitor the invisible realm of sorcery and to overturn or, as Muedans call it, kupilikula sorcerers' destructive attacks by practicing a constructive form of counter-sorcery themselves. Kupilikula argues that, where neoliberal policies have fostered social division rather than security and prosperity, Muedans have, in fact, used sorcery discourse to assess and sometimes overturn reforms, advancing alternative visions of a world transformed.

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