✅Relevance : RELIGION- UNIT 5 and Unit 8 Participant Observation. (Can be quoted to support the respective topics)
📌In the ethnography In Sorcery’s Shadow (1987), anthropologist Paul Stoller and his co-author Cherl Olkes extend Evans-Pritchard’s commitment to respect and understand others’ systems of knowledge, even when they may at first appear irrational, unreasonable, and incomprehensible. Stoller takes Evans-Pritchard’s work on magic and sorcery (another term for witchcraft) to a deeper personal level through direct engage- ment in the beliefs and practices of those he studied.
📌In the late 1970s Stoller arrived in the Songhay region of the Republic of Niger, West Africa, determined to learn about the role of religion in community life there. Through intensive fieldwork covering five visits over eight years, his deep involvement in a world of magic, spirits, sorcery, and spirit possession prev- alent in the Songhay and surrounding regions eventually led him to be initiated as a sorcerer’s apprentice. He memorized magical incantations. He ate special foods needed for his initiation. He ingested medicinal powders and wore magicalobjects to protect himself from antagonistic sorcerers. And he indirectly partic- ipated in an attack of sorcery that temporarily paralyzed the intended victim.
🎖Stoller’s fieldwork led him to reflect on the transformative and deeply personal experience of conducting research into people’s religious worlds:
For me, respect means accepting fully beliefs and phenomena which our system of knowledge often holds preposterous. I took my teachers seriously. They knew that I used divination in my personal life. They knew that I had eaten powders to protect myself. They knew I wore objects to demonstrate my respect for the spirits. They knew I had an altar in my house over which I recited incantations. They liked the way I carried my knowledge and power and taught me more and more. (1987, 228)
🌟The anthropological commitment to long-term, in-depth participant observation brings many of us into close contact with the beliefs, practices, and emotions of those whom we study, an intimacy that often reveals the vibrant power of religion in their lives that leaves one marked by the encounter.