ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION JOHN AND JEAN COMAROFF Studies in the Ethnographic ImaginationEthnography and the Historical Imagination |YSTIC WARRIORS GAINING GROUND IN MOZAMBIQUE WAR.” The head- lline was exotic enough to make the front page of the Chicago Tribune ‘one Sunday.’ “Call it one of the mysteries of Africa,” the report began. “In the bartle- ravaged regions of northern Mozambique, in remote straw hut villages where the modern world has scarcely penetrated, supernatural spirits and magic potions are suddenly winning a civil war that machine guns, mortars and grenades could not.” The account went on to describe an army of several thousand men and boys, sporting red headbands and brandishing spears. Named after their leader, Naparama—who is said to have been resurrected from the dead—they display on their chests the scars of a “vaccination” against bullets. Their terrain is the battle-scarred province of Zambesia, where a civil war, with South African support, has been raging for some fifteen years. Now heavily armed rebels flee at the sight of the Naparama, and government troops appear equally awed. Western diplomats and analysts, the report recounts, ‘can only scratch their heads in amazement.” The piece ends in a tone of arch authority: “Much of Naparama’s effectiveness can be explained by the predominance of super- stitious beliefs throughout Mozambique, a country where city markets always have stalls selling potions, amulets and monkey hands and ostrich feet to ward off evil spirits.” Faced with such evidence, anthropologists might be forgiven for doubr- ing that they have made any impact at all on Western consciousness. It is more than fifty years since Evans-Pritchard (1937) showed, in the plainest prose, that Zande magic was an affair of practical reason, that “primitive mentality” is a fiction of the modern mind; more than fifty years of writing 34 THEORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, HISTORIOGRAPHY in an effort to contextualize the curious. Yet we have not routed the reflex that makes “superstitious” most aptly qualify African belief. No, the straw huts and magic potions are as secure in this text as in any early nineteenth century traveler's tale. There is even the whiff of a traffic in flesh (the monkey sands; the ostrich feet). No matter that these wayward warriors are in fact the victims of a thoroughly modern conflict, that they wear civilian clothes and file into combat singing Christian songs. In the popular imagination they are fully fledged signs of the primitive, alibis for an evolutionism that puts them—and their fascinating forays—across an irretrievable gulf from ourselves. These sensationalized savages, thrust across our threshold one snowy Sunday, served to focus our concerns about the place of anthropology in the contemporary world. For the “report” told less of the Mozambican soldiers than of the culture that had conjured them up as its inverted self- image. Despite the claim that meaning has lost its moorings in the late capitalist world, there was a banal predictability about this piece. It relied on the old opposition between secular mundanity and spectral mystery, European modernism and African primitivism.? What is more, the contrast implied a telos, an all too familiar vision of History as an epic passage from past to present. The rise of the West, our cosmology tells us, is accompanied, paradoxically, by a Fall: The cost of rational advance has been our eternal exile from the sacred garden, from its enchanted ways of knowing and being. Only natural man, unreconstructed by the Midas touch of modernity, may bask in its beguiling certainties. The myth is as old as the hills, But it has had an enduring impact on post-Enlightenment thought in general and, in particular, on the social sciences. Whether they be classical or critical, a celebration of modernity or a denunciation of its iron cage, these “sciences” have, at least until recently, shared the premise of disenchantment—of the movement of mankind from religious speculation to secular reflection, from theodicy to theory, ftom culture to practical reason (Sahlins 1976a; n.d.). Anthropol- ogists, of course, have hardly ignored the effects on the discipline of the lingering legacy of evolutionism (Goody 1977; cf. Clifford 1988). None- theless, it remains in our bones, so to speak, with profound implications for our notions of history and our theories of meaning. The mystic warriors underscored our own distrust of disenchantment, our reluctance to see modernity—in stark contrast to tradition—as driving a “harsh wedge between cosmology and history” (Anderson 1983:40). To be sure, we have never given any analytic credence to this ideologically freighted opposition or to any of its aliases (simple:complex; ascrip- tive:achievement-driven; collectivistiindividualist; ritualist:rationalist; and so on). For, dressed up as pseudohistory, stich dualisms feed off one another, caricaturing the empirical realities they purport to reveal. “Tra-