Fields of experience: in between healing and harming. On conversation between Dogon healers and sorcerers.

There is a parallel history of "local healing" and "witchcraft" in Africa. They had a common destiny in anthropological debate, the ‘truth’ and ‘effectiveness’ of both of them being previously denied, trivialized, or assimilated to mere superstition. In postcolonial times traditional medicine, once just an example of subjugated knowledge, was flattened, recognized, and professionalized, although always ambivalently. Accusations of witchcraft and its imaginary met with increasing interest in anthropological studies due to its diffusion, and because witchcraft-related issues are recognized –at least by some African Penal Codes– as crimes to be punished (in other words, as 'facts'). This knot of interests needs to be explored in a way that can question the nature of witchcraft and the irreducibility of the experience of it, beyond any questions of belief in it or its ‘metaphorical’ value (West). At the same time, the ambivalent morality of healing knowledge, its socail and political value (Feierman, Hunt), and its cognitive strategy of “not knowing” (Last) have to be questioned within a phenomenological as well as historical perspective. Both reveal a common secret: the aporetic nature of their epistemology. The fieldwork on traditional healing started many years ago on the Dogon plateau (Mali), where sorcery is called ‘poison,’ dugo, and the sorcerer a ‘poisoner,’ dugone. This forced me to recognize the hidden theatre of ubiquitous violence where the witch and the healer meet, converse, and carry out their invisible battle. The unique dialogue I had over years with Eric de Rosny about these issues is the background of my ongoing ethnographical work in Dogon.