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Harry G. West. Ethnographic Sorcery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 128 pp.
This tiny, readable book consists of fifteen short chapters averaging six pages, each arranged according to a thematic that flows directly from Harry West's ethnographic encounters with people living on the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique and with his scholarly musings regarding questions of theory, epistemology, sorcery, truth-claims and discourse - in other words, about knowledge. In this book-which initially formed part of an earlier draft of his important book Kupilikula (2005)-West sets out to "explore the epistemological paradox arising from the ethnographic encounter of sorcery" (p. xi). He takes the reader on a number of brief but forceful encounters with debates within anthropology on the question of knowledge...