The Social Dynamics of Sorcery

The difference between sacrificial and nonsacrificial violence is anything but exact; it is even arbitrary. At times the difference threatens to disappear entirely - René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 1972.

Strategically deployed, the rumor represents one of the most powerful weapons that can be utilized in interpersonal conflict. The strength of an accusation lies primarily in the persuasiveness of the speaker, the repugnance of the charge attributed to the accused, and the willingness to believe on the part of the listeners. Malicious gossip is a cudgel wielded collectively, and in societies where sorcery beliefs are deeply ingrained, it can function as an instrument that stimulates communal punishment.  

Pirai, a kanaimà’san, also known as a “dark shaman” or killer shaman. From Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (2002) by Neil Whitehead.

The sorcerer is a contradictory figure. He may be a dreaded and feared warrior, or a scapegoated loner, marginalized and despised. Among the Ilahita Arapesh horticulturalists of New Guinea, a man named Asao reveled in his status as a magician of great power. In the book The Cassowary’s Revenge (1997), anthropologist Donald Tuzin writes,

During my first fieldwork, Asao was the scariest man in the village – a sagguma, and proud of it. People would have openly despised him, only it was too dangerous to do so. It was safer to fear him, and that they certainly did…Sangguma [sorcerers] are said to acquire ghostly powers by mastering magical skills, submitting to harsh bodily disciplines, and drinking the fluids of a rotting corpse. Asao did not simply admit to all of this, he boasted of it. Animal familiars (mostly night birds) spied for him and brought him news of distant places. Asao claimed the ability to fly and to make himself invisible. With ostentatious glee, he told of participating in attacks (sangguma usually work in teams of two or three) on selected victims…Occasionally, he would be mysteriously absent for days or weeks at a time, presumably in retreat to purify his magical powers or on commission to stalk and attack someone in another, possibly distant, place (Tuzin, 57).

Tuzin adds that, “It was apparent that Asao liked being feared, liked being outrageous, liked being thought of as a scoundrel and a ghoul.” Sorcery for Asao was a practice he oriented his entire identity around, and it represented an integral part of the high degree of social status he received. Yet this public recognition came at a price;

Asao's baleful reputation carried social costs. With his three wives and two children, he lived in a bleak, unshaded camp thirty minutes' walk from the village...no community in the village would have him. Asao was a pariah. Even his own kinsmen did not like to have this golem around, living and lurking nearby...his complicity as a sorcerer was suspected in nearly every adult death… reviled and respected at the same time, Asao was viewed as a kind of public executioner (Tuzin, 58).

Anthropologist Adolphus Peter Elkin writes that across a number of Australian aboriginal societies, “to have a reputation for successful sorcery is to be a marked man. Such a man knows that sooner or later he will be designated the "murderer" of some person or other, and that either magical retaliation will be taken or else a revenge expedition will be sent to kill him.”

So, what is a sorcerer? A sorcerer is a – real or perceived – violator of norms of conduct. Such atypical behaviors often entail great risk. One who transgresses taboos that are not particularly esteemed, or that indicate one’s impressive abilities, can gain greater status and prestige, while those who infringe on regulations widely considered legitimate earn the enmity of kith and kin. This is the paradox at the heart of sorcery – the sorcerer seizes power or inadvertently orchestrates his own demise, on occasion performing each concurrently.

In Marcel Mauss’s work A General Theory of Magic (1902), he expands on the relationship between having high status and utilizing magic or sorcery, writing that,

Among the Australian Arunta, the chief of the local totemic group, its master of ceremonies, is at the same time a sorcerer. In New Guinea, most influential members of society are magicians; there are grounds for believing that throughout Melanesia, the chief – an individual who possess mana, that is, spiritual force – is endowed with magical as well as religious powers. It is no doubt for the same reasons that the mythical princes in the epic poetry of the Hindus and Celts were said to possess magical attributes (Mauss, 47).

In ‘The cultural evolution of shamanism’ (2017), anthropologist Manvir Singh notes how becoming a shaman can affect an individual’s social status, writing that, “Becoming a shaman provided a way for low-status individuals to attain prestige, such as in some hierarchical societies of the Pacific Northwest, while in other instances, shamans were regarded as attractive sexual partners.”

When it comes to distinguishing between practices that have been variously referred to as ‘sorcery’, ‘witchcraft’, ‘magic’, or ‘shamanism’, there is no widely agreed upon typology among anthropologists. In Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (2003), anthropologists Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern write that, “In principle…a distinction can be made between witchcraft as the expression of a malign power in a person’s body and sorcery as the use of a magical craft or knowledge to harm or benefit others. Especially, what is labeled witchcraft is often seen as a consuming force. The witch eats the life power of the victim.” Yet these differences are often not so clear. They add that, “in fact, people’s ways of putting ideas and practices together outrun any neat distinctions we may wish to make. Often what one writer translates as “sorcery” may look like “witchcraft” to another observer, depending on what features are emphasized.”

In the volume In Darkness and Sorcery: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (2004), anthropologist Carlos Fausto notes that, “We know that one of the shaman’s functions is to favor hunting and warfare expeditions. We also know that shamans are held capable of magically killing their adversaries and that many Amazonian people do not clearly differentiate the shaman from the witch.” Singh adds that, in many societies, shaman represent a professional class that may be somewhat distinct from the more informal recognition of a witch or sorcerer. However, shaman tap into some of the same belief systems, and may fulfill similar social roles as that of the sorcerer. In this sense, all shaman may be said to practice sorcery, but not all sorcerers are professionals in the shamanic sense.

As each of these terms were originally developed in the early days of anthropology, and were largely subject to the vagaries of individual ethnographers, I consider them all together as related phenomena here, focusing on the facets they tend have in common in the relevant ethnographic material.

There are, however, differences between types of sorcery, across and within societies, that are worth addressing. For example, anthropologist Bruce Knauft writes that the Gebusi forager-horticulturalists of New Guinea distinguished between two types of sorcery: “Bogay constitutes what ethnographers call “parcel sorcery”—sickness sent by manipulating a parcel of the victim’s leavings. By contrast, ogowili qualifies as “assault sorcery,” a cannibal attack by magical warriors.” These sort of societal distinctions are not uncommon. Sorcery in warfare tends to be the undertaking of men, while the more subtle shades of magical torment can be deployed by either sex.

While sorcery can be wielded by persons of high status in some societies or circumstances, accusations of sorcery can also be used to impose punishments on marginalized individuals. Among the Mundurucu horticulturalists of the Amazon, anthropologists Yolanda and Robert F. Murphey write that, “For a person to shirk group work bespeaks of alienation from others, a dangerous pose in a society that identifies sorcerers by their estrangement from their fellowman – and kills them for the crime of witchcraft.” Knauft says that, “Gebusi sorcery is a form of scapegoating. The identity of sorcerers is “confirmed” by elaborate spirit inquests and divinations. Male spirit mediums play a key role in Gebusi sorcery accusations.”

Sorcery beliefs can exist as a key component of interpersonal or intergroup conflict. Of the Azande farmers of north central Africa, anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard notes that, “Death is due to witchcraft and must be avenged. All other practices connected with witchcraft are epitomized in the action of vengeance.” For the Yanomami forager-horticulturalists of the Amazon, Napoleon Chagnon says that, “New wars usually develop when charges of sorcery are leveled against the members of a different group.”

Accusations of sorcery can be both a cause of, and response to, conflict. Stewart and Strathern note that, in many cases, “While the witch or sorcerer is seen as the source of evil or wrong doing, it is the accusers who can be seen as playing the aggressive role.” They add that, “Rumor and gossip form the substratum from which accusations of sorcery or witchcraft may be made.” While the sorcerer is ostensibly a figure of great power, the accusation itself can contain far more hostile magic, as it may impel the group to engage in violent sanctioning of the putative magician. In The Scapegoat (1986), anthropologist René Girard writes that, “Magical thought seeks “a significant cause on the level of social relations,” in other words a human being, a victim, a scapegoat.” Girard adds that, “Those who are suffering are not interested in natural causes. Only magic makes “corrective intervention" possible, and everyone eagerly seeks a magician who can put things right.”

Accusations of improper sorcery can be used tactically by individuals to punish those they’re in conflict with, or to benefit themselves. Knauft notes that, “The opinion of spirits during all-night séances has been especially influential for finding and interpreting “evidence” of sorcery. Though spirit mediums should be neutral parties, the outcome of the sorcery inquest may benefit the spirit medium who conducts them.” Knauft tells the story of a spirit medium named Swamin, who redirected sorcery suspicions away from an accused woman named Sialim, and months later took her as his wife. Swamin had previously identified Sialim’s own mother, Mokoyl, as the alleged sorcerer responsible for killing his first wife, and he executed Mokoyl himself.

Among the Gebusi, individuals from families who fail to follow socially prescribed marriage exchanges were often accused of sorcery. Knauft writes that, “In this sense sorcery homicide is ultimately about male control of marriageable women. However, these statistically significant factors are neither publicly nor privately recognized by Gebusi as a cause of homicide against sorcery suspects, even by the closest kin of those killed.” Anthropologists Neil Whitehead and Robin Wright also note the strategic element of sorcery allegations in the Amazon, writing that, “sorcery accusations may represent forms of discourse about tensions in intervillage and interethnic relations, and may be structured by the idiom of kinship (consanguinity and affinity) and village hierarchy.”

In their study of 800 households in rural southwestern China, anthropologist Ruth Mace and her colleagues found that households accused of practicing witchcraft were often excluded from mainstream social networks, and instead preferentially associated amongst themselves. Mace and her colleagues argue that this “stigmatization originally arose as a mechanism to harm female competitors.” Stewart and Strathern sum up many of the patterns identified here, writing that,

Claims and counterclaims about the activities of witches and sorcerers tend to exist in the background of community affairs in the societies where such ideas are held. They flourish in the shadows, fed by gossip and rumor, and emerge into public debate or accusations only in times of specific tension, most often following the actual sickness or death of someone in a prominent family. Notably, rumors follow the patterns of imputed jealousies, hostilities, and resentments that also keep mostly to the shadows or lurk in the background of social life, ready to reveal themselves in times of crisis. Or they swing into play at times of unusual or epidemic deaths that themselves cause panic and fear (Stewart & Strathern, 7).

Beyond self-interested social conflict, or misattributed suspicions against marginal figures, sorcery accusations can function as a component of a legal system used to punish criminals and known killers. In his work on Ifugao law, anthropologist Roy Franklin Barton describes one such case;

Atiwan of Longa acquired a reputation as a sorcerer. He killed several of his kinsmen in Baay. Even his relatives in Longa admitted that he was a sorcerer, and said that he ought to be killed. Ginnid of Baay and several companions went to Longa one night, and called to Atiwan that they had come to see him. He opened the house and put down the ladder. The party ascended, and set upon Atiwan with their war knives and killed him. In trying to protect him, his wife, Dinaon, was wounded. The killing was universally approved.

The concept of sorcery hits at core notions of power and punishment, community and ostracism, causation and chance; it offers a framework both for understanding the world and mediating social relationships. In his book on The Australian Aborigines (1964), Elkin writes that sorcery across Australian societies “arises from a belief that illness and death and even accidents are caused by magical or animistic actions.” Across the world, in South America, anthropologist Esther Jean Langdon concurs in the volume In Darkness and Sorcery: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (2004), writing that,

one is struck by the shared images throughout these ethnographies associated with death and illness. Both are generally caused by aggressive activities and forces in the occult side of reality, whether they be instigated by humans or not. “Being eaten from the inside” is an extremely widespread image of illnesses that are attributed to invisible attacks. Putrid smells and other rotten qualities, particularly the stench of tobacco and blood, represent the decay of death as well as secret uncontrolled aggression (Whitehead, 308).

Fausto argues that Amazon shamanism is best understood as “predatory animism: subjectivity is attributed to human and nonhuman entities, with whom some people are capable of interacting verbally and establishing relationships of adoption or alliance, which permit them to act upon the world in order to cure, to fertilize, and to kill.”

“When outcomes of uncertainty are controlled by invisible forces, cultural selection will favor individuals who claim special abilities of interacting with those forces.” Figure from ‘The cultural evolution of shamanism’ (2017) by Manvir Singh, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

The sorcerer is a paradox. At times both respected for their talent, and despised for their impropriety, they may be elevated by the community or punished and killed. Sorcery beliefs can be used to understand the world, seeking out causes of uncertain events, and may be embraced by self-interested parties to scapegoat enemies and promote collective violence. Functioning as a legal system, a practical tool of manipulation and control, a social philosophy, and a conceptual framework for understanding the world, sorcery beliefs have been a fundamental component of human societies the world over.

Sorcerers and their accusers are still among us, yet rather than fetishes and incantations, their weapons are often social networks and mass media. Take a recent case from the New York Times: An ornithologist collects a “ghost” bird seeking to learn its secrets, is accused of murdering a totemic animal, and is hit with counter-witchcraft advocating his elimination from society. In the aftermath, his fellow ornithologists vow to continue their activities with greater secrecy. This is modern sorcery, framed in terms more ostensibly moral than magical, but containing many of the elements of traditional sorcery—scapegoating, gossip, fear-mongering, rumors, ostracism, manipulation of information, reputational management, collective punishment. As Stewart and Strathern write, “even when particular notions of witchcraft or sorcery are not involved, rumor and gossip themselves may act as a kind of witchcraft, projecting guilt on others in ways that may cause them harm: for example, to lose their jobs, to be physically attacked, or to be socially shamed.”

Ritual mutilation, human consumption, and contemporary insulation

Until you have used a sieve to find the finger bones of a newborn baby in ploughsoil it is hard to explain how small they are – Timothy Taylor, The Buried Soul – How Humans Invented Death, 2002.

There are many dimensions of human behavior, and quite a few of them are unpleasant or inconceivable to modern, western eyes. One stares repulsed or uncomprehendingly at acts that likely would have been much more commonplace across cultures throughout our history. Consider the mourning practices of the Gebusi forager-horticulturalists of New Guinea. Anthropologist Bruce Knauft recounts the aftermath of the death of a man named Dugawe;

The following morning, Dugawe’s body was grossly bloated. His swollen limbs oozed corpse fluid, and his peeling skin exposed putrid yellowgreen flesh. His belly and even his genitals had swelled with the gases of decomposition. The stench was unforgettable; it burned up my nose, down my throat, and into my brain. Equally powerful were the actions of Dugawe’s female kin. With unearthly sobs, they draped themselves physically over the corpse, lovingly massaged its slime, and drew back its skin. They rubbed their arms and legs with the ooze of the body. Corpse fluid on one’s skin is a tangible sign of grief, of physical as well as emotional connection to the deceased—making one’s own body like the corpse. Seeing this, Dugawe’s departing soul was said to know how much they cared for him and ease his anger at having died, at least a little (Knauft, 51).

Knauft describes his own reaction to viewing this behavior; “Prior to fieldwork, the only dead body I had seen was the sedate face of a friend of my parents at an open-casket funeral. Now I was shocked and repulsed by the events surrounding Dugawe’s death. It seemed hideous that his corpse was allowed to decay and that our women friends wallowed in its stench.”

The Gebusi also previously had a practice of killing, cooking, and eating those suspected of committing sorcery. Knauft tells the story of a woman named Mokoyl, who was killed after being accused of sorcery, “Her body was summarily buried in the forest, but villagers from another settlement, knowing she had been killed as a sorceress, dug up and cooked and ate parts of the body before it decomposed. In doing so, they indicated their own support for the killing.”

Traditions of cannibalism often revolve around attempts to control the violent and unpredictable elements of life, as well as the afterlife. In Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (1986), anthropologist Peggy Sanday writes that,

In many reports, the events associated with cannibalism refer not to hunger but to the physical control of chaos. For example, the victim is cast as the living metaphor for animality, chaos, and the powers of darkness - all those things people feel must be tamed, destroyed, or assimilated in the interest of an orderly social life. Cannibalism is then associated with a destructive power that must be propitiated or destroyed, and the act of propitiation or destruction is directly tied to social survival (Sanday, 6).

As anthropologists Kim Hill and Ana Magdalena Hurtado note of the Ypety Ache of Paraguay, after the death of a particularly hated individual, or if the death was especially violent, they “simply ate the cooked flesh of such cadavers and broke open the skulls to liberate the vengeful spirit rather than cremating the body completely.”

Anthropologist Fitz John Porter Poole described the funerary rites of the Bimin-Kuskusmin horticulturalists, also of New Guinea, writing that, "The wife of a deceased man, if she is still within her childbearing years, is expected to eat a tiny, raw fragment of flesh from her dead husband's penis.” Notably, however, there is good reason to think many Bimin-Kuskusmin themselves found these practices quite unpleasant. “Indeed, most Bimin-Kuskusmin consider this mortuary act to be particularly degrading and disgusting.” Poole considers – but does not necessarily endorse – the idea that “some expressions [of disgust towards these rituals] were shaped by the knowledge that Europeans (government officials and missionaries) were strongly against such practices.”

Other Bimin-Kuskusmin rituals also showed a strong connection to bodily fluids in ways that are largely incongruous with modern western sensibilities. Buried tubes of menstrual blood were used in ritual fertilization of crops considered to be "female" (cultivated by women), such as sweet potatoes. In taro gardens, which are cared for by men, “tubes of semen are placed there to strengthen the finiik spirit believed to inhabit the tubers.” Men of the Arunta foragers of Australia would drink some of each other’s blood under the belief that it would make them stronger and prevent treachery. Anthropologists Francis Gillen and Walter Spencer wrote that, “If [a man] refused to drink the blood, then, as actually happened in one case known to us, his mouth would be forced open and blood poured into it, which would have just the same binding influence as if the drinking had been a voluntary one.” Gillen and Spencer also discuss practices of treating sickness with blood, adding that,

When a woman is very ill and weak, one of her male Umba, to whom she is Mia alkulla – that is, he is the son of one of her younger sisters – may volunteer to strengthen her with his blood, in which case all the women and children are sent away from her. The man draws a quantity of blood from [his] sub-incised urethra, and she drinks part of it, while he rubs the remainder over her body, adding afterwards a coating of red ochre and grease. [italics added]

Beyond funerary cannibalism, and the particular attention given to viscera and bodily fluids in rituals and social practices, cultures the world over have practiced forms of extreme body modification. In Captain James Cook’s journals describing his voyage to the Polynesian Islands, he described the amputation practices of the people of Tonga;

When I first visited these islands, during my last voyage, I observed that many of the inhabitants had one or both of their little fingers cut off; and we could not then receive any satisfactory account of the reason of this mutilation. but we now learned, that this operation is performed when they labour under some grievous disease, and think themselves in danger of dying. They suppose, that the Deity will accept of the little finger, as a sort of sacrifice efficacious enough to procure the recovery of their health. They cut it off with one of their stone hatchets. There was scarcely one in ten of them whom we did not find thus mutilated, in one or both hands; which has a disagreeable effect, especially as they sometimes cut too close, that they encroach upon the bone of the hand which joins to the amputated finger (Cook, 403).

Among several Xhosa-speaking populations, there was another ritual mutilation practice involving fingers, known as ingqithi, which was described by the superintendent of a mission hospital in South Africa in 1964;

The ingqithi custom is a ritual mutilation among several Xhosa-speaking tribes, usually performed upon children of pre-school age, in which the last portion of one of the fingers is amputated. The word is derived from the verb ukuthi qithiqithi, which means “to separate”. Separation, anatomical as well as psychological, is an important element in this custom…The whole family witnesses the ceremony, no outsider being present…the mutilation is not medically an amputation, but an exarticulation. The joint between the middle and the distal phalanx is crossed, the knife not cutting the bone… Special attention is paid to concealing the amputated portion of the finger. A burial place is chosen in the wall of the hut, at the top of which a little hole is made, and the phalanx is wrapped in cow-dung and plastered into that hole. This secrecy is exercised to prevent witches or evil spirits from detecting the piece of finger, as this would be fatal to the child. People say that if witches found it, the wound could swell and become septic.

Among 677 patients at Dr. Jensen’s hospital in 1964, 225 (33 percent) had ingqithi.

In a previous article, I described numerous historical traditions of extracting and displaying human heads, both during warfare and for ritual purposes. Heads would be severed, either in war or after the death of a relative, then in some cases organs would be removed, parts would be eaten, the head would be treated with chemicals and stitched, or defleshed, and prominently displayed. Such traditions have existed all over the world.

Head-hunting, extreme body mutilation, sorcery killings, cannibalism, human sacrifice; these were very real components of many human societies throughout history.

Heads taken by the Iban people of Borneo. From The pagan tribes of Borneo (1912) by Charles Hose

Anthropologist Timothy Taylor writes that the concept of ‘visceral insulation’ “describes the way in which the necessary specialization of the modern world screens or insulates people from 'visceral' things - bodies, blood, death screams, screams in in childbirth, excessive grieving…” He argues that this insulation has its genesis in the development of civilizations with substantial economic specialization;

Within civilizations, dirty and distressing jobs were delegated to people who could become habituated to them. The viscerally immersed specializations of slaughterers, tanners, butchers, embalmers, grave-diggers, and refuse collectors free others to become insulated enough to specialize in the arts and sciences. Without visceral insulation there would have been no Johann Sebastian Bach and no Marie Curie (Taylor 279).

Occupational specialization combined with modern infrastructure, sanitation systems, and medicine leads to most people in wealthy, industrialized societies – most of the time – having a degree of insulation from the violence, death, and disease that has been substantially more common throughout human history. Taylor adds that, “Visceral insulation, in prehistory and history, has led to the creation of a series of increasingly distinct and exclusive comfort zones.”

Being shielded from the violent, the horrifying, and the disgusting elements of life leads to a perspective of human existence that is fundamentally alien to the beliefs and social practices that have come before. Eating the body parts of a hated enemy or a loved one, collecting severed heads, cutting off fingers, or drinking the blood of a relative to cure a sickness, are behaviors that can only make sense among people familiar with the visceral. People who saw one-third of their children die in infancy, who had to regularly hunt, kill, and butcher animals themselves for food, where less than half of children made it to adulthood, and warfare was often fundamentally personal and endemic.

In sanitized environments, the visceral is kept hidden – and represents a much-maligned intruder – yet many cultures had to acclimate to its frequent appearance. If their practices seem strange, it is only because we inhabit societies that have been constructed precisely to shield us from this reality.

A Tale of Sorcery and Marriage Among the Gebusi

This post covers events described in the book The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World (2016) by Bruce Knauft.

In 1980, while anthropologist Bruce Knauft was conducting fieldwork among the Gebusi forager-horticulturalists of New Guinea, a Gebusi man named Dugawe killed himself.

Knauft did not see the act, only its aftermath, and with other Gebusi individuals he went into the forest to inspect the body. When he arrived, he saw Dugawe’s wife, Sialim, weeping over Dugawe’s corpse. Knauft looked for signs of foul play, and wondered if the death may have been a murder disguised as a suicide. “But the only sign of struggle was a mark on the front of his faded T-shirt; something had poked and scratched down its fabric for a couple of inches.” However, nothing had pierced his skin.

After discussing it with the others, Knauft managed to piece together part of the story:

It turned out that Dugawe had fought earlier that day with his wife, Sialim. During the scuffle, she had held an arrow, thrust it toward him, and scratched his shirt. Their fight had been about a sexual affair that was generally acknowledged between Sialim and a young man, Sagawa. Publicly cuckolded, Dugawe had been furious. He had wanted to kill his wayward wife, and perhaps her lover as well. But Silap and others had discouraged him from doing this. Incensed but lacking other recourse, Dugawe had fought with his wife. He was further shamed by her scratching his shirt, his prized possession. When she went off to fetch water, the men said, he took tubes of poison he had previously made to kill fish in the stream and, in a fit of rage, drank them all. Empty tubes with the smell of the deadly toxin were found nearby. Dugawe had died a writhing death after poisoning himself in anger against his wife (Knauft, 49).

A number of Gebusi men lashed Dugawe’s body to a makeshift stretcher to carry him back to the village, with Knauft walking with them, and Sialim trailing behind. As they were walking through the forest, two women converged on them from another direction. Seeing Dugawe’s body, the two women began screaming and attacking Sialim. They were Dugawe’s extended “mothers”, not by blood, but through an important social kinship category. One of the women began hitting Sialim with the blunt side of a steel axe. She soon ended her attack and began sobbing over the body, while the other woman started shoving Sialim with a pointed stick. The men soon intervened and wrestled them both away, and then continued carrying the body to the village.

When they arrived at the village, they laid Dugawe’s body down in his family house. A crowd of women were waiting nearby and they began beating Sialim, who “could not run away without neglecting her duty to mourn her dead husband.” Knauft writes that, “Our neighbor, Owaya, emerged waving a firebrand in her face and shouted, “Si-nay!” [to Sialim]. I later learned this meant, “We’re going to cook and eat you!”—which is what Gebusi traditionally did to persons executed as sorcerers.”

Knauft goes in to more detail:

Only an hour later, a constable arrived from Nomad Station [the local center of government]. Silap and other men had taken the rare step of sending word to the Nomad Station about Dugawe’s death. Why? Apparently, villagers had worried that authorities might receive a different tale of Dugawe’s death from another source. After a long conversation through several interpreters, the constable finally wrote a brief entry in his police book: “Reason of death: Suicide caused by his wife fooling around.” Though the constable’s inquiry was completed, discussion about Sialim continued. Given the anger against her, it was decided that she should go with the officer back to Nomad and stay there for her own protection. The main events of the day were then over; the piercing wails of women haunted the night.

The Gebusi traditionally believed that all adult deaths were due to sorcery (I described some of the changes the Gebusi have recently undergone in a previous article for Quillette). As a consequence, a sorcery inquest was required to determine who ‘killed’ Dugawe, even though it seemed clear to Knauft that he had killed himself. The sorcery investigation would occur weeks after Dugawe’s death. In the interim, Knauft learned new information that substantially changed his perspective of Sialim and Dugawe:

by the time this sorcery investigation resumed, my opinion of Sialim had changed. At first, I thought she had acted irresponsibly. She had carried on a sexual affair with a young man named Sagawa, and she had apparently shamed her husband into killing himself. But additional facts painted a different picture. As Eileen [Knauft’s wife] found out from the women, Dugawe had previously killed not only his first wife but also his own small son. These murders had been so awful that villagers had informed the police, and Dugawe had served a five-year term at the Western Province prison. To my knowledge, no other Gebusi had ever been incarcerated there—or has been since. With his prison term over, Dugawe had returned to the Gebusi and married Sialim, who had recently been widowed by the death of Dugawe’s “brother.” Gebusi widows often end up marrying a clan brother of their dead husband. This custom is common in a range of societies; anthropologists call it marriage by “levirate.” Such marriages can keep a woman— her residence, her labor, and her children—within the clan of the deceased husband. Women themselves may desire this. Knowing Dugawe’s history, however, Sialim did not want to marry him. As newlyweds, they fought, and he frequently beat her. On one occasion, she showed her bruises to police at the Nomad Station, and, knowing his violent history, they put him in jail. While he was there, Sialim took up with Sagawa, her young lover. Perhaps she hoped her new relationship would become a de facto marriage. But Dugawe was discharged earlier than expected. Enraged, he wanted to kill Sialim and Sagawa. But Silap and other men persuaded him this would only give him a longer prison term than he had already endured. Amid this tension, Dugawe took up again with Sialim. But after their fight, he killed himself (Knauft, 53).

The sorcery inquisition was conducted five weeks after Dugawe’s death, and was led by the local spirit medium, a man named Swamin.

The spirits that Swamin conferred with apparently redirected the popular suspicion away from Sialim as culprit. “Rather than accuse Sialim, the spirits described how ogowili [sorcerer] warriors had descended on Dugawe from a distant settlement while Sialim was away fetching water.” Armed with this knowledge, the men searched the location where Dugawe died for evidence of this sorcery attack:

we searched for the magically transformed remains of the sorcerers’ attack. With Swamin’s spirits guiding us, we found an odd-looking stick that was said to be the “bush knife” that the sorcerers had used to cut Dugawe open. An indentation in the ground was the “footprint” of an ogowili. A discolored patch of dirt was Dugawe’s “blood,” which poured out during the attack. As incredulous as I was, the men around me seemed completely convinced (Knauft, 56).

Knauft adds that they tried to track the putative culprits back to their distant settlement, but, “Swamin’s spirits lost the trail as we waded up a stream. As such, we could not determine exactly where the sorcerers were from, or their identity. But the investigation did validate that Dugawe had been killed by an assault sorcerer from a distant village. It being impossible to discover more, no further action was taken.”

This was the end of the sorcery investigation, and it left Sialim in the clear. Over the next seven months, she spent more and more time with Swamin, the spirit medium who exonerated her. “Strong and robust for a middle-aged man, Swamin had been a widower.” Eventually, she consented to marry him, despite the objections of Sagawa, the young man she had an affair with. By the end of Knauft’s fieldwork, they seemed to be happily married…

However, more details are required to flesh out this story. A year before Knauft’s arrival, Swamin had killed Sialim’s own mother. Her mother, Mokoyl, was thought to be a sorcerer responsible for Swamin’s first wife’s death. l will end with Knauft’s description:

At the time, Mokoyl tried to prove her innocence by conducting a bird egg divination—cooking eggs placed inside a large mound of sago starch. Unfortunately, the eggs were badly undercooked. When Mokoyl had given Swamin one of the eggs to eat—as she was expected to do—he had vomited. This was taken as a sign that Swamin’s dead wife was clutching his throat, refusing Mokoyl’s food and confirming her guilt. A few weeks afterward, about a year before we began our fieldwork, Swamin tracked Mokoyl alone in the forest and split her skull with a bush knife. As the spiritual evidence had confirmed Mokoyl’s guilt, most in the community agreed she had been guilty and deserved to die. Her body was summarily buried in the forest, but villagers from another settlement, knowing she had been killed as a sorceress, dug up and cooked and ate parts of the body before it decomposed. In doing so, they indicated their own support for the killing. Government officers never discovered what happened.

The Human Penis is Remarkably Boring

In case you missed it, I wrote an article for Quillette critiquing the first episode (titled ‘Monogamy, explained’) of Vox’s new Netflix series. Author Christopher Ryan was featured in that video, and he provided a very civil and thoughtful reply to my article in the comments section at Quillette.

He makes two main points here that I think are worth engaging with further. The second one (communal caregiving among foragers), I will save for a later date, to focus narrowly here on the first.

The first point is in regard to the suite of features that Ryan argues testify “in support of ancestral promiscuity.” These being: “penis morphology, repeated thrusting movement, frequent non-reproductive sexual behavior, female multiple orgasm, female copulatory vocalization, etc.).”

Let’s consider penis morphology. I will quote at length the case Ryan makes regarding the uniqueness of the human penis in Sex at Dawn:

Despite its lack of curlicues, the human penis is not without interesting design features. Primate sexuality expert Alan Dixson writes, “In primates which live in family groups consisting of an adult pair plus offspring [such as gibbons] the male usually has a small and relatively unspecialized penis.” Say what you will about the human penis, but it ain’t small or unspecialized. Reproductive biologist Roger Short (real name) writes, “The great size of the erect human penis, in marked contrast to that of the Great Apes, makes one wonder what particular evolutionary forces have been at work.” Geoffrey Miller just comes out and says it: “Adult male humans have the longest, thickest, and most flexible penises of any living primate.” So there.

            Homo sapiens: the great ape with the great penis!

The unusual flared glans of the human penis forming the coronal ridge, combined with the repeated thrusting action characteristic of human intercourse—ranging anywhere from ten to five hundred thrusts per romantic interlude—creates a vacuum in the female’s reproductive tract. This vacuum pulls any previously deposited semen away from the ovum, thus aiding the sperm about to be sent into action. But wouldn’t this vacuum action also draw away a man’s own sperm? No, because upon ejaculation, the head of the penis shrinks in size before any loss of tumescence (stiffness) in the shaft, thus neutralizing the suction that might have pulled his own boys back. Very clever.

Intrepid researchers have demonstrated this process, known as semen displacement, using artificial semen made of cornstarch (the same recipe used to simulate exaggerated ejaculates in many pornographic films), latex vaginas, and artificial penises in a proper university laboratory setting. Professor Gordon G. Gallup and his team reported that more than 90 percent of the cornstarch mixture was displaced with just a single thrust of their lab penis. “We theorize that as a consequence of competition for paternity, human males evolved uniquely configured penises that function to displace semen from the vagina left by other males,” Gallup told BBC News Online. (Ryan, 234).

Broadly, we can break Ryan's argument down into a number of specific claims:

1) The human penis has “interesting [unique] design features,” it’s “specialized.”

2) The human penis is, among other virtues, the “longest…of any living primate.” (according to Geoffrey Miller, and quoted favorably by Ryan)

3) The flared glans of the human penis is “unusual” and that, according to Gordon G. Gallup, “as a consequence of competition for paternity, human males evolved uniquely configured penises that function to displace semen from the vagina left by other males.”

Now, Sex at Dawn was published in early 2010; however, in 2009, a book was published by primatologist Alan Dixson, who Ryan accurately describes as a “primate sexuality expert.” Ryan repeatedly quotes Dixson’s work from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s in Sex at Dawn, but I’m guessing Dixson’s 2009 book, Sexual Selection and the Origins of Human Mating Systems, was published too late for Ryan to integrate his insights from that work into his own, since it is not referenced.

This is unfortunate, because Dixson offers a pretty comprehensive breakdown for why each of these claims are likely mistaken.

First, the human penis actually seems to be comparatively quite dull in terms of “design features”. Here are illustrations from Dixson’s work on the penile morphology of various primates.

A-H are from primates which have polygynous mating systems, while I-N are from primates with multi-male/multi-female mating systems. As you can see, primates with polygynous mating systems have comparatively simple penises, much more similar to that of humans, compared to those of multi-male/multi-female mating primates.

To better compare primate penile complexity, Dixson created a rating system:

Ratings of penile complexity (length, distal complexity, size of baculum, and penile spines) show some consistent differences between these mating systems, as can be seen in Figure 3.22. Using a 5-point scale, each trait was rated for species representing forty-eight primate mate genera…Primates in which the females typically show multi-partner matings (multi-male/multi-female and dispersed mating systems) have significantly longer and distally more complex penes than representatives of polygynous or monogamous genera (Figure 3.22). They also tend to have longer bacula (when present) and larger penile spines, but these traits are more variable.

Regarding humans, “Human penile morphology is not exceptional when compared to that of the prosimians, monkeys, and apes. The overall rating for all four traits analysed is 10 for H. sapiens. This is the same rating as scored by a number of putatively monogamous or polygynous primates (e.g. Leontopithecus, Callimico, Erythrocebus, Theropithecus) and less than the ratings given to twenty-seven of the forty-eight primate genera included in the study.”

So in regard to penile morphology, humans are comfortably within the norm of monogamous and polygynous primates, and unlike multi-male/multi-female mating primates.

Next, let’s consider size. In Sex at Dawn, Ryan shows this graph:

The problem with this graph is that it compares erect human penises with flaccid bonobo, chimp, and gorilla penises. Dixson provides a table comparing erect and flaccid penis length between chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and humans:

As you can see, when erect, human penis length is actually roughly the same as that of chimps and bonobos. Further, Dixson writes that, “The erect human penis is comparable in length to those of other primates, in relation to body size.”

So the human penis is not uniquely long: it is roughly the same length as that of chimps and bonobos, and it scales with body size to about the same degree as most other primates. Its size is not particularly impressive.

However, when considering its girth, the human penis might be at least somewhat unique. Dixson adds that, “Only its circumference is unusual when compared to the penes of other hominoids. However, even this comparison may not hold true for some primates, such as the spider monkeys (Ateles) which have large and thick penes.”

I can't find any comparative data on penis circumference, in Dixson's work or elsewhere, so this question has to be tabled. Dixson writes that, "No accurate data on penile circumferences are available for apes, or for the vast majority of primate species."

Nonetheless, even if the human penis is uniquely thick (which has yet to be demonstrated) there is no reason to think this has anything to do with sperm competition or "ancestral promiscuity".

Finally, what about Gallup’s ‘semen displacement’ hypothesis? Again, Dixson must disappoint. I will quote him at length here, but you can skip to the bolded parts to get the gist of his argument.

Gallup et al. (2003) tested Baker and Bellis's (1995) hypothesis concerning the 'plunger' action of the human glans penis in relation to sperm competition. They used models of human penes and vaginae to examine the putative effects of copulatory movements upon displacement of previously deposited (artificial) semen. Despite their contention that the large diameter of the human glans and its posterior margin (corona) represent adaptations to displace semen and provide an advantage in sperm competition, I can find no comparative evidence to support this view. A helmet or acorn-shaped glans is common amongst Old World monkeys, such as various colobines, macaques, baboons, mangabeys, and guenons, regardless of whether they have polygynous or multi-male/multi-female mating systems (see Figure 3.21 for examples). Gallup et al. stress that reduced length of the portion of the penile shaft covered by the prepuce (the pars intrapreputialis) in man is unusual, citing this as an adaptation to assist in removing semen from the vagina. However, this trait is shared by H. sapiens and the gorilla which, despite having a very small penis in relation to its body size, exhibits a distal morphology more similar to the human condition than is the case for other apes… The gorilla's genitalia are remarkably similar (in miniature) to the human condition. Among the African apes, the chimpanzee and the bonobo have the most specialized and derived penile morphologies. A glans penis is lacking, and distally the penis is filiform and contains a very small baculum (6.9 mm in P. troglodytes and 8.5 mm in P. paniscus)…The information presented thus far has, I hope, helped the reader to place earlier accounts of human penile morphology and that of apes and other primates in comparative perspective. A detailed argument has been made here because I believe it necessary to correct misunderstandings about the role of sexual selection and sperm competition in relation to the evolution of the human genitalia. It is highly unlikely that penile size or shape in human beings has been influenced by sexual selection via sperm competition…Nor is there any credible evidence that human penes evolved as plungers to displace semen deposited by previous males.

So the human glans penis is not actually unique, and is in fact very similar to that of numerous Old World Monkeys, and much of human penis morphology is actually quite similar (though larger) to that of gorillas (who have a polygynous mating system). In contrast, chimps and bonobos (with multi-male/multi-female mating systems) have a much more specialized penile morphology, and yet they lack the glans penis that Gallup (likely incorrectly) considers to be an adaptation for sperm competition (which is extreme among chimps and bonobos).

I’m afraid your dick is remarkably boring.

Now, I haven’t delved deeply in regards to the reasons for “frequent non-reproductive sexual behavior, female multiple orgasm, female copulatory vocalization, etc,” in humans, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that for any argument that associates these behaviors with “ancestral promiscuity,” you could equally come up with a model that considers them to be adaptations for pair-bonding in humans. Or by-products of other features. I’ll look a bit more into it, though, and If I find anything notable I’ll do a follow up.

Otherwise, in part 2, I’ll address Ryan’s claims in Sex at Dawn, and in his reply to my article, about communal caregiving among foragers.