Afterword: Political Ethnography as Art and Science

Adam Ashforth has written one of the recent political ethnographies I most admire. His Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa draws on a total of about three years’ residence during the 1990s in Soweto (South West Township), an Apartheid-built black suburb of Johannesburg, plus subsequent visits to his adopted family and friends there. Earlier, Ashforth wrote an impressive historical analysis of the process by which Apartheid took shape (Ashforth, 1990). But preparation for his book on witchcraft, violence, and democracy plunged him shoulder-deep into ethnography. Through first hand observation, personal intervention, and incessant interrogation of his acquaintances, Ashforth built up a powerful picture of coping, strife, and hope amid vicious violence. Ashforth’s ethnographic involvement forced him to abandon many a preconceived category and explanation of struggle during and after Apartheid. Ashforth’s ethnography yielded remarkable, even disturbing, results. His analysis persuades me, at least, of two surprising conclusions I long resisted when hearing them from Adam: first, that no one can make sense of local South African politics without understanding the enormous part played by fears about, accusations of, and reactions to witchcraft in Soweto’s (and, by extension, South Africa’s) everyday politics; second, that no one can hope to deal with South Africa’s devastating AIDS epidemic or build local-level democracy without confronting witchcraft directly. Many a political ethnographer will resonate to Ashforth’s reflection: