It only recently came to my attention what a powerful sway
local beliefs surrounding magic, or uchawi,
have in my village; I think, in a large part, this is because my neighbors are
very aware that outsiders view witchcraft as backwards and primitive. They know
it’s seen as a detriment to Development, the chief goal of Tanzania’s leaders
and western nations that use diplomacy, economics, and aid to direct the Tanzanian
policy. Yet, uchawi is still a very
strong component of people’s lives.
Students
have told me that they can’t start a business in town because the uchawi won’t allow it. Witch doctors are
said to use magic to collect debts and people wear amulets made from Chinese
coins to cure illnesses. Of course, this foreignness can strike an Americans as
silly. We chuckle when we are told past ventures have failed due to magic, not
because of a complete lack of business skills and planning. However, this post isn’t
supposed to highlight something backwards or, *cringe*, primitive. Actually, I
think it highlights many flaws in western thought.
I personally find the way my neighbors live
refreshing; there’s no western self-delusion of knowing or certainty (the kind
that makes us individualistic and confident but can also be used to rationalize
terrible things, such as depleting the planet’s resources and enslaving entire
continents). People here recognize that they don’t know that much, something we
could all stand to do more of, and act
according to their experiences, the resources available to them, and what they
see as effective. Uchawi is the
unknowable, and Tanzanians give it a more healthy reverence. We, westerners,
claim to know things and live by facts, scientific principles, laws of
economics, and political systems, for example, but most of us would be hard
pressed to really explain them. We constantly put our faith in things we
understand only elementarily; we trust things we don’t know because someone
says they can and are understood, beyond our comprehension. The only difference
our ideologies have from uchawi is
someone claims to understand them, that they are not, by definition, mysterious
and apart.
A reoccurring point in Paul Farmer’s
anthropological and medical work is that people in Haiti accept what they need
to survive, be it western medical treatment or voodoo. Neither is a hindrance
to the other, they are just two ways of people trying to reduce suffering and
make sense of life; people adopt what works. Why should we ask a rural
Tanzanian to live life by the scientific method, when a life of observation
and, we would say non-rigorous, experimentation has lead them to conclude uchawi is the answer?
When I hear development workers
anguishing over Tanzanians’ inability or hesitance to adopt free market
practices, I want them to understand that those practices aren’t widely adopted
because, hey, maybe they don’t work in Tanzanian society. Westerners quickly
dismiss uchawi because of its
ineffectiveness but keep on zealously pursuing neoliberal market reforms despite
the absence of predicted outcomes. Imagine Larry Summers, the medicine man.
My experiences in Tanzania have
lead me to ask a lot of questions: Do we want a world order that has been
designed by a small, elite portion of the population? Opinions will vary. How
about if we know these same people are responsible, actively or complacently,
for incredible suffering, environmental degradation, human exploitation, and
murder in the name of ideals? If development has been going on for fifty or
more years and all we see are failed attempts to implement the same flawed and
incompatible systems and ideas, are these development goals actually
legitimate? I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re fooling ourselves; which, to
be fair, I think is the fate of humanity; although maybe not the fate of
individuals.
At the core of these problems in
development and cross-cultural understanding, I see the flawed western
dedication to knowledge. This rejection of knowledge may seem a little strange coming
from someone who studied and teaches chemistry but I think one of the best
lessons of science is the adamant dedication to skepticism and rejection of
dogmatism. Basic limitations in human knowledge and experience should garner respect
for the unknowable universe we live in. Some of the greatest scientific
understandings of the twentieth century, the uncertainty principle, quantum
mechanics, and complimentarity, are based on acceptance of our ability to have
absolute knowledge. To best understand the behavior of matter at a subatomic
scale we have to accept the boundaries to our knowledge and visualization. Is
it a coincidence that one of the theory’s founders and greatest proponents,
Neils Bohr, also happened to ponder the duality of Kierkegaard? I don’t think
so; in fact, I think the philosophical and the scientific are inseparable. One
of the basest human instincts is to try and find am unknowable meaning; with
the odds stacked against us, we should go at it every way we can.
Yet, in many instances, science has
been used to humanize a very inhuman universe, shrinking trillions of years of
entropic perpetuation and chemical perturbations into a system comprehensible
on a human scale. We learn to adapt to our environment through observation, but
we have committed many mistakes through the self delusion of knowledge. Our
certainty in human understanding has created a world where food production is
dependent on petroleum (the distant memory of our everyday friend, the sun) and
resource extraction instead of nature’s self-perpetuating bounty. What’s more,
we allow human constructs like capitalism and religion to be taken as natural
laws and are not satisfied until everything we perceive is dissected, every
little part understood.
How do I
now see science in my life? It’s a way out of complacency, driving humans to think
honestly with an understanding of our limitations. We could all do well to
remember that science in its purest form is anti-intellectual; to observe, not
suppose. Humankind’s drive to dream is what brings it back into the
intellectual realm. One of the most scientific Tanzanian’s I know told me he
saw a man, mocking his university education, turn a rope into a snake. He saw
it and he believed it. Try telling Mosley his spectra were an illusion! He did
what every great scientist has done; he saw an unexpected phenomena, he
evaluated it based on his incomplete understanding of the physical world, and,
thanks to Bohr’s theoretical work and guidance, saw something that was more or
less magic at the time: a complete collapse of Newtonian dogma, the quanta of a
nuclear world. He was fortunately in an environment to replicate his
observations. Now where’s that man with the rope?
As a human being, I’m torn because I
love and respect the glory of being a self aware, curious individual but also
recognize the unnatural and skewed world that our intellect has lead us to
create. Navigating this paradox, like so many others, is one of life’s
challenges. Ultimately, I think the only way forward is to embrace every
beautiful facet of reality in our perception, recognize our abject puniness,
and go forward cautious of our hubris and, not paralytically, cynical. I.e.
Let’s be more Vonnegut, less Old Testament. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t act
with conviction, to achieve anything we must, but let’s try not getting carried
away this time.
So, do I mock uchawi and a Tanzanian culture that can appear lazy and
unmotivated? No. In some ways, it’s more truthful than the cultures that would
criticize it. I will mock any system that refuses to respect the legitimacy of
nature, holds fast to human dogmatism, and allows the human miracle of
perception and self knowing to harm the world it draws from.
