The Feast of the Sorcerer

Sorcery has long been associated with the "dark side" of human development, along with magic and witchcraft. This text argues, however, that sorcery practices reveal critical insights into how consciousness is formed, and how human beings constitute their social and political realities. Kapferer focuses on sorcery among Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka to explore how the art of sorcery is deeply connected to social practices and lived experiences such as birth, death, sickness, and war. He describes in detail the central ritualism of exorcism, a study which challenges anthropological approaches to such topics as the sources of emotion and the dynamics of power. Seeking to overcome both "orientalist" bias and postmodern permissiveness, the book reframes sorcery as a pragmatic, conscious practice that, through its dynamic of destruction and creation, makes it possible for humans to reconstruct repeatedly their relation to the world.