Penis snatching comes to Europe

I’m not much of a comedian, but I can usually elicit a chuckle -- if only of disbelief -- by talking about penis snatching. Depending on one’s point of view, genital removal by occult means is either a rumor or an epidemic or both, and it has swept across western, central and southern Africa over the past two decades or so. I encountered an outbreak in Tiringoulou, in CAR’s far Northeast, in March 2010. Penis snatching falls into solidly into the category of African-news-so-bizarre-it’s-funny, and for that reason I often feel a little guilty when I regale people with these tales, for I fear they stoke false images of Africa as the home of startlingly irrational people.

What I hadn’t realized until my mom happened upon a reference on the Norwegian Wikipedia site about witch trials there is that genital theft was a major preoccupation in Europe, too, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries. Detailed accounts of these crimes can be found in the 1486 volume Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”). The Malleus’s authorship is attributed to two Dominican scholar/inquisitioners living in present-day Germany. Their objective was simple: to convince people that witchcraft exists and that it is a devil-driven scourge demanding immediate eradication. After offering a proof of the existence of witchcraft, the authors begin describing different modes of witchcraft, how they are perpetrated, and what can be done to treat them. They conclude with detailed discussion of how witches should be punished and reformed, which, though advocating the death penalty and torture in certain cases, are surprisingly un-bloody, with forgiveness often an important element. (These instructions cover scenarios from "method three of passing sentence on a woman with a bad reputation who is to be exposed to questioning under torture" to "method two of passing sentences on a denounced woman who merely has a bad reputation" to "the method of passing sentence on a woman who has confessed heresy but is relapsed, though repentant".)

The book explains a range of practices such as turning people into wild animals and such, but by far the bulk of the sorcery described concerns anxieties over procreation. For instance, the authors go into cases of women becoming infertile, and men whose semen can no longer exit or lose power, and men who can no longer get an erection. It also discusses “the way in which they [witches] take away male members”. Here is one such case, recounted by a venerable father from the convent at Speyer. He was hearing confession one day when

“a certain young man showed up, and in his confession he claimed sorrowfully that he had lost his male member. I was astonished and did not wish to believe his words lightly, since the man who believes lightly is judged to be fickle-minded by the wise man. So, I discovered the truth through experience, perceiving nothing by sight when the young man removed his clothes and showed me the place. Then, I came up with a sensible plan and asked whether he considered any woman suspect. The young man said that the did, but she was away, living in Worms. Then I said, ‘Here are my instructions for you. Approach her as soon as possible and strive, to best of your abilities, to soften her with promises and enticing words,’ which is what he did do. A few days later he returned to thank me, claiming that he had regained every thing. I believed his words, though I was once more made certain through visual experience” (p. 324).

One of the main differences I’ve noticed between the European and African discussions of this kind of witchcraft is the importance accorded to the visual/physical aspect. In conversations about penis snatching with people in Tiringoulou, I never met anyone concerned with the physical possibility of removing (and eventually replacing) a “male member” without touching it. When I’ve discussed with people from outside of Central Africa, in contrast, their first question tends to be something along the lines of, “But they didn’t really remove the penis -- that’s impossible!” Already in 1487, the Malleus anticipates this concern. Its authors go to great lengths to explain the mechanics of the operation. For instance, they write:

At this point, a few things should be noted for a clearer understanding of the previous discussion of this topic. First, it should in no way be believed that such members are torn out of or separated from the body. Instead, they are hidden by the demon through the art of conjuring, so that they can be neither seen nor touched. This is shown by authority and reason... . Alexander of Hales says: “Properly speaking, conjuring is an illusion of the demon. This has no cause from the point of view of a change in the thing but only from the point of view of the perceiver, who is deceived, in terms of either the internal or the external sense of perception.” In connection with these words, it should be noted that in this instance the illusion is played on the two external senses (sight and touch), and not on the internal ones (the common sense, fantasy, the force of imagination, that of estimation, and memory (p. 324).

The authors later continue,

As for what pronouncement should be made about those sorceresses who sometimes keep large numbers of these members (twenty or thirty at once) in a bird’s nest of in some cabinet, where the members move as if alive or eat a stalk or fodder, as many have seen and the general report relates, it should be said that these things are all carried out through the Devil’s working and illusion. In this case, an illusion is played on the viewers’ senses of perception in the ways discussed above (p. 327).

(When picturing a nest of members, my mind leaps to the handbag full of penis butter sandwiches that a Tiringoulou man told me about. How odd for such similar images to become socially powerful in such different times and places.)

I’m not sure what to make of this observation about the importance of the physical element to tales of penis snatching. The most facile interpretation would be the developmentalist one: “Africa -- (still) 500 years behind Europe.” For obvious reasons that’s unsatisfactory, to say nothing of simply wrong. I’m in the early stages of developing an article comparing contemporary African penis snatching scares to these earlier European ones. I don’t yet know how it all fits together. For now I’m filing it under the trove that is the mental category of surprising connections -- a category that gives me satisfaction as much for the puzzles it introduces as those that it solves.

Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches). 2006. New York: Cambridge. Christopher S. Mackay, ed.

Truth and Rumors

I promised months ago that I would review Julien Bonhomme's Les voleurs de sexe: Anthropologie d'une rumeur Africaine (Paris: Seuil, 2009). Now, on the eve of departure for Bangui, I must write at least a few quick words or else postpone months more, as I'm trying to minimize the number of books I lug around with me.

Bonhomme argues that the penis-snatching phenomenon can explain “forms of sociability and modes of communication” in African urban areas. It is a response to the dislocation and uncertainty wrought by moving from a village-based social structure, in which roles and relationships are at least partly determined by family and lineage, to an urban one, in which few have these networks of trust and support. On p. 89, Bonhomme has created a chart to compare penis-snatching to “traditional” witchcraft, of the E.E. Evans-Pritchard variety. Whereas the earlier forms of witchcraft took place at night, within the family, and at home, penis-snatching occurs in the daytime, between strangers, and in public space. Where news of witchcraft in the village travels through gossip, in the cities news of penis-snatching travels through rumors. (Bonhomme is careful to dissociate his argument from negative connotations that the rumor has had throughout Western scholarship – notably in Durkheim – in which rumors have been portrayed as a kind of social cancer.) In other words, penis-snatching is a way of understanding the world that draws from the various stressors of life in the city

Bonhomme's argument is a compelling and useful one, except that penis-snatching is not at all limited to urban areas, as he suggests. After all, it happened in Tiringoulou, which barely even has a market and could hardly be characterized as urban. This oversight is probably due to the bias introduced by his sample: he draws on his own experience and interviews in urban Gabon as well as newspaper accounts from all over West and Central Africa, which report almost exclusively on urban areas. (I should not that the book also benefits from an impressive mastery of both the English and French literatures on occult phenomena.) Moreover, though this point goes somewhat beyond the scope of his book, it bears mentioning that though he sees villages as running on gossip, in fact they, too, are saturated with rumors. A social life organized through rumor is not a new experience for recent city arrivals. And dislocation and uncertainty pervade both urban and rural spaces.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is Bonhomme's discussion of whether people “actually believe” that genitals are stolen in these encounters. He points out that part of how rumors circulate is because people are unsure, perhaps even doubting, of the veracity of an account, and they seek guidance by relating the story and observing their friend's reaction. In this way, the rumor spreads, even though its perpetuation is laced through with uncertainty. This is similar to the scene I described in It's Complicated, and I think it's a useful addition to the debates on witchcraft and belief, which have tended to assume a binary between belief and unbelief. Figuring out what is true is a social process, after all. In addition, people tend to assume that what they want to be true is true, whether or not this is actually the case. For instance, in the run-up to the 2000 election, an email circulated with a series of quotes attributed to George W. Bush, each one more stupid than the last. The email went viral, and I can imagine much tut-tutting over water coolers: “Can you believe this idiot wants to be president...?” None of these phrases issued from Bush's mouth, however; they all dated back to another notorious word-mangler, Dan Quayle. But few if any of those who sent on the email bothered to check. It seemed true because it correlated with what they wanted to be true. Similarly, think of the debates over Obama's religion, whether Nixon was a crook, or whether Christine O'Donnell is a witch. Repudiating the charges (“Obama is not a Muslim”; “Nixon is not a crook”; “O'Donnell is not a witch”...) simply entrenches belief on both sides of the issue. Hypothesis confirmation bias strikes us all, some more often than others.

This observation meanders away from strictly speaking about penis-snatching, but I wanted to mention it because of the initial reactions I tend to get when I tell people about the phenomenon. They usually follow a similar trajectory: “Huh?” → [head-shaking] → “But they don't really believe it, do they?” Part of the strength of Bonhomme's book is that he re-frames the issue around ambivalence. Rumors -- the (in)famous radio trottoir – enable ideas to circulate, but they may circulate more from a “better safe than sorry” mentality than anything else. The phenomenon's progress through the continent, and beyond, hides these variations in degree of certitude about what is happening. The more analytically-minded may regard a failure to always question and test one what one hears as stupidity, but that makes the tendency none the less widespread.

Genital theft goes to Hollywood: Another penis snatching update

On a plane recently I made the bad decision to pass the time with the film "It's Complicated." Meryl Streep leans on the coos and croissants of her Julia Child portrayal to this time incarnate a supremely irritating SoCal divorcée. I squirmed with embarrassment for the actors' sake, especially Alec Baldwin -- please, Alec, do us all a favor and return to 30 Rock, where you belong.

But the film does contain one noteworthy scene. Toward the end, Meryl and her gal pals are dishing about their lackluster sex lives when one bursts out the assertion that a lack of sex can cause a woman's vagina to close up. "It's true!" she insists, "I read about a case on the internet!" The others laugh, but the scene is ultimately ambivalent about the veracity of the tale, leaving viewers with the impression that whether or not it's true, it's a real fear for women of a certain age and status.

Though most of the African stories of disappearing genitals involve men, women can suffer the fate too. For women, it usually happens much like the actress said: the crotch becomes strangely sealed, like a Barbie doll, though in the African case lack of sex is not understood to be the precipitating factor.

Julien Bonhomme, in his book Les Voleurs de sexe: Anthropologie d'une rumeur africaine, argues that because the notion of the rumor carries such a negative social-epidemiological charge -- the rumor as social cancer -- the phenomenon of penis snatching is better understood as gossip, a major mode of communication in the African city. It's "radio troittoir" as the animating force of social life, in newspapers (Bonhomme's main source) as well as in curbside conversation, and penis snatching offers a prism through which to grasp that reality. I'm only a few chapters into the book so will save a full review for later. For the time being, I'll say that if nothing else, "It's Complicated" reminded me that gossip, even penis-snatching absurd gossip, is far from solely an African thing. Perhaps Bonhomme will have to write a sequel: Anthropologie d'une rumeur américaine.

(This is one of the things I love about anthropology: navigating and exploring difference and finding unexpected convergence amid the divergence.)

Penis snatching update

I have wanted to write an update on the penis snatching incident that occurred here in Tiringoulou last week, but some of the responses I've received to my previous post have reminded me that a phenomenon that seems normal (though unfortunate) here appears bizarre to people elsewhere, and I don't want to portray people here as exotic rubes.

As I learned more about the incident, I had one of those moments that occurs sometimes during field research when words on paper suddenly become animated: so this is what the recent surge of anthropological literature on “occult economies” was about. Led by the Comaroffs, this branch of research investigates the ways that people make sense of a world in which the origins of wealth have largely become obscured from view. Before, this argument goes, wealth came from things like factories. Townspeople could see in front of them why the owner had a mansion: the coal-spewing workhouse. But when people become massively, incomprehensibly rich from something as ephemeral and mysterious as credit swaps (or government corruption), it is bound to have an effect on our explanations about how the world works. And one effect that scholars have noticed is a heightened anxiety about the body and trades in organs.

Several people with whom I spoke in Tiringoulou made these links. “You see how advanced Cameroon is compared to CAR? They have multi-story buildings! It's because they are so strong in commerce of all kinds – including in genitals and scalps.” (Male pattern baldness sufferers take heart: your bald pates fetch higher prices in this trade.) Practitioners of such magic profit in one of two ways. A man here in Tiringoulou who used to live in Cameroon had seen both with his own eyes. In a crowd, a person might suddenly realize that his penis has disappeared. He cries out. Immediately his savior steps forward: I'll heal you, he says. For a fee of 25,000 [about $50]. Or else the penis-taker sells his loot to the boss who taught him the magic, for which he is handsomely rewarded.

The man who had lived in Cameroon described one case that particularly stuck in my mind. A woman arrived at the airport, off to Europe to sell a load of penises. The airport guard sensed something fishy about the woman and decided to thoroughly go through her hand luggage. He saw that she had packed some baguette sandwiches and asked if he could have one. The woman assented and made to hand him the one on top. But he persisted in reaching deeper, deeper into the bag and picked one from the bottom. Now the woman became agitated. He unwrapped it and found that, though butter leaked from the edges to make it look innocent, a row of penises were lodged between the loaf's halves. A penis-butter sandwich. Not to be eaten. Without a doubt this is the most memorable tale of “effective” (the story-teller's term) airport security I've heard.

When I asked another man if he'd heard of any similar magical crimes, his response surprised me. “Yes. In Bangui sometimes a child in a crowded street will eat a biscuit and suddenly disappear – all the way to Nigeria!” All of a sudden people's anxiety here sounded familiar: how many ridiculous strictures (not allowing kids to walk to school, for instance) have been erected in the US in recent years due to a largely irrational fear of the dreaded candy-offering kidnapper?

If the idea of penis-stealing seems beyond-the-pale weird, consider what people in a subsistence economy might think upon hearing of an American woman who starves herself near death because her reflection in the mirror convinces her she's fat? Or consider the affliction philosophers love to ponder which consists of being convinced that certain of one's limbs are not supposed to exist, making them beg their doctors for amputations. What, ethically, should the doctor do when the person avers that she will cut it off herself if necessary (and those sufferers who do so report immense relief afterward)? One hundred thousand people in the US have this condition, if Wikipedia is to be believed. I cite these examples only to highlight that there is no end to the strange things people experience when it comes to their bodies.

Did the men in Tiringoulou really have their penises magically removed? Everyone here (including the doctor at the hospital) thinks so. I don't, but the men's experience of debilitating illness certainly seems real. Perhaps their maladies are as real and yet medically invisible, unexplainable, as certain kinds of back pain or chronic fatigue syndrome. For this latter condition, the only effective treatment appears to be group talk therapy with fellow-sufferers – people who don't doubt your agonizing reality. In that respect, people in this poorest of places are well-off.

The arrival of the penis snatchers

In a previous post I wrote about the effusive greetings here in Central Africa. Yesterday morning when I arrived in Tiringoulou, in the remote Northeast of CAR (even further northeast and even more remote than Ndele), however, I was told that since yesterday people had forsaken the usual handshakes in favor of a small wave. Why? The day before a Sudanese merchant truck arrived in town. One of the passengers alighted in the village center and went to take tea. He shook the proprietor's hand firmly as he sat down.

The guest left, but the proprietor soon felt an electric tingling all over. He knew suddenly that something was wrong. He looked down: his penis had shrunk to smaller than that of a baby. (Witnesses aver that the penis was in fact teeny-tiny, but unfortunately no one had a camera for proof to convince those who weren't there at the time.) This fate befell one other man before the mob descended upon the visitor, the only one judged capable of committing the crime because of his contact with the men at the fateful hour (bodily contact is sufficient to remove the penis). Under duress from the UFDR (the armed group that runs this town) forces' “interrogation,” he admitted his guilt. He was executed (gunshot) shortly thereafter.

This is the first case of penis snatching seen in Tiringoulou, but a woman in a village not too far from here had her genitals disappear as well. The visitor, a Chadian, worked for some merchants in Nigeria, where, if newspaper reports are to be believed, penis-snatching occurs in epidemic proportions. When I asked why they snatch penises, people here responded that they could be sold for a lot of money in Nigeria, where they would be used by “feticheurs”.

I admit: I'm skeptical. For one thing, the victims have their members back and currently complain only of a bit of testicular pain. But I also find it really interesting to think about how the phenomenon of penis snatching has traveled through West and Central Africa, finally now reaching this most remote corner of the world. How did people here become aware of it, and does it resemble anything they have seen before?

I hope to meet one of the victims tomorrow. Perhaps then I will have more answers.