Wizards and Ghosts

The place in Isoso, Bolivia, where I can turn up unexpectedly at three in the morning and receive a hug and a bed and leave days later with tears on all sides lost, several years ago, its person of central anthropological interest.This was a shaman, quite a renowned one in the region.He managed to his eventual regret to attract the attention of so many scientists and agents of development that eventually a laboratory was built around him which became, in a way, his sarcophagus.The people to whom I now go back are women and children: his wife, her mother and sister, his daughters, and their children.Over the years I have experienced a divide between what brings me back to Isoso-these women, and a few others in two other villages and a small nearby town-and what originally brought me to Isoso: men, principally that shaman but also a second shaman in another village and other men who occupied leadership roles in Isoso in externally funded development projects there around the turn of the twenty-first century.For about a decade between 2003 and 2013 I didn't know how to write or even to think about this disjuncture, at least not intellectually, though I knew how it felt emotionally: like a sham.I had profound sentiments about Isoso and people there that did not in any way animate or inform my analytic work as an anthropologist.Visits back felt at once necessary and silly: necessary to fulfill personal pledges and commitments but silly from a research point of view as the questions I most wanted to ask (who had gotten married and who had split up, who had had babies, who was going to school and who was working, who had been ill, who had died) spoke to no problems of

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