Chapter 4 SORCERY, MODERNITY AND THE CONSTITUTIVE IMAGINARY Hybridising Continuities Bruce Kapferer … man is not an abstract being squatting outside the world. – Karl Marx, Critique of Religious Belief 1 The cosmologies implicated in sorcery practice are human-centric. Within them, human beings are at the heart of processes that are integral in the forma- tion of their psychical, social and political universes. Sorcery fetishises human agency, often one which it magically enhances, as the key mediating factor affecting the course or direction of human life-chances. The fabulous character of so much sorcery practice, its transgressive and unbounded dimensions, a rich symbolism that appears to press towards and beyond the limits of the human imagination, is surely connected to the overpowering and totalising impetus that sorcery recognises in human agency and capacities. Sorcery is that magical additional force that unites with the intentional direction of human beings into their realities – a creative and destructive directionality. Such sor- cery must needs affect the lives of others because of their co-presence, their ongoing involvement in each other’s life circumstances. The overriding concern of sorcery with the problematics of human agency means that it is a highly differentiated practice, produced out of a great diver- sity of circumstances and often taking the shape of the very situations and problematics that it addresses. Sorcery has the capacity always to be reinvented as something new. In Sri Lanka, from whence the ethnography for this essay is drawn, the most powerful destructive sorcery is not only that which is hidden, secretive, but also that which engages in highly original practices. There is a tension in sorcery towards hybridity, a mixing up of procedures often kept sep- arate and, too, towards borrowing. The most powerful spells are often con- ceived to be from elsewhere. Foreign magic is particularly highly prized. Social Analysis, Volume 46, Issue 3, Fall 2002