Eugene Volokh posts this item, titled “Vampires of Malawi”. It’s a link to a short Reuters news item about a politician who was stoned by a crowd . They accused him of “harboring vampires” and the man was said to be “the latest victim of a bizarre rumor that the country’s government is colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies.”

Eugene posts this without comment, so I’m not sure what he wants us to make of it. The only context is that the piece is from the ‘Oddly Enough’ section of Yahoo’s news (aka ‘Weird Stuff from Around the World’) and it immediately follows a post of his titled “Witchcraft Scandal in the Greenland Government.” That latter story is about “the activities of Jens Lyberth, who called upon the services of a healer to drive evil spirits from the government’s offices in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital” and precipitated the collapse of the government.

Is Eugene is inviting us to have a laugh at backward foreigners who believe in vampires and witchcraft? That would strike me as odd, for two reasons. First, being an immigrant like myself, Eugene should know that, although they may be strange, the weird habits of crazy foreigners can often turn out to be quite comprehensible on closer investigation. Second, Eugene generally leans towards a view of society where people (via their friend, the market) know better than the State. This entails some assumptions about rationality—- on this view, people know pretty well what they’re doing and what’s good for them. The reach of those assumptions shouldn’t stop at the border.

So, what to make of vampires and witchcraft? Off the top of my head, there are plausible potential explanations in each case. First, Malawi.

  • Rumor is a political weapon, and labelling your target as a vampire might be a very useful way to ensure their removal from office. Any society will have some suitable category that can freak people out: think about the effects of successfully labelling someone a pedophile, for instance. Of course, pedophiles exist whereas vampires (a la Dracula) do not. Perhaps a better example is the panic surrounding allegations of satanic ritual child abuse in England in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
  • The piece says the victim was accused of “colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies”. This is interesting (and something I know a bit about). One possibility is that there’s a private blood or plasma collection center active in the country. Such centers have been the target of attacks in the past in the developing world. For instance, the Compania Centroamericana de Plasmaferesis was a large plasma center in Managua during the Somoza dictatorship. It bought its product from poor locals and sold it to companies in the United States. The Somoza family appeared to be involved in the business. After a journalist investigating the plant was killed in suspicious circumstances, the building—- known locally as the casa de vampiros—- was attacked by protesters and burned down, in one of the first events in Somosa’s downfall. Similar rumors, of people snatching babies and bringing them to the U.S. to use their organs for transplant, have popped up in Guatemala and elsewhere. Nothing of the kind has been documented, but of course a perfectly legitimate international trade in adoptive babies has been on the upswing in that region for a while now. If you didn’t like the idea of babies leaving the country to be raised in America, the link wouldn’t be hard to draw.
  • Incidentally, the report also mentions that Malawi is in the middle of a “regional food crisis” in which “many face starvation”. That sort of thing can really drive people to extremes.

Next, Greenland and witchcraft. This one is easier.

  • It looks like the Government collapsed because of the good-faith efforts of a civil servant to incorporate a bit of folk religious practice while moving into a new building. He seems to have wanted to be nice to the Greenlanders, but hired the wrong guy (he didn’t do anything the Inuits recognized as religious) and ended up offending everyone. This sort of misjudgement happens all the time, occasionally with severe consequences.
  • Of course, being ourselves and therefore rational, we don’t practice nonsensical witchcraft over here. Any practices which may appear to resemble such nonsense—- calling on Supreme Beings to save Supreme Courts, blessing ships when launched, affirming the existence of One Nation Under God—- are really perfectly sensible, only vestigally religous if at all, and have no solidarity-generating ritual component to them whatsoever. And because we’re reasonable people, if an outsider said that any of them were bizarre, nobody would freak out in the least.

In general, when looking for explanations of why people call others a vampire—- or a witch, or a Communist, or an Idiotarian, or whatever—- it’s usually better to begin by looking to the politics of group solidarity than to write off the participants as ignorant loons. Of course, the ignorant loon option can be kept in reserve, but it shouldn’t be the first explanation you reach for. Anthropology, if it’s done anything, has shown that it’s a big mistake to think as though only foreigners have cultures (i.e., weird beliefs and habits) whereas everything we do is quite normal.