The Lust To Kill and The Arnhem Land Sorcerer An Exercise in Integrative Anthropology

"The Lust to Kill" and the Arnhem Land Sorcerer: An Exercise in Integrative
Anthropology
Author(s): Victoria Katherine Burbank
Source: Ethos, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp. 410-444
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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"The Lust to Kill" and the
Arnhem Land Sorcerer: An
Exercise in Integrative
Anthropology
VICTORIA KATHERINE BURBANK
ABSTRACT This comparison of the Western serial sex killer and

the Arnhem Land sorcerer arosefrom reading the argument that
the serial sex murderer is the creation of a series of discourses.
"The discourse," say Cameron and Frazer, "is the heart of the
matter and the rest is silence." While acknowledging the power
of culture to structure lives, I argue that the rest is not "silence"
but something requiring anthropological understanding. This
article is an exercise in integrative anthropology, an attempt to
address the multifaceted character of human experience and
trace some of the possible means and mechanisms of human
development in the sphere of sexual passion.
s Bradd Shore (1996) tells it, psychic unity's "uncomfortable

relationship" with the culture concept has been exacerbated
in these times of radical relativism. Yet this doctrine continues
to be foundational. Without it, an anthropological focus on
variation is too easily interpreted as "othering," a construc-
tion of difference that invites only invidious and divisive forms of compari-
son. Thus, models that allow us to see "universalism without uniformity"
(Shweder and Sullivan 1993) become all the more important. The challenge
of this kind of endeavor is, however, considerable. How do we approach
seemingly culturally and historically specific human experience in a way
that preserves its unique qualities while placing it in the embracing context
of a shared humanity? And how do we choose from the array of fecund pos-
sibilities that an astonishingly productive academy of arts and sciences pre-
sents us with today? We begin, I think, by looking at specific instances of
Ethos28(3):410-444. Copyright ? 2000, American Anthropological Association.
"The Lust to Kill" ? 411
human action or sociality. We then develop our frameworks in interaction

with our interpretations of specific things people do and think that they do.
This article is an attempt to address the multifaceted character of
human experience and to trace some of the possible means and mecha-
nisms of human development in the sphere of sexual passion. I explore a
resemblance between Western serial sex killers and sorcerers in Arnhem
Land, Australia as an exercise in integrative anthropology, drawing on ma-
terial from psychological and psychoanalytic anthropology, evolutionary
psychology, developmental psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. In
this comparison of serial sex killers and sorcerers, I re-visit a classic an-
thropological idea-that homicide and sorcery can sometimes be equated
in terms of human motivation. I compare the fantasy product and genesis
of sex killers and sorcerers, outlining a possible developmental trajectory
that moves the serial sex killer and the sorcerer, via attachment theory
and the neuroscience of fear, from their beginnings in psychic unity to a
point that is a singular (and fortunately rare) instance of the human po-
tential. These exceptional human manifestations nevertheless illustrate
basic developmental processes that may under-gird the observation that
early nurturing experiences are the foundation of later passion. A look at
fantasy, its content, function, and cultural construction is central to this
effort. It is, I argue, not only fantasy that protects the child from early
fears, but also fantasy that motivates or inhibits murderous acts in adult-
hood. The cultural construction of fantasy may be decisive in these outcomes.
My point of departure in this effort is an intuition that two seemingly
different kinds of human action represent a similar human experience.
That is, that some serial sex murders bear at least a family resemblance to
some acts of sorcery, and that an exploration of this family resemblance
may be fruitful in explicating both serial sex murder and sorcery as exem-
plars of human passion. I use the exploration of this resemblance as an
exercise in integrative anthropology, aspiring to address the multifaceted
character of human experience.1
The insight (if I may so describe it) that sorcerers and sex killers are
engaged in similar endeavors came upon reading a paper by Deborah
Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer (1994). In this paper, they propose that the
serial sex murderer is the creation of a series of discourses arising during
the Enlightenment: those of psychoanalysis, sexology, and criminology.
Until Europeans had the language these discourses provide, their argu-
ment goes, the serial sex murderer did not exist: "It is these ways of con-
ceptualizing and understanding that enables us to think of murders as
sexual, enables murder to be sexual, and enables men to commit sexual
murder, to take on the role of sex murderer" (Cameron and Frazer
1994:158-159). Cameron and Frazer say that their thesis that sex murder
is a modern Western phenomenon has not been refuted; no historian has
412 ? ETHOS
been able to present them with a case outside the sphere of Western cul-
ture arising before the 1880s. Yet, I kept asking myself as I read their
article, what about the Arnhem Land sorcerer?
In this extended article, I shall develop an argument around this com-
parison of serial sex killers and Arnhem Land sorcerers. My argument
draws on a variety of efforts both empirical and theoretical across a
number of disciplinary boundaries including prior syntheses. I shall focus
on the sorcerer in northeast Arnhem Land at a time that begins just after
missionization in the early 1930s, drawing primarily, but not exclusively,
from material on the "Muringin" and other Yolngu areas.2 While my effort
is based on reading across disciplinary boundaries, it is, at the same time,
centered by an understanding of culture largely derived from cognitive
anthropology. By culture I mean "ideas in people" (Linger 1994:297),
ideas that may or may not have motivational force, ideas that may or may
not be shared with other people. How the ideas get "in" there is a large part
of what this article is about.
Now, the serial sex murderer, some might say, kills in fact and the
sorcerer only in fiction. In many psychologies around the world, however,
sorcery and physical violence are equated (e.g. Carruci 1992; Knauft 1985;
Lepowsky 1990; Williams 1987). I begin from this perspective and propose
the Arnhem Land sorcerer as an exceptional case. There are several other
ways in which the Arnhem Land sorcerer deviates from the picture that
Cameron and Frazer paint of the modern sex murderer. As they portray
him (and it is always a him), he is a man who murders for no other motive
than sexual pleasure.3 He has little or no relationship with his victims prior
to the murder. Instead, his victim represents a category, usually one that
is obviously gendered, such as woman, blonde, young boy, or prostitute.
And the murder often has a ritualistic aspect.
In contrast, the Arnhem Land sorcerer may know his victim and may
kill him for a specific cause. Furthermore, though the kind of Arnhem
Land sorcerer of whom I will be speaking is almost always a man (Reid
1983:35), his victims are not always women; indeed they may more often
be men.4 More to the point, they appear to be selected less on a categorical
basis than on a biographical basis; that is, they are selected as a conse-
quence of their actions and their relationships. On the other hand, I argue
there are points of similarity between the Western serial sex murderer and
the Arnhem Land sorcerer. The reader may better understand this asser-
tion having read the following account by a self-confessed Arnhem Land
sorcerer provided by W. L. Warner in his classic ethnography A Black
Civilization:
All of us were camping at Marunga Island. We were looking for oysters. This woman I
was about to kill was hunting for lilies that day, for the other women had gone another
way to search for oysters. I carried a hatchet with me and watched her. The woman
gathered her lily bulbs, then left the swamp, went back on the sandy land and lay down
"The Lust to Kill" * 413
in the shade. She covered herself with paper bark to keep warm because she had been
in the lily pond and felt cold. Only her head came out from the bark. She could not see me.
I sneaked up and hit her between the eyes with the head of a tomahawk. She kicked
and tried to raise up but she couldn't. Her eyes turned up like she was dead. I picked
her up under the arms and dragged her to a mangrove jungle and laid her down. She
was a young girl.
I split a mangrove stick from off a tree and sharpened it. I took some djel-kurk [orchid
bulb] first and got it ready. I did not have my spear thrower with me, so I took the
handle off my tomahawk and jabbed her about the skin on her Mount of Venus which
was attached to her vagina and pushed it back. I pushed the skin up to her navel.
Her large intestine protruded as though it were red calico. I covered my arm with
orchid juice. I covered the killing stick with it, too. I put the stick in the palm of my
hand so that I could push the point upward with my thumb. When she inhaled, I pushed
my arm in a little. When she exhaled I stopped. Little by little I got my hand inside her.
Finally I touched her heart. I pushed the killing stick with my thumb up over the palm,
which pressed the stick against my fingers, into her heart. She had a very large heart
and I had to push harder than usual.
I pulled the stick out. I stood back of her and held her up with her breasts in my
hands. She was in a squatting position.
Her heart's blood ran out into the paper bark basket I had left to catch it in. It ran
slower and slower and then stopped. I laid her down and took the blood away. I hid it.
I came back and broke a nest of green ants off a tree. I laid it near her. I put the live
ants on her skin.... I did not squeeze them, for I was in a hurry because I was afraid
her relatives would come looking for her. The skin, when bitten by the ants, moved by
itself downward from her navel and covered her bones over her Mount of Venus.
I then took some dry mud from an old lily pond. I put my sweat on the mud and
warmed it over the fire. I put it against her to heal the wound so that no trace would
be left of what I had done. I was careful none of her pubic hair would be left inside her
vagina so that it would be felt by her husband or seen by the women. I kept up the mud
applications until the vagina looked as it did before. I put blood and sweat in the mud
and warmed it and put it inside the uterus. I did this again, using the mud, sweat, and
blood. I did this six or eight times. The inside now was like it was before.
I turned her over. Her large intestine stuck out several feet. I shook some green ants
on it. It went in some little way. I shook some more on, and a little receded. I shook
some more, and all of it went in. Everything was all right now. There was no trace of
the wound.
I took the tomahawk handle which had her heart's blood on it. I whirled it around
her head. Her head moved slowly. I whirled it again. She moved some more. The spirit
that belonged to that dead woman went into my heart then. I felt it go in. I whirled the
stick again and she gasped for breath. I jumped over her and straightened her toes and
fingers. She blew some breath out of her mouth and was all right.
It was noontime. I said to her, "You go eat some lilies." The woman got up and walked
away. She went around another way. I said to that woman, "You will live two days. One
day you will be happy, the next day you will be sick." The woman went to the place
where I had found her. She went to sleep. I took her blood and went away. The other
women came from where they had been gathering oysters. They were laughing and
talking. They awakened the girl. She picked up her lily bulbs and went to the camp
with the women.
The next day she walked around and played, laughed, talked, and made fun and
gathered a lot of oysters and lilies. She came back to camp that night. She brought the
things she had gathered into camp. She lay down and died that night. [1937:189-190]
414 ? ETHOS
Reading this description, I see the murder as a highly sensuous, if not

sexual act. First, the victim is identified as a "young girl," the Kriol or
Aboriginal English word for female adolescent. At this age, girls in Arnhem
Land were married and were initiated into sexual activity by their hus-
bands (1937:118). We might thus assume that she was seen by the mem-
bers of her community, including her murderer, as nubile and sexually
attractive. Entry to the vital organs is made through the vagina, after a
probing of the mons venus, not the most direct route for reaching the
heart.5 The murderer's movements as he pushes his killing stick into her
body are slow and rhythmic. The stop-and-start movement of the killing
stick mimics the movement of the penis during coitus. The stick and his
arm are even lubricated with orchid juice. The slow manner in which the
murderer moves his hand into the vagina is also reminiscent of descrip-
tions of how a husband gradually prepares a virginal girl for first inter-
course. A man, for example, may first deflower his young wife manually,
reserving intercourse for a later time (Goodale 1971:45). Though Western-
ers might regard the murderer's subsequent holding of the woman by her
breasts as a sexual or sensuous act, it is not clear if such fondling would
have been regarded as foreplay by people in Arnhem Land. However, the
growth of breasts is associated with sexual intercourse, that is, breasts are
said to develop as a result of it (e.g., Goodale 1971:45; Merlan 1986:
480-481) and their development is associated with nubility (Burbank 1988).
The murderer uses sweat to conceal the wound. While sweat is routinely
used in healing, for example, to cool a feverish brow, it is also associated
with sexual intercourse. For example, it is a man's sweat from the activity
of coitus that causes a young girl's breasts to grow. We might even interpret
the woman's gasping as she awakens, and the need of the murderer to
straighten her fingers and toes, as a sign of her orgasm. Finally, the murderer
ensures that no pubic hair is left in the vagina to be discovered by the
husband, a step that lovers might take to conceal adultery.
It might be that some Arnhem Land people would also see the possi-
bility of this interpretation. In another account given to Warner, an on-
looker thinks that the murderer and his victim "were having sexual
intercourse" (1937:192), while the connection between murder and coitus
is quite explicit in the following:
Two or three men sneak out into the bush and wait for the arrival of the woman they
expect to kill .... [O]ne of the men pretends that he is calling her to flirt with her and
she comes over. He asks her to lie down beside a clump of bushes and she thinks that
he is going to lie on top of her. Instead of this he kicks her Mount of Venus with his
heel. The woman faints.
The men start operating on her. They do not cut her as they would a man. The
sorcerer who is to open her heart wraps his hand up very tightly with string. The doctor
pushes his hand, with the killing stick in it, up through her uterus. All the men turn
their heads and backs, refusing to look at the vagina. If they should look there is great
'The Lust to Kill" ? 415
danger of spoiling the effects of the magic; they are liable to be overcome with sexual
desire, causing an erection which would destroy the magic because it would be bad
luck. [1937:216]
In his summary of information received about "the sorcerer and black

magic," Warner says that during the murder of a man, the sorcerer squats
in front of his victim. But, "in opening a woman he works from the side
with his legs pressed together for fear sexual desire will overcome his
magic" (1937:186).
Unlike the Western murderer who is said to kill only for sexual pleas-
ure, the sorcerer is said to murder for cause. But let us look at these causes.
There are some that may be regarded as quite serious; for example, the
violation of religious law (e.g. Reid 1983:44-46). Yet the reason for mur-
dering someone may also be quite trivial-for example, the failure to give
a promised object-a cause that might give others reason to be angry,
maybe even reason to fight, but not to kill (Burbank 1994). Several of the
cases reported by Warner involve the sorcerer acting as a kind of "hit
man," killing his victim at another's request. For example, a sorcerer was
asked to kill a young man who was having an affair with the petitioner's
wife (Warner 1937:195). Prestige might have been a reward for such an
act; Warner says that a sorcerer's kin turn to him at "times of trouble and
weakness" (1937:233). Material wealth would have been irrelevant, if not
inconceivable, for the period in which Warner was reporting. Yet it is also
possible that the deed itself was seen as the reward, at least to the sor-
cerer's eyes.
In this anthropological interpretation of the sorcerer's act, I am not
entirely alone. Nancy Munn was the first to see connotations of "a per-
verted sexual attack" in Warner's accounts, interpreting them as a "lethal
distortion" of sexual intercourse and an indicator of "excessive, unregulated"
male power (1968-69:187).6 Thus, I argue, we have the possibility of a
serial sex murderer existing outside of contemporary post-Enlightenment
culture, a man who murders on multiple occasions largely for his own
sensual (if not sexual) pleasure, whether his victims be male or female.
The primary difference between this serial killer and the Western variety
is that one murders in fantasy, whereas the other murders in fact.
In my experience, anthropologists dislike, and often avoid, saying that
they do not believe something that the people they work with hold to be
true. Though many, if not most, of the Arnhem Land people that I know
believe in sorcery, I find it necessary to state at the outset that I do not
share all of their beliefs on this topic. While I believe that some people may
in fact die because they believe themselves to have been ensorcelled, I do
not believe that people die because someone has performed the acts de-
scribed by the sorcerers above.7 It is from the standpoint of my disbelief
that I explore the value of understanding the Arnhem Land sorcerer as an
exemplar of human desire. The question I shall begin with is: why this
416 ? ETHOS
particular fantasy? And why does it so closely resemble the acts of the
serial sex killer? The question I end with is: what makes the difference
between a murderer who kills only in his imagination and one who kills in
reality? I have described my perceptions of the similarity between sexual
killers and at least some forms of sorcery as an intuition. But in fact this
mental operation is better described as an inference, for it arises from my
understanding of evolutionary biology, particularly its manifestation as
evolutionary psychology. I begin to address the question of the sorcerer's
fantasy's content with a brief reprise of this framework.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that just as human bodies are
evolved products, so are human minds, or more specifically-at least for
my purpose here-the complex of learning propensities and constraints
that interact with the social and physical environment throughout the in-
dividual's life course. The mind is seen as an array of functionally specific
adaptive systems; a function is understood as an evolved solution to a
problem of survival or reproduction faced by our ancestors at some time
in the evolutionary past. In consequence, this theory predicts people will
attend to and learn certain things given certain circumstances, including
what might be regarded as motivation and emotions. Evolutionary theo-
rists have repeatedly emphasized that to say that an aspect of human
physiology or psychology can be identified as an evolved function is not to
say that a particular ability or potential is necessarily functional in an
animal's or human's current circumstances.8 The hypothetical identifica-
tion of an adaptive function, that is, both problem and solution, can, how-
ever, be theoretically fruitful insofar as it helps in the identification of
cognitive mechanisms required to support the function in question (Cos-
mides and Tooby 1995). For example, working from an evolutionary per-
spective, Wilson et al. propose that femicide, the killing of women by men,
can be viewed as "manifestations of an evolved masculine sexually pro-
prietary psychology" (1997:453) and propose a number of cognitive
mechanisms necessary to support this functional system. Basically, these
are abilities that enable or ensure that men will attend to, perceive, and
calculate, though not necessarily consciously, the relative risk and benefit
of mate fidelity or perfidy in a context determined by their evaluation of
characteristics of mate, rival, and self.
What drives the evolutionary process, according to theory, is differ-
ential reproductive success. While undoubtedly affected, from time to
time, by nothing but good or bad luck, more consistently the selection for
specific traits or characteristics can be seen as the outcome of successful
competition. Male and female (by definition) make different contributions
to offspring (e.g., sperm and egg) and in consequence are characterized by
different reproductive strategies. That is to say, the ancestors of today's
men and women evolved as they competed over different things in different
ways. Sex differences in reproductive strategies have several implications

of relevance for this discussion. The first is that females, because of their
greater initial investment, became, in our ancestors' past, the limiting re-
source for which males must compete (Trivers 1972). The second is that
males, but not females, were more likely to be uncertain about their con-
nection to specific offspring. Thus, it is argued, there exists in that abstrac-
tion we might call the generic man of today a greater propensity for
learning sexual jealousy (Daly et al. 1982). That is, a male ancestor who
could both inseminate more females and ensure the offspring he contrib-
uted to were indeed his own was more of a winner in the reproductive
competition than a male who inseminated fewer females and spent his
resources rearing other males' descendants. The third implication is the
possibility of a functionally specific adaptive system of a masculine (but
not feminine) coercive sexuality or sexually proprietary psychology, an
adaptive solution to the associated problems of access and control of fertile
females (Burgess and Draper 1989; Daly and Wilson 1988; Hrdy 1997;
Smuts 1995). It needs, perhaps, to be emphasized here that a part of this
problem, from the male point of view, is a distinctly female reproductive
strategy that may, in some circumstances, conflict with the success of a
potential or actual male partner (Hrdy 1997; Smuts 1992; Wilson et al.
1997; cf. Malamuth 1996).9
How does a framework from evolutionary psychology contribute to an
understanding of the sorcerer's fantasy content? Let us look more closely
at the cognitive mechanisms hypothesized by Wilson et al. (1997) as nec-
essary to support a sexually proprietary psychology. They anticipate a sen-
sitivity to cues (though not necessarily a conscious one) indicating the
probable fecundity and reproductive value10 of a woman, the stability of
the relationship they have with the woman, and the presence and com-
petitive potential of rivals for the woman. That is, they suggest that it is
easy for men to notice such things as a woman's age (an indicator of prob-
able fecundity and reproductive value), signs indicative of marital or rela-
tionship instability (e.g., a wife's expressed unhappiness, a girlfriend's
desire to date other men), and signs of a potentially successful rival (e.g.,
a wealthy and attentive bachelor neighbor). And when men do notice such
things, Wilson et al. go on to say, it is easy, in some circumstances, for
them to respond by using violence or threats of violence against the
woman. Male aggression is a part of the adaptation of sexual jealousy, a
system that evolved in an environment where such acts of control served
male reproductive success (Wilson and Daly 1992; Wilson et al. 1997).11
In this context, much of the content of the sorcerer's fantasy, though to
my eyes gruesome, is unremarkable. The themes of control and fertility
are easily associated with this adaptive system.
418 * ETHOS
I begin with fertility. The Arnhem Land sorcerer kills both men and
women by draining blood from the heart, and thus, interestingly, at least
according to Warner's translation, removes their souls. But, as noted
above, the hearts of men and women are approached from different routes,
and the blood drained in different ways. When a man is murdered, his
chest is cut, two ribs are pulled back and the heart pierced to then drain
from the wound in his side into the sorcerer's basket. A woman's blood, on
the other hand, drains from the wound made in her vagina. Now, according
to Warner, in Arnhem Land, heart blood is differentiated from body blood
in so far as the heart is the "home of the soul" (Warner 1937:185). But
blood in general is a powerful substance, a source of life and power, ac-
cording to Janice Reid (1983:79) who writes of Arnhem Land people living
just to the east of Warner's locale. Menstrual blood in particular is power-
ful, associated with fertility and worthy of ritual emulation (e.g., Hiatt
1975:150; Shapiro 1981:67; Warner 1937:289). It is as this symbol of fer-
tility that menstrual blood captures our attention here, for surely the re-
moval of the heart's blood through the vagina mimics the menstrual flow.
Or perhaps it mimics the blood of parturition. The blood that is taken thus
may even have the power to regenerate a kind of life, though this is as the
"image of something alive" that can be used for killing either people or
animals (Reid 1983:38).
That the theme of fertility has psychological relevance to the sorcerer
is also suggested by the fact that he places his sweat, a substance associ-
ated with growth and sexuality, within the victim's uterus. Warner's dis-
cussion of Murngin men's understanding of reproductive physiology
makes it clear that at least some Arnhem Land men associate the uterus
with women's fecundity. "That was what made babies," he was told, in
reply to a question about the effects of semen in the womb (1937:24). In
support of the cultural relevance of the uterus to fertility, I could also refer
to ritual content as well as to the knowledge that hunters have of animal
physiology. For example:
At Yirrkalla one day a wallaby was caught, and brought back to the camp. Men cutting
it up for distribution found a foetus inside it. Immediately they began to sing the songs
of the clan which had the wallaby as one of its totems, exclaiming at intervals, "Ah, we
are sorry for that wallaby mother with her young, that poor little wallaby baby!"
[Berndt and Berndt 1992:153-154]
But let me now turn to the theme of control. Cameron and Frazer
characterize murder as the total denial of autonomy; it is, in other words,
total control. But in addition to the fact of murder, the ritualization of
the Arnhem Land fantasy can, perhaps, be seen as one that especially
emphasizes control. As Munn (1968-69:188) might phrase it, the "com-
plete autonomy" of the sorcerer requires the "total subjection" of his vic-
tim. The act of killing is long and complicated. The victim must be seized
and rendered immobile. The body must be opened, the heart pierced, the
blood removed, the wound healed, and the victim sent on her way. After
an initial startled act of resistance, the victim is deprived of all volition.
She is completely passive, indeed she is unconscious. But an even more
total kind of control is exerted when the victim awakens. She is told that
she will have no memory of the event, and thus no reason to attempt to
undo what has been done to her. Were she able to remember she might
seek the ministrations of a healer, but she does not. She may even be told
how to feel, as in the above statement, "You will be happy." And she is told
when and how she will die. Victims might be told that they will get sick or
die in a fight. For example, "A Yandjinung man will hit you with a spear
and kill you" (Warner 1937:191).
The culturally salient association of infidelity and isolation provides
a pivotal feature of the sorcerer's fantasy. Isolation of the victim makes
control possible. The sorcerer encounters his victim alone in the bush,
often when she is on a gathering expedition with other women but has
become separated from the group. Or indeed, as in one of the cases above,
the sorcerer entices a woman away from the group by pretending to flirt
with her. There are dual possibilities accompanying isolation in Arnhem
Land society, the danger and excitement of being alone in the bush. It is
in a solitary state that one is the ideal target for a sorcerer. An example of
this possibility is provided by the following account by Janice Reid:
One day I left the main group hunting mud crabs and, with a sister, Maypilama, and
her children, clambered through a broad and muddy expanse of mangroves to a beach
where we could harvest rock oysters. After a few hours I announced my intention to
return to the other women. Maypilama looked alarmed and said that I would get lost.
Insisting I would not, I set off, tracing our footprints through the the disorienting maze
of mangroves. Flushed with pride I emerged only 100 metres from the main camp.
When the women saw me they looked agitated, asking, "Where's Maypilama?" I indi-
cated the beach. They asked incredulously if I had come back alone. I responded,
proudly, that I had. As if by silent signal, several women began to wail. Between refrains
they explained that travelling alone I was liable to attack by a sorcerer who had reput-
edly been seen in this part of the country. [1985:137]
But going alone into the bush is also how a woman meets her lover or
elopes with a man of her choice. An example of this possibility was related
to me by a woman living in southeast Arnhem Land:
A woman was with the women who were gathering corms in the mud.... [She] went
a little way from the others, pretending to gather as she slowly moved away from the
group. She put down her cooliman [carrying vessel] and ran off with her husband's
younger brother. The women noticed she was gone and went to look for her. They
found her cooliman and sang out, "Gagagagaga, your wife has eloped." [Burbank
1994:96]
Recall that as he worked upon the young girl, the sorcerer was "afraid her
relatives would come looking for her," just as they might if they suspected
420 ? ETHOS
her of meeting a lover. And so we return, in a sense, to the theme of fertil-

ity, or at least sexuality, and who is in control.
Viewed through lenses provided by evolutionary psychology, these
themes seem self-apparent. But as Annette Hamilton (1988), to choose a
local example, says of the analysis of Aboriginal myths, multiple interpre-
tations of any text are always possible. We can know, to some conscious
extent, at least, what we learn from any text, but what does it mean to its
speaker? This is a question that has provided the raison d'etre for many a
scholar's career and I am unlikely to provide a definitive answer here. All
I can argue is that my interpretation bears some resemblance to the mean-
ing this text had for the sorcerer, that is, for at least a partial psychological
validity (Wallace 1961). I hope that my years of field work in Arnhem
Land-and thus an experience that parallels in part those of the sorcerer
and his victims-and the fluidity of my exegesis of those experiences may
persuade my audience.12
I shall not try here to treat these themes in the sad texts of the West-
ern serial sexual killer but leave this task to others. I will suggest that it is
an easy step from Cameron and Frazier's discussion of misogyny and tran-
scendence.13 Instead, I turn to my second question: why does the Western
serial sex murderer kill in fact, while the Arnhem Land sorcerer only mur-
ders in fiction? Here it is important to note that it may not only be the
horrible story content that links the serial sex killer with the sorcerer, but
the very fact of the story itself.
Many who try to explain the behavior of sexual killers have noted the
importance of fantasy in their lives and have proposed it as a motivating
force in their crimes (e.g., Burgess et al. 1986; Egger 1998; Giannengelo
1996; Keppel 1995; Prentky et al. 1989; Ressler et al. 1986). One of the
earliest studies of the link between sadistic fantasy and criminal violence
was set in a London psychiatric hospital. In-depth interviewing of 16
criminal inmates revealed 13 men whose acts of violence did not seem
particularly intelligible in terms of external circumstances. Instead, the
authors of this study, MacCulloch et al. (1983), make a suggestive case for
the motivational impetus of at least some sexual fantasy. Detailed personal
and sexual histories revealed that years prior to the crime for which he
had been imprisoned, each of the 13 men had developed a sadistic fantasy
that was "identical to all or part of the . . . offense" (MacCulloch et al.
1983:23). In addition, each of the 13 had, prior to committing the offense
for which they had been convicted, tried out various aspects of their fan-
tasy, explaining to the interviewers that their actions were necessary to
"maintain the effectiveness of the fantasy as a source of arousal"
(1983:26). After, say, following a woman though a park, this experience
would be incorporated into a fantasy of stalking, abduction, rape, and
murder. In some cases, these "behavioral try-outs" had lead to criminal
convictions, for, say, burglary. Unaware of the associated fantasies, of

course, the authorities had not identified these crimes as sexually moti-
vated.
Researchers associated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's
1979-83 study of 36 incarcerated sexual murderers in the United States
have definedfantasy as "an elaborated set of cognitions (or thoughts)
characterized by preoccupation (or rehearsal), anchored in emotion, and
originating in daydreams" (Prentky et al. 1989:889; see also Burgess et al.
1986; Reseler et al. 1988). They nominate fantasy as the prime motivator
in serial sexual homicide. As Burgess and her colleagues put it:
Whereas psychological motives for violent behavior are usually conceptualized in the
literature as having roots beginning with trauma, insult, and/or overstimulation in early
childhood, our thesis is different. We hypothesize that these men are motivated to
murder by their way of thinking. Over time, their thinking patterns emerged from or
were influenced by early life experiences. [1986:256-257]14
Between 81 percent to 82 percent of the men in the FBI study reported

"daydreaming" from childhood, continuing through adulthood. But it
should be noted, as Burgess et al. do, that "96 percent of adults in the
general population report that they daydream several times a day"
(1986:256). In their overview of research on sexual fantasy, including that
of the FBI group, Leitenberg and Henning conclude that "there is no evi-
dence that sexual fantasies, by themselves, are either a sufficient or a nec-
essary condition for committing a sexual offense" (1995:488). Also noting
that only a minority of the men who entertain sadistic sexual fantasies
attempt to enact them, the FBI group asks a question similar to that posed
in this paper: "what leads an individual to translate a fantasy into a real-
ity?" (Prentky et al. 1989:891).
Alternatively we might ask, what leads an individual to not translate
a fantasy into reality. This brings us back to the Arnhem Land sorcerer.
Why doesn't the Arnhem Land sorcerer actually perform the acts dictated
by his fantasy the way we presume the serial killer renders his fantasy
concrete? Because, I suggest, the sorcerer's fantasy is so satisfying.
Gananath Obeyesekere (1975) anticipated this kind of argument years ago
in his discussion of Sri Lankan public shrine sorcery. Insofar as the pa-
trons of such shrines believe in the efficacy of sorcery, their acts can be
likened to that of someone hiring a paid killer. Sorcery in this view is an
act of homicide and provides the same satisfaction as physical murder
even if the victim does not die: "If a client strongly believes that sorcery is
effective, he already imagines the death of his enemy sooner or later. His
enemy is alive, but it is just a matter of time before he dies" (1975:21).
Fantasy, however is sufficiently satisfying only in some circumstances.
Again Obeyesekere guides my way when he points out that in the villages
of Sri Lanka, life's traumas are multiple and constant. Misfortune, illness,
422 ? ETHOS
and death are not rare events. Thus the belief that one has harmed an
enemy through an act of sorcery is often reinforced by a chance, but prob-
able occurrence (Obeyesekere 1975). Similarly, we might observe that
injury, disease, and death were not infrequent experiences in hunting and
gathering Arnhem Land, though colonization often exacerbated their fre-
quency, intensity, and devastation in the newly settled populations.
Two points are routinely made today about Aboriginal health in Aus-
tralia prior to contact. First, that it is impossible to know about it with any
certainty or in any detail. Second, in 1788 when the English first arrived
to stay, it was probably of a standard somewhat better than that of most
18th-century Europeans. Endemic disease was possibly limited to tra-
choma, leprosy, and yaws.15 Nutrition was generally good, dental problems
few, and childbirth not usually a danger, though infant and child mortality
may have been substantial. Adults did, however, occasionally sicken and
die. The most likely causes of adult injury and death, however, were snake-
bites, accidents, and interpersonal conflicts (Berndt and Berndt 1992;
Franklin and White 1991; Saggers and Gray 1991). In Arnhem Land, in-
terpersonal conflict as a cause of mortality may have been particularly
high due to the relatively concentrated population and the greater fre-
quency of polygyny than elsewhere on the continent. Warner saw "war-
fare," that is, armed combat between clans, as "one of the most important
social activities" in northeast Arnhem Land; it was often precipitated by
disputes over women or a desire to avenge a previous death (1937:144).
Of a population of about 3,000, he estimated that armed aggression had
resulted in the death of 200 people over the previous 20 years. The vast
majority of victims were men, particularly young men, but women might
be killed occasionally. Thus it is likely that illness, injury, and death oc-
curred with sufficient frequency to satisfy a sorcerer's belief in his own
efficacy. Indeed, the sorcerer who gave Warner the account presented in
the beginning of this article had a number of deaths attributed to his prac-
tice; five of these are detailed in Warner's book.
Circumstances might also affect the fantasy experience more directly.
The postulated relationship between fantasy and murder in this discussion
raises the questions of just what kind of human experience we are talking
about when we use the wordfantasy and how it might work as a motivating
force. According to Michele Stephen (1989a, 1989b, 1995, 1997), whose
work on sorcery is necessary to my argument, past thinking about the
kinds of imaginative activity of which fantasy seems to be one version has
revolved around a contrast between unconscious and conscious processes.
Following a survey of an interdisciplinary array of research, she advocates
a view of mind and experience that eschews this dichotomization. Much,
if not most, of cognition16 occurs outside of consciousness. Our mental
process are better characterized as a mixture of discursive thought (logical
sequential) and symbolic thought (via images) whether we are awake or

asleep, going about our daily routines or engaged in erotic fantasies
(Stephen 1989b).
Building upon this new understanding of mind and Douglas Price-
Williams's concept of the "waking dream" (1987), Stephen posits the ex-
istence of "the autonomous imagination." Dreams, possession, trance, and
visions are, according to this formulation, products of the autonomous
imagination, experiences arising within the mind but perceived as occur-
ring outside the mind. The autonomous imagination is an unconscious
cognitive information-processing series of operations that draw on mate-
rial from both internal and external sources. It duplicates neither source,
but rather emerges from the interaction into an entirely unique, or emer-
gent, product. Though the stream of imagery thought is unconscious, it is
intertwined with conscious thought. It may also, from time to time, emerge
more fully into consciousness to be experienced as a dream or vision. Psy-
chically adept individuals may be able to control the appearance of its
product, autonomous imaginings, in consciousness to some extent; for
most people these manifestation are experienced as uncontrolled visita-
tions from an external source.
In casting autonomous imagination in this mediating role, Stephen's
means for understanding the interaction of nature and culture allows an-
thropology to move beyond what D'Andrade has called "a cultural theory
with empty people" (1995:234). Her construct invites us to model a
mechanism of the individual mind that both shapes cultural symbols and
brings cultural symbols to bear on the contours of individual motivation.
Here I think her "hunch" about the relationship of the autonomous imagi-
nation to culture, cognition, and emotion is particularly important. As
Stephen visualizes this relationship, "via autonomous imagination, the
deepest emotional needs of the individual contribute to culture, while at
the same time are shaped by it" (1989a:229-230).
Along with D'Andrade (1984), and many others (Chisholm 1999),
Stephen (1989a, 1995) sees emotions as a kind of intelligence, a means of
distinguishing what is good from what is bad. In a formulation that paral-
lels much of Strauss and Quinn's (1994, 1997) reworking of cognitive con-
nectionism, emotions are seen linked in associative networks to other
kinds of information from both the past and the present. Autonomous
imagination may, according to this construction, be the means by which
emotions are, at least initially, linked to particular experiences and the
concepts and symbols derived from those experiences. The resulting con-
figurations are both personal and shared. They are particular to the person
because they arise from the particular experiences that an individual has
had. But they are also cultural insofar as a group of individuals have similar
experiences, structured to some extent by their public culture and shared
424 * ETHOS
meaning. Because experience and information are linked both cognitively

and emotionally, a particular image or concept may evoke not only under-
standing, but also emotion in an audience that shares the association be-
cause it has shared the culturally structured experience. Looking at the
sorcerer's fantasy from Stephen's perspective, we can interpret much of
its content as culturally constructed personal symbols. We can also see the
actions of the sex killer in a similar light. In this sense, we can agree with
Cameron and Frazer that sexual murder is constructed by cultural dis-
course. We can also understand why the sex killer's deed, beyond the fact
of his killing, evokes such strong emotions in his Western audience.
However, there may be a third reason that the autonomous imagina-
tion's configurations of emotion, experience, concepts, and symbols can
be shared, at least to some extent, though those who share particular con-
figurations may enact and be enmeshed in different sociocultural struc-
tures. This, I suggest, is because the internal source that it draws upon is
largely uniform, a species-specific brain and mind. Here Joseph LeDoux's
work (1994, 1995, 1996) on "the emotional brain," provides a glimpse of
the species-specific neural circuitry that might underlie the kind of rela-
tionship between emotion and symbol that Stephen intuits in her con-
struct of the autonomous imagination. It is also an important addition
to Stephen's framework, for it allows me to connect her ideas about
the autonomous imagination to those of evolutionary psychology. A
neuro-scientist who has focused on fear, LeDoux (1994, 1995, 1996) views
emotions not as psychological states, but as biological functions that
operate largely on an unconscious level. Most, if not all, emotional feelings
are conscious manifestations of a specific physiological and behavioral
system that evolved as a solution to a problem of survival and reproduction
faced by our ancestors at some time in the evolutionary past. There is,
according to this perspective, not an emotional system, but many emo-
tional systems in the human body, each concerned with a specific problem
in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Emotions are "powerful
motivators" precisely because they are so central to our survival and re-
production. We may also experience them as powerful because they work
largely outside of consciousness and thus outside of our conscious control.
We cannot control our emotions directly, says LeDoux. Emotional systems
are attached to cognitive areas in the brain, but (and this is one of the
reasons we are more rather than less at the mercy of our emotions) there
are more neural connections from unconscious centers of emotion, like
the amygdala, to cognitive areas, than the other way around. What we can
do to evoke or suppress a feeling is manipulate our environments. Hence
the importance of cultural symbols. Fear, for example, is an evolved system
that addresses the problem of survival in the face of danger. In humans it
is a system that can be turned on by evolved (or what LeDoux calls "natural
"The Lust to Killt * 425
triggers") environmental cues of dangers that recurred often in our evolu-

tionary past. Patterns in phobias suggest what some of these might be and
include: "snakes, spiders, heights, water, open places, social situations"
(LeDoux 1996:130). But the fear system may also be started by a "learned
trigger." This is a cue associated with a "natural trigger." For example, in
association with a fear of heights, one person might learn to fear airplanes
and to calm this fear by taking trains or praying.
The fear system is particularly important for this discussion insofar
as it may have something to do with the sorcerer's fantasy and the sex
killer's actions. A recent synthesis of some of LeDoux's work with attach-
ment theory (Chisholm 1999) moves this discussion closer to an answer
to the second question that I have posed. Why does the sorcerer kill only
in fantasy while the sex killer does so in fact? A model of the sex killer's
motivation proposed by Burgess et al. (1986:261; see also Ressler et al.
1988) begins by positing an "ineffective social environment," that is, inef-
fective attachments to nurturers, as foundational. Here quality of care-
taker/child attachments is distinguished from other formative factors such
as physical or sexual abuse. Though clearly the latter could result in the
former, such behaviors can also be experientially distinct. A child, for ex-
ample, may be "securely attached" to his mother, but beaten by his father.
The ways in which early attachments might be critical is a question worth
exploring in some detail.
Attachment theory gives central place to representation or models of
self, other, and relationship that are understood as emergent and dynamic
mechanisms of human social interaction. Briefly, beginning in the early
years of life, children's interactions with primary caregivers are internal-
ized as working models of social relations that will in adulthood, following
subsequent life course modification, motivate their views of self and rela-
tions with others. A vast array of empirical work suggests that perceived
patterns in early and ongoing attachment experience are related to sub-
sequent patterns of social adaptation and competence or, alternatively, of
maladaptation and psychopathology. Cichetti et al. (1995) have suggested
that if these models are understood as prototypes of self, other, and rela-
tionship that guide social perception and interaction, they suggest a means
for understanding the intergenerational transmission of parenting behav-
ior, including abusive and neglectful behaviors (Cichetti et al. 1995:29).
There is also a growing literature linking infant attachment experience
with later reproductive strategies (e.g., Belsky et al. 1991; Chisholm 1993,
1995, 1996, 1999).
Building on Bowlby's (1969) original formulation and recent refine-
ments (e.g., Crittenden 1997a, 1997b), Chisholm emphasizes the protective
function of the attachment system; it can be seen as an evolved mecha-
nism that addresses the problem of safety. Beginning in early infancy,
426 ? ETHOS
representations of self in relationship to others and associated expecta-

tions about self and other become virtually indelible though unconscious
memories. The attachment system is associated with feelings, particularly
those of security/love and anxiety/fear. During the latter part of the first
year of life, the "securely" attached child-that is, a child who uses the
caretaker as a secure base from which to explore-will express what can
be interpreted as anxiety or fear upon separation from the caretaker. The
behavior expressed upon reunion with the caretaker is interpreted as
manifestations of love and security. But for other children, the caretakers
may themselves be a source of fear. As Chisholm sees it, a major function
of the attachment system is to provide the infant with information about
environmental risk. One source of risk posited as a variable but recurrent
factor in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was violence from
parents and/or their partners. Or more correctly stated according to
Trivers's (1974) theory of parent-offspring conflict, the risk came from the
parent's or partner's reproductive strategy. Animals, including people,
have offspring that they don't necessarily want to rear to maturity. The
offspring that has an early warning of this possibility and who can thus take
steps to circumvent parental actions that might lead to injury or death is
an offspring that has a somewhat greater chance of surviving to reproduce.
As Chisholm observes, there is little a helpless infant can do when faced
with a parent unwilling to invest further in the child. "Insecure" attach-
ment styles, that is, those manifest by children who do not play or explore
when separated from the caretaker and who are not comforted upon the
reunion, may represent a small but significant variation in action that
made, and may still make, a life or death difference. That is, Chisholm
suggests, attachment styles are contingent on a system that evolved in an
environment of adaptedness that included a very real possibility of infan-
ticide, either through deliberate action or fatal neglect.17
Chisholm (1999) also believes that fear may permeate the internal
working model of self and other of the insecurely attached child; for not
only is the environment without mother a danger, so, too, is the environ-
ment with mother a danger. Returning to LeDoux's work, we must recall
that an emotion system includes not only a perception of danger and a
consequent feeling, but also a largely unconscious repertoire of response.
In the case of fear, there seem to be four possibilities contained within the
system: "withdrawal (avoiding the danger or escape from it), immobility
(freezing), defensive aggression (appearing to be dangerous and/or fighting
back), or submission (appeasement)" (LeDoux 1996:131). But as men-
tioned above, the helpless infant is limited in its ability to successfully
enact these strategies. What happens then?
Dorothy Bloch's (1978) ideas about many of the patients that she had
been seeing in her psychoanalytic practice of 25 years may provide at least
part of the answer. As she understood them, a fear of infanticide grounded

their symptoms. The fear of being killed by one or both parents was espe-
cially apparent in the children. To Bloch, this fear seemed quite reason-
able. Children are small, vulnerable, and dependent beings. Furthermore,
from the perspective of her framework, their distorted understanding of
their own thoughts, wishes, and feelings, or "magical thinking" led them
to assume that they were responsible for most of what happened around
them and led to their concern that they would be held responsible if things
went wrong. Additionally, the demeanor and actions of some parents sug-
gested that some of the children's fears might be realistic; at the very least,
some of the children were perceiving a parent's unconscious wish to kill
them. For example, one mother lifted her daughter out over the edge of
the parapet of Bloch's New York office building after the child had ex-
pressed a desire to look at the view. The fear of infanticide is, according to
Bloch, amplified by first- or second-hand experiences of actual violence.
Children who are abused by parents or siblings or who witness the abuse,
injury, or death of others, are all the more ready to believe that they will
be killed. Fear becomes terror as suspicions of parental motives become
convictions about parental motives.
In Bloch's view, the child's fear of infanticide is a human universal.
The typical response, the guard against fear, is the hope of obtaining pa-
rental love. This hope is grounded in self-deception served by fantasy. The
fantasy takes a variety of predictable forms that correspond to the degree
of fear felt by the child. When the fear is not too intense, the fantasy ide-
alizes the parents and devalues the self. The purpose of this is the promise
of love once the self becomes worthy. With a greater degree of fear the self
must be camouflaged to avoid destruction. With the terror and trauma of
actual violence and the conviction that they will be killed, Bloch believes
that fantasy is inhibited.
Bloch's interpretations of her patients' fears and defenses can be un-
derstood in another way, however. This is in light of an evolutionary psy-
chological or psycho-Darwinian take on self-deception. Much of the
thinking in this area revolves around the Alexander/Trivers hypothesis
and has been summarized recently by Nesse and Lloyd (1992). Self-deception
is an adaptation, according to this framework; its function is to give its
possessor an edge in social interactions where not consciously perceiving
one's own or others' motives can be advantageous. What situations might
these be? In the case of the infant in the environment of evolutionary
adaptedness, or in the case of the human infant of today for that matter,
it might be advantageous to recognize homicidal motives in one's caretakers
only at an unconscious level. While alerted, self-deception at the conscious
level should help the infant enact the kinds of behaviors that might save
its life. For example, a cooing and smiling infant is less likely to be attacked
428 ? ETHOS
than one that is wailing in terror. For similar reasons it might well serve
the infant not to recognize its own fear or a subjective experience of the
responses entailed by the fear system. Freezing or submissive behavior,
for example, would hamper or inhibit cooing and smiling. Attempted flight
or defensive aggression would clearly be ineffectual and might well pro-
voke an ambivalent caretaker to attack.
Here too, fantasy can be seen in the service of self-deception. To make
this point I turn to Christoper Badcock's (1990, 1992, 1995) melding of
Darwin and Freud. In this framework, ego is proposed as "the interface of
external perception and internal sensation" (1990:9), a construct that
bears some resemblance to that of Stephen's autonomous imagination.
The id is seen as the "Inclusive fitness-maximizing Demands" (Badcock
1990:10). We are by evolutionary design motivated to reproduce and this
is the id's function. The ego has a tactical function of implementing the
id's demands, but not at the cost of great injury or death. The relationship
posited between ego and id is somewhat parallel to the relationship of
LeDoux's amygdala and cortex. Recall that in the later relationship there
are more neural connections from the amygdala to the cortex than the
other way around. In Badcock's scheme, the id has a number of "up-links"
to the ego. But the ego, lacking "down-links," can modify the id only indi-
rectly via repression and defense. Or, to phrase this slightly differently, the
ego can modify the id with deception. Badcock sees dreams as ego's device
for satisfying unrealistic and unrealizable id demands. Though he seems
to cast fantasy as an id product (Badock 1990:12), I shall cast it as a prod-
uct of ego, not a dream, but a daydream and sometimes a waking dream.
As with dreams, fantasy's role is that of persuasion. It lets the id see the
satisfaction of its desires in an almost cinematic fashion.
And here I can begin to imagine a source of the variation in the inten-
sity of "autonomous imaginings." Though I've never had a waking dream
or vision, as far as I can remember, I understand from Price-Williams
(1987) that they take on a degree of reality not shared by more ordinary
fantasy products like daydreams. There may come a time when living in
an illusion is bad for your health. "That person is really trying to kill you!
You need to see this clearly!" says one adaptive system. But another-
remember the likelihood of multiple adaptive systems-says, "If you act
upon your fear you are more likely to be killed" and, because the impulse
to see clearly is so strong, creates a very vivid vision, one that masks, at
least to some extent, what is really happening.
This scenario casts the terrorized child living in a vivid fantasy world.
It is, however, at odds with Bloch's view that children who have experi-
enced extreme fear inhibit fantasy. This disagreement is important, for
according to her argument it is such children who may later kill. I do not,
however, think that she demonstrates this. It is not clear from her exposition
that murderers inhibit fantasy. Indeed, the frequency with which amnesia
and disassociation are characteristic of their murderous acts points to a
life-like fantasy. There is also the evidence from MacCulloch et al. (1983)
and the FBI group that serial sex killers are immersed in worlds of fantasy.
One murderer interviewed in the latter's study said, "So excessive was my
daydreaming that it was always in my report cards ... I was dreaming
about wiping out the whole school" (Burgess et al. 1986:259). As I read
Bloch, the more fearful children were less willing to share their fantasies
with her but that they had fantasies was apparent once they finally did
engage in play. The rage they demonstrated struck me as the reason for
their reticence in sharing them. But not all children are so reserved. This
example from the Burgess et al. study begins with an observation by a
three-year-old boy's mother. He had used a string to tie his penis to a
bureau drawer:
As a young adolescent, he was found by his parents in the bathtub practicing autoerotic
asphyxia with his penis and neck tied to the cross-bar of the faucets. At age 14 his
parents took him to a psychiatrist after noticing rope burns on his neck. At age 17 this
same subject abducted a girl at knife-point, took her to a deserted area where he kept
her all night, and released her in the morning. The adolescent was apprehended and
then released; the charge on his record was "girl trouble." Of importance is the of-
fender's shift in the object of aggression from himself to a woman. Not until late ado-
lescence when the offender began following women, confronting them with a knife,
binding them, and fondling them was the offender sent to prison. After release from
prison, his crimes escalated to the murder of three young women by asphyxia. [Burgess
et al. 1986:260]
This example is highly suggestive of a continuous stream of imagery con-

necting early masturbatory fantasy with later murderous acts. It also raises
the question of why a child in fear of his parents chooses not to kill them
(though some serial killers do) but, rather, subjects who are clearly seen
as sexual objects.
Here I think it is useful to look at Robert Stoller's (1976) explication
of perversion as "the erotic form of hatred" arising in early childhood,
occasioned by frustration, pain, and fear. Perversion, which in his view
may include sexual murder, is a fantasy that is sometimes, but not always,
acted out. The "perversion fantasy" provides both protection and pleasure.
Primarily, it is a defense against fear, a fantasy or act of revenge that re-
enacts the original childhood trauma, but reverses the roles of victim and
perpetrator. Stoller's elaboration of this hypothesis is based on a Freudian
interpretation of his psychoanalytic patients. But I find a more useful in-
terpretation in a connectionist account of the links between early and later
love. Naomi Quinn and Claudia Strauss also begin with Freud, in particular
with his ideas about adult love being an attempt to re-find the bliss and
perfection of the pre-Oedipal mother-child relationship. As they concep-
tualize this linkage, because security and survival (issues accompanied by
430 ? ETHOS
strong emotions) are so central to the mother-child relationship, the re-

sulting associational schema of intimacy is "indelible" and "motivationally
charged." In adolescence or adulthood, when intimacy is re-found in sex-
ual passion, the activation of any "component of the early schema,
whether feelings of closeness, or fear of separation, or neediness ... or
particular memories of the caretaker-will activate the entire complex of
ideas, feelings, and motivations" (Strauss and Quinn 1997:202) of the
original enduring network of associations. In the case of the sexual killer,
and the sorcerer, this motivating schema includes feelings of fear and the
fantasy of hatred and revenge.
Along similar lines, some of the recent re-conceptualizations of at-
tachment focus on its implications for adult sexual passion and reproduc-
tion. The internal working models of social relations in early childhood are
seen as especially pertinent for motivating adult "love styles." Just as early
attachment styles of young children can be seen as contingent upon vari-
ation in caretaker behavior, so too are adult "love styles" seen as contin-
gent on early experience as well as later sociocultural circumstances
surrounding local practices of courtship and marriage. Of particular rele-
vance here is a body of evidence that strongly associates insecure attach-
ment with a love style that is "intensely passionate," a style of adult love,
"in which men and women are 'crazy' about, 'preoccupied' with and 'ad-
dicted' to each other-but not for very long" (Chisholm 1995:49; see also
Belsky et al. 1991; Hazan and Shaver 1987). It is an easy step from this to
interpret the murderous acts of the serial sex killer, however perverted and
maladaptive others might find them, as a contingent "love style" arising
from an attachment experience that is a further variant of the insecure
style. This style arises in the fearful fantasies of the infant that may be due
to caretaker qualities or actions, aspects of the interaction, or aspects of
the child's perception of self, caretaker, or their relationship. For example,
an infant's fearful fantasies might arise due to his experience with a se-
verely depressed or brutal mother, and/or to a mismatch of his capabilities
and his caretaker's demands, and/or his way of reading faces, a way that
transforms the subjective experience of a laugh into a threat.
Now, readers familiar with the child rearing practices of Aboriginal
Australia (e.g., Berndt 1978; Hamilton 1981) might object that the kind of
early experiences associated with insecure attachment are unlikely. I
would agree with this objection and point to the rarity of the sorcerer, in
contrast to the good magician, in Aboriginal societies. According to A. P.
Elkin (1945:47), although belief in sorcerers is widespread, the self-
confessed sorcerer is rarely found. However, as Robert Edgerton (1992:75)
suggests, even in relatively egalitarian societies, social arrangements are
not necessarily good for everyone. There is always a potential for the in-
terests of one person, group, or category to negate those of another person,
"The Lust to Killt * 431
group, or category. In the case of the Arnhem Land sorcerers' early child-
hood, I can identify several possible situations that might lead to insecure
attachment of mother and child. First, let me observe that maternal de-
pression is often associated with insecure bonding, the mother in these
instances, unable to respond in such a way as to create a secure attach-
ment with the child (Cicchetti et al. 1995:31-38). Indeed with Bloch's
theory in mind, we can imagine that the impassive or sad face of a de-
pressed mother might easily be read by the infant as a fearful sign of a
dangerous detachment (Cohn and Tronick 1983). Aside from a spontane-
ous endogenous cause, depression might be expected as a response to
some experiences of Arnhem Land women, which though probably rare,
have been recorded. Warner (1937:58), for example, states that a man may
abduct a pregnant woman taking her to live among his clan. Or a man may
abduct a woman after he has killed her husband (1937:66, 71). One can
imagine I think, the trauma such women might suffer. Furthermore, they
might well be met with hostility by their abductors' other wives. Even for
women not so abducted, co-wife hostility, a well-documented phenome-
non in Aboriginal Australia (e.g., Burbank 1994) might be another source
of a mother's depression.18 Warner's (1937:187-18) statement that sorcer-
ers usually gain their knowledge and power from their fathers may also be
significant here. First, it suggests another possible source of maternal de-
pression: heightened fear of a fearsomely aggressive husband.19 Second, it
suggests an additional parallel between sorcerers and at least some serial
sex killers. Ressler et al. (1988) have noted that, though such killers often
come from "intact" families, there are suggestions nevertheless that these
families are more rather than less pathological. Of particular interest here
are indicators that suggest the presence of aggressive and abusive fathers.
These include records of alcohol and drug abuse, mental illness, and crimi-
nal behavior. Such men may not only model deviant behavior for their
sons, but also instill a traumatic degree of fear in both mother and child.
But if I have suggested the source of a murderous fantasy of both the
serial killer and sorcerer, I have yet to suggest why the former actually
kills, that is, acts out his fantasy. In Obeyesekere's (1990) discussion of
symptom and symbol, motive and meaning-when he asks himself about
the difference between Abdin, the penitent who hangs himself on hooks
and the more successful resolution of inner turmoil of the priestesses with
the Medusa hair-he provides me with a means of addressing this ques-
tion. As Obeyesekere (1981, 1990) defines them, symptom and symbol
bear a family resemblance insofar as both represent "deep motiva-
tions"-the conflicts, terrors, and unacceptable desires that arise in early
life-and strategies for living with the pain and internal conflict they may
entail. As I understand him, symbol is a symptom transformed, the symptom
arising in unconscious psychic conflict as a manifestation of that conflict and
432 ? ETHOS
as a means of self-communication, the sufferer's self-representation that

is both meaningful and soothing. Symptom becomes symbol as sufferers
appropriate from the symbolic world of their cultures, thus communicat-
ing not only to self but also to others. Faced with the diverse possibility of
any symbolic system, each sufferer might choose anew, yet Obeyesekere
notes predictability in the symbol chosen by the women priestesses, i.e.,
the matted hair, that assists their redirection of sexual desire from man to
god. The pattern of this choice is due, he suggests, to the origin of at least
some symbols in psychic conflict. Symptom expressed is institutionalized
as symbol but need not bear the same meaning for all members of a cul-
ture; symbols may exist apart from deep motivations, the experience that
gave rise to them. But because of their origin in unconscious conflict, they
facilitate representation of just that kind of deep motivation that originally
gave rise to their expression. They contain a potential to represent the
kind of experience of their genesis, an ease of association with cognition
and emotions that represent the personal though unconscious experiences
of those who choose them.20
Motive and meaning are attributes of both symptom and symbol; mo-
tive and meaning in Obeyesekere's scheme are intertwined, though the
pairs symptom/motive and symbol/meaning bear the strongest links.
Meaning, in fact, is a means of overcoming motive. Hence the progressive
aspect of at least some symbols, for it is through symbols that the sufferer
devises a form of communication with self and other capable of over-
coming past trauma. But not all symbols are equal. Some bear closer
resemblance to symptoms, or more precisely, perhaps, not all symbols are
used to the same progressive effect, but in their form as personal symbols
may bear closer resemblance to symptom and as such are less useful tools
for self-knowledge and transcendence. The closer the symbol to the "ar-
chaic motivations of childhood," the more it motivates a regressive repe-
tition of the original trauma. The regressive/progressive potential of a
symptom and a symbol is largely a cultural matter, though clearly it is also
a matter of the sufferer's relation to the cultural system as well. The greater
the freedom of maneuverability, the greater the progressive potential for
symbolically mediated removal from the painful psychic past.
Symptoms are relatively inflexible compared to symbols, hence
Obeyesekere finds in them a "near identity cross-culturally" (1990:14).
Similarly, a symbolic system may allow for a greater or lesser freedom of
maneuverability. Here Obeyesekere contrasts the dream experience of
Sada Sami, a Sinhala Buddhist ascetic with that of a Western psychotic:
Note that Sada Sami recounts these meetings [with demons] as if they were real. It is
only when I interject that he states they are from his dream life. Yet they are real to
him; they are encounters experienced in another dimension of reality, the spiritual. It
is instructive to compare Sada Sami with a Western psychotic displaying a similar set
of symptoms. The Western paranoid patient would identify the dream with the reality,
'The Lust to Kill" 433
whereas Sada Sami recognizes that his was a dream. Yet it is not an ordinary one for
him; the dream experience is a real spiritual one, an actual adventure taking place in
a different plan, above the mundane. He can therefore narrate the experience as if it
had actually occurred, like any everyday experience. [1981:189]
Hence the satisfaction of the sorcerer with his fantasy of murder. His cul-
tural environment colludes in his attempted resolution of a deep motiva-
tion in at least two ways. First, it supports him through the widespread
instantiation of the sorcery schema. While the following example is a pub-
lic myth from Western Arnehm land, it suggests something of the symbolic
environment in which the sorcerer might have been raised.21 The "Re-
venge for a Crocodile-Death" is a story Catherine and Ronald Berndt re-
corded at Oenpelli in 1951:
Before, long ago, when there were only those very first people, one woman was a victim
of sorcery. The man had already worked sorcery on her, taken her soul, because she
would not accept him as her husband-even though her mother, his proper mother-in-
law, had given her to him as his promised wife. She reject him. So he made trouble for
her. He struck her with a magic spear, and called out to that creature, that water
dweller, the salt-water crocodile.
Well, all the children went together to swim in the creek. She was the one who urged
them to do that. She said to them, "Let's go and swim, and get mussels to eat!" They
talked about it among themselves, those older adolescent girls. She already had breasts,
and that was why she did not want that man for her husband ["She hadn't got used to
him when she was small!"] And so he killed her; he took her soul.
They were all swimming, those adolescent girls and those children. That creature,
that crocodile, was lying far away. At last it got her "smell," the smell of a sorcery
victim, a body without a soul. They saw bubbles coming running along. Maybe they
thought it was a fish hitting the water. It just came running. At last the others climbed
up from the water, those adolescent girls, and the little ones. She was alone, that sor-
cery victim. At last it got hold of her, and took her under water. The other, climbing
out, asked each other, "What about her? Where did she go?" And they said, "A croco-
dile got her, and took her under the water!" The creature swung its tail, striking them.
They were just dying of fright. But they ran and beat the water with their hands, asking
that creature desperately, "Show her to us, that girl you took! Perhaps there was some-
thing wrong with her, that we didn't know about." The crocodile came floating up then,
with the girl on his back, where he had put her. The other girls were crying. Then they
began to recover, but for a while they lay in the sun, on the warm sand, until their bones
became stronger. At last the old ones took the smaller children on their shoulders and
went home to where their mothers and father were living. They went on, and when at
last they came close, they gave them the death message. "That girl, a crocodile got her,
took her for ever, underneath the water!" And her mother and father told all about it,
far and wide. [1989:231-232]
As the myth continues, the girl's family identifies the husband as the sor-
cerer, "the man who was sulking because she rejected him" (Berndt and
Berndt 1989:232) and respond by killing his entire group, the adults
speared, the children smashed against rocks. In the Berndts's opinion, the
content of such stories, which might be heard repeatedly throughout a
person's lifetime, were taken as illustrative of social reality. Note that as
this story portrays society, sorcery has real effects; not only does it result
434 ? ETHOS
in the girl's death, but also in those of the sorcerer and his family as his
victim's kin take their revenge.
The extent to which sorcery beliefs are foundational, at least in north-
east Arnhem Land, if not in the rest of Aboriginal Australia, is suggested
by Munn's analytic juxtaposition of soul theft with the Wawilak myth, a
myth that structures the ritual series of male initiatory rites and defines
the stages of manhood. The psychological power of the myth rests on the
"common images and underlying structures" (Munn 1968-69:190) that it
shares with sorcery beliefs, that is, sorcery beliefs provide the context in
which the myth's images take on a motivational relevance. As Obeyesek-
ere might understand this cultural setting, "fantasy itself may be rendered
redundant, since it is often converted into subjective imagery or personal
symbols" (1981:167), that is, the culturally available sorcery story takes
on a personal significance for the sorcerer, soothing, if not transcending,
his inner conflict.
The sorcerer's resolution of deep motivations is also assisted via the
cultural attitude to dreams and other products of the autonomous imagi-
nation. Douglas Price-Williams and Rosslyn Gaines (1994) detail various
anthropological ideas about the relationship of dreams to the dream-
ing-that understanding of the creation and continuity of the natural and
moral world that grounds Aboriginal identity and social life (Stanner
1965).22 Although this relationship is far from a clear and likely variable
across the continent, even its possibility suggests the potential importance
of dreams in Aboriginal Australia. Just as "it is hard to separate religious
experience from the experience of everyday life" in Aboriginal Australia
(Morphy 1984:215), so too can we speak of continuity between dreaming
and waking experience (Pentony 1961; Price-Williams 1987; Yengoyan
1990). An example of this, par excellence, is seen in conception dreams.
One of the men who spoke with Warner provides us with an illustration:
I had a nice dream the other night. I dreamed that a boy child walked past all the other
humpies [huts] ... in the camp and kept coming until he got to my house. He beat on
the bark wall. He called out, "Father! Father! Where are you?"
"Here I am."
"Where is mother?"
I told him and wakened up. I thought to myself, "True." [1937:21]
As is often the case, the dream was followed up by an anomalous experi-

ence the expectant father had in the bush:
Yesterday I went fishing with my wife at the creek. I went up one side of the creek and
she went up the other. By and by a bream fish came up and took her hook. He came
up to it easily and quietly. My wife did not have to pull on the line, for he came in to
her like he wanted to. [Warner 1937:21]
Both this man and his wife interpreted this fish's behavior as a sign that
she was pregnant, as apparently she was. Here dreams are seen as a means
of creating a very real event, a new life. Similarly, according to Warner,

dreams are a vehicle of communication for spirits of the dead. They may
inform a dreamer how to conduct ceremonial affairs (Warner 1937:270).
Dreams may also affect the physical well-being of the dreamer; the spirit
of a recently deceased friend or kinsman may make a dreamer sick
(Warner 1937:410). In each of these cases dream events have waking con-
sequences.
Other products of the autonomous imagination may also be more or
less routine occurrences in Arnhem Land. A. P. Elkin describes how the
physical as well as the sociocultural environment support this:
Aborigines spend much time with their own thoughts, reflecting on dreams, and being
ready, at any moment, to enter a condition of receptivity. The quietness and silence of
so much of their life, the absence of rush and of urgent appointments, and the fewness
of their numbers, facilitate this occupation with the psychic. [1945:67]
According to Petchkovsky and Cawte, "waking hallucinations and vision-

ary experiences" are a "fairly common occurrence in Yolngu culture"
(1986:358). Price-Williams and Gains describe the "special dreams" re-
ported by the Arnhem Land artists they inspire. One man from Yirkalla,
for example, described his dream as: "Very real. See and hear and feel and
touch. When is very real, it is a special dream. Difficult to tell the differ-
ence between [what is happening] now [i.e., the interview in which we
were engaged] and special dreams" (quoted in Price-Williams and Gaines
1994:379).
Although Warner's informants declined to detail the manner in which
a man became a sorcerer, an account given to Reid suggests that the
autonomous imagination may play an important part in this experience.
As the sorcerer-to-be sleeps upon someone's bone or blood, the spirit of
the deceased tells him to "Follow me and do this or that magic thing" (Reid
1983:41). The sorcerer's routine aggression may also be experienced via
the autonomous imagination. Although I cannot illustrate this possibility
with a case of soul theft, the following account of bone pointing is sugges-
tive:
When using this magical implement [the bone], the operator takes it in his left hand,
and says very softly, "Shooh ho! Let the breath leave thy body, O boy!" Then he chants
a song of hate for an hour or more, after which he warms part of the ngathungi, con-
centrates his mind until he sees a picture of his victim, and then with all the emotion
and energy he can summon, he whispers, "Die!" [Elkin 1945:52-53]
In contrast, the sex killer lives in a cultural environment where the

mainstream sees fantasy as just that, fantasy. Just as the Victorians secu-
larized a symbol system that would have allowed women to exhibit hysteria
as religious passion (Obeyesekere 1981:86), so does the contemporary
Western world prevent the sex killer from using the sorcerer's fantastical
techniques. It is not, I would argue, so much "discourses of violence,
436 ? ETHOS
masculinity, gender relations, subjectivity, and sexuality" (Cameron and

Frazer 1994:157) that create the sexual killer. Instead it is a series of dis-
courses insisting on the separation of waking and dreaming realities, mak-
ing clear and sharp distinctions between spiritual and material worlds that
makes his acts necessary. That is to say, both sorcerer and sex killer "act
out" their fantasy, but only the sex killer is required to do so in the physical
world. To conclude, it is not the historically particular construction of
masculine sexuality that explains sex murder. What Sarah Hrdy has said
of male dominance generally can be made to speak to my point here; we
err if we see masculine sexuality merely "as a recent historical construc-
tion." In contrast, "an evolutionary perspective pushes the search for [in
this instance the origins of the serial sex murderer] back in time by mil-
lions of years" (Hrdy 1997:8). Yet our search cannot end with a description
of "the psychic unity of humankind," too much of historical and cultural
importance has happened to us in those millions of years. Our psychic
unity is always expressed in historically and culturally particular ways. It
is expressed, however, in predictable ways (Shore 1996). We cannot un-
derstand the Western serial sex murderer only by looking at the Arnhem
Land sorcerer, nor can we understand the Arnhem Land sorcerer only by
looking at the Western sex killer. We can, however, understand more
about them, and about men and women, by looking at them both.
VICTORIA KATHERINE BURBANK is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Western Australia, Nedlands,
WA, Australia.
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Drs. Greg Acciaioli, James Chisholm, Douglas
Fry, Michael Pinches, Clayton Robarcheck, John Stanton, and Robert Tonkinson for their
critical reading and constructive comments on an earlier version of this article. I would also
like to thank Drs. Kimberley Cook and Maureen Perkins for their enthusiastic interest in this
article and Dr. Judith K. Brown for her sage advice about publication. Thanks are also due to
the University of Western Australia for providing me with the time to write with a period of
study leave.
1. Worthman (1992:170) calls to our attention Shore's (1988) suggestion about the per-
missibility of "rigorous partial accounts." Nevertheless, she expresses the hope they be en-
compassed by an integrated framework. At the very beginning of this exercise, I must say
that while I attempt an integrated and multidisciplinary account, I am nevertheless aware
that it is still a partial account. For example, it does not consider the larger, and certainly
relevant, sociopolitical environment in which both sorcerer and serial sex killers are formed
and perform. Nor does it include a consideration of the neurology of physical trauma, though
this may be an important factor in the homicidal motivation of serial killers (e.g., Egger
1998) and possibly of sorcerers as well.
2. See Keen 1994 for a detailed discussion of the heterogeneity and homogeneity of expe-
rience that these labels imply.
3. Phillip Jenkins (1994:45) informs us that women serial killers make up seven percent
of the U.S. Justice Department's database on such offenders. He also asks why "serial killers"
are equated with those whose acts are seen as sexual. While there have been a number of
women serial killers, in the sense that they have killed on several different occasions, the
question of motive can be raised, as in Cameron and Frazer (1987:144-148). In a recent
text, for example, several women are identified as serial killers. The motives ascribed to
their acts, however, are not sexual ones (Egger 1998:52-55). Because a sexual motive is of
relevance to my argument, I am happy to maintain the limited sense in which serial is
understood, though I admire Jenkin's important treatment of problem construction.
4. According to David McKnight (1981:42) women as well as men are recognized as sor-
cerers in some Aboriginal communities. He notes, however, that the ability to do greater
harm tends to be attributed to men rather than to women. For example, he cites Hiatt
(1965), who says of the Gidjingali that while women may bring illness to their victims, only
men kill them. Of Aboriginal Australia generally, Berndt and Berndt say that, "Women may
help in a [sorcery] rite; but generally speaking despite exceptions, they are not regarded as
responsible for such performances themselves" (1992:319). At Mangrove, in southeast Arn-
hem Land, I was told that, "Women can't kill, they might cry and be sorry" (Burbank
1994:171).
5. Some readers of the sorcerer's text may find the anatomic details somewhat vague.
One reader of this description, for example, understood the initial wound to be made in the
abdomen. Warner, however, is quite clear that "the magician enters the body of the woman
through her vagina" (1937:186). See also Berndt and Berndt 1992:329 and Munn
1968-69:187.
6. Les Hiatt (personal communication, October 27, 1999) has noted that while the mythi-
cal Gijingarli character Gabi-gabi commits rape with his penis rather than a stick, his act
resulting in a woman's death is "reminiscent of Warner's sorcerer" (see Hiatt 1990). I might
also mention here Geza Roheim's (1971:59) interpretation of the Central Australian point-
ing bone as a "symbolic penis," but must add John Morton's observation that Roheim's inter-
pretations "tended to be highly monotonous, hastily reducing every cultural item longer that
it was wide to a 'penis symbol' " (Morton 1988:xvii).
7. For an interesting series of exchanges between physicians and anthropologists over the
putative mechanisms of sorcery death, see Cawte 1983; Eastwell 1982, 1984a, 1984b; and
Reid and Williams 1984.
8. A major difference in the use offunction in evolutionary biology on the one hand and
anthropology and sociology on the other is captured by the synchronic/diachronic distinc-
tion (cf. Harris 1968). According to a recent sociology text,function refers to the effect that
a part has on the whole, with a particular emphasis on the way that it contributes "to the
maintenance and survival of the social system" (Haralambos et al. 1996:8). This use of func-
tion is often, but not necessarily accompanied by assumptions of stasis, consensus and ho-
mogeneity. It is worth emphasizing, I think, that those working with evolutionary
frameworks assume only that an evolved system was once functional, i.e., that it once served
the organism's survival and reproduction. They do not, particularly with regard to human
affairs, assume a contemporary functionality, indeed they often point out an evolved sys-
tem's contribution to current human dysfunction (e.g., LeDoux 1996; Wrangham and Peter-
son 1996).
9. The tactics of a context-dependent female strategy might include selective mate choice
and behavior that would confuse paternity (Lancaster 1991:3). That is to say, a woman
might not be willing to have a sexual relationship with a particular man. Or she might, in
addition, to having a relationship with him, pursue other partners.
10. Wilson et al. (1997:449), following Fisher (1958), define reproductive value as "the
statistically expected summed future reproduction of an individual, given her age, condition,
and circumstances."
438 ? ETHOS
11. The proposal of this putative system does not necessitate absence of jealousy in
women. In fact, Daly et al. (1982) posit an adaptive female jealousy, but see it as a response
to a different set of problems. See also Wilson and Daly 1992.
12. My fieldwork in southeast Arnhem Land, conducted in a settlement that I refer to as
Mangrove, includes an 18-month visit between 1977 and 1978, a nine-month visit in 1981,
a seven-month visit in 1988, and a five-week visit in 1997.
13. At least one caution must accompany this suggestion. Jenkins (1994:221-223) has
observed an interplay between popular notions of the serial killer, academic psychology, and
the content of published confessions. He suggests that serial killers interpret their behavior
as much through cultural lenses as anyone else. Thus their accounts are as likely to re-
circulate cultural stereotypes as provide innovative insights into their actions. Cameron and
Frazer (1987:148-155) make a similar point in their discussion of Dennis Nilsen.
14. This formulation appears to underlie the construct of the signature left by serial kill-
ers. Seen as distinct from the modus operandi, or the means of killing, the signature is
thought of as an all-too-physical manifestation of the killer's fantasy (e.g., Keppel 1995).
Examples of signatures might include postmortem mutilation and positioning of the body.
15. For Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea, ulcer infliction is seen as one of the more
grisly results of the sorcerer's magic, "causing terrible pain, disfigurement, the loss of limb,
and finally a grotesque, lingering death during which the victim's rotting flesh stinks so vilely
that he or she is abandoned even by close relatives" (Stephen 1995:223). The disease of
yaws, it might be noted, is characterized by the appearance of potentially disfiguring skin
ulcers.
16. And emotion (LeDoux 1996).
17. In a cross-cultural survey of family violence in a sample of 90 societies, Levinson
(1989:25) observes that infanticide reportedly occurs in 78.5 percent. In 60 percent of these
societies, it is the mother who reportedly kills the infant. In some non-human primates,
males taking over a troop routinely kill off their infants, thus bringing the females into an
earlier estrus (Hrdy 1977). It should be noted that parents may have altruistic motives for
infanticide or fatal neglect in some circumstances (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1992).
18. This is where, in a more extended treatment of this topic, I might introduce a critical
political economic component to my argument. Clearly the extent to which women's coop-
eration or competition is facilitated will be affected by the larger sociocultural context in
which they interact (Burbank 1994:101-103). Further attention to power, history, and so-
cial reproduction would clearly be relevant to this analysis.
19. Warner did not find the sorcerers of his acquaintance to be strikingly different from
other Aboriginal men (1937:187), nor, he said, were they particularly feared by their own
kinsmen (1937:233). This impression seems to parallel at least some of the responses of
people who find they know a serial killers, e.g., "Wes seemed so harmless, such an all-
around, basic good citizen" (Egger 1998). But these are not necessarily the reactions of inti-
mates.
20. While I find this formulation of the origins of symbols and the basis of patterning in
choice useful and believable, I am less persuaded by Obeyesekere's use of "castration anxi-
ety" (1981, 1990) in his interpretation of the content of the unconscious conflict. I suggest
that a more fruitful analysis of the universal tendency to associate matted hair with snakes
and sexuality might begin with a consideration of the fear system (snakes are a phobic ob-
ject) and its possible relation to attachment and transference.
21. Berndt and Berndt (1992:22) propose a view of Australian Aboriginal culture as "vari-
ation on a basically common ground." One can look at continental Aboriginal Australia as an
intricate weaving of local variation with broadly shared patterns. Thus I see the use of this
example as a reasonable step in my argument but must add that it can be no more than
suggestive.
22. There is also a literature addressing the adequacy and consequences of the terms
Dreaming and Dreamtime (e.g., Perkins 1998). For an anthropologist's reply see Morphy
1998.
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The Lust To Kill and The Arnhem Land Sorcerer An Exercise in Integrative Anthropology

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The Lust To Kill and The Arnhem Land Sorcerer An Exercise in Integrative Anthropology

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"The Lust to Kill" and the Arnhem Land Sorcerer: An Exercise in Integrative

American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

ABSTRACT This comparison of the Western serial sex killer and

s Bradd Shore (1996) tells it, psychic unity's "uncomfortable

Ethos28(3):410-444. Copyright ? 2000, American Anthropological Association.

human action or sociality. We then develop our frameworks in interaction

Reading this description, I see the murder as a highly sensuous, if not

In his summary of information received about "the sorcerer and black

ways. Sex differences in reproductive strategies have several implications

her of meeting a lover. And so we return, in a sense, to the theme of fertil-

convictions, for, say, burglary. Unaware of the associated fantasies, of

Between 81 percent to 82 percent of the men in the FBI study reported

sequential) and symbolic thought (via images) whether we are awake or

meaning. Because experience and information are linked both cognitively

triggers") environmental cues of dangers that recurred often in our evolu-

representations of self in relationship to others and associated expecta-

part of the answer. As she understood them, a fear of infanticide grounded

This example is highly suggestive of a continuous stream of imagery con-

strong emotions) are so central to the mother-child relationship, the re-

as a means of self-communication, the sufferer's self-representation that

As is often the case, the dream was followed up by an anomalous experi-

of creating a very real event, a new life. Similarly, according to Warner,

According to Petchkovsky and Cawte, "waking hallucinations and vision-

In contrast, the sex killer lives in a cultural environment where the

masculinity, gender relations, subjectivity, and sexuality" (Cameron and

Leitenberg, Harold, and Kris Henning

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