Buses in Bongoland

It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an oblique, metaphysical critique of the now, the new, the neoliberal. Indeed, such understandings have come to form a deep-seated anthropological analytic. Yet while this analytic has proved productive, the explanations it invites often hinge more on theoretical expectation than empirical demonstration. This may disable the very politics and ethics anthropologists seek to engage, insofar as it renders redundant the real-world inequalities and forms of exploitation they seek to understand. This article considers this analytic in relation to Tanzanian buses and the devils alleged to inhabit them. To re-engage anthropology's critical politics and ethics, the article suggests that anthropologists pay sustained attention to historical processes, particularly, continuities. This requires we reconfigure some longstanding theoretical frameworks, lexicons, explanations and pre-theoretical commitments. The article concludes by providing some conceptual signposts to re-orientate projects on the occult.