Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition: The Case of Kenyan Horticulture

This article examines the social effects of contract farming of export horticulture among smallholders in Meru District, Kenya. During the 1980s and 1990s, contracting was popularized by donors and governments alike as a way to reduce poverty and increase opportunities for self–employment in rural areas. Considerable research has documented the tensions in social relations that emerge in such cases, giving rise to gendered struggles over land, labour, and income in the face of new commodity systems. This article highlights similar tendencies. It suggests that men’s failure to compensate their wives for horticulture production has given rise to a string of witchcraft allegations and acts, as the wealth engendered by horticultural commodities comes up against cultural norms of marital obligation. While witchcraft accusations can expose women to risks of social alienation and financial deprivation, witchcraft nevertheless remains a powerful weapon through which women can level intra–household disparities and, more broadly, challenge the legitimacy of social practice. In Meru, witchcraft discourses are a vehicle through which gendered struggles over contract income are articulated and contested, and through which the social costs of agrarian transition become apparent.     

Globalization and the Power of Indeterminate Meaning: Witchcraft and Spirit Cults in Africa and East Asia

The obsession with witchcraft in many parts of present-day Africa is not to be viewed as some sort of traditional residue. On the contrary, it is especially present in the more modern spheres of society. In a comparative, global perspective, this linking of modernity and witchcraft is not particular to Africa: in other parts of our globalized world, modern developments coincide with a proliferation of what the Comaroffs (forthcoming) call ‘the economies of the occult’. In this article, representations in South and West Cameroon about ekong, supposedly a novel form of witchcraft explicitly associated with modern forms of wealth, are compared to Weller's study of the upsurge of spirit cults in Taiwan, during the recent economic boom of this ‘Asian tiger’. The power of such discourses on occult forces is that they relate people's fascination with the open-endedness of global flows to the search for fixed orientation points and identities. Both witchcraft and spirit cults exhibit a surprising capacity for combining the local and the global. Both also have specific implications for the ways in which people try to deal with modernity's challenge.     

The Nightmare Experience,Sleep Paralysis,and Witchcraft Accusations

Witch-trial records, and other early-modern writings on witchcraft, reveal that in various European societies people complained of being physically oppressed at night by witches and other supernatural beings, the victims of these nocturnal assaults describing a similar set of symptoms. Contemporary English authors termed the experience the "mare" or "nightmare." In the twentieth century, it has been identified as a manifestation of "sleep paralysis." Medical studies and surveys of the condition help us make better sense of the historical accounts, while an awareness of the historical evidence illuminates modern reports of sleep paralysis experiences. [1]     

Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation.Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.     

Witchcraft,Statecraft, Mancraft: On the Demonological Foundations of Sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Questions of sovereignty remain central to political theology, yet the role played by demonology in sovereignty’s construction has yet to be closely examined. This article addresses this omission by exploring the relation between the phantasmatic figures of the “sovereign” and the “witch” in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). Early modern concepts of “witchcraft” and its prosecution have a constitutive relation to (theo)political sovereignty, modern gender relations, and the birth of the nation-state. Reading Bodin’s work on witchcraft alongside those on sovereignty, tolerance, and the household, I argue that the demonological witch forms a self-consolidating other at the foundation of modern constructions of sovereignty, tolerance, and the (cishetero)normative family – an excess or absence that reinforces and destabilizes gendered, sexual, political, juridical, and religious hierarchies that continue to influence the present. In doing so, I demonstrate that sovereignty rests on a demonological foundation.     

“The family farm”: A review of a central concept in western European agricultural politics

This article explores the differences between Danish lay and Roman inquisitorial witchcraft prosecution, by investigating the understanding of witchcraft and how it inflicted on the course of the trials. For the first half of the 17th century, the understanding of witchcraft among Danish lay judges corresponded to popular beliefs. Focus remained on malevolent magic, and the diabolical pact was rarely introduced until after the verdict, when torture was initiated. To the Roman Inquisition, the pact with the devil, namely the implicit pact, was crucial when sentencing the illiterate villagers, since it made it possible to incorporate the offender into a learned theological system of ideas.     

巫术史研究新理路:小冰期影响范式

小冰期影响范式是近来巫术史研究中出现的新理路。它将近代早期气候异常和气候变化重新带入学术争论之中,强调小冰期气候异常影响下的人们的需要、失望和集体恐惧,并对气候在重大历史事件中的重要影响和合理定位做了充分研究,从而在自然史、社会史与文化史跨学科研究成果之间实现了某种综合。而学界对气候因素的一度忽视也有其复杂原因,如学科壁垒和跨学科研究的难度、工业社会和现代化对现代世界的解释、学术研究中的非历史主义的影响等。     

Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft,Religion and the Law on Montserrat in the 20th Century

This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft (the worship of the serpent/obeah) on the British colony of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean. It looks at obeah in the 20th century as practised by colonial British subjects and prohibited by British law imposed by British expatriates. Colonial governance is examined first through correspondence at the start of the 20th century, and then through newspaper archives and fieldwork reports and experiences throughout the century. The continued use of anti‐obeah laws by the British is shown to be an irrational but effective colonial technology of control.     

The twenty‐second Katharine Briggs memorial lecture,November 2003

The elite theories of witchcraft in early modern Europe rested on the elaborate imaginary constructs of scholastic theologians, with their implications about a cosmic struggle between good and evil. These were reinforced by a range of popular beliefs and practices, and by the iconography of such artists as Bosch, Grien and Cranach. The imaginary world of witchcraft always tended towards a Manichean dualism that commanded widespread popular support, but aroused doubts among the elites. The fears on which it played, of sterility and dearth, bad mothers, and death, gave it an extraordinary imaginative appeal, which also helps to explain its reappearance in modern literature.     

Cunning Histories: Privileging Narratives in the Present

Examining contemporary British witchcraft necessitates representing its historical context, currently a highly contested arena. Both magical practitioners and scholars have heavily critiqued the “orthodox” histories of unbroken lines of tradition reaching back to the distant past that were prevalent in the early to mid‐twentieth century. However, continuities of knowledge and skills based on the practices of rural cunning folk and folk magic continue to be mobilized by some practitioners as a way of connecting to ideas about the past, a narrative that is also critiqued by others. What is at stake is not only the conflicting foundational histories for contemporary witchcraft, but the ways in which the same textual and material evidence is deployed to substantiate competing accounts: they hinge on the ways evidence is contextualized. Interrogating “context” is not limited to the histories we aim to represent, but is embedded within anthropological writing and knowledge.     

Witchcraft,Social Cohesion and Participation in a South African Village

The past thirty years have seen development agencies, non‐governmental organizations and their funders embrace ‘participatory’ development strategies. These strategies require the poor to take part in decision‐making about, and the implementation of, development projects and programmes. Underlying enthusiasm for participation is the recognition that centralized, top‐down systems and methods have not delivered development, and the assumption that the poor are eager and able to ‘participate’. Using ethnographic research on witch beliefs and their impact on social relations in a South African village, this article argues that such assumptions are not always justified. It shows that witch beliefs and related conflicts have long‐term negative consequences for intra‐community relations and examines what this implies for development policy and practice.     

Thinking with Montaigne: evidence, scepticism and meaning in early modern demonology

In 1612 the Bordeaux witchcraft inquisitor Pierre de Lancre (1556–1631), himself linked by marriage to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), revealed that the essayist and sceptic was related on his mother’s side to a leading authority on magic and superstition, the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608). De Lancre confounded historians' expectations by using the revelation to defend Montaigne against his cousin's criticism. This article re-evaluates the relationships of De Lancre, Delrio and Montaigne in the light of recent scholarship, which casts demonology as a form of "resistance to scepticism" that conceals deep anxiety about the existence of the supernatural. It explores De Lancre’s and Delrio’s very different attitudes towards Montaigne and towards evidence and scepticism. This, in turn, reveals the different underlying preoccupations of their witchcraft treatises. It hence argues that no monocausal explanation linking scepticism to witchcraft belief is plausible.     

Fairies and the Devil in early modern England

This article considers the fate of fairies in late-Elizabethan and seventeenth-century England. Specifically, it asks whether these “doubtful spirits” were demonised in the period. Drawing on a wide selection of devotional, literary, and demonological texts, the article argues that English Protestants associated fairies with Satan, but this did not necessarily imply that fairies were reclassified as demons. Rather, they were embedded in a complex of beliefs that connected them with falsehood, Catholicism, and the invisible wiles of the Devil. The operation of these beliefs is examined in the context of cases of witchcraft, as well as the representation of fairies in cheap print.     

Witchcraft,Human Nature,and Political Theology in Jean Bodin’s de la Démonomanie des sorciers

ABSTRACT

Jean Bodin (1530–1596) is most well-known as the thinker Carl Schmitt credits for modern absolutist sovereignty and political theology. Contemporary critics of sovereignty, following Schmitt, ascribe to Bodin a theological politics of obedience and the negation of individual and collective human freedom through authoritarian discipline (Cocks, Joan. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Yet, a dedicated study of Bodin’s own political theology remains wanting. His most extensive discussion of theology and law is in his more obscure work on the jurisprudence of witchcraft. In de la Démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Bodin provides a theological account of a divinely created rational order where benevolence and evil are at work in the world. Humans must exercise the free will to choose between them. Bodin’s theological anthropology anchors his political theology with important implications for the proper exercise of human political power within the natural and divine order.     

《推定儿女法》与中古辨胎术

《推定儿女法》为俄藏黑水城出土金代占卜类写本文献,其文本来源于《孙子算经》,特殊性在于通过算术方法并结合阴阳五行思想卜算胎儿性别。以《推定儿女法》为代表的祈男辨胎思想和孕育信仰曾长期流行于中国古代社会,是研究古代社会民生与民间信仰的珍贵资料。在历史发展过程中,《推定儿女法》逐渐渗透到医学与命理学文本书写中,反映了阴阳五行思想主导下,中国古代数术、巫术与医学思想的相互影响与交流融合。     

Children accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Finnmark

This article deals with six children accused of witchcraft in the district of Finnmark, Northern Norway, during a witchcraft panic in 1663. Through a narratological approach, the article presents close-readings of court records, trying to detect the various voices heard in the documents: the voice of the accused person, the voice of the law and the voice of the scribe. The article draws attention to four points discussed within ongoing witchcraft research: the role of the scribe, the individualized character of the children's confessions, oral transference of witchcraft ideas and the speed of transmission of ideas about witchcraft. The analyses show that children confessed to similar demonological elements as adults, similarly seen in other European countries. The contents must be known before the children were brought before the court, as their answers to leading questions were detailed. The voices of the children are individualized, there is no indication that the confessions are constructions made by the scribe. The influence of specific persons had great influence on transference of demonological ideas.     

Problems of doing research at home: research on child witches in London (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In this narrative, Jean La Fontaine recounts her experiences trying to do fieldwork in London on the topic of witchcraft accusations involving children.     

Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.     

Rendering justice in witch trials: the case of the val de Lièpvre

The borderland of the val de Lièpvre, with lands in Alsace and in the Duchy of Lorraine, and divided by religion and language, offers a rich collection of sources for the history of witchcraft persecution. The territory sharply reveals what was undoubtedly characteristic of witchcraft trials more widely. The crime of witchcraft was considered abominable before the Christian community and God, and its prosecution justified abandoning many of the safeguards and constraints in legal procedure, whether restrictions on the use of torture, the reliance on dubious testimony or even denial of advocacy to the witches. The action of the judges was nonetheless, as they understood it, the rendering of true justice, by punishing the culprits with a harshness that would expiate their crimes before the community and preserve them from damnation in the face of God's judgment.