(Theoretical Perspectives - week 3) Witchcraft

Question to the room: What is withcraft not?
answers included: sleeping, politics (c.f. Azande), stewardship (caring for the self, others and environment), science, sorcery (taken to mean creation (conjuring) and manipulation)

witchcraft did not disappear, but did diminish, with the domination of Christianity; nor did it disappear with the advent of rationality or technology. Today it is rising in popularity, though often taken negatively. Very few populations regard witchcraft positively, including people in the UK and USA.

The history of theories of magic and witchchraft in 5 1/2 chapters:
1. Sir James George Frazer: an evolutionist, believe that people are curious to know the answers, the causality and reasons of stuff, and magic is one set of answers for these questions, coming about sympathetically (relating like with like. Magic is science, only wrong.
2. Émile Durkheim: magic is not religion because it is not socially organised, there are no set institutions, but it provides a rationale for people and they adhere to its "teachings". Magic is religion, only wrong.
3.Max Weber: in the same sense as laws of science explaining cause and effect etc., magic is taken as a law for what cannot be seen. Magic is law, only wrong.
4. Evans-Pritchard: the aristocracy are never accused of witchcraft because it is likely to jeopardise your social standing; they are in the position to manipulate how you are treated in society, what favours may be granted to you should you need help and their counteracting bewitchers or unwitchers are more powerful than whatever magic you can muster. Magic is politics, only wrong.
5. Several anthropologists of and from African countries questioned why witchcraft prevailed after "modernity", technological advances, and national independence had been established. They suggested that magic was the language used to discuss capitalism and how liberal, free markets have made most people poor. Magic is capitalism, only wrong. (The Modernity of Witchcraft by Geschiere)
5 1/2. Jeanne Favret-Saada: magic is discourse, so how is it possible for it to be wrong?

Discourse is:
- a conversation, debate or discussion (regular dictionary definition)
- a way of describing the world (modernism)
- a system of meaning and signification that structures or codifies thought (structuralism)
- ‘Systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’ – Iara Lessa on Foucault (postmodernism, obviously!)


re: Deadly Worlds - Witchcraft in the Bocage
If you speak of witchcraft, you must either be bewitched, a witch or an 'unwitcher'. Otherwise witchcraft does not exist. A person does not believe in witchcraft until it catches them. Witchcraft and un-witchcraft are skills taught through the generations. Bewitching can occur as simply as a pat on the back, a handshake, eye contact or planting something near the victim's property.
Favret-Saada arrived in the village wanting to study witchcraft. Asking questions and wanting to talk and learn about witchcraft gave the people the impression that she was bewitched, so they pointed her towards un-witchers. After her discussions with them, she felt obliged to pay them as informants, and this gave them the impression that she was an un-witcher, especially since she was healthy and her and her relatives were not suffering (no witch attacks had been made on her), so they eventually accused her of being a witch.
 
‘The social sciences aim to account for cultural differences. But can this be achieved by postulating the existence of a peasant who is denied all reality save that he is the mirror-image of an academic?’ Jeanna Favret-Saada