WITCHCRAFT.

The word witchcraft is used in many different ways. The word witch is derived from Old English wicca (masc., "wizard") and wicce (fem., "witch"). The term wiccan ("witchcraft") referred to human acts intended to influence nature, usually through the use of power unavailable to all human beings. This use of the word witchcraft is synonymous with the more general word magic. The acts associated with witchcraft were sometimes called spells (Old English "talk, tale"). The person could conduct these acts for his or her benefit, or for others who did not have access to the necessary power. In contemporary academic work and in popular culture, however, it is still generally assumed that the influence or change resulting from the act is harmful. With these negative associations, witchcraft is also used for diabolism, acts performed with the assistance of the devil. Other acts, those that attempt to influence nature in a beneficial way, are usually not considered. Witchcraft also refers to ideas and practices believed to influence nature that emerged in the twentieth century, largely in Europe and North America, sometimes referred to as neo-paganism. This use of witchcraft is similar to the one derived from the Old English wiccan.

Witchcraft is the term most commonly used in the social science literature, and the practices it refers to can be found in all societies. Over the years there has been some debate about the similarities and differences between the practices of witchcraft and sorcery, and in the social sciences there are several traditions. Studies conducted in Asia tend to use the term sorcery for the practices referred to by magic, while studies in South America use shamanism in a similar way. Studies in Africa use both sorcery and witchcraft, and the use of both terms usually assumes that the magical acts are intended to be harmful.

In the twentieth century, there were debates about whether different terms should be applied to rituals that were conducted with and without the assistance of spirits. There were also discussions about distinguishing between practitioners whose power was innate and those who learned the knowledge and skills from existing practitioners. In the social sciences, it is generally assumed that both witchcraft and sorcery can be used interchangeably, but it is important for the scholar to explain the particular way each term is being used, as well as its relationship to local terms.

The Social and Political History of Witchcraft in Europe

The ancient Greeks made distinctions among forms of magic, although they differ from the categories found in contemporary thought. The Greeks considered all magic to be performed with the assistance of spirit entities called diamones ("demons") that could be either harmful or helpful. During the Hellenistic period, a new belief emerged that developed the notion that evil spirits were led by Satan. Christians then began to divide the diamones into good angels and harmful demons. People involved in magic were thought to use the power of demons. During the Renaissance, this idea expanded into a full-fledged belief in diabolical witchcraft. The idea of the devil in Christianity overshadowed all other ideas concerning magic, and the fear of witchcraft took a central place in the religious imagination.

During the period of the European witch craze (1450–1700), many beliefs and practices rooted in paganism and folklore came to be associated with influences from the devil. The idea of diabolical witchcraft also came to be applied to medieval heretics, who were imagined to be involved in a pact with witches and with Satan himself. In Spain and its colonies, the Inquisition, which provided a legal forum for persecuting those identified as witches and heretics, further collapsed the concepts of magic and diabolical witchcraft. Gradually, any form of magic came to be viewed in Europe as diabolical witchcraft.

During the witch craze, patterns in accusation show that the accused generally had a low social status, already had been faulted for other transgressions, and exhibited difficult personality traits. Many were practitioners of medicine, and a disproportionately large number were women, as discussed below. Although there were no witch hunts in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many colonial societies developed new versions of witchcraft laws that were used to stigmatize the religious ideas and practices of colonized peoples.

The Functions of Witchcraft

In the 1940s and 1950s sociologists and anthropologists explored the many positive functions of witchcraft and illustrated them with detailed studies. As E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) observed in his classic study of the belief in witches in an African society, the Azande, witchcraft can be understood as an explanation for unfortunate events. That explanation enabled people to maintain a sense of control over their lives and feel that they understood their world. Understandings about witchcraft could also help to define values and moral standards in a society.

The ideas that a society creates about witches can be seen to support norms and values in that society, and, when analyzed along with a structural model of the society, can also provide insights into the organization of the culture and society. Ideas about the negative characteristics of the witch can be a way to guide behavior, as functionalist anthropologists argued in a series of studies showing that the belief in witchcraft served as a social control mechanism. In his work on the Navajo, Clyde Kluckholn found that the fear of becoming the victim of witchcraft encouraged them to cooperate, share resources, and minimize public displays of anger. The socially permitted form of aggression toward the witch allowed other hostilities to be displaced onto an individual, a useful outlet in situations where in-group hostilities could threaten the survival of the group or damage people's abilities to act collectively.

The central problem with studies that assumed a cohesive function for witchcraft was that, like other functional analyses, the theory could not be proved or falsified. Some sociologists and anthropologists such as Max Marwick were more interested in analyzing the social basis of witchcraft accusations and the life conditions that placed particular strain on these relationships. Against the dominant functionalist trend, Robert Murphy proposed that beliefs about witchcraft and accusations could have disruptive effects. Working with the Mundurucú in Brazil, he found that witchcraft accusations, combined with a rubber economic boom, created group divisions and family migration, which eventually supported a more dispersed settlement pattern. From her comparative analysis of African Studies, Mary Douglas (1963) came to a similar conclusion.

It has been observed that people in relatively marginal positions in society might be able to use witchcraft, or the threat of witchcraft, as a form of social power. The relatively weak could then influence people with more power or wealth to redistribute it and minimize some of the inequalities in the society. In his study of the Maka in Cameroon, Peter Geschiere shows that witchcraft can work both to promote accumulation and leveling.

Symbolic and Ideological Aspects of Witchcraft

Largely through the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist approach, anthropologists have placed great emphasis on the position of witches in symbolic systems. In ethnographic studies, it has often been observed that witches are associated with the left hand and with wild or nondomestic realms, and are placed in opposition to the moral standards of a society. Actors' understandings of witchcraft are extremely important, although most anthropologists are cautious in interpreting these exegeses, placing them within more comprehensive analyses that also examine symbolic meanings more generally, as well as their relationship to the social, political, and economic processes in the society. This approach is best shown in the work of Bruce Knauft in New Guinea.

Scholarship has also explored the role of witchcraft beliefs in diverting people's attention from economic and political explanations for untoward events. This kind of argument, similar to Karl Marx's (1818–1883) understanding of ideology, claims that witchcraft as a form of explanation functions to maintain the existing sociopolitical structure of a society. According to George Bond, witchcraft explanations in Muyombe, Zambia, work to obfuscate the changing labor and property relationships among villagers. While their participation in accusations emphasizes their common membership in the community, it deemphasizes their increasingly unequal economic status.

Witchcraft and Gender Relations

Scholarly works from many different societies and time periods have shown that witch-finding rituals, popularly called witch hunts, are used by more powerful segments of a society to persecute people who are opponents or who present a threat to established power. Christina Larner shows that in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England the church and state entered new forms of cooperation and identification that especially targeted women as witches. Her explanation is that men identified themselves as the proper professional group to offer healing services, and women were persecuted because their healing traditions competed with this new system.

It is important to understand that the disproportionate number of women targeted by European and American witchcraft accusations should not be taken to mean that this focus is a universal. In some societies, men are more commonly accused of witchcraft and represent that society's ideal witch. Diane Ciekawy (1999) shows that among Mijikenda in Kenya witchcraft accusations are primarily directed toward men. In her analysis of the witchcraft accusation process, women collect evidence and shape ideas about culpability in the homestead, thereby wielding a great deal of power. The work of Rosalind Shaw with Temne women in Sierra Leone illustrates the ways that women are active agents in diviner consultations. She shows how women can select from diviner consultations the explanations for their problems that they most favor. These chosen explanations can resist patriarchal explanations that disadvantage them or create less favorable power relations.

Witchcraft: Questions of Translation and Meaning

Scholars continue to debate the question of how well scholarly concepts like witchcraft convey the meanings of local terms, and how much a term like witchcraft can reduce the diversity and complexity of ideas and actions to which it is applied. Regarding the history of scholarship around the terms magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, we see that, although magic can be indigenously conceived as having both harmful and helpful potentials, the latter can be deemphasized by scholars who are more interested in its harmful potential. While these questions are not entirely new—both Victor Turner and Malcolm Crick encouraged anthropologists to use local terms and their specific meanings as much as possible in their work—current scholarship is more sensitive to the possibility of misrepresenting the cultures it attempts to describe. In view of the political history of witch hunts in Europe, and the ways non-Christian religious ideas and practices were demonized, it is possible to ask if a similar process continues in the structure of contemporary academic discourse.

Some scholars regard witchcraft as a discourse of power that requires knowledge about the historical and ethnographic conditions that shape understandings about it. This might entail a more careful analysis of the semantic range of terms for magic and harmful magic, with an attempt to separate local discourses from wider regional or national ones. Ciekawy (1998) does this in her analysis of the application of the Witchcraft Act in colonial and postcolonial coastal Kenya. She describes different words that Mijikenda people use for harmful magic: utsai is a Kimijikenda term, the kiSwahili words are uchawi and ulozi, and some people use witchcraft. Mijikenda employ these terms in different contexts. She concludes that, for conceptual and analytical purposes, the terms must be distinguished because utsai refers to a discourse on harmful magic that is created and operates within local social and political settings largely under the control of Mijikenda who use them, while witchcraft is best understood as a technology of power that emerged under European colonialism, supported largely through discourses of mission Christianity and colonial law and administration.

Witchcraft as a Discourse of Power

Jeanne Favret-Saada's study of witchcraft in the Bocage of western France examines the power of words used by people to talk about witchcraft. She distinguishes this approach to witchcraft as power from its more conventional use in anthropology as knowledge or information, pointing out that in the Bocage there is no neutral position that a person can have when it concerns such socially and politically powerful speech. She also questions the way academics have viewed witchcraft as the backward and untrue beliefs of people who do not use academic forms of reasoning. This is consistent with the general approach used to study many forms of magic offered by Arens and Karp. Rather than use the words magic and witchcraft, they advocate the use of the terms transformational capacity and power.

The Modernity of Witchcraft

Contemporary scholarly work indicates that the study of witchcraft is as relevant today as it has been in the past. Ideas about witchcraft address new circumstances and are very much a part of people's understanding of how their lives are connected to events and processes both near and far. It is common for witchcraft discourses to relate to the countryside, town, state, and world. Few current studies see witchcraft only as a social construction; it is also understood to be a concept that meaningfully provides people with a representation of the complexity of the order in which they live, including power and inequality, individual and collective interests, and resources and their allocation. Witchcraft addresses issues of globalization and transformations within the state, and continues to explain events and the mechanics of their integration into daily life. It is also important to remember that the constructions of witchcraft can be powerful realities, and have the ability to maintain or transform social relationships.

See also Anthropology ; Astrology: Overview ; Demonology ; Evil ; Gender Studies: Anthropology ; Heresy and Apostasy ; Magic ; Miracles ; Nature ; Superstition ; Witchcraft, African Studies of .

bibliography

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——. "Women's 'Work' and the Construction of Witchcraft Accusation in Coastal Kenya." Women's Studies International Forum 22, no. 2 (1999): 225–235.

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Diane Ciekawy