Oct 23, 2024 05:17 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/the-universal-bel...pest-fears
EXCERPTS: . . . To say that witches are universal doesn’t mean belief in them has been recorded in all cultures, or that, where recorded, widespread public accusations, witch-hunts or moral panics ensue. Whereas recent accusations of satanism in the West, including Pizzagate, evidently do reveal these features, witchcraft in non-Western societies often does not. For instance, the Hopi people of Arizona never openly accused people of being witches, for fear of retribution. Instead, they believed the evildoers would be punished in the afterlife.
Anthropologists have also described a few societies as being unfamiliar with witches altogether – at least at the time they were being investigated. Or they were familiar with witches but didn’t feel particularly threatened by them, perhaps because they thought they were sufficiently protected by counter-witchcraft magic or the security of benevolent gods. An example are the Tallensi of Ghana, in whose world view the anthropologist Meyer Fortes judged witchcraft to be ‘remotely peripheral’. That is, the Tallensi do not, for the most part, believe that misfortune derives from the wickedness of other people but from the actions of just and all-powerful ancestors, so that illness and death are interpreted as rightful punishment for human wrongdoing.
What the universality of witchcraft does reveal, however, is our persistent and enduring tendency to imagine the existence of evil people, either next door or somewhere in the next valley, who constantly strive to harm us by supernatural means. Thus, the same ideas crop up time and again in places that are otherwise culturally different and geographically distant
[...] Anthropologists, who have studied witchcraft from the early days of their discipline, strive to explain the phenomenon by focusing on social systems. Do accusations of witchcraft reveal social relationships that are ill-defined and likely to give rise to tension? Do they play a role in political or economic rivalry (including among co-wives in polygamous marriages)? Have they been invoked to explain why some people suffer misfortune while others do not?
The inspiration for this approach goes back to the work of E E Evans-Pritchard on the Azande of Central Africa. In his book Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937), E-P (as he was known to students and colleagues) treated accusations and confessions of witchcraft as essential elements of Zande cosmology and a way of maintaining an orderly social life.
Zande witches were said to embody an evil substance with the supernatural power to harm a person whom the witch, consciously or unconsciously, disliked. Unlike witches in many other cultures, the Zande variants attacked by purely mental means. They simply had to harbour ill will against another, and did not, for example, need to recite spells or deliberately send invisible projectiles to injure a person as is common among witches elsewhere.
Suffering an illness or other misfortune, especially one that afflicted only themselves and not others (eg, snakebite or another ‘accident’), a Zande man or woman (or their relatives, if the misfortune was fatal) would then suspect the work of a witch who had it in for them; with the help of a diviner, the suspect’s identity could be confirmed. Claiming they were not conscious of causing harm, the accused often confessed. The two parties were then reconciled, and the victim no longer regarded the accused as a witch. In this way, Evans-Pritchard saw belief in witches as a way of explaining why bad things sometimes happened to people, including good people. Since accusations and confessions could reveal strains in relations between people, this was a way to promote and maintain social harmony as well... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . To say that witches are universal doesn’t mean belief in them has been recorded in all cultures, or that, where recorded, widespread public accusations, witch-hunts or moral panics ensue. Whereas recent accusations of satanism in the West, including Pizzagate, evidently do reveal these features, witchcraft in non-Western societies often does not. For instance, the Hopi people of Arizona never openly accused people of being witches, for fear of retribution. Instead, they believed the evildoers would be punished in the afterlife.
Anthropologists have also described a few societies as being unfamiliar with witches altogether – at least at the time they were being investigated. Or they were familiar with witches but didn’t feel particularly threatened by them, perhaps because they thought they were sufficiently protected by counter-witchcraft magic or the security of benevolent gods. An example are the Tallensi of Ghana, in whose world view the anthropologist Meyer Fortes judged witchcraft to be ‘remotely peripheral’. That is, the Tallensi do not, for the most part, believe that misfortune derives from the wickedness of other people but from the actions of just and all-powerful ancestors, so that illness and death are interpreted as rightful punishment for human wrongdoing.
What the universality of witchcraft does reveal, however, is our persistent and enduring tendency to imagine the existence of evil people, either next door or somewhere in the next valley, who constantly strive to harm us by supernatural means. Thus, the same ideas crop up time and again in places that are otherwise culturally different and geographically distant
[...] Anthropologists, who have studied witchcraft from the early days of their discipline, strive to explain the phenomenon by focusing on social systems. Do accusations of witchcraft reveal social relationships that are ill-defined and likely to give rise to tension? Do they play a role in political or economic rivalry (including among co-wives in polygamous marriages)? Have they been invoked to explain why some people suffer misfortune while others do not?
The inspiration for this approach goes back to the work of E E Evans-Pritchard on the Azande of Central Africa. In his book Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937), E-P (as he was known to students and colleagues) treated accusations and confessions of witchcraft as essential elements of Zande cosmology and a way of maintaining an orderly social life.
Zande witches were said to embody an evil substance with the supernatural power to harm a person whom the witch, consciously or unconsciously, disliked. Unlike witches in many other cultures, the Zande variants attacked by purely mental means. They simply had to harbour ill will against another, and did not, for example, need to recite spells or deliberately send invisible projectiles to injure a person as is common among witches elsewhere.
Suffering an illness or other misfortune, especially one that afflicted only themselves and not others (eg, snakebite or another ‘accident’), a Zande man or woman (or their relatives, if the misfortune was fatal) would then suspect the work of a witch who had it in for them; with the help of a diviner, the suspect’s identity could be confirmed. Claiming they were not conscious of causing harm, the accused often confessed. The two parties were then reconciled, and the victim no longer regarded the accused as a witch. In this way, Evans-Pritchard saw belief in witches as a way of explaining why bad things sometimes happened to people, including good people. Since accusations and confessions could reveal strains in relations between people, this was a way to promote and maintain social harmony as well... (MORE - missing details)
