The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  104.Anthony Forge, ‘Prestige, Influence and Sorcery’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations.

  105.Peter H. Buck, Regional Diversity in the Elaboration of Sorcery in Polynesia, New Haven, 1936.

  106.Annemarie Shimony, ‘Iroquois Witchcraft at Six Nations’, in Dewar E. Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, Moscow, ID, 1970, 239–65.

  107.Isaac Schapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, African Affairs, 51 (1952), 41–52.

  108.Audrey Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’, Africa, 8 (1935), 448–61.

  109.Hocart, ‘Medicine and Witchcraft in Eddystone of the Solomons’.

  110.W. Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, Allahabad, 1894, 352.

  111.J. T. Munday, ‘Witchcraft in England and Central Africa’, in J. T. Munday et al. (eds), Witchcraft, London, 1951, 12; Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, London, 2001, 119–20.

  112.Gregory Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeastern Asia, 99–122.

  113.T. O. Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 57–98.

  114.E. H. Winter, ‘The Enemy Within’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 277–99.

  115.Lieban, Cebano Sorcery, ch. 4.

  116.Harriet Ngubane, ‘Aspects of Zulu Treatment’, in J. B. Loudon (ed.), Social Anthropology and Medicine, London, 1976, 328–37.

  117.Keith H. Basso, ‘Western Apache Witchcraft’, in Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, 11–36.

  118.Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist, London, 1983, 103, 139.

  119.Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, section 1.8.

  120.Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 359–62.

  121.Buck, Regional Diversity in the Elaboration of Sorcery in Polynesia, passim.

  122.Gunter Wagner, The Bantu of Western Kenya, Oxford, 1970, 111–32.

  123.Nancy D. Munn, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformations in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society, Durham, NC, 1986, 215–33.

  124.John R. Bowen, ‘Return to Sender: A Muslim Discourse of Sorcery in a Relatively Egalitarian Society, the Gaya of Northern Sumatra’, in Watson and Ellen (ed.), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeastern Asia, 179–90

  125.Mary Kingsley, West African Studies, London, 1899, 211.

  126.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, passim; Schapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’.

  127.Mayer, ‘Witches’.

  128.Buck, Regional Diversity in the Elaboration of Sorcery in Polynesia, passim.

  129.Daryll Forde, ‘Spirits, Witches and Sorcerers in the Supernatural Economy of the Yakö’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (1958), 165–78.

  130.Barbara Ward, ‘Some Observations on Religious Cults in Ashanti’, Africa, 26 (1956), 47–60.

  131.Burridge, ‘Tangu’, 226–30.

  132.Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 154–66.

  133.Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’.

  134.E. Paul Durrenberger, ‘Witchcraft, Sorcery, Fortune and Misfortune among Lisu Highlanders of Northern Thailand’, in Watson and Ellen (ed.), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 47–66.

  135.Ajay Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence in Colonial Western India’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 109–41.

  136.Munday, ‘Witchcraft in England and Central Africa’, 12–13.

  137.Beattie, ‘Sorcery in Bunyoro’; La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’.

  138.S. F. Nadel, Nupe Religion, London, 1954, 188–90.

  139.Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist, 103–4.

  140.Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’.

  141.Herman Slaats and Karen Porter, ‘Sorcery and the Law in Modern Indonesia’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 135–58.

  142.Geoffrey Parrinder, Witchcraft, London, 1963, 173–4.

  143.Gregory Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 99–122.

  144.Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence’.

  145.Sir Alfred Lyall, Asiatic Studies: Religious and Social. First Series, London, 1899, 99–130; Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 356–9; Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism.

  146.Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, section 1.8.

  147.Ardener, ‘Witchcraft, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief’, 141–60.

  148.Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, Oxford, 1981, ch. 6.

  149.Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence’.

  150.Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 363–5.

  151.Beattie, ‘Sorcery in Bunyoro’; Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’; Maia Green, ‘Shaving Witchcraft in Ulanga’, in Ray Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, Cambridge, 1994, 28.

  152.Merete Demant Jakobsen, Shamanism, New York, 1999, 94–100.

  153.Beatrice B. Whiting, Paiute Sorcery, New York, 1950, 50.

  154.Matthew Dennis, ‘American Indians, Witchcraft and Witch-hunting’, Magazine of History, 17.4 (2003), 21–3.

  155.Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’; Margaret Wiener, ‘Colonial Magic: The Dutch East Indies’, in David J. Collins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, Cambridge, 2015, 496–7.

  156.Shapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’.

  157.Honigman, ‘Witch-Fear in Post-contact Kaska Society’.

  158.A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, London, 1929, 650–51; Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, ch. 17; Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, ch. II.3; A.F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, New York, 1972, 102–10; Stephen Ellis, ‘Witch-hunting in Central Madagascar 1828–1861, Past and Present, 175 (2002), 90–123; Matthew Dennis, Seneca Possessed, Philadelphia, 2010.

  159.R. D. Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, Lincoln, NB, 1985, 5–97; Jay Miller, ‘The 1806 Purge among the Indiana Delaware’ Ethnohistory, 41 (1994), 245–65.

  160.Amanda Porterfield, ‘Witchcraft and the Colonization of Algonquian and Iroquois Cultures’, Religion and American Culture, 2 (1992), 103–24.

  161.Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

  162.What follows is based on Audrey Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’; Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-Witchcraft Movement’; Willis, ‘The Kamcape Movement’; Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’; Ward, ‘Some Observations on Religious Cults in Ashanti’; Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’; R. G. Willis, ‘Instant Millennium’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations,129–39; Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult’; Jack Goody, ‘Anomie in Ashanti’, Africa, 27 (1957), 356–63; Bohannan, ‘Extra-Processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’; Karen E. Fields, ‘Political Contingencies of Witchcraft in Colonial Central Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 16 (1982), 567–93; Andrew Apter, ‘Atinga Revisited’, in Comaroff and Comraroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, 111–28; Green, ‘Shaving Witchcraft in Ulanga’; John Parker, ‘Northern Gothic: Witches, Ghosts and Werewolves in the Savanna Hinterland of the Gold Coast, 1900s–1950s’, Africa, 76 (2006), 352–79; Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-witchcraft Movement in East Central Africa’; David Tait, ‘A Sorcery Hunt in Dagomba’, Africa, 33 (1963), 136–46; Anthony A. Lee, ‘Ngoja and Six Theories of Witchcraft’, Ufahamu, 6 (1976), 101�
�17.

  163.Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’.

  164.Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence’.

  165.Bohannan, ‘Extra-processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’; Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult’.

  166.Bohannan, ‘Extra-Processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’.

  167.Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order, Cambridge, 1979, 102–5.

  168.David J. Parkin, ‘Medicines and Men of Influence’, Man, N.S. 3 (1968), 424–39; Willis, ‘Kamcape’; Daniel Offiong, ‘The Social Context of Ibibio Witch Beliefs’, Africa, 53 (1982), 73–82; Suzette Heald, ‘Witches and Thieves’, Man, N.S. 21 (1986), 65–78; Douglas, ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed’; Simon Mesaki, ‘Witch-Killing in Sukumaland’, in Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, 47–60; Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft Suppression Practices and Movements’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997), 319–45; Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft’; Blair Rutherford, ‘To Find an African Witch’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), 89–109; Mark Auslander, ‘Open the Wombs!’, in Comaroff and Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, 167–92; Cynthia Brantley, ‘An Historical Perspective of the Giriama and Witchcraft Control’, Africa, 49 (1979), 112–33.

  169.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 130–82; and Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy: Continuity and Change in Green Valley, Lebowa, 1930–91’, Africa, 63 (1993), 498–530.

  170.Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, 1209.

  171.Diane Ciekawy, ‘Witchcraft in Statecraft: Five Technologies of Power in Colonial and Postcolonial Coastal Kenya’, African Studies Review, 41 (1998), 119–41.

  172.Elizabeth Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’, Africa, 70 (2000), 333–58.

  173.David Law, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, London, 1985, 167–8.

  174.Blair Rutherford, ‘To Find an African Witch’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), 89–109.

  175.Linda M. Heywood, ‘Towards an Understanding of Modern Political Ideology in Africa: The Case of the Ovimbundu of Angola’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 36 (1998), 139–67; Inge Brinkman, ‘Ways of Death: Accounts of Terror from Angolan Refugees in Namibia’, Africa, 70 (2000), 15.

  176.Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks, The Witches of Abiquiu, Albuquerque, 2006; Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, 19–47; Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico, Durham, NC, 2003; William and Claudia Madsen, ‘Witchcraft in Tecapsa and Tepepan’, and Benson Sales, ‘Sorcery in Santiago El Palmar’, in Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, 73–94 and 124–46.

  177.Ellis, ‘Witch-hunting in Central Madagascar’.

  178.Dennis, Seneca Possessed.

  179.Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-world Peoples, London, 1973, 83–4.

  180.Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, London, 1963, 133–5.

  181.Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’.

  182.Wilson, Magic and the Millennium, 89–91, 94–101, 152–6.

  183.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 27–41; Auslander, ‘Open the Wombs!; Bengt M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, Oxford, 1961, 109, 253–9.

  184.Burridge, ‘Tangu’, 226–30; Birgit Meyer, ‘“If You Are a Devil, You are a Witch, and If You Are a Witch You Are a Devil”: The Integration of “Pagan” Ideas into the Conceptual Universe of Ewe Christians in Southeastern Ghana’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 22 (1992), 98–132.

  185.Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’; J. R. Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, Oxford, 1967, ch. 16.

  186.Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Creating “a Place to Feel at Home”: Christian Church Life and Social Control in Lusaka, Zambia (1970s)’ in Piet Konings et al. (eds), Trajectoires de Liberation en Afrique Contemporaine, Paris, 2000, 234–8.

  187.Mary Douglas, ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed: the Lele Revisited’, Africa, 69 (1999), 177–93.

  188.René Devisch, ‘Sorcery Forces of Life and Death among the Yaka of Congo’, in Bond and Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, 101–30.

  189.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, ix–xii.

  190.Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult’.

  191.Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’.

  192.R. G. Abrahams, ‘A Modern Witch-hunt among the Lango of Uganda’, Cambridge Anthropology 10 (1985), 32–45.

  193.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 1–2; and ‘Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy’; Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Occult Economics and the Violence of Abstraction’, American Ethnologist, 26 (1999), 279–303.

  194.Johannes Harnischfeger, ‘Witchcraft and the State in South Africa’, in John Hund (ed.), Witchcraft Violence and the Law in South Africa, Pretoria, 2002, 40–72.

  195.Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, 1215.

  196.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 191–2; Michael Rowlands and Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘Sorcery, Power and the Modern State in Cameroon’, Man, N.S. 23 (1988), 118–32; Peter Geschiere and Cyprian Fisiy, ‘Domesticating Personal Violence’, Africa, 64 (1994), 323–41; Cyprian F. Fisiy, ‘Containing Occult Practices: Witchcraft Trials in Cameroon’, African Studies Review, 41 (1998), 143–63; Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 109–97; Mesaki, ‘Witch-Killing in Sukumaland’.

  197.Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft’.

  198.David Macfarlane, ‘African Witch-hunts’, The Cauldron, 141 (2011), 42–4; Nick Britton, ‘Witchcraft Murder that Exposed Hidden Wave of Faith-Based Child Abuse’, Daily Telegraph (2 March 2012), 6; ‘Branded a Witch’, BBC3 television documentary, screened 20 May 2013.

  199.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, xiii, 7–19, 120.

  200.June Nash, ‘Death as a Way of Life: The Increasing Resort to Homicide in a Maya Indian Community’, American Anthropologist, 69 (1967), 455–70.

  201.Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan, Gender and Tribe: Women, Land and Forests in Jharkand, New Delhi, 1991, 94; Puja Roy, ‘Sanctioned Violence: Development and the Persecution of Women as Witches in South Bihar’, Development in Practice, 8 (1998), 136–47.

  202.Nathan Wachtel, Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya, Chicago, 1994, 77–9.

  203.Knut Rio, ‘The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person’, in Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Rationalism, 129–30.

  204.Miranda Forsyth and Richard Eves (eds), Talking It Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia (Canberra, 2015) gathers seventeen essays on the problem.

  205.Dawn Perlemutter, ‘The Politics of Muslim Magic’, Middle East Quarterly, 20 (2013), 73–80.

  206.Slaats and Porter, ‘Sorcery and the Law in Modern Indonesia’.

  207.Douglas, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, xiii–xxi.

  208.On this see particularly Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’; and Winter, ‘The Enemy Within’.

  209.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, chs 1.1, 1.4, 1.8; John Middleton, Lugbara Religion, Oxford, 1960, 238–50; Jean La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’, in ibid., 187–220; Lawrence and Meggitt, ‘Introduction’, in Lawrence and Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, 16–18; Bowie, ‘Witchcraft and Healing among the Bangwa of Cameroon’, 71; Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, 19.

  210.Geschiere and Fisiy, ‘Domesticating Personal Violence’; Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft’; Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Occult Economics’; Geschiere, ‘Witchcraft and New Forms of Wealth’, in Paul Clough and Jon P. Mitchell (eds), Powers of Good and Evil, New York, 43–76.

  211.Niehaus, ‘Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy’, 503; James Howard Smith, Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinv
ention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya, Chicago, 2008; Brantley, ‘An Historical Perspective of the Giriama and Witchcraft Control’.

  212.Ibid.

  213.Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’.

  214.BBC3, ‘Branded a Witch’.

  215.Gerald W. Hartwig, ‘Long-Distance Trade and the Evolution of Sorcery among the Kerebe’, African Historical Studies, 4 (1971), 505–24.

  216.Honigman, ‘Witch-Fear in Post-contact Kaska Society’.

  217.Shapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, and Martin Zelenietz, The Effects of Sorcery in Kilenge, West New Britain Province, Port Moresby, 1979, are examples of respected scholars who have asserted that witchcraft did occur among the peoples whom they studied, but they do not provide evidence.

  218.Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’; Parrinder, Witchcraft, 173–4.

  219.Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, Palo Alto, CA, 1979, 65.

  220.Robert A. Levine, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery in a Gusii Community’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 221–55; Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, ch. 1.

  221.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy, 63–87.

  222.Tina Hamrin-Dahl, ‘Witch Accusations, Rapes and Burnings in South Africa’, in Tore Ahlbäck (ed.), Ritualistics, Åbo, 2003, 56–70.

  223.Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 50–51.

  224.Margaret Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gă People, Oxford, 1937, 138–49.

  225.Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, 410.

  226.Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, ch. 2. The scholars of European witch trials to have taken the most sustained interest in this aspect of the subject have been Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Falmer, 2010, and Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2008.

  227.Walter B. Cannon, ‘Voodoo Death’, American Anthropologist, 44 (1942), 169–81.

  228.C. P. Richter, ‘On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Men’, Psychosomatic Medicine 19 (1957), 190–98; G. L. Engel, ‘A Life Setting Conducive to Illness’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 32 (1968), 355–65; David Lester, ‘Voodoo Death: Some New Thoughts on an Old Phenomenon’, American Anthropologist, 74 (1972), 378–85. For a rare examination of this theme in the early modern European context, with an updating of the medical literature, see Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 5–39, 287–303.