Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Module 4, Week 1, Lectures 1
Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 410
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
October 21, 2019
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/4.1.1

• Wailing
• The haus krai
• Speaking to the dead

If you were raised in a society in which mourning is not practiced in this way, you might ask “Why do those people have to do this? Why do they have to register so clearly to everyone that someone else's death affects them?” I would like you to ask a different question: Why doesn't your society compel you to see that you are involved in other people's deaths?

Many cultures throughout the world find invisible causes for otherwise material, physical events, like illness, death and misfortune. Let's call any kind of belief of this nature magic.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, an anthropologist who studied the people who live in what is today South Sudan, has been very influential in helping anthropologists think about magic in social terms.

For Azande, there is an important distinction in forms of magic:

• Sorcery is a skill one learns and uses to attack and harm or kill a person.
• Witchcraft is an “inherent quality” (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 1). Witches are people who possess this substance in them. A person's witchcraft leaves their body and hurts other people invisibly, and often this happens without the witch's knowledge, or at least in complete secrecy (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 56-57).

Some key points:

• Witchcraft is mentioned every day, and invoked to explain any number of bad things, from minor incidents to death. “Witchcraft is not less anticipated than adultery” (which is also common) (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 19).
• Witchcraft belief coexists with reason and logic. When the granary collapsed on top of a person, and people saw that termites had eaten away the posts, they reasoned that termites made the granary fall, but a witch made sure it fell on that person at that time (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 22).
• Witchcraft doesn't explain everything: when people commit certain acts, like lying and adultery, they cannot claim that they have been bewitched (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 26). Similarly, sickness that results from breaking a taboo is not caused by a witch (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 28).
• “Azande say, 'Death always has a cause, and no man dies without a reason'” (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 51). Specifically, people's death is always the result of a latent or overt conflict. The witch is always motivated by this conflict.
• If someone's witchcraft causes death, then the witch is killed in vengence (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 5).

Many societies have very similar beliefs. We can speak of these beliefs as forming a package, because they often go together too.

Some key variations:

• Is the witch an “insider” or an “outsider”?
• Is the witch typically male or female?
• Is witchcraft always unintented or just covert?

Social anthropologists loved talking about witchcraft and sorcery. It seemed a perfect test case for their ideas about social function:

• Witchcraft and sorcery functions in relation to ideas about egalitarianism. Only equals bewitch each other (Fortune 1932).
• Witchcraft is a way of mediating social conflicts (Nadel 1952).
• Witchcraft is a collective representation of deviance itself, the “standardized nightmare” of the society (Wilson 1951: 313).

Witchcraft exist in an equilibrium, and is part of a process of maintaining social equilibrium.

People have long debated the persistence and growth of these beliefs in the postcolonial period.

Some, like Comaroff and Comaroff (1999), argue that they are not a belief in magic at all, but a diagnosis of the real workings of neoliberal global capitalism in Africa.