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Witchcraft Suppression Practices and Movements: Public Politics and the Logic of Purification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2012

Maia Green
Maia Green
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

Public practices for the suppression of witchcraft are periodically performed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologists have generally sought to interpret such practices rather than explain them. This interpretation rests on assumptions about what such practices might mean for social actors rather than on the actual social processes which make their public performance possible. In the anthropological view, the performance of anti-witchcraft practices amounts to an expression of discontent with aspects of social and economic life deriving from the terms of Africa's engagement with the contemporary world. Antiwitchcraft practices and the witchcraft discourse of which they are part are understood to constitute locally constructed critiques of social transformation and modernity. But, whatever the coherence of the symbolic logic expressed in anti-witchcraft practices, such accounts fail to explain why large numbers of people participate in such practices from time to time or how such practices become public.

Type
Ritual Power
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 1997 , pp. 319 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1997

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