The article, based on fieldwork conducted in rural Eastern Slovenian region, discusses specifics of various discourses-Christian, rational, New Age, and, in particular, witchcraft discourse-that the inhabitants of the region use in discussing witchcraft. It shows the occasions in everyday life in which the witchcraft discourse may be mobilised and strategically used by people for their own benefit. Later, it compares the discourse used by traditional magic specialists in the unwitching procedure, performed when misfortune is ascribed to bewitchment, with the discourse used by a contemporary New Age therapist in therapy performed for the same reason. The author argues that in basic elements they resemble each other, the main difference being that the key underlying premise of the traditional unwitcher, i.e. that the source of misfortune threatens from the outside, loses its importance in the New Age therapy. In this, the main arena of counteraction against the perpetrator is transferred from the outside to the inside, to one's own body and mind.

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Abstract:Based on field research, this article discusses various discourses that the inhabitants of the Eastern Slovenian region could use when discussing witchcraft. Further on it focuses on various possible uses of the witchcraft discourse: as long as witchcraft discourse had enough open support in the region, it constituted the context in which witchcraft narratives were “shared with licence”, which enabled people to draw upon and mobilize them for various purposes and with various intentions. This paper gives examples of how bewitchment narratives served as a strategy that individuals could appropriate and use to their benefit in everyday life.

The paper focuses on a particular legend about a wrestling match between a human and a dead werewolf, which I recorded during my fieldwork in the Croat (i.e. Catholic) community in Herzegovina in 2017. Based on the analysis of a legend about a wrestling match between a human of Catholic faith and a Muslim werewolf, I aim to show how latent inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions in multi-ethnic and multi-religious Bosnia and Herzegovina are reflected in this legend about the restless dead. I pay particular attention to how the ethnic and religious Other is constructed in the legend, and demonstrate the prejudices against the religious and ethnic Others that are reflected in it. I argue that its main function was, and still is, first and foremost to emphasise the superiority of the narrator's religion, i.e. Catholicism, over Islam, and to serve as a warning to Catholics against abandoning their faith and converting to another religion.

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