Reconsidering Witchcraft: Postcolonial Africa and Analytic (Un)Certainties

Abstract

African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static but are highly flexible and deeply attuned to the conundrums of our contemporary world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch provide commentaries on the meaning and merit of modernity as experienced in different historical and cultural settings. By exploring one particular type of witchcraft —that involving rain—amongst the lhanzu of Tanzania, this article suggests instead that some forms of witchcraft may be more pertinent to understanding local notions of "tradition" than "modernity." It is argued that the process of identifying rain witches provides lhanzu men and women with a way to circumscribe, contemplate, and, ultimately, reassert the veracity and significance of a conceptual category they call "tradition." The article concludes by critiquing the homogenizing effects of terms like the African witch and African witchcraft, compelling us to think in terms of pluralities rather than singulars. [Keywords: witchcraft, modernity, tradition, rainmaking, anthropological theory]

Contemporary views on dementia as witchcraft in sub‐Saharan Africa: A systematic literature review

“…An understanding of witchcraft would need to include both the act of witchcraft “harmful actions carried out by persons presumed to have access to supernatural powers” (Ashforth, :64) and the impact of witchcraft the misfortune and loss, which has been inflicted onto a person (Simmons, ). However, witchcraft is a construct of modernity that addresses tensions within society, and provides an explanation for events, which have no logical explanation, such as illnesses, sudden death, misfortune, bad luck and crop failure (Saunders, ).…”

Excess

“…On which side are we as ethnographers to come down when what people say about the social significance of commodities does not match what they do with commodities? The thesis that "witchcraft critiques modernity" (Sanders 2003), which Edelman recommends that I duplicate in search of "parables about the disappearance of found or ill-gotten wealth," is a prime example of anthropologists' failure to complicate subalterns' spoken or enacted questioning of the capitalist order against evidence that these same people avidly embrace the satisfactions derivable from an advanced industrial economy (Martinez 2007:24-29). Although I am in equal parts mystified and honored to be likened to George Harrison (my favorite Beatle; how could Professor Rey know?…”

“…9. The thesis that "witchcraft critiques modernity," first formulated by Michael Taussig (1980), has produced an extensive body of research in cultural anthropology, the precepts and findings of which are reviewed by Todd Sanders (2003). For a more critical perspective on this thesis, see also Martinez (2007:24-29).…”

The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco

“…Their interventions are countermodern (or at least countercapitalist) critiques in which the village often becomes the metaphor of choice for Africa as a whole and in which agents of the village's ruin are the usual impersonal suspects-a stifling colonialism, a cancerous capitalism. Although countermodern critiques are coming under increasing scrutiny among a newer generation of Africanist social anthropologists who see them as a kind of misplaced proxy war that we in the academy have routinely fought against capitalism (see, e.g., Sanders 2003), they migrate into even the subtlest of analyses, because they are, in a sense, already embedded in the dichotomizing tradition of social anthropology's version of modernity.…”