anthropology, history and witchcraft - ronald hutton

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HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL

APPROACHES TO WITCHCRAFT :

POTENTIAL FOR A NEW COLLABORATION?

RONALD HUTTON

University of Bristol

A B S T R ACT. In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was

common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some

anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less

ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again

to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these

debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational

model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of

the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the

witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again

be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to

mutual benefit.

I

In the years around 1970 it seemed that a global approach to the study of what the

English-speaking world calls witchcraft had become the scholarly norm. Most of

the research published upon the phenomenon during the previous two decades

had been produced by anthropologists, above all those working in the colonial or

newly independent territories of sub-Saharan Africa. When sustained investi-

gation commenced into the trials of witches in early modern England, towards

the end of the 1960s, ethnographic parallels were prominently employed to inter-

pret the domestic data. Indeed, it was acknowledged that the study of witchcraft

in tribal societies elsewhere on the planet had provided one inspiration for the

new interest in similar beliefs in the English past.1 Anthropologists returned

the compliment by setting places for historians at their feasts. The conference on

1 E.g. Keith Thomas, ‘The relevance of social anthropology to the historical study of English

witchcraft ’, in Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations (London, 1970), pp. 47–81; Alan

Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1970), pp. 211–53; Norman Cohn, Europe’s

inner demons (Falmer, 1975), pp. 220–3.

The Historical Journal, 47, 2 (2004), pp. 413–434 f 2004 Cambridge University Press

DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X03003558 Printed in the United Kingdom

413

http://journals.cambridge.org


the study of witchcraft held at Oxford in 1968 to mark the retirement of one of the

pioneers of the subject in African societies, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, included

a set of papers from experts in the early modern European trials.2 When another

leading Africanist, Max Marwick, edited a collection of writings on the same

subject that appeared in 1970, he included extracts from the work of experts in

ancient, medieval, and early modern European studies as well as that of colleagues

in his own field.3 In 1978 one of the most prominent social anthropologists of

that decade, Rodney Needham, declared that his discipline depended on com-

parativism, and proposed some characteristics for ‘a steady image of the witch’,

based on data from both African and European sources.4

By that date, however, the co-operative enterprise was already collapsing.

It had always been more fragile and narrowly based than may appear from the

manifestations of it listed above. The historians who were engaged in it consisted

of no more than a handful based in British universities, above all Keith Thomas

and Alan Macfarlane. American experts in the early modern trials directly

rejected it, claiming that the ‘primitive ’ social groups of sub-Saharan Africa bore

so little resemblance to the more complex cultures and societies of Europe that

comparisons were unhelpful. In 1972 Erik Midelfort warned his readers that

his study of German trials would ‘not bristle with arcane allusions to the Navajo,

Azande or Cewa’.5 Four years later William Monter, discussing evidence from

France and Switzerland, declared that ‘non-Western social anthroplogy provides

keys that do not fit European locks ’.6 What doomed the enterprise of comparing

African and European material, however, was a loss of faith in it on the part of

those British historians who had most prominently applied it ; and here the crucial

event was the debate between Hildred Geertz and Keith Thomas in the Journal

of Interdisciplinary History in 1975.7 The former, writing as an anthropologist, ques-

tioned whether cultural particulars could be placed in general categories and

whether these types could be compared across time periods and continents. She

accused Thomas of having adopted the categories constructed by the British from

the eighteenth century onward, and used as cultural weapons against others.

It is worth emphasizing that Geertz also stated that the imposition of scholarly

categories is itself unavoidable, and was calling not for their abolition but for

the recognition of the cultural particularity of those employed hitherto by modern

2 Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations.3 Max Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery (Harmondsworth, 1970).4 Rodney Needham, Primordial characters (Charlottesville, 1978), pp. 23–50, at p. 42.5 H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany, 1562–1684 (Stanford, 1972), p. 5.6 E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca, 1976), p. 11. It was later asserted

in retrospective dismissals of the comparative method that prominent British scholars such as

E. P. Thompson and Max Marwick had already turned against it in the early 1970s, citing Thompson,

‘Anthropology and the discipline of historical context ’, Midland History, 1 (1972), pp. 46–55, and

Marwick, review of Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, Man, n.s. 6 (1971), pp. 320–1.

Neither disowned the method as such, however, only criticizing some applications of it.7 Hildred Geertz and Keith Thomas, ‘An anthropology of religion and magic: two views’, Journal of

Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), pp. 71–110.

414 H I S T O R I C A L J O U RN A L



Western scholars. She urged that Thomas’s work be not rejected but followed

up with a greater awareness of these difficulties. In this context, it was Keith

Thomas’s answer that was particularly significant. He defended his conceptual

models and use of terms with regard to British material, but signalled the end of

a straightforward engagement with anthropological data. He declared his rec-

ognition that anthropologists had become chary of employing Western concepts

to understand non-European societies and preferred to use those of the people

whom they were studying. Their aim had now become that of reconstructing

individual cultural systems in their entirety, and they regarded as contentious

terms accepted unthinkingly by historians, such as ‘witchcraft ’, ‘belief ’ and

‘magic ’. This being so, he concluded that historians needed to back off from

the problem and concentrate on their own society, for which their terminology

seemed still to be well suited. He conceded that ‘historians must recognise that

much of their work does not easily lend itself to cross-cultural comparison’.8

He himself could recognize it the more clearly in that his own university of

Oxford had become one of the centres of the new approach to anthropology: he

himself cited the work of his colleague Edwin Ardener as typifying it.9 In general,

the dismantling of the European colonial empires was producing a reaction

against the traditional framework of the discipline as a handmaiden to imperia-

lism. This reaction embodied hostility both to the imposition of European

terms and concepts on views of other societies and the habit of making compari-

sons between social groups that such an imposition made easier. The fashion was

indeed for a close study of particular communities, as much within their own

linguistic and mental models as possible. It was applied directly to witchcraft by

another Oxford anthropologist of the period, Malcolm Crick. Between 1973 and

1976 he developed an argument that the concept of ‘witchcraft ’ needed to be

‘dissolved into a larger framework of reference ’, by relating the figures whom

English-speakers tended to call witches to others who embodied power of differ-

ent kinds within a given society. He asserted that conceptual categories varied so

much between cultures that ‘witchcraft ’ could not be treated as a general topic at

all, and warned historians off ethnographic material, proclaiming that ‘English

witchcraft is not like the phenomena so labelled in other cultures ’.10 In this respect

the writing had been on the wall ever since the conference to honour Evans-

Pritchard back in 1968, where an American contributor, T. O. Beidelman, had

commented that ‘witchcraft ’ was being used as a label for social phenomena

that differed radically between societies.11 What had been a warning at that date

seemed to have become an orthodoxy a decade later.

8 Quotation on p. 107.9 Specifically, Edwin Ardener, ‘The new anthropology and its critics ’,Man, n.s. 6 (1971), pp. 449–67.10 Malcolm Crick, ‘Two styles in the study of witchcraft ’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford,

4 (1973), pp. 17–31, at p. 18; and idem, Explorations in language and meaning : towards a semantic anthropology

(London, 1976), pp. 109–27.11 T. O. Beidelman, ‘Towards more open theoretical interpretations ’ in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft

confessions and accusations, pp. 351–6.

H I S T O R I O G R A P H I C A L R E V I EW S 415



That is, at any rate, how historians of early modern Europe chose to regard

it. Comparisons with extra-European material almost completely vanished from

their work, and the boom in the study of witch beliefs and trials that took place

from the mid-1980s onwards took the form of an exercise in cross-referencing

between different parts of Europe and the English colonies in America. Near the

beginning of that dramatic increase of interest in the subject, an expert in

Mediterranean studies, Robert Rowland, did contribute an essay that compared

European and African material. Implicitly addressing some of the criticisms of

such an exercise, he emphasized the differences as well as the similarities ; but his

work was not followed up.12 In 1989 J. H. M. Salmon concluded that anthro-

pologists had effectively deterred attempts by historians to engage in any further

collaboration over the subject, in a review article labelled ‘History without

anthropology ’.13 When I began to present guest lectures and seminar papers from

1991 onward that recommended a further attempt to compare data from differ-

ent parts of the world, I repeatedly encountered the same objection from his-

torians : that ‘anthropologists ’ had rendered such an exercise futile, by declaring

that the comparisons could not be made.

The irony of this was that during the same period the practitioners of anthro-

pology were starting to send out exactly the opposite message. In 1992 Mary

Douglas published an essay in which she used African and early modern European

data to compare witchcraft and leprosy as strategies of rejection. She made ref-

erence again to European material in an article published seven years later.14

In 1998 Jean La Fontaine united studies of African beliefs, European trials, and

the modern British and American panic over ‘ satanic ritual abuse ’, to show the

basic similarities between the stereotypes operating in each case. She explicitly

attacked the earlier denials that the term ‘witchcraft ’ retained any utility in the

task of cross-cultural comparison that she held to be one of the duties of her

discipline.15 In 1995 a British sociologist, Andrew Sanders, had made another

challenge to the same denials, and published a worldwide survey of the occur-

rence of the figure known in English as the witch, using both ethnographic and

historical records.16 Most significant in this regard was the development of a

school of thought among Africanists publishing with American university presses,

who have called for a renewed emphasis on cross-cultural comparison in the

12 Robert Rowland, ‘ ‘‘Fantasticall and devilishe persons’’ : European witch-beliefs in comparative

perspective’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early modern European witchcraft (Oxford,

1990), pp. 161–90. The volume was based on the proceedings of a conference that had been held at

Stockholm in 1984.13 J. H. M. Salmon, ‘History without anthropology: a new witchcraft synthesis ’, Journal of Inter-

disciplinary History, 19 (1989), pp. 481–6.14 Mary Douglas, Risk and blame : essays in cultural theory (London, 1992), pp. 83–101; idem, ‘Sorcery

accusations unleashed: the Lele revisited’, Africa, 69 (1999), pp. 177–93.15 J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil : tales of satanic abuse in contemporary England (Cambridge, 1998),

esp. pp. 180–92.16 Andrew Sanders, A deed without a name : the witch in society and history (Oxford, 1995).




specific field of witchcraft studies, in response to a dramatic phenomenon associ-

ated with post-colonial Africa.

This is the discovery, clearly often shocking to Western scholars, that a fear of

what English-speakers called witchcraft has not diminished with the moderniz-

ation of the independent African nations, but often intensified while adapting

to the new social conditions. In many states responses take the form of crowd or

vigilante action, but in a few of them legal trials of accused witches, with heavy

penalties on conviction, have been resumed. The cost in human suffering is

very clear, and demands a scholarly response. Part of the latter has focused on a

wholly justifiable attempt to dissuade Westerners from attributing the persistence

of a belief in witchcraft in Africa to an inherent disposition to ‘ superstition ’ or

‘primitivism’ on the part of its peoples. This has in turn led to a new emphasis

on the prevalence of such beliefs across the globe and a call for a return to the

comparative method; likewise, Jean La Fontaine’s use of the latter was justified

powerfully by the discovery that the stereotypes that underpinned the erroneous

belief in cells of Satanists who ritually abused children in the United Kingdom

and United States were derived directly from early modern demonology. It was

becoming apparent that the figure of the witch could not be packaged safely away

into the history or ethnography of vanished societies.

The new trend among Africanists was visible by 1993, when Ralph Austen

declared that a comparative approach could ‘at the very least help to historicize

further our understanding of African witchcraft and add cultural context to our

understanding of European capitalism’.17 In the following year Ray Abrahams,

introducing a collection of essays on Tanzanian witchcraft, commented that

the earlier convergence of ideas between the disciplines had been ‘very useful ’.18

The pattern was established by 1997. In that year Barry Hallen and J. Olubi

Sodipo published a study of African beliefs in which it was assumed that a com-

parison with early modern European equivalents was one obvious means for an

understanding of attitudes to witchcraft. It returned an open verdict, however,

on whether such an exercise actually yielded useful material.19 The same year

saw the appearance of an influential study of Cameroon by Peter Geschiere, in

which the same complex of attitudes was even more sharply polarized. It had a

preface by Wyatt MacGaffey, who declared that ‘African beliefs in the occult are

highly varied and may have nothing more in common than the word ‘‘witch-

craft ’’ applied to them by English speakers. ’20 This blunt restatement of the 1980s

orthodoxy was then contradicted by Geschiere himself, who concluded that

‘ these notions, now translated throughout Africa as ‘‘witchcraft ’’, reflect a strug-

gle with problems common to all human societies ’. He called for anthropologists

17 Ralph A. Austen, ‘The moral economy of witchcraft : an essay in comparative history’, in Jean

and John Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its malcontents (Chicago, 1993), p. 94.18 Ray Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania (Cambridge, 1994), p. 12.19 Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo, Knowledge, belief and witchcraft (Stanford, 1997).20 Peter Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft : politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville,

1997), p. viii.




to learn from the studies of the European trials, which had shown that beliefs at

the local level could only be understood in relation to wider historical processes ;

he termed the neglect of these studies by recent anthropology ‘even more discon-

certing ’ than the lack of awareness of research in Africa on the part of historians

of Europe. Rounding on those among the latter who had denied that ‘primitive ’

African communities could be compared with those of post-medieval Europeans,

he argued convincingly that, especially with their cap of colonial settlers and

rulers, the societies of Africa in the early twentieth century were every bit as

complex as those of Europe in the sixteenth.21 By 2001 the editors of a major

collection of essays on African belief systems could introduce their material by

warning scholars to be careful not to restrict the study of witchcraft ‘ to any one

region of the world or to any one historical period … There is a history of

witchcraft beliefs in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa. ’22 One

of the contributors to the volume was Barry Hallen, who again took issue with a

specific model that had been offered for a supracontintental approach,23 but

none of them seemed to challenge the assertions of the editors. Another, indeed,

remarked that ‘ the amazing point is not so much variation across the African

continent, but convergence’.24 In urban centres of modern Africa, a multicultural

perspective is now essential in any case. In the Soweto suburb of Johannesburg,

fear of witchcraft was endemic by the 1990s and produced serious tension and

violence. It was based on stereotypes drawn from a number of different native

groups, and blended with features of that developed in early modern Europe and

brought by Dutch and English settlers.25

Three major problems stand in the way of the renewed collaboration that

is thus being proposed between disciplines and between specialists in different

geographical regions. One is that, with the notable exception of Andrew Sanders,

experts in the respective traditions of research have completely failed to keep up

with each other. Africanists sometimes still refer to recent studies made in other

parts of the world (and vice versa), but this wider awareness tends to be the

exception rather than the rule. The gulf between anthropology and the explosion

of publication on early modern European witch beliefs is almost absolute. His-

torians, as said, are mostly under the impression that anthropologists have shown

them the door, while those among the latter who are calling for collaboration

seem to be under the impression that research in Europe stopped around 1970,

or at latest 1980. Mary Douglas, writing in 1992, still accepted Margaret Murray’s

21 Ibid., pp. 188–223, at p. 223.22 George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues : anthropological and philo-

sophical exchanges (Athens, OH, 2001), p. 5.23 Barry Hallen, ‘ ‘‘Witches’’ as superior intellects : challenging a cross-cultural superstition’, in

ibid., pp. 80–100.24 Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualized boundary conditions of the

kinship order’, in Bond and Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues, p. 243.25 Adam Ashforth, ‘ ‘‘Of secrecy and the commonplace’’ : witchcraft and power in Soweto’, Social

Research, 63 (1996), pp. 1183–234.




thesis that the people accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were prac-

titioners of a surviving pagan religion, which had been completely discredited

in the 1970s. When Hallen and Sodipo reviewed the comparative method in 1997,

they apparently knew of no work on the European material published since

1971, which naturally affected their sense of its value. When Hallen returned to

the subject in the collection published in 2001, his sole example of it was a work

that had appeared in 1970. In his book in 1997 Peter Geschiere rightly castigated

the historian Robert Rowland for having attempted a comparative exercise in

the 1980s while citing just one publication by an anthropologist, from 1969.

Geschiere’s own sense of the state of European witchcraft studies, however, was

still stuck in the 1970s. The recent literature of witchcraft in extra-European

societies has hardly ever contained the names of historians who have made the

running in the study of early modern European beliefs during the 1990s, or

indeed referred to the simultaneous burst of studies of witchcraft and magic in the

Mediterranean and Near Eastern ancient worlds.26

The second major problem is that, having apparently been snubbed by

anthropology, historians of early modern European witchcraft found new friends

in other disciplines, such as cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, criminology,

literary theory, and the philosophy of science. These influences had considerable

effect in inspiring and conditioning the tremendous growth in studies of the early

modern material since 1985, and could indeed give a strong impression that

anthropology had been dispensed with profitably. Such an impression would,

however, conceal an irony and a loss. The irony is that the new cultural history

in which the studies concerned took their place was itself heavily influenced by

anthropological thought. The loss is that those studies might have been still more

valuable if they had borne any relation to the global context. Such a context was

most obviously needed for the work of Carlo Ginzburg, whose attempt to derive

the early modern stereotype of the witches’ sabbat from an ancient pan-Eurasian

tradition of shamanism cried out for comparison with traditions of witches’

gatherings in other continents ; as will be considered further below. It would also,

however, have been interesting to possess evaluations of Stuart Clark’s analysis of

early modern demonology, Lyndal Roper’s application of psychoanalytic theory

to German witch trials, Robin Briggs’s reconstruction of the role of neighbour-

hood tensions in accusation, James Sharpe’s examination of the complex inter-

play between learned and popular belief and Diane Purkiss’s interpretation of

witch trials in terms of cultural expectations (to name but a few examples) within

26 For recent overviews in a very large literature, see Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink,

eds., Magika hiera (Oxford, 1991) ; Peter Schafer and Hans G. Kippenberg, eds., Envisioning magic

(Leiden, 1997) ; Fritz Graf, Magic in the ancient world (Cambridge, MA, 1997) ; Bengt Ankarloo and

Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and magic in Europe : ancient Greece and Rome (London, 1999) ; Matthew W.

Dickie, Magic and magicians in the Greco-Roman world (London, 2001). My own intervention in a major

debate in this field will be found in Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London, 2003),

pp. 98–117.




a broader international framework.27 Such evaluations would have suggested

which components of their findings were specific to time and place and which

had more universal human implications.

The third major problem is that there is no general agreement on what a witch

or witchcraft is supposed to be. Historians of Europe have tended to let their

terms be defined for them by their sources, which had by 1600 produced a wide-

spread stereotype of witches as adherents of a demonic religion. Anthropologists

have tended to use the terms as blanket ascriptions, while repeatedly worrying

about their efficacy, and then analyse the words employed in particular cultures

for phenomena that can be associated with the English terminology. There is little

or no sense of a well-defined common model to which everybody is working. The

rest of this review will be devoted to proposing such a model, based on recent

research from across the globe as well as data collected up to the past couple of

decades.

I I

There is no doubt that the cross-cultural characteristics for the figure of the witch

proposed in studies made before 1980 do need to be revised in the light of sub-

sequent information. The model from 1970 to which Barry Hallen took exception

was proposed by Geoffrey Parrinder, and some of its components – that the

stereotypical witch is female and identified with demonic pacts and orgiastic

gatherings – are clearly wrong in a global context.28 Rodney Needham’s check-

list, offered eight years later, holds up better, but still has features, such as the

association of the witch with animals and with flight, that now seem less essential

than others which are omitted.29 None of the work published since 1990, and

cited above, seems to offer a systematic global model, argued point by point. That

of Andrew Sanders comes closest, but as a sociologist he is more concerned

with different issues. Although he assembles much material on the nature of the

witch figure in different societies, his central interest is in the relationship between

that figure and the pursuit of power through competitive social relationships.

The result is a masterly study of the sociological aspects and consequences of

beliefs rather than a sustained analysis of the constant and the variable charac-

teristics of the beliefs themselves.

The present study rests largely on studies of witchcraft beliefs in a total of

148 extra-European societies, published between 1890 and 2002: ninety-three in

27 For recent general overviews of the early modern historiography, see Brian Levack, The witch hunt

in early modern Europe (2nd edn, London, 1995 ) ; Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow,Witchcraft and magic in

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (2nd edn, London, 2001) ; and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft

in Europe and the New World, 1400–1800 (London, 2001). The specific studies cited are Carlo Ginzburg,

Ecstasies (London, 1991) ; Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons (Oxford, 1997) ; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the

Devil (London, 1994) ; Robin Briggs, Witches and neighbours (London, 1996) ; James Sharpe, Instruments of

darkness (London, 1996) ; Diane Purkiss, The witch in history (London, 1996).28 Points well made in Hallen, ‘ ‘‘Witches’’ as superior intellects ’.29 Needham, Primordial characters, pp. 26–42.




sub-Saharan Africa, seven in India and Sri Lanka, twenty-eight in Australasia and

Oceania (Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands),

fifteen in North America (including Greenland), and five in South America.30 The

predominance of Africa in the sample reflects the amount of work that has been

done there, but also the sources available to a historian based in the United

Kingdom as so much of that research was carried out by British scholars. There

is enough data from the rest of the world to provide comparison with the African

material, and both may be assimilated to that from early modern Europe.31 A

comparison suggests that there is a fairly consistent image of the being to which

English-speakers have given the name of witch, and that it depends on five

characteristics.

The first is that it defines a person who uses non-physical means to cause

misfortune or injury to other humans. These means fall within the category

that English-speakers have traditionally described as ‘uncanny’, ‘mystical ’, or

‘ supernatural ’. This is the bottom-line definition to which all scholars who employ

the word ‘witch’ seem to subscribe. In 1970 Esther Goody defined witchcraft as

‘ the covert use of mystical forms of aggression by human agents ’.32 To Rodney

30 To avoid blotting out whole pages of this review with the references, a hundred of these are

identified in Ronald Hutton, ‘The global context of the Scottish witch-hunt’, in Julian Goodare, ed.,

The Scottish witch-hunt in context (Manchester, 2002), pp. 17–18. To these I have since added A. T. Bryant,

Olden times in Zululand and Natal (London, 1929), pp. 650–1; B. B. Whiting, Paiute sorcery (New York,

1950) ; S. F. Nadal, Nupe religion (London, 1954), pp. 163–200; Antera Duke and Cyril D. Forde, eds.,

Efik traders of old Calabar (Oxford, 1956), pp. 16–22; Victor Turner, Schism and continuity in an African society

(Manchester, 1957) ; W. Lloyd Warner, A black civilisation : a social study of an Australian tribe (New York,

1958) ; L. W. Simmons, ed., Sun chief : the autobiography of a Hopi Indian (New Haven, 1963), pp. 120, 331–3;

K. H. Basso, Western Apache witchcraft (Phoenix, 1969) ; Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, sorcery and social

categories among the Safwa (Oxford, 1970) ; K. M. Stewart, ‘Witchcraft among the Mohave Indians ’,

Ethnology, 12 (1973), pp. 313–24; Mary Patterson, ‘Sorcery and witchcraft in Melanesia’, Oceania, 45

(1974), pp. 132–60, 212–34; E. L. Schieffelin, The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers (St Lucia,

Queensland, 1977) ; Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru sorcery (Palo Alto, CA, 1979) ; Karen E. Fields, ‘Political

contingencies of witchcraft in colonial central Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 16 (1982),

pp. 567–93; Colin Turnbull, The forest people (London, 1984) ; R. D. Edmunds, The Shawnee prophet

(Lincoln, NB, 1985), pp. 5–97 ; Bruce M. Knauft, Good company and violence (Berkeley, 1985) ; Gilbert

Herdt and Michele Stephen, eds., The religious imagination in New Guinea (New Brunswick, 1989),

pp. 122–59; George T. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Lagona (Seattle, 1991) ; Birgit

Meyer, ‘ If you are a devil, you are a witch, and if you are a witch, you are a devil ’, Journal of Religion in

Africa, 22 (1992), pp. 98–132; Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its malcontents, pp. 111–92;

F. G. Bailey, The witch-hunt : or, the triumph of morality (Ithaca, 1994) ; Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in

contemporary Tanzania ; Ashforth, ‘Of secrecy and the commonplace’ ; Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft sup-

pression practices and movements’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997), pp. 319–45; Bruce

Kapferer, The feast of the sorcerers (Chicago, 1997) ; Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft ; Diane Ciekawy,

‘Witchcraft in statecraft ’, African Studies Review, 41 (1998), pp. 119–41; B. Rutherford, ‘To find an

African witch’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), pp. 89–109; Douglas, ‘Sorcery accusations unleashed’ ;

Bond and Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues, pp. 39–79, 101–89, 212–63; Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft,

power and politics (London, 2001) ; Stephen Ellis, ‘Witch-hunting in central Madagascar, 1828–1861 ’,

Past and Present, 175 (2002), pp. 90–123.31 To save space, again, this will be fed into the arguments below, rather than listed here.32 Esther Goody, ‘Legitimate and illegitimate aggression in a west African state ’, in Douglas, ed.,

Witchcraft confessions and accusations, p. 207.




Needham in 1978, it essentially represented ‘someone who causes harm to others

by mystical means ’.33 Although the term ‘mystical ’ might be criticized as cul-

turally loaded, the general drift of these formulae would seem to command general

agreement. This basic characteristic, however, is not sufficient by itself ; in the

classic witch figure it is accompanied by the others. The second of these is that

such a person works to harm neighbours or kin rather than strangers, so that she

or he is a threat to other members of his or her community. Ralph Austen has

commented that virtually all work in rural African societies (the great majority

in the continent) indicates that the efficacy of witchcraft is believed to increase in

direct proportion to the intimacy between witch and victim.34 Peter Geschiere has

added that ‘ in many respects, witchcraft is the dark side of kinship, ’35 and that

certainly seems true for much of Africa, although the degrees of kinship within

it is supposed to operate vary greatly between societies. Nor are kin necessarily

suspected, the spectrum of favoured targets extending through friends and

neighbours to outsiders who have been accepted into a community. The pattern

of suspicion among Africans was most simply summed up by Philip Mayer, half

a century ago, when he said that witches and their accusers are individuals who

ought to like each other but do not.36

This is also true of witchcraft beliefs in the Americas and India. In Europe the

link with kinship is much weaker, but that with the frictions of communal living

just as strong: the relationship in the early modern period is summed up by the

title of Robin Briggs’s book on the subject, Witches and neighbours.37 In 1964 Max

Marwick drew attention to a common impression among ethnographers that in

Oceania witchcraft belief systems reflected tensions between communities, rather

than within them. He concluded that in certain cases this different pattern does

obtain, but that inmany others, especially in Polynesia and theMelanesian islands,

workers of non-physical harm are perceived to be internal to social groups.38 The

more recent data certainly bears this out.39

The third abiding characteristic of the witch figure is that she or he earns

general social disapproval, usually of a very strong kind, which is associated with

two particular traits of the way in which he or she is supposed to operate. One is

that the witch works in secrecy, normally giving the intended victim no warning

or consciousness of what is happening until the harm has been done. The other is

that she or he does not cause harm as a purely practical means of gaining greater

wealth or prestige, but from motives of malice and spite. The attacks of witches

are never treated as legitimate retribution for wrongdoing or bad character on

33 Needham, Primordial characters, p. 26. 34 Austen, ‘The moral economy of witchcraft ’, p. 89.35 Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft, p. 11.36 Philip Mayer, ‘Witches’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, p. 55.37 Briggs, Witches and neighbours, passim.38 Max Marwick, ‘Witchcraft as a social strain-gauge’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery,

pp. 280–95.39 E.g. Patterson, ‘Sorcery and witchcraft in Melanesia’ ; Knauft, Good company and violence ;

P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt, eds., Gods, ghosts and men in Melanesia (Oxford, 1965).




the part of those whom they attack. In one respect, witchcraft represents the

evil inherent in the universe, manifesting through humans who are fitted by

their natures to act as fit vessels for it. In another, it embodies all that is selfish,

vindictive, and anti-social within human communities, epitomizing treachery

and disharmony in societies that strive for unity and neighbourliness. Godfrey

Lienhardt summed up a general rule when speaking of one African people, the

Dinka: that the witch ‘embodies those appetites and passions in every man

which, if ungoverned, would destroy any moral law’.40 The stereotypical witch

is generally an individual who manifests habitual anti-social behaviour, being

unusually proud, morose, aloof, cantankerous, or envious, although actual accu-

sations have been just as commonly directed at people who did not depart

from social norms. Likewise, from Arizona through Europe and Africa to the

Philippines, it has often been believed that witches reverse those norms in more

dramatic ways, engaging during their meetings or while working their evil in such

activities as incest, nudity, hanging upside down, walking on their hands, canni-

balism, or corpse-eating.

The fourth characteristic is the belief that the appearance of a witch figure is

not an isolated and unique event. Witches are expected to work within a tradition,

and generally use techniques, or are possessed of or by powers, that have been

handed down within the society concerned from time immemorial or introduced

into it from outside. They are not freak occurrences within the natural order of

things, but created by inheritance, training or initiation. The fifth characteristic

is that they can be resisted by their fellow humans, and worldwide this resistance

takes three different, though not exclusive, forms. One is to persuade or force the

witch to divest herself or himself permanently of his or her special powers, or to

heal the harm that has been caused and to desist from causing more. Another is

to use non-physical means (what English-speakers call counter-magic) to neutralize

the work of the witch and perhaps to make the witch suffer in turn. The third is

to deter or remove the witch by physical means : usually, by corporal punishment,

exile, the imposition of a punitive fine, or execution. Most societies which believe

in witches also have specialist figures who are regarded as skilled in the detection

of witches, known in English as cunning folk, witch doctors, or medicine people.

Wherever they exist, their fundamental work is to establish that a malady or

misfortune has been caused by witchcraft. In most cases they are expected also to

identify a culprit or culprits, and in Europe, Africa, and Melanesia in particular,

their remit further includes the working of counter-magic to cure or neutralize the

work of the witch.

I I I

These, then, are the five fundamental and definitive characteristics that can be

suggested for the model. If they may seem obvious, or even banal, to those used

40 Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Some notions of witchcraft among the Dinka’, Africa, 21 (1951), p. 317.




to studying what English-speakers call witchcraft, in specific societies, then this

should reinforce their genuine ubiquity. Their identification should also drive

home the major associated point, that all the other presumed characteristics

of the witch figure that are found in specific societies and situations are actually

variables. When dealing with these, it is also worth emphasizing that not all

traditional human societies possess the concept of the witch. At the conclusion of

his magisterial survey of the context of trials in early modern Europe, Robin

Briggs proposed that a fear of witchcraft might be inherent in humanity : ‘a

psychic potential we cannot help carrying round within ourselves as part of our

long-term inheritance ’.41 Peter Geschiere suggested a more subtle form of univer-

salism, by stating that ‘notions, now translated throughout Africa as ‘‘witchcraft ’’,

reflect a struggle with problems common to all human societies ’.42 In fact an

acceptance of the reality of witchcraft is just one possible solution to the problem

of apparently uncanny misfortune. There are plenty of peoples across the world

who do not believe that humans can inflict harm by non-physical means. This is

because they have alternative explanations for misfortune, usually that it is caused

by angry or evil spirits, either of ancestors or inherent in the world. The Andaman

Islanders of the Indian Ocean, the Korongo of the Sudan, the Tallensi of Ghana,

the Gurage of Ethiopia, the Mbuti of the Congo basin, the Fijians, the hill tribes

of Uttar Pradesh, and the Ngaing, Mae Enga, Manus, and Daribi of New Guinea

are all examples of societies who either do not believe in witchcraft at all or do not

believe that it matters in practice.43 These peoples were all surrounded by others

that were very similar in society, economy, and cosmology and yet feared witches.

Angela Bourke’s recent analysis of popular beliefs in nineteenth-century Ireland

reveals a rich traditional cosmology in which land-spirits (‘ fairies ’) were held

responsible for untoward events and puzzling misfortunes. By sharp contrast,

Owen Davies’s parallel investigation of Somerset in the same century shows that

witchcraft, and its human agents, were blamed for the same phenomena in a

manner familiar to any scholar of the early modern trials.44 The Kulu of central

Turkey blame misfortune variously on the will of Allah, malevolent spirits, or the

inadvertent and unconscious ability of some humans to harm with a glance : there

is no room in this complex of causation for the witch.45

41 Briggs, Witches and neighbours, p. 394. 42 Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft, p. 223.43 Mayer, ‘Witches’, and S. F. Nadel, ‘Witchcraft in four African societies ’, in Marwick, ed.,

Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 52, 264–79; P. Lawrence, ‘The Ngaing of the Rai Coast ’, in Lawrence and

Meggitt, eds., Gods, ghosts and men, pp. 198–223; Meyer Fortes, The web of kinship among the Tallensi

(Oxford, 1967), pp. 32–5; I. M. Lewis, ‘A structural approach to witchcraft and spirit possession’, in

Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 293–303; Andrew Strathern, ‘Witchcraft, greed,

cannibalism and death’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the regeneration of life

(Cambridge, 1982), pp. 111–33; Turnbull, The forest people, pp. 205–7; Knauft, Good company and violence,

pp. 341–2.44 Angela Bourke, The burning of Bridget Cleary (London, 1999) ; Owen Davies, A people bewitched :

witchcraft and magic in nineteenth-century Somerset (Bruton, 1999).45 Lisbeth Sachs, Evil eye or bacteria? (Stockholm, 1983), pp. 75–97.




Before modern times, the largest witch-free area of the inhabited planet may

have been Siberia, which covers a third of the northern hemisphere. Among

virtually all of the thirty-five indigenous native groups identified there by ethno-

graphers, uncanny misfortune is ascribed to ancestral or nature-spirits, which

must be defeated or propitiated. All over Siberia, this was the work of specialists

to whom European scholars gave the blanket term of ‘shamans’. These carried

out their work by a dramatic performance of dancing, chanting, and drumming,

in the course of which they entered trances and called familiar spirits to aid them.

Some, notably among the Buryat tribes, were reputed to work with evil entities,

but these were still respected as having a legitimate role to play in assisting indi-

viduals and their societies.46 Shamanism is perfectly compatible with a belief in

witches : in the Arctic zone of North America native peoples had very similar

practitioners to the shamans of Siberia, and they fulfilled the classic function of

witch doctors or cunning folk elsewhere: of detecting the human workers of non-

physical harm in their communities.47 Moreover Siberia itself was not wholly free

of the witch figure : among one important native group, the Sakha, some shamans

were believed to abuse their powers to afflict the persons and livestock of their

own people. These individuals, if identified, were punished in native law with

fines or physical attacks.48

Witch figures tend likewise not to exist in societies which do believe in the

power of humans to inflict harm by what English-speakers term magic, but

perceive this power to be used naturally between communities rather than inside

them. Uncanny misfortune is therefore blamed on other tribes, clans, or villages,

and treated as part of a system of endemic feuding between them. This pattern

is very common in New Guinea and smaller Melanesian islands such as New

Britain, occasioning Max Marwick’s remark about the perceived difference

between Oceania and Africa, quoted above. In many of the societies of this

region, the power to work this sort of harm is regarded as unique to chiefs or

ruling elders, further decreasing the potential for a belief in witchcraft.49 The

same pattern is found in some peoples of the Amazon basin, and some of the

Evenks of Siberia, who often treated illness as sent by shamans working for rival

clans.50

Among peoples who do traditionally have the witch figure, as defined above, a

large number of variables apply to perceptions of that figure. One of them is age.

46 Ronald Hutton, Shamans : Siberian spirituality and the Western imagination (London, 2001).47 E.g. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, pp. 398–410; Merete D. Jakobsen, Shamanism: traditional and

contemporary approaches to the mastery of spirits and healing (New York, 1999), pp. 94–100.48 S. A. Tokarev, ‘Shamanstvo u Iakutov v 17 veke’, Sovietskaia Etnografia, 2 (1939), pp. 88–102. I am

very grateful to Andrei Znamenski for this reference.49 Knauft, Good company and violence, pp. 340–3; Patterson, ‘Sorcery and witchcraft in Melanesia’ ;

Fitz John P. Poole, ‘Cannibals, tricksters and witches ’, in Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin, eds., The

ethnography of cannibalism (Washington DC, 1983), pp. 6–32.50 Peter Riviere, ‘Factions and exclusions in two South American village systems’, in Douglas, ed.,

Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 245–55; A. F. Anisimov, ‘The shaman’s tent of the Evenks’, in

Henry N. Michael, ed., Studies in Siberian shamanism (Toronto, 1963), pp. 84–123.




In many societies, across the globe, accusations are directed mainly against the

elderly, but in others they focus on young adults and in many more, age is not a

relevant factor. It is normal for suspects to be past puberty, because children are

much less rarely involved directly in social tensions, and much less credited with

power of any kind. None the less, in some parts of early modern Europe, children

were either swept up in suspicions or became prime targets.51 Among the Bangwa

of Cameroon, children were also frequently accused.52 Gender is another

worldwide variable, witches being, within each continent, viewed as essentially

female, essentially male, or of both sexes in different proportions and according

to different roles. It is fairly common, too, for societies to manifest a discrepancy

between the genders of their stereotypical witch and of the individuals most

commonly accused of witchcraft within them. Accusers are likewise normally

female, male or both, according to the conventions of different cultures. The

same variety attaches to the social status and wealth of accusers and accused,

witchcraft being viewed as a weapon of poor against rich, rich against poor, or

between equals, or open to any member of a society, according to the people

concerned.

There is, unsurprisingly, equal mutability in beliefs regarding the practices of

witches, although certain patterns are very widespread. Across the global range

of the witch figure, there are peoples who believe that witchcraft is worked with

especial ease by use of material objects associated with the body of the person

intended to be bewitched: faeces, nail trimmings, or hair. Such physical remnants

are, however, not universally important, and it is just as common (and frequently

compatible) to emphasize the use by the witch of material objects taken from the

natural world and imbued with arcane power : special plants, stones, or portions

of animal. In parts of western and central Africa and Melanesia, on the other

hand, witches are believed to work through their own innate projection of evil,

and require no physical aids. Many peoples who emphasize the latter also believe

that their use is much enhanced by the natural powers of the witch. James Sharpe

has recently drawn attention to the unusual nature of the English belief that

witches worked with the help of familiar spirits which often took animal form.

The only European parallel to this is the Basque tradition that each witch was

given a toad that acted as a guardian angel ; but as Sharpe has noted, it is not

an exact one.53 On the other hand, a looser association of witches with particular

kinds of animal, either real or in spirit form, is common in other parts of the world.

The beasts concerned are supposed to act as agents, or steeds, or to represent

spirit-doubles of the witch or to be the witches themselves shape-shifted into

animal form. Normally the species concerned are harmful, predatory, ugly, or

51 E.g. Hans Sebald, Witch-children (New York, 1995) ; Robert S. Walinski-Kiehl, ‘The Devil’s

children’, Continuity and Change, 11 (1996), pp. 171–89; Lyndal Roper, ‘ ‘‘Evil imaginings and fantasies ’’ ’,

Past and Present, 167 (2000), pp. 107–39.52 Robert Brain, ‘Child-witches’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 161–79.53 James Sharpe, ‘The witch’s familiar in Elizabethan England’, in G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn,

eds., Authority and consent in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 219–32.




associated with the night : bats, owls, hyenas, polecats, baboons, crabs, snapping

turtles, hares, and various species of cat, dog, amphibian, and reptile in Africa,

insects in the Philippines, cats, coyotes, wolves, bears, or owls in the south-western

United States, and cats, tigers, and crocodiles in India. Once again, however,

such an association is not universal, even in one continent.

There is also considerable variety in the perceived social organization of

witchcraft. In every continent traditions have been recorded in which witches,

although operating within set customs of their kind, do so individually and alone.

Equally commonly found are beliefs that, although working in solitary fashion,

witches are aware of others of their kind and undergo training by them. In

addition, there has been a very widespread perception of the existence of secret

societies dedicated to witchcraft, in which participants meet to feast together, co-

ordinate plans to work evil, and encourage and strengthen each other. At these

gatherings, they are also reported to engage in activities abhorrent to most people

in the societies to which they are linked, as part of their general rejection or

reversal of social norms. Such associations of witches have been recorded across

much of sub-Saharan Africa, among the peoples of what are now the south-

western United States, in India and Nepal, and in New Guinea. The continental

European equivalent is, of course, the early modern myth of the witches’ sabbat,

which fits the general characteristics of the intercontinental stereotype. It also,

however, differs from the other variants in two important respects. It is the only

case in which the gatherings are regarded as rites dedicated to a rival religion

to the norm, which speaks for the special characteristics of medieval and early

modern Latin Christianity as a system of thought. It is also unusual in that the

most prominent anti-social activity associated with them is sexual promiscuity,

while that most prominent in the other regions of the world is feasting on corpse-

flesh.

The belief in gatherings of witches is related to the divergent views of the

relationship between the operations of witches and their physical selves. In much

of Africa and parts of the Americas and Melanesia, the tradition was that they

travel about by night, and work their harm, by sending out their spirits while

their bodies remained asleep in their huts. This was, however, interspersed with

alternative convictions, that they roved abroad in physical form. Both concepts

occurred in early modern European debates over the nature of the sabbat. In

parts of all regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and of Melanesia, it was also accepted

that witches could fly, either in their physical or spectral forms, and used this

ability to attend meetings and to effect their operations. Carlo Ginzburg has,

famously, related reports of the flight of witches to their sabbats in early modern

Europe to earlier traditions of night-flying spirits, and beyond those to a pan-

Eurasian heritage of shamanism.54 The first part of this equation seems un-

doubted, but the latter may be weakened both by the lack of witch beliefs in much

of shamanism’s ‘definitive ’ Siberian homeland and by the presence of similar

54 Ginzburg, Ecstasies, passim.




traditions in regions of the world outside Ginzburg’s shamanic province. A

further variable in this complex of beliefs is the seriousness with which they are

taken by those who report them: in central and eastern Africa it is clear that

night-flying witches were treated as a serious menace by some peoples, whereas

others regarded them essentially as figures of folklore.

In his study of the Azande, which largely inspired the great burgeoning

of studies of African witchcraft, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard drew attention to a

distinction made by that people between non-physical harm worked because of

innate and hereditary power and that produced by the use of material means,

though used in a way that Europeans would term magical. He gave the former

phenomenon the name of ‘witchcraft ’ and the latter that of ‘ sorcery ’.55 This

reflected a division traditional in European society, between the figure of the

witch, who used a mixture of inherited, individual, and taught abilities, and that

of the sorcerer, who learned to use magic from books or masters, by the operation

of set techniques. In European culture, as in that of the Azande, witchcraft was

always regarded with hostility, but sorcery was judged according to its ends and

could have something of the de facto acceptance accorded to cunning craft

and medicine men. Evans-Pritchard’s distinction was for a time widely applied to

African societies,56 but came under criticism as inappropriate to most,57 and has

since been abandoned as a tool for general analyses. What emerges from a global

analysis is that traditional peoples make various distinctions between kinds of

harm caused by non-physical means, some of which correspond to that obtaining

in Europe and among the Azande (and are found in places as distant as Melanesia,

Polynesia, and Central America), and many of which do not. Equally variable

are the cultural answers provided to the question of whether witchcraft, if its

existence is accepted, is a voluntary or involuntary phenomenon. Many peoples

in western and central Africa, from Ghana to Tanzania and the Sudan, and some

in Melanesia, regard it as the consequence of a literal physical malady, a growth

within the body’s organs or a virus in the blood, that compels and empowers

people to work uncanny harm. Not all have this belief, however, even in the

regions described, and most cultures that have credited the existence of witchcraft

are inclined to regard it as controllable, and culpable, as ill nature of any normal

human kind.

These questions impinge on the wider one of how seriously societies that pos-

sess the witch figure in theory regard it in everyday life. The range of reaction

here is enormous, and represents as much a patchwork quilt of regional diversity

as most of the other variables. European historians are now accustomed to the

phenomenon whereby differing attitudes among rulers and commoners com-

bined to produce high and low incidences of trials for witchcraft in particular

55 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937).56 E.g. John Middleton and E. H. Winter, eds., Witchcraft and sorcery in east Africa (London, 1963).57 Victor W. Turner, ‘Witchcraft and sorcery’, Africa, 34 (1964), pp. 314–24.




areas of the same state, or the same region of small polities.58 Among the many

peoples included in the modern state of Cameroon are the Banyang, the

Bamileke, and the Bakweri. The first of those believed in witches, but very rarely

accused anybody of being one. Those afflicted by witchcraft were believed to

have brought their misfortune on themselves.59 The second took witchcraft

seriously and made strenuous efforts to detect its operators. The latter, however,

were not held responsible for their actions, and were thought to lose their powers

on exposure; so witch-finding was effectively a non-violent resolution of personal

tensions.60 The third people took witchcraft seriously, worked hard to detect its

operators, and then killed them if they were thought to have caused serious harm:

in the pre-colonial period every village was said to have its witch-hanging tree.61

A clutch of neighbouring Nigerian societies shared very similar theoretical beliefs

concerning witches, but in practice the Ekoi dreaded them, the Ibibio and Ijo

had a moderate fear of them, and the Ibo and Yako took little notice of them.62

Among groups who believed that convicted witches merited significant punish-

ment, the nature of the latter could also vary considerably within the same broad

region: the tribal groupings of modern mainland Tanzania imposed fines, exile,

beating to death, or burning alive.63

Certainly there have been extra-European societies which manifested, at

the time of study by ethnographers, an endemic dread of witchcraft more intense

than any recorded in early modern Europe. The inhabitants of the Melanesian

island of Dobu had no concept of misfortune, attributing all mishaps to witches.

They never went anywhere alone for fear of becoming more vulnerable to them,

even an adulterer keeping a friend watching for their activities outside the hut

in which he was preoccupied.64 The Lele of the present Democratic Republic of

Congo attributed in practice all deaths and most illnesses to witchcraft.65 In the

mid-1980s the Nalumin, a small tribe in the New Guinea highlands, actually

believed that they were being killed off altogether by cannibal witches because of

a serious increase in the incidence of illness among them. The anthropologist

who lived with them then described the atmosphere as one of ‘unending hidden

58 For a European overview, see William Monter, ‘Witch trials in continental Europe, 1560–1660’,

in Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and WilliamMonter, The Athlone history of witchcraft and magic in Europe,

IV (London, 2002), pp. 1–52. For an English case study, Sharpe, Instruments of darkess, pp. 105–27.59 Malcolm Ruel, ‘Were-animals and the introverted witch’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions

and accusations, pp. 333–50.60 Charles-Henry Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the avoidance of physical violence in

Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 1 (1995), pp. 599–609.61 Edwin Ardener, ‘Witchcraft, economics and the continuity of belief ’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft

confessions and accusations, pp. 141–60.62 G. I. Jones, ‘A boundary to accusations ’, in ibid., pp. 321–32.63 Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania ; T. O. Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’,

and Robert F. Gray, ‘Some structural aspects of Mbugwe witchcraft ’, in Middleton and Winter, eds.,

Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 57–98, 143–73.64 R. F. Fortune, ‘Sorcerers of Dobu’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 101–7.65 Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of sorcery control in central Africa’, in Middleton and Winter, eds.,

Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 123–41.




war’.66 The major scholar of the Tlingit of Alaska has declared that witchcraft

dominated their lives, making the simplest words or actions liable to miscon-

struction.67 The equivalent expert in the BaVenda of the Transvaal recorded in

1931 that fear of the witch ‘and her creatures hangs as a sinister shadow over

all their doings ’.68 It was reckoned that among the Kwahu of Ghana 92 per cent

of the population became at some point an accuser, victim, or suspect, although

public denunciation was rare.69 Among the Cochiti of New Mexico, ‘practically

everyone’ in the tribe was suspected at some time, and the elders had to winnow

the accusations, and put to death those convicted, according to the perceived

good of the community.70 All these are, however, exceptional cases : most societies

that have believed in the witch figure seem to have regarded the risk factor, for

most of the time, in the manner in which a modern city-dweller treats the danger

of a road accident.

Just as there appears to be no straightforward functional explanation for the

tendency of some human groups to believe in witches at all, so there is none to

provide a general explanation for the intensity of fear. It does seem as if the

pattern found by P. T. W. Baxter for east African pastoralists71 holds good on a

global scale : that accusations are relatively rare among nomads, even when the

latter have a well-developed concept of the witch figure. The practical conse-

quences of having such a concept are more serious in rooted societies with a high

influence of conflictual personal relationships. Historiographically and ethno-

graphically, the problem is that not all societies that have those characteristics

believe in witches, and not all those that have had that belief translated it into

pronounced fear and frequent accusation. All over the world, moreover, both

belief and behaviour are subject to pronounced change. The outburst of trials

for witchcraft between 1400 and 1700, and the subsequent disappearance of

belief in it among the controlling social groups, are two of the most dramatic

developments in the history of European culture. Elsewhere in the world, the

phenomenon familiar to experts in early modern Europe, of the development

of ‘epidemics ’ of witch-hunting among populations hitherto characterized by

an absence or low level of public accusation, is constantly repeated. It is a general

rule that dramatic economic, social, and cultural changes commonly induce a

sharp increase in witch-hunts among people who have a traditional fear of witches.

It is also a rule, however, that such an increase is not an automatic result of such

changes.

66 Eytan Bercovitch, ‘Moral insights : victim and witch in the Nalumin imagination’, in Herdt and

Stephen, eds., The religious imagination in New Guinea, pp. 122–59, at p. 140.67 Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, p. 398. 68 Hugh A. Stayt, The BaVenda (Oxford, 1931), p. 275.69 Wolf Bleek, ‘Witchcraft, gossip and death’, Man, n.s. 11 (1976), pp. 526–41.70 J. Robin Fox, ‘Witchcraft and clanship in Cochiti therapy’, in Ari Kiev, ed., Magic, faith and

healing (New York, 1964), pp. 174–200.71 P. T. W. Baxter, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, in Max Gluckman, ed., The allocation of

responsibility (Manchester, 1972), pp. 163–91.




Where the consequence does occur, it can rebound on the social order in

three different ways. The impulse to hunt witches has often served merely to

confirm the existing leaders and ranks of communities in their traditional roles.

Alternatively, it has sometimes functioned as a significant tool for individual

members of a traditional elite concerned with building stronger states or new

moral orders associated with an enhancement of their own authority. Shaka, king

of the Zulus, and chiefs Manuelito of the Navaho and Handsome Lake of the

Seneca are all examples of rulers who reinforced inherited powers at particular

moments by waging war on witches. James VI of Scotland represents a more

subtle and complex (if more famous) case of one who adopted different policies

towards accusations of witchcraft at particular times to bolster his own style of

kingship.72 At other times witch-hunts have been conducted by individuals

and groups from outside the traditional structures of power. They have often

worked with or alongside the existing elites, but in other cases witch-hunting has

played its part in a process of revolution whereby the newcomers have displaced

traditional rulers. Europe has produced examples of the former, such as Matthew

Hopkins, who led England’s biggest hunt during a period of relative disrup-

tion of the judicial system and traditional local leadership by civil war, and the

set of Swabians who emerged as expert consultants in the waves of trials that

affected southern Germany in the late sixteenth century.73 The Shawnee prophet

Tenskwatawa was a native American equivalent.74 In Africa they were common

in the colonial period, affecting much of the western and central parts of the

continent.75 Such movements, originating from outside traditional structures of

authority but not displacing them, have continued in some of the independent

African nations.76 Even under colonial rule, however, witch-hunters sometimes

emerged who provoked a rejection and punishment of the familiar native elites,77

and this pattern has become much more common since the removal of European

72 Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts,Witchcraft in early modern Scotland (Exeter, 2000) ; Bryant,

Olden times in Zululand, pp. 650–1 ; Clyde Kluckhorn, Navaho witchcraft (Boston, MA, 1944), ch. II.3 ;

A. F. C. Wallace, The death and rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1972), pp. 102–10.73 Sharpe, Instruments of darkness, pp. 128–47; Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft persecutions in Bavaria

(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 115–211. 74 Edmunds, The Shawnee prophet, pp. 5–97.75 Audrey Richard, ‘A modern movement of witch-finders ’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery,

pp. 164–77; MaxMarwick, ‘The Bwanali-Mpulumutsi anti-witchcraft movement’, in ibid., pp. 178–83;

P. Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga cult among the south-western Yoruba’, Bulletin de L’Institut Francais

d’Afrique Noire, 18 (1956), pp. 315–34; Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of sorcery control in central Africa’,

in Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery, pp. 123–41; Barbara Ward, ‘Some observations

on religious cults in Ashanti ’, Africa, 26 (1956), pp. 47–60; Alison Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’, in Douglas,

ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 103–28; R. G. Willis, ‘ Instant millennium’, in ibid.,

pp. 129–39.76 Susan Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi witchcraft, subversion and changing gender relations’, Africa,

63 (1993), pp. 531–49; Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft suppression practices and movements ’ ; Rutherford,

‘To find an African witch’ ; Mark Auslander, ‘Open the wombs! ’, in Comaroff and Comaroff, eds.,

Modernity and its malcontents, pp. 167–92.77 Paul Bohannan, ‘Extra-processual events in Tiv political institutions ’, American Anthropologist,

60 (1958), pp. 1–12.




rule.78 Witch-finding has also been associated with revolutionary opposition

to post-imperial white regimes. The groups of young men who terrorized and

murdered suspected witches in parts of the Transvaal during the 1980s were also

those who led resistance to the system of apartheid.79

I V

With so many variables present in the model, it is not surprising that many

scholars, with specific preoccupations, have found a comparative approach to the

subject problematic or unhelpful. Furthermore, while it is clear how witchcraft

beliefs relate to patterns of tension in particular societies, no overall framework of

sociological prediction seems to arise from those case studies that determines that

specific sorts of society will hold specific beliefs about witches. Meanwhile, among

English-speakers the word ‘witch’ itself has undergone mutations of meaning that

create a potentially hopeless confusion in common parlance. Over the past two

hundred years, for reasons bound up with the development of modern Western

culture, it has come to denote practitioners of a religion based on images derived

from ancient European paganism; a completely novel contextualization of the

word.80 At the same time, the concepts of the witch and the cunning person have

been collapsed into the figure of the ‘white witch’, one which in traditional

European culture is simply a contradiction in terms. The blending was first made

in the seventeenth century as an attack by evangelical Protestant reformers upon

cunning folk, and adopted by folklorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries as part of a contemporary sentimentalization of the countryside.81 While

these developments may add greatly to the difficulty of scholars when expounding

their studies, they are easily distinguished from the traditional image of the witch.

It is more difficult to argue for a general utility of comparative models to

anthropologists and historians. Very often individual researchers will be concerned

with projects for which a comparative approach is unnecessary. Very often, also,

the models concerned are imposed on local beliefs and practices that are far more

complex, and bear only an oblique relationship to them. Scholars of Siberian

shamanism must reckon with the fact that native Siberian societies often con-

tained a number of different functionaries who dealt with what Westerners called

religion and magic. Usually only one or two kinds of these would approximate to

the composite figure whom European scholars labelled the shaman. Having said

that, however, it remains true that all over Siberia Europeans noticed native

78 David J. Parkin, ‘Medicines and men of influence’, Man, n.s. 3 (1968), pp. 424–39; R. G. Willis,

‘Kamcape’, Africa, 38 (1968), pp. 1–15; Daniel Offiong, ‘The social context of Ibibio witch beliefs ’,

Africa, 53 (1982), pp. 73–82; Suzette Heald, ‘Witches and thieves’, Man, n.s. 21 (1986), pp. 65–78;

Douglas, ‘Sorcery accusations unleashed’ ; Simon Mesaki, ‘Witch-killing in Sukumaland’, in

Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania, pp. 47–60.79 Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, power and politics (London, 2001), pp. 130–82.80 This process is the main theme of Ronald Hutton, The triumph of the moon (Oxford, 1999).81 Ibid., pp. 84–150.




practitioners working in ways that seemed radically strange and interesting

to them, and to whom the generic word ‘shaman’ could be usefully applied. The

same considerations operate in the worldwide study of the witch figure, which

detaches and emphasizes certain aspects of local beliefs and relationships in ways

which can be genuinely significant.

This point answers the recent arguments of Barry Hallen, who has twice

cast doubt on the utility of traditional polyglot African-European stereotypes of

witchcraft by examining the case of the Yoruba of Nigeria. He demonstrates that

what English-speakers translate as ‘witchcraft ’ among this people denotes not a

person but a power, an attribute of a human rather than a type of human. It can

make a witch doctor more powerful, and can be used by people to work good as

well as harm; so he holds that it is not comparable to European traditions, which

are supposed to view the witch as a person dedicated to absolute evil.82 The

trouble here is that the model used by Professor Hallen for European witchcraft

was (as said earlier) thirty years old at the time at which he wrote, and based on

the stereotypes developed by intellectuals, which indeed depend on an absolute

theological polarity between good and bad powers.83 Investigations of popular

traditions have revealed a more widespread European belief in magic as a neutral

force, to be employed for the benefit or detriment of fellow humans.84 This is very

similar to Yoruba attitudes, and it is also clear from Barry Hallen’s own research

that the Yoruba also believe that some members of their own society are

inherently malicious, and use that power to kill their neighbours and relatives.

They are supposed to work at night, to meet in secret groups, to send out their

spirits from their bodies and to take on animal forms; and they are feared. They

correspond, in every point, to the global model of the witch figure that is being

proposed here. That figure may represent just one aspect of the way in which

non-physical power can be presumed to be deployed by members of a given social

and cultural group, but it is a highly significant way.

The model delineated in this review, with its five ‘core ’ characteristics and

its large number of variable associations, is intended to meet a specific scholarly

need: the call being made by some anthropologists for a global definition of

witchcraft that will facilitate cross-cultural comparisons and a renewed collabor-

ation between historians and ethnographers. If it is found wanting, and a better

alternative emerges in its place, then it will still have served a useful purpose. If

it is found wanting, and its defects suggest that intercontinental models have in

general no utility in the field, then it is time that such a conclusion finally became

recognized.

As has been emphasized, the call for a new co-operation between disciplines

has been made by anthropologists, and has so far been largely unnoticed or

ignored by historians ; yet the advantages of such a rapprochement ought to be as

82 Hallen and Sodipo, Knowledge, belief and witchcraft, pp. 86–118; Hallen, ‘ ‘‘Witches ’’ as superior

intellects ’. 83 The classic extant study of these writings is Clark, Thinking with demons.84 See, for example, Owen Davies, Cunning-folk (London, 2003).




considerable to the latter. At the very least, the proposition of a global model

ought to help them to decide how far their discrete subjects are or are not part of

a very widespread cultural phenomenon. It should also help them to recognize

more clearly both the possibilities and the limits of cross-disciplinary fertilization.

During the past three decades historians of early modern European witchcraft

have constantly had recourse to comparative exercises ; the technique of relating

data between different cultures is still intrinsic to their work. It has, however,

become arbitrarily limited to cultures within an area bounded by the Balkans, the

Urals, the Mediterranean, and the frontiers of the European settlements in the

Americas. There does seem to be something particularly odd about a framework

of reference which ties together peoples on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but

severs the colonies of New England from the native American communities of

the same region, sometimes only a few miles apart, usually in regular contact with

each other, and engaged (in this case) in a parallel activity.

A historian whose horizons have become bounded by the European cultural

province may fairly ask what help a better knowledge of the peoples of tropical

Africa or New Guinea would possibly be to an analysis of a witch trial in England

in 1650. My own reply would be to set that trial within a series of widening

contextual circles. The first would consist of the complex of local relationships,

conditions, and beliefs that produced that particular case. The second comprises

witchcraft beliefs and trials in seventeenth-century England. The third consists of

the same phenomena in early modern England as a whole. The fourth considers

them throughout early modern Britain, and the fifth includes the whole of Europe

during the period. The sixth takes in the ancient and medieval European and

Near Eastern past, an enterprise especially necessary in view of the impact of

classical texts and images upon early modern Europeans, and of old folk tradi-

tions on popular stereotypes of witchcraft. The seventh represents the global

aspect of the phenomenon. The point in this widening vision at which individual

historians choose to halt must be a matter of personal taste, and could quite

legitimately and effectively be at the beginning of the third circle or the outer

boundary of the seventh, according to the nature of the study being made. What

does seem unnecessarily limiting, and unhelpful, is to assume or declare as a fact

of nature that only the first five or six actually exist, and that there is no broader

context within which the subject may be set.



anthropology, history and witchcraft - ronald hutton

Documents

witchcraft confessions

world calls witchcraft

early modern england

early modern european

disciplines of anthropology

early modern european

historians of europe

global approach