4091566

Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration?
Author(s): Ronald Hutton

Source: The Historical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 413-434
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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TheHistoricalJournal,
47, 2 (2004),pp. 413-434 ? 2004 Cambridge Press
University
DOI: io.ioi7/Sooi8246Xo3003558 Printed in the United Kingdom
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS
ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL
APPROACHES TO WITCHCRAFT:
POTENTIAL FOR A NEW COLLABORATION?
RONALD HUTTON
Universityof Bristol
AB STRAC T. In theI960S a comparative

approach,coveringdifferentcontinentsandperiodsof time,was
common in thestudyof witchcraft.
Duringthe itfell outoffashionbecause of criticism
by some
andcollusion
between 197os
thedisciplines andhistoryoverthesubjectmoreorless
anthropologists, ofanthropology
ended.In thei99os, unnoticed all historians,
byvirtually someanthropologists andsociologists
beganagain
to emphasize a global,andinterdisciplinary,
perspectiveon the issue.Thefollowingarticlereviewsthese
debates,andthenpoolsresearch undertakenin variouspartsof theworldto suggestthata supranational
model for thefigurethatEnglish-speakers
call thewitchis indeedviable.It alsodistinguishesattributes
of
thefigurethatdovarysignificantly
between variouscultures,andidentifies manypeoplesamongwhomthe
witch-figuredoesnotseemtohaveexistedat all. In doingso, it suggests mayonceagain
thatanthropology
beoneof thedisciplines withwhichhistoriansofEuropehavetheoptionof collaborating overthesubjectto
mutualbenefit.
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 i96os, 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.' Anthropologists returned
the compliment by setting places for historians at their feasts. The conference on
1 E.g. KeithThomas,'The relevanceof socialanthropology to the historicalstudyof English

in MaryDouglas,ed., Witchcraft
witchcraft', (London,1970),pp. 47-81;Alan
andaccusations
confessions
Macfarlane, in Tudor
Witchcraft andStuart
England(London,1970),pp. 211-53;NormanCohn,Europe's
inner
demons(Falmer,1975),pp. 220-3.
413
414 HISTORICAL JOURNAL
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'.' 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
Historyin 1975.'7The former, writing as an anthropologist, ques-
of Interdisciplinary
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., Witchcraftconfessionsand accusations.

3 MaxMarwick, andsorcery
ed., Witchcraft (Harmondsworth,
1970).
4 Rodney Needham, Primordialcharacters(Charlottesville, 1978), pp. 23-50, at p. 42.
H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witchhuntingin southwesternGermany,1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972), p. 5.
6 E. WilliamMonter,Witchcraft
in France (Ithaca,1976),p. II. It waslaterasserted
andSwitzerland
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 970os,citing Thompson,
'Anthropology and the discipline of historical context', Midland History, I (1972), pp. 46-55, and
Marwick,reviewof Macfarlane,Vlitchcraft in Tudor andStuart 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 (I975), PP. 71-110.
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 415
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 notlike the phenomena so labelled in other cultures'."oIn 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." What had been a warning at that date
seemed to have become an orthodoxy a decade later.
8 Quotationon p. 107.
EdwinArdener,'Thenewanthropology
9 Specifically, anditscritics',Man,n.s.6 (1971),
pp.449-67.
10MalcolmCrick,'Twostylesin thestudyofwitchcraft',
JournaloftheAnthropological ofOxford,
Society
4 (I973),PP.17-31,at p. 18;andidem,Explorations
in language
andmeaning: a semantic
towards anthropology
(London,
- 1976),pp. 109-27.
T. O. Beidelman,'Towardsmoreopentheoreticalinterpretations' in Douglas,ed., Witchcraft
confessionsand accusations,pp. 351-6.
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-i98os 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."5 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 RobertRowland,"'Fantasticall
and in comparative
witch-beliefs
devilishepersons":European
in BengtAnkarloo
perspective', andGustavHenningsen, eds.,Earlymodem witchcraft
European (Oxford,
1990),pp. 161-90. The volumewasbasedon theproceedings of a conferencethathadbeenheldat
Stockholm in 1984.
13 J. H. M. Salmon, 'History without anthropology: a new witchcraft synthesis', Journal of Inter-
disciplinaryHistory, 19 (1989), PP. 481-6.
14 Mary Douglas, Risk and blame: essays in culturaltheory(London, 1992), pp. 83-101; idem, 'Sorcery
accusationsunleashed:the Lele revisited',Africa,69
(I999),pp. 177-93-
"5J. S. La Fontaine, Speakof theDevil: tales of satanic abusein contemporaryEngland (Cambridge, 1998),
esp. pp. i80-92.
16 Andrew Sanders, A deedwithouta name: the witch in society and history (Oxford, I995).
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'.1 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."1 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 I980s
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
an essayin comparative
17 RalphA. Austen,'The moraleconomyof witchcraft: history',inJean
andJohnComaroff, anditsmalcontents
eds.,Modernity (Chicago,i993), P. 94.
18 RayAbrahams, incontemporary
ed., Witchcraft Tanzania
(Cambridge, 1994),P. 12
19 Barry Hallen andJ. Olubi Sodipo, Knowledge,beliefand witchcraft(Stanford, 1997).
20
Peter Geschiere, The modernityof witchcraft:politics and the occultin postcolonialAfrica (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 ofJohannesburg,
fear of witchcraft was endemic by the 99gosand 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 I992, still accepted Margaret Murray's
21
Ibid., pp. 188-223, at p. 223.
22 George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraftdialogues:anthropological
and philo-
sophicalexchanges(Athens, OH, 2001), p. 5.
23 Barry Hallen, '"Witches" as superior intellects: challenging a cross-culturalsuperstition',in
ibid., pp. 8o-ioo.
24 Wim van Binsbergen, 'Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualized boundary conditions of the
kinship order', in Bond and Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraftdialogues,p. 243.
25 Adam Ashforth,'" Of secrecy and the commonplace": witchcraftand 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 i97os. 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 197o. In his book in 1997 Peter Geschiere rightly castigated
the historian Robert Rowland for having attempted a comparative exercise in
the I98os 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 I97os. 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 199Os, 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 Forrecentoverviews
in a verylargeliterature, A. FaraoneandDirkObbink,
see Christopher
eds., Magika hiera (Oxford, i99i); Peter Schafer and Hans G. Kippenberg, eds., Envisioning magic
(Leiden, 1997); Fritz Graf, Magic in the ancient world (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Bengt Ankarloo and
StuartClark,eds., Witchcraft
andmagicinEurope:
ancient andRome(London,1999);MatthewW.
Greece
Dickie,Magicandmagicians in theGreco-Roman in a major
world(London,2ooi).My ownintervention
debatein thisfieldwillbe foundin RonaldHutton,Witches,DruidsandKingArthur
(London,2003),
pp. 98-II7.
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 I6oo 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.
II
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."8 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 witchhunt
in earlymodernEurope(2nd edn, London, 1995 ); Geoffrey Scarre andJohn Callow, WitchcrafJ and magicin
sixteenth-
andseventeenth-century(2ndedn, London,2001);and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart,
Europe Witchcraft
inEuropeandtheNewWorld,I4oo-80oo(London,2001).The specificstudiescitedareCarloGinzburg,
Ecstasies(London, 1991); Stuart Clark, Thinkingwith demons(Oxford, 1997); Lyndal Roper, Oedipusand the
Devil(London,1994);RobinBriggs,JT'itches
andneighbours Sharpe,Instruments
(London,1996);James of
darkness(London, 1996); Diane Purkiss, The witch in history(London, 1996).
28 Points well made in Hallen, '"Witches" as superior intellects'.
29 Needham, Primordialcharacters,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
identifiedin Ronald Hutton, 'The global context of the Scottishwitch-hunt', inJulian Goodare, ed.,
TheScottish in context
witch-hunt (Manchester,2002), pp. 17-18.To these I have since addedA. T. Bryant,
Oldentimesin ZululandandNatal (London, 1929),pp. 650-1; B. B. Whiting, Paiutesorcery (New York,
1950); S. F. Nadal, Nupereligion(London, 1954),pp. 163-200; Antera Duke and Cyril D. Forde, eds.,
EfiktradersofoldCalabar (Oxford,1956), pp. 16-22; Victor Turner, Schismandcontinuity in anAfricansociety
(Manchester,1957);W. Lloyd Warner,A blackcivilisation: a socialstudyof anAustralian tribe(New York,
1958);L. W. Simmons,ed., Sunchief:theautobiography ofa HopiIndian(New Haven, 1963),pp. 120,331-3;
K. H. Basso, Western Apachewitchcraft (Phoenix, 1969); Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, sorceryand social
amongtheSafwa(Oxford, 1970); K. M. Stewart, 'Witchcraftamong the Mohave Indians',
categories
Ethnology,12 (1973),PP. 313-24; Mary Patterson, 'Sorcery and witchcraftin Melanesia', Oceania,45
(1974),PP. 132-60, 212-34; E. L. Schieffelin,Thesorrow of thelonelyandtheburning of thedancers(St Lucia,
Queensland, 1977);ShirleyLindenbaum,Kurusorcery (PaloAlto, CA, 1979);Karen E. Fields, 'Political
contingencies of witchcraftin colonial central Africa', Canadian Journalof AfricanStudies,16 (1982),
pp. 567-93; Colin Turnbull, Theforestpeople(London, 1984); R. D. Edmunds, The Shawnee prophet
(Lincoln, NB, 1985),pp. 5-97; Bruce M. Knauft, Goodcompany andviolence (Berkeley,1985); Gilbert
Herdt and Michele Stephen, eds., The religiousimagination in New Guinea(New Brunswick, 1989),
pp. 122-59; George T. Emmons, The TlingitIndians,ed. Fredericade Lagona (Seattle, 1991); Birgit
Meyer, 'If you are a devil,you are a witch, and if you are a witch, you are a devil',JournalofReligionin
Africa,22 (1992),pp. 98-132; Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Modernity andits malcontents, pp. 111-92;
F. G. Bailey, The witch-hunt: or, the triumphof morality(Ithaca, 1994); Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in
contemporary Tanzania;Ashforth, 'Of secrecy and the commonplace'; Maia Green, 'Witchcraftsup-
pressionpracticesand movements', Comparative Studiesin SocietyandHistory,39 (1997),PP. 319-45; Bruce
Kapferer, Thefeastof thesorcerers
(Chicago, 1997);Geschiere, Themodernity Diane Ciekawy,
of witchcraft;
'Witchcraft in statecraft',AfricanStudiesReview,41 (1998),pp. 119-41; B. Rutherford, 'To find an
Africanwitch', CritiqueofAnthropology,19(1999),pp. 89-io9; Douglas, 'Sorceryaccusationsunleashed';
Bond and Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues,pp. 39-79, 101-89, 212-63; Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft,
powerandpolitics(London, 2001); Stephen Ellis, 'Witch-huntingin central Madagascar,1828-1861',
PastandPresent,175(2002), pp. 90-123.
"3 To save space, again, this will be fed into the argumentsbelow, ratherthan listed here.
32 Esther Goody, 'Legitimateand illegitimateaggressionin a west African state', in Douglas, ed.,
confessionsand accusations,p. 207.
W/itchcraft
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,'"3 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, Witchesand neighbours."3 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 in many others, especially in Polynesia and the Melanesian islands,
workers of non-physical harm are perceived to be internal to social groups."38The
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, Primordialcharacters,p. 26. 34 Austen, 'The moral economy of witchcraft', p. 89.

35 Geschiere, The modernityof witchcraft,p. Ii.
36 Philip Mayer, 'Witches', in Marwick, ed., Witchcraftand sorcery,p. 55.
37 Briggs, Witchesand 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. Lawrenceand M.J. Meggitt, eds., Gods,ghostsandmenin Melanesia(Oxford, I965).
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.
III
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 ('95'), 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.44The 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
andneighbours,
p. 394. Themodernity
42 Geschiere, ofwitchcraft,
p. 223.
in fourAfricansocieties',in Marwick,ed.,
43 Mayer,'Witches',and S. F. Nadel, 'Witchcraft
pp. 52, 264-79;P. Lawrence,'The Ngaingof the Rai Coast',in Lawrenceand
andsorcery,
Witchcraft
Meggitt,eds., Gods,ghostsandmen,pp. 198-223;MeyerFortes,Thewebof kinship amongtheTallensi
(Oxford, 1967), pp. 32-5; I. NM.Lewis, 'A structural approach to witchcraft and spirit possession', in
Douglas, ed., Witchcraftconfessionsand accusations,pp. 293-303; Andrew Strathern, 'Witchcraft, greed,
cannibalismanddeath',in MauriceBlochandJonathanParry,eds.,Deathandtheregeneration
of life
(Cambridge,1982),pp. 111-33;Turnbull,The
forest pp. 205-7;Knauft,Good
people, andviolence,
company
pp. 341-2-
44 Angela Bourke, The burningof Bridget Cleary (London, 1999); Owen Davies, A people bewitched:
andmagic
witchcraft innineteenth-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.
46RonaldHutton,Shamans:Siberian andtheWestern
spirituality (London,2001).
imagination
47E.g. Emmons,TheTlingit pp. 398-4IO;MereteD. Jakobsen,Shamanism:
Indians, traditional
and
tothemastery
approaches
contemporary andhealing
ofspirits (NewYork,1999),pp. 94-oo00.
48 S. A. Tokarev, 'Shamanstvou Iakutovv 17veke', Sovietskaia 2 (1939),pp. 88-102. I am
Etnografia,
very grateful to Andrei Znamenski for this reference.
49Knauft,Good company andviolence,pp. 340-3; Patterson,'Sorceryandwitchcraft in Melanesia';
FitzJohnP. Poole,'Cannibals, andwitches',in PaulaBrownandDonaldTuzin,eds., The
tricksters
ofcannibalism
ethnography (Washington DC, 1983),pp. 6-32.
50 PeterRiviere,'Factionsandexclusions in twoSouthAmericanvillagesystems',in Douglas,ed.,
Witchcraft
confessions
andaccusations,
pp. 245-55;A. F. Anisimov,'The shaman's tentof the Evenks',in
HenryN. Michael,ed., StudiesinSiberian
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.51Among 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', Continuityand 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., Witchcraftconfessionsand accusations,pp. 161-79.
53 James Sharpe, 'The witch's familiar in Elizabethan England', in G. W. Bernard and S.J. Gunn,
eds., Authorityand consentin TudorEngland (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
"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard,Witchcraft,
oraclesandmagicamongtheAzande(Oxford, 1937).
56 E.g.JohnMiddleton andE. H. Winter,eds., Witchcraft
andsorcery
ineastAfrica(London,1963).
5' Victor W. Turner, 'Witchcraft and sorcery', Africa, 34 (1964), PP. 314-24.
areas of the same state, or the same region of small polities."8 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."9 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."5 In the
mid-I98os 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 BengtAnkarloo,
StuartClark,andWilliamMonter,TheAthlone andmagic
ofwitchcraft
history inEurope,
IV(London,2002),pp. 1-52.Foran Englishcasestudy,Sharpe,Instruments
ofdarkess,
pp. 105-27.
"9 Malcolm Ruel, 'Were-animals and the introverted witch', in Douglas, ed., Witchcraftconfessions
andaccusations,
pp. 333-50.
60 Charles-Henry Pradellesde Latour,'Witchcraftand the avoidanceof physicalviolencein
Cameroon', oftheRoyal
Journal n.s. I (1995),PP-599-609.
Institute,
Anthropological
61 EdwinArdener,'Witchcraft, economicsandthecontinuity of belief',in Douglas,ed., Witchcraft
andaccusations,
confessions pp. 141-60.
62 G. I.
Jones,'A boundaryto accusations', in ibid.,pp. 321-32.
63 Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft
in contemporary
Tanzania; T. O. Beidelman,'Witchcraft in Ukaguru',
andRobertF. Gray,'Somestructural aspectsof Mbugwewitchcraft', in MiddletonandWinter,eds.,
andsorcery,
Witchcraft pp. 57-98, 143-73.
64 R. F. Fortune, 'Sorcerers of Dobu', in Marwick, ed., Witchcraftand
sorcery,pp. 101-7.
65 Mary Douglas, 'Techniques of sorcery control in central Africa', in Middleton and Winter, eds.,
Witchcraft and sorcery,pp. I123-41.
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.7' 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 pastoralists71holds 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 140o and 170o, 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 religiousimaginationin New Guinea,pp. 122-59, at p. 140.
67 Emmons, The TlingitIndians, p. 398. 68 Hugh A. Stayt, The BaVenda(Oxford, 1931), p. 275.
69 Wolf Bleek, 'Witchcraft, gossip and death', Man, n.s.
Ix (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 allocationof
responsibility (Manchester, I972), pp. 163-91.
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 43I
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."7The 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.'" Such movements, originating from outside traditional structures of
authority but not displacing them, have continued in some of the independent
African nations."76Even 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
72Lawrence NormandandGarethRoberts,Witchcraft inearly

modem Scotland
(Exeter,2000);Bryant,
Oldentimesin Zululand, pp. 650-1; ClydeKluckhorn, Navaho (Boston,MA, 1944),ch. n.3;
witchcraft
A. F. C. Wallace,Thedeath andrebirth
oftheSeneca
(NewYork,1972),pp. IO2-IO.
73 Sharpe, Instrumentsof darkness,
pp. 128-47;WolfgangBehringer,Witchcraftpersecutions in Bavaria
(Cambridge, 1997),PP.115-211. 7 Edmunds,TheShawnee prophet,
pp.5-97-
" in Marwick, andsorcery,
AudreyRichard,'A modernmovementof witch-finders', ed., Witchcraft
pp.164-77;MaxMarwick, 'TheBwanali-Mpulumutsi anti-witchcraft
movement', in ibid.,pp. 178-83;
P. Morton-Williams, 'TheAtingacultamongthe south-western Yoruba',Bulletin deL'InstitutFranfais
Noire,18(1956),pp. 315-34;MaryDouglas,'Techniques
d'Afrique of sorcerycontrolin centralAfrica',
in MiddletonandWinter,eds., Witchcraft pp. 123-41;BarbaraWard,'Someobservations
andSorcery,
on religiouscultsin Ashanti',Africa, pp.47-60; AlisonRedmayne,'Chikanga',
26 (1956), in Douglas,
ed., Witchcraftconfessions pp. 103-28;R. G. Willis,'Instantmillennium',in ibid.,
andaccusations,
PP.129-39.
76 Susan Drucker-Brown, 'Mamprusi witchcraft, subversion and changing gender relations', Africa,
63 (1993),PP.531-49;MaiaGreen,'Witchcraftsuppressionpracticesandmovements';Rutherford,
'To findan Africanwitch';MarkAuslander,'Openthewombs!',in ComaroffandComaroff, eds.,
anditsmalcontents,
Modernity pp. 167-92.
77PaulBohannan,'Extra-processual American
eventsin Tiv politicalinstitutions', 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 I980s were also
those who led resistance to the system of apartheid.79
IV
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."8 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 DavidJ.Parkin,'Medicinesandmenof influence',Man,n.s.3 (1968),pp.424-39; R. G. Willis,

38 (1968),pp. i-15; DanielOffiong,'The socialcontextof Ibibiowitchbeliefs',
'Kamcape',Africa,
Africa, 53 (1982), PP. 73-82; Suzette Heald, 'Witches and thieves', iMan, n.s. 21 (1986), pp. 65-78;
Douglas, 'Sorcery accusations unleashed'; Simon Mesaki, 'Witch-killing in Sukumaland', in
Abrahams, incontemporary
ed., Witchcraft Tanzania,
pp.47-60.
7 Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft,power andpolitics (London, 2001), pp. 130-82.
80 This process is the main theme of Ronald Hutton, The triumphof the moon(Oxford, 1999).
81Ibid.,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,beliefandwitchcraft,pp. 86-II8; Hallen, "'Witches" as superior

intellects'. 83 The classicextant study of these writingsis Clark, Thinking
withdemons.
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.

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Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration?

Author(s): Ronald Hutton

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

AB STRAC T. In theI960S a comparative

1 E.g. KeithThomas,'The relevanceof socialanthropology to the historicalstudyof English

2 Douglas, ed., Witchcraftconfessionsand accusations.

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

33 Needham, Primordialcharacters,p. 26. 34 Austen, 'The moral economy of witchcraft', p. 89.

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

72Lawrence NormandandGarethRoberts,Witchcraft inearly

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

78 DavidJ.Parkin,'Medicinesandmenof influence',Man,n.s.3 (1968),pp.424-39; R. G. Willis,

82 Hallen and Sodipo, Knowledge,beliefandwitchcraft,pp. 86-II8; Hallen, "'Witches" as superior

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