The Witch Page 4

  Both conclusions are reproduced here, on the global scale. There are many cases of extra-European societies that have manifested, at least at the time of study, an endemic dread of witchcraft more intense than any recorded in Europe. The inhabitants of Dobu, an island group near the coast of New Guinea, had no concept of misfortune, blaming all mishaps on witches. Dobuans never went anywhere alone for fear of becoming more vulnerable to them.42 In the 1980s, among a small New Guinea tribe, the Gebusi, about 60 per cent of middle-aged men had killed at least one person – mostly within their own community – in revenge for presumed bewitchment.43 The most notable scholar of the Tlingit of Alaska has declared that witchcraft dominated their lives, making the simplest words or action vulnerable to misinterpretation as a manifestation of it.44 It was calculated that among the Kwahu of Ghana, 92 per cent of the population became at one point in their lives an accuser, presumed victim or suspected of witchcraft.45 ‘Practically everyone’ in the Cochiti tribe of New Mexico was under suspicion at some time or another, and the elders had to winnow the accusations and decide which affected the good of the community and should be followed up officially.46 In Burma in the 1970s, every village was presumed to harbour at least one woman who worked magic secretly to cause illness or death among her neighbours from personal spite.47 Among some peoples found across Africa and Melanesia, and Australia’s Northern Territory, all deaths save those caused by murder or suicide, and most illnesses, were attributed to bewitchment.48 Having said all this, however, most peoples who 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 car-driver treats the danger of a road accident.

  There seems to be no functional explanation to account for the tendency of some human groups to believe in the existence of witches and some not to do so; those in both categories generally share similar societies, economies and cosmologies, and live in close proximity.49 Likewise, there is no apparent general explanation for the varying intensity of fear of witchcraft between different peoples. In the 1960s, P.T.W. Baxter, studying those of East Africa, noted that wandering pastoralists in that region rarely accused each other of using bewitchment, even when they possessed a well-developed belief that people could do so.50 This pattern does seem to hold true for nomads across the globe, perhaps because their mobile lifestyle and relatively small social units tend to reduce the potential for the personal conflicts that generate suspicions of witchcraft. On the other hand, not all static and deeply rooted agrarian societies have believed in witches, and not all of those that have done have feared them deeply. Moreover, even those that have taken witchcraft seriously have not done so with the same intensity at all times. Instead, witch-hunting, all over the world, has tended since records began to burgeon dramatically at particular times and die away or fall to a low level at others.

  This phenomenon was confronted head-on in 2013 by the Dutch anthropologist Niek Koning, who developed a general theory of witchcraft beliefs which covered every time and place, uniting history and anthropology in a way recommended by others in his discipline since the 1990s. He suggested that small foraging bands tend to cope well with the social consequences of deceit and envy, but the adoption of agriculture much exacerbates them, leading to the development of witch-hunts. State formation, civilization and economic development abate these, and replace them with more collectivist forms of social paranoia; though demographic and economic crises can still rekindle a fear of witchcraft, as in early modern Europe.51

  This broad-sweep approach is courageous and commendable, and does incorporate the truth that economic and social stress often result in intensified fear of witchcraft in societies that already possess it, as was the case at times in early modern Europe. Its determinism, however, fails to take account of too many exceptions to its rules: that small foraging bands like those of native Australia can have a pronounced belief in witchcraft; that some agrarian societies lack one; that highly developed urban civilizations such as those of ancient Rome and early modern Europe could hold big witch-hunts; and that the early modern European trials do not map simply and straightforwardly onto areas of most pronounced demographic and economic pressure, and indeed they commenced at a time of low population and relatively high incomes. All groups that do believe in witchcraft suspect certain kinds of person as being more likely to practise it than others, but the characteristics attributed to natural suspects differ greatly.

  One major variable is age. In many societies, across the globe, accusations are directed mainly against the elderly, but in others they focus on the young and in many more, age is not a determining factor. It is normal for suspects to have passed puberty, because children are much more rarely involved in the social tensions between adults that generate accusations, and much less credited with power of any kind. None the less, among the Bangwa of Cameroon, children were frequently accused, and even babies could be thought culpable; and, as will be seen, there were and are other societies that associate witchcraft with the young.52

  Gender is another worldwide variable, witches being, at different places within each continent, viewed as essentially female, or essentially male, or of both sexes in different proportions and according to different roles. It is fairly common, also, for societies to manifest a discrepancy between the gender of their stereotypical witch and that of the people whom they actually accuse. Those making the accusations are, likewise, normally female or male or both, according to the conventions of the culture to which they belong. The same variety attaches to the social status and wealth of accusers and accused, witchcraft being viewed as a weapon employed by poor against rich, rich against poor, or between equals or competitors, or by any member of a community, according to the society concerned. There has been a common tendency across the world for suspicions to map onto economic and social tensions, so that quarrelsome or boastful individuals, or parvenus, within societies in which affability and modesty are regarded as prime virtues and economic mobility is limited, have often been considered either as obvious targets for witchcraft or as obvious practitioners of it; but several other categories of behaviour or person fall into both roles.

  While being so various in such details, local concepts of the witch figure are also strongly rooted, and often seemingly impervious to the fact that neighbouring peoples could have very different ideas. There are three island groups off the north-east coast of New Guinea, close to and in regular communication with each other: Dobu, Trobriand and Fergusson. Their inhabitants are similar enough in physical, social and cultural respects to make them virtually one people. All fear witchcraft, but to Dobuans witches can be of either sex, though women are regarded as more dangerous; to Trobrianders they are mostly male; and to Fergussonians they are essentially female, and especially dangerous. An obvious question to be asked is whether the people in one of these societies find anything odd about the discrepancy between their beliefs and those of the other two. The answer seems to be completely negative, so that when Dobuans visit Trobriand, they are not afraid of the local women as witches but start to fear the men more, while the women of Fergusson frighten them even more than those at home.53

  Characteristic Two: A Witch is an Internal Threat to a Community

  As suggested above, early modern Europeans believed that witches attacked neighbours or kin, or, exceptionally, they attacked elite figures within their own political unit such as an aristocrat or a king. Witches were therefore not imagined to be interested in harming strangers. This distinguishes witchcraft from the use of harmful magic as a weapon in conflicts between communities. Much feuding between traditional human societies, whether organized as tribes, clans or villages, has been believed by members to include a magical element, and such societies are disposed to blame misfortunes on the activities of magicians among their collective enemies. This belief is found in many parts of the world, but especially in three: the Amazon basin, Siberia, and Australia and Melanesia. It is especially prevalent in the last of these regi
ons, although even there it is found interspersed with societies in which the threat of destructive magic is perceived to be mostly or entirely internal, as mentioned above.54

  Despite this broad dispersal of communities that expected magical danger from outside, they have been greatly outnumbered in the world by those who have feared it from within. Ralph Austen has commented that virtually all studies of rural African societies indicate that the efficacy of witchcraft is believed in them to increase in direct proportion to the intimacy between witch and victim.55 Peter Geschiere has added that ‘in many respects, witchcraft is the dark side of kinship’, and Wim van Binsbergen that it is ‘everything which challenges the kinship order’.56 This certainly seems true for much of Africa, although even there the degrees of kinship within which it is supposed to operate vary greatly. In polygamous societies, accusations often arose from jealousies and animosities between different wives of the same man.57 On the other hand, such consequences were by no means certain, and there was no more inevitable and predictable a relationship between polygamy and the targets of suspicion than there was between witchcraft beliefs and any other kind of social organization. Among the Konkomba in northern Togo, who believed in witchcraft, much tension existed between co-wives, and yet accusations never arose from them.58 The Wambugwe, living in Tanzania’s Rift Valley, thought that witches could not attack their own lineage.59 Further north, in Kenya, the Nandi believed that witchcraft operated between in-laws, while another Tanzanian tribe, the Safwa, held that it could only be used against members of the perpetrator’s own patrilineage.60 In Zambia the Ndembu thought that only close maternal kin were at risk, while in Sierra Leone the Kuranko viewed witchcraft as an attack on conjugal relationships, deployed only by married women against a husband or his kin.61 The Ngoni of Malawi thought that witches only attacked relatives on their mother’s side.62

  Nor are kin necessarily suspected of witchcraft in Africa, or indeed other parts of the world, the spectrum of favoured targets for suspicion extending through friends and neighbours to outsiders who had been allowed to settle in a community. Among the Gusii of Kenya the obvious targets were simply people who had failed to give clear evidence of their loyalty to the social group as a whole; likewise, the Nyakyusa of Tanzania suspected the generally antisocial members of their society.63 One New Guinea people, the Tangu, used their equivalent word for a witch to describe all socially marginal people who had ceased to reciprocate in the social relationships of the community, whether they had begun to use witchcraft or not.64 The Lugbara of Uganda associated witchcraft with strangers, loners, people with red or squinting eyes, the greedy and the grumpy.65 The Quiché of Guatemala saw it in the lazy as well as the antisocial.66 The Western Apache, on the other hand, eclectically suspected the wealthy, the elderly and strangers who had moved unexpectedly into the community.67 Sometimes the stereotype did not actually match up to the reality, so that the Mandari of the Sudan traditionally associated witchcraft with physical filth, stealing and generally antisocial nonconformist behaviour, but admitted that most suspects were people indistinguishable from the norm.68 The Wambugwe thought that witches had no features at all that distinguished them from anybody else, while among another Tanzanian group, the Hehe, accusations bore no relationship to sex, age or kinship.69 The Gisu of Uganda thought that witches only attacked people of their own sex, while in Papua the Kaluli believed that they normally made victims of those unrelated to them by blood or marriage.70 To the Mohave, whose traditional territory spanned parts of California, Nevada and Arizona, witchcraft was especially insidious because those who possessed its powers only used them to kill people whom they liked, as a compulsive and appalling consequence of genuine affection.71

  In general, the comment made by Philip Mayer on Africans half a century ago holds good for human societies in general, that suspected witches and their accusers are people who ought to like one another but do not.72 To put it another way, as Eytan Bercovitch did after working in New Guinea, ‘The witch is everything that people truly are as communities and individuals but would rather not be.’73 Suspicion of witchcraft has generally been one consequence of unmet social obligations. The circumstances under which that suspicion arises tend everywhere to be those of regular, close and informal relationships, especially those in confined and intense environments where it is difficult to express animosities in open quarrelling and fighting: which is why, for example, in southern India accusations were never made between different social castes, as they never had intimate enough relations with each other.74 Although the consequences of allegations of witchcraft generally involved social groups, in essence they were generated by close personal relationships. In Godfrey Lienhardt’s words, ‘witchcraft is a concept in the assessment of relations between two people’.75 A belief in it is an aspect of face-to-face human encounters.

  Characteristic Three: The Witch Works within a Tradition

  Around the world, it has commonly been believed that witches gain their malignant powers through training or inheritance; but there has been no general solution to the question of how this is done. Two very common responses are that the capacity to do harm is something innate in the person of the witch, or else that the witch works by the employment of magical materials. The two often overlap, in that a person who is empowered by an innate and internal force can utilize arcane forces in material objects in order to put their powers into action. Those societies that believe in witchcraft as an innate power often differ over whether it manifests because of the volition of the person concerned, or asserts control over the will and actions of that person, sometimes directly against their own inclination. It is quite common for the two kinds of witch figure, the one who operates because of innate power, and the one who needs to work by manipulation of the right tools and substances, to exist in the imagination of the same social group.

  One such group was the Azande of southern Sudan, who became the subject of a very famous study during the 1930s by Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, which helped to inspire the subsequent interest in witchcraft shown by members of his discipline and created some of the methods and models for it. As one of the latter, he confined the term ‘witchcraft’ to describe the actions of people who worked harm through natural and internal abilities, and employed that of ‘sorcery’ for those who needed external means.76 For a time his distinction was widely applied to the study of extra-European magic, and that in Africa in particular.77 By the 1960s, however, it was coming under criticism as inapplicable to many traditional peoples, in Africa as elsewhere.78 It has now largely been abandoned, although some anthropologists still sometimes find it relevant to the particular societies with which they are concerned.79 What emerges from a global analysis is that traditional peoples distinguish between forms of magic in different ways, some of which map onto the division made by Evans-Pritchard and some of which do not. A classification of harmful magic into witchcraft and sorcery, according to his criteria, will therefore not be used here. None the less, it must be recognized that societies across the world have divided workers of harmful magic into categories, in which some operate more from instinct and natural power and others more from design. In Dobu, for example, women were believed to work evil in their sleep, their spirits going forth to attack those of neighbours and so do them harm, while men worked it when awake, putting curses on the belongings of victims.80

  Equally variable across the world are local answers provided to the question of whether witchcraft is voluntary or involuntary; and if it is involuntary, what implications this has for the treatment of the suspected witch. Some peoples in Africa and Melanesia have regarded it as the consequence of a literal physical malady. The Hewa of the New Guinea Highlands thought that witches had a being like a small human foetus living inside them, which craved human flesh and drove them to kill to get it.81 The Tiv of Nigeria thought that witchcraft was a substance that grew on the hearts of certain people and gave them magical powers.82 In southern Africa the Swazis considered it to be a v
irus, transmitted by mothers to children or acquired by infection later in life, which drove sufferers to join a secret witch society dedicated to murder.83 In north-eastern Ghana the Mamprusi also thought it a substance in the body inherited from the mother, though virtuous people were believed to be capable of resisting and neutralizing it.84 The Bamileke of Cameroon believed it to be an extra organ, which produced a literal blood lust, satisfied by magical attacks.85 Elsewhere in the same country, the Bangwa thought that it was generated by a substance in the gullet, with which a person was born: parents with a baby who seemed to be manifesting strange behaviour would presume it to have this affliction, and would allow it to die.86 Inhabitants of Seram in the Molucca archipelago of eastern Indonesia were of the opinion that the power to work evil magic was generated by a hard lump in the stomach or intestines.87