Anthropological and historical approaches to witchcraft: Potential for a new collaboration?

Historical Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 413-434

  Hutton, Ronald ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 56849127607     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X03003558     Document Type: Article

References (172)

1. E.g. Keith Thomas, ‘The relevance of social anthropology to the historical study of English witchcraft’, in Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations (London, 1970), pp. 47–81
2. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1970), pp. 211–253
3. Norman Cohn, Europe's inner demons (Falmer, 1975), pp. 220–223.
4. Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations.
5. Max Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery (Harmondsworth, 1970).
6. Rodney Needham, Primordial characters (Charlottesville, 1978), pp. 23–50, at p. 42.
7. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany, 1562–1684 (Stanford, 1972), p. 5.
8. E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca, 1976), p. 11.
9. It was later asserted in retrospective dismissals of the comparative method that prominent British scholars such as E. P. Thompson and Max Marwick had already turned against it in the early 1970s, citing Thompson, ‘Anthropology and the discipline of historical context’, Midland History, 1 (1972), pp. 46–55
10. Marwick, review of Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, Man, n.s. 6 (1971), pp. 320–1. Neither disowned the method as such, however, only criticizing some applications of it.
11. Hildred Geertz and Keith Thomas, ‘An anthropology of religion and magic: two views’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), pp. 71–110.
12. Specifically, EdwinArdener, ‘The new anthropology and its critics’, Man, n.s. 6 (1971), pp. 449–467.
13. Malcolm Crick, ‘Two styles in the study of witchcraft’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, (1973), pp. 17–31, at p. 18
14. idem, Explorations in language and meaning: towards a semantic anthropology (London, 1976), pp. 109–127.
15. T. O. Beidelman, ‘Towards more open theoretical interpretations’ in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 351–356.
16. Robert Rowland, ‘“Fantasticall and devilishe persons”: European witch-beliefs in comparative perspective’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early modern European witchcraft (Oxford, 1990), pp. 161–90. The volume was based on the proceedings of a conference that had been held at Stockholm in 1984.
17. J. H. M. Salmon, ‘History without anthropology: a new witchcraft synthesis’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19 (1989), pp. 481–486.
18. Mary Douglas, Risk and blame: essays in cultural theory (London, 1992), pp. 83–101
19. idem, ‘Sorcery accusations unleashed: the Lele revisited’, Africa, 69 (1999), pp. 177–193.
20. J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: tales of satanic abuse in contemporary England (Cambridge, 1998), esp. pp. 180–192.
21. Andrew Sanders, A deed without a name: the witch in society and history (Oxford, 1995).
22. Ralph A. Austen, ‘The moral economy of witchcraft: an essay in comparative history’, in Jean and John Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its malcontents (Chicago, 1993), p. 94.
23. Ray Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania (Cambridge, 1994), p. 12.
24. Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo, Knowledge, belief and witchcraft (Stanford, 1997).
25. Peter Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, 1997), p. viii.
26. The modernity of witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa, pp. 188–223, at p. 223.
27. George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues: anthropological and philosophical exchanges (Athens, OH, 2001), p. 5.
28. Barry Hallen, ‘“Witches” as superior intellects: challenging a cross-cultural superstition’, in Witchcraft dialogues: anthropological and philosophical exchanges, pp. 80–100.
29. Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualized boundary conditions of the kinship order’, in Bond and Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues, p. 243.
30. Adam Ashforth, ‘“Of secrecy and the common place”: witchcraft and power in Soweto’, Social Research, 63 (1996), pp. 1183–1234.
31. For recent overviews in a very large literature, see Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink, eds., Magika hiera (Oxford, 1991)
32. Peter Schafer and Hans G. Kippenberg, eds., Envisioning magic (Leiden, 1997)
33. Fritz Graf, Magic in the ancient world (Cambridge, MA, 1997)
34. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and magic in Europe: ancient Greece and Rome (London, 1999)
35. Matthew W. Dickie, Magic and magicians in the Greco-Roman world (London, 2001).
36. My own intervention in a major debate in this field will be found in Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London, 2003), pp. 98–117.
37. For recent general overviews of the early modern historiography, see Brian Levack, The witch hunt in early modern Europe (2nd edn, London, 1995)
38. Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (2nd edn, London, 2001)
39. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 1400–1800 (London, 2001).
40. The specific studies cited are Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies (London, 1991)
41. Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons (Oxford, 1997)
42. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil (London, 1994)
43. Robin Briggs, Witches and neighbours (London, 1996)
44. James Sharpe, Instruments of darkness (London, 1996)
45. Diane Purkiss, The witch in history (London, 1996).
46. Points well made in Hallen, ‘“Witches” as superior intellects’.
47. Needham, Primordial characters, pp. 26–42.
48. To avoid blotting out whole pages of this review with the references, a hundred of these are identified in Ronald Hutton, ‘The global context of the Scottish witch-hunt’, in Julian Goodare, ed., The Scottish witch-hunt in context (Manchester, 2002), pp. 17–18.
49. To these I have since added A. T. Bryant, Olden times in Zululand and Natal (London, 1929), pp. 650–651
50. B. B. Whiting, Paiute sorcery (New York, 1950)
51. S. F. Nadal, Nupe religion (London, 1954), pp. 163–200
52. Antera Duke and Cyril D. Forde, eds., Efik traders of old Calabar (Oxford, 1956), pp. 16–22
53. Victor Turner, Schism and continuity in an African society (Manchester, 1957)
54. W. Lloyd Warner, A black civilisation: a social study of an Australian tribe (New York, 1958)
55. L. W. Simmons, ed., Sun chief: the autobiography of a Hopi Indian (New Haven, 1963), pp. 120, 331–3
56. K. H. Basso, Western Apache witchcraft (Phoenix, 1969)
57. Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, sorcery and social categories among the Safwa (Oxford, 1970)
58. K. M. Stewart, ‘Witchcraft among the Mohave Indians’, Ethnology, 12 (1973), pp. 313–324
59. Mary Patterson, ‘Sorcery and witchcraft in Melanesia’, Oceania, 45 (1974), pp. 132–60, 212–34
60. E. L. Schieffelin, The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers (St Lucia, Queensland, 1977)
61. Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru sorcery (Palo Alto, CA, 1979)
62. Karen E. Fields, ‘Political contingencies of witchcraft in colonial central Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 16 (1982), pp. 567–593
63. Colin Turnbull, The forest people (London, 1984)
64. R. D. Edmunds, The Shawnee prophet (Lincoln, NB, 1985), pp. 5–97
65. Bruce M. Knauft, Good company and violence (Berkeley, 1985)
66. Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen, eds., The religious imagination in New Guinea (New Brunswick, 1989), pp. 122–159
67. George T. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Lagona (Seattle, 1991)
68. Birgit Meyer, ‘If you are a devil, you are a witch, and if you are a witch, you are a devil’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 22 (1992), pp. 98–132
69. Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its malcontents, pp. 111–192
70. F. G. Bailey, The witch-hunt: or, the triumph of morality (Ithaca, 1994)
71. Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania
72. Ashforth, ‘Of secrecy and the common place’
73. Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft suppression practices and movements’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997), pp. 319–345
74. Bruce Kapferer, The feast of the sorcerers (Chicago, 1997)
75. Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft
76. Diane Ciekawy, ‘Witchcraft in statecraft’, African Studies Review, 41 (1998), pp. 119–141
77. B. Rutherford, ‘To find an African witch’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), pp. 89–109
78. Douglas, ‘Sorcery accusations unleashed’
79. Bond and Ciekawy, eds., Witchcraft dialogues, pp. 39–79, 101–89, 212–63
80. Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, power and politics (London, 2001)
81. Stephen Ellis, ‘Witch-hunting in central Madagascar, 1828–1861’, Past and Present, 175 (2002), pp. 90–123. To save space, again, this will be fed into the arguments below, rather than listed here.
82. Esther Goody, ‘Legitimate and illegitimate aggression in a west African state’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, p. 207.
83. Needham, Primordial characters, p. 26.
84. Austen, ‘The moral economy of witchcraft’, p. 89.
85. Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft, p. II.
86. Philip Mayer, ‘Witches’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, p. 55.
87. Briggs, Witches and neighbours, passim.
88. Max Marwick, ‘Witchcraft as a social strain-gauge’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 280–295.
89. E.g. Patterson, ‘Sorcery and witchcraft in Melanesia’
90. Knauft, Good company and violence
91. P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt, eds., Gods, ghosts and men in Melanesia (Oxford, 1965).
92. Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Some notions of witchcraft among the Dinka’, Africa, 21 (1951), p. 317.
93. Briggs, Witches and neighbours, p. 394.
94. Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft, p. 223.
95. Mayer, ‘Witches’
96. S. F. Nadel, ‘Witchcraft in four African societies’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 52, 264–79
97. P. Lawrence, ‘The Ngaing of the Rai Coast’, in Lawrence and Meggitt, eds., Gods, ghosts and men, pp. 198–223
98. Meyer Fortes, The web of kinship among the Tallensi (Oxford, 1967), pp. 32–35
99. I. M. Lewis, ‘A structural approach to witchcraft and spirit possession’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 293–303
100. Andrew Strathern, ‘Witchcraft, greed, cannibalism and death’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the regeneration of life (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 111–133
101. Turnbull, The forest people, pp. 205–207
102. Knauft, Good company and violence, pp. 341–342.
103. Angela Bourke, The burning of Bridget Cleary (London, 1999)
104. Owen Davies, A people bewitched: witchcraft and magic in nineteenth-century Somerset (Bruton, 1999).
105. Lisbeth Sachs, Evil eye or bacteria? (Stockholm, 1983), pp. 75–97.
106. Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian spirituality and the Western imagination (London, 2001).
107. E.g. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, pp. 398–410
108. Merete D. Jakobsen, Shamanism: traditional and contemporary approaches to the mastery of spirits and healing (New York, 1999), pp. 94–100.
109. S. A. Tokarev, ‘Shamanstvo u Iakutov v 17 veke’, Sovietskaia Etnografia, 2 (1939), pp. 88–102. I am very grateful to Andrei Znamenski for this reference.
110. Knauft, Good company and violence, pp. 340–343
111. Patterson, ‘Sorcery and witchcraft in Melanesia’
112. Fitz John P. Poole, ‘Cannibals, tricksters and witches’, in Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin, eds., The ethnography of cannibalism (Washington DC, 1983), pp. 6–32.
113. Peter Riviere, ‘Factions and exclusions in two South American village systems’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 245–255
114. A. F. Anisimov, ‘The shaman's tent of the Evenks’, in Henry N. Michael, ed., Studies in Siberian shamanism (Toronto, 1963), pp. 84–123.
115. E.g. Hans Sebald, Witch-children (New York, 1995)
116. Robert S. Walinski-Kiehl, ‘The Devil's children’, Continuity and Change, 11 (1996), pp. 171–189
117. Lyndal Roper, ‘“Evil imaginings and fantasies’, Past and Present, 167 (2000), pp. 107–139.
118. Robert Brain, ‘Child-witches’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 161–179.
119. James Sharpe, ‘The witch's familiar in Elizabethan England’, in G. W. Bernard and S.J. Gunn, eds., Authority and consent in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 219–232.
120. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, passim.
121. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937).
122. E.g. John Middleton and E. H. Winter, eds., Witchcraft and sorcery in east Africa (London, 1963).
123. Victor W. Turner, ‘Witchcraft and sorcery’, Africa, 34 (1964), pp. 314–324.
124. For a European overview, see William Monter, ‘Witch trials in continental Europe, 1560–1660’, in Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and William Monter, The Athlone history of witchcraft and magic in Europe, IV (London, 2002), pp. 1–52.
125. For an English case study, Sharpe, Instruments of darkess, pp. 105–127.
126. Malcolm Ruel, ‘Were-animals and the introverted witch’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 333–350.
127. Charles-Henry Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the avoidance of physical violence in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 1 (1995), pp. 599–609.
128. Edwin Ardener, ‘Witchcraft, economics and the continuity of belief’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 141–160.
129. G. I. Jones, ‘A boundary to accusations’, in Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 321–332.
130. Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania
131. T. O. Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’
132. Robert F. Gray, ‘Some structural aspects of Mbugwe witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 57–98, 143–73.
133. R. F. Fortune, ‘Sorcerers of Dobu’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 101–107.
134. Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of sorcery control incentral Africa’, in Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 123–141.
135. Eytan Bercovitch, ‘Moral insights: victim and witch in the Nalumin imagination’, in Herdt and Stephen, eds., The religious imagination in New Guinea, pp. 122–59, at p. 140.
136. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, p. 398.
137. Hugh A. Stayt, The BaVenda (Oxford, 1931), p. 275.
138. Wolf Bleek, ‘Witchcraft, gossip and death’, Man, n.s. 11 (1976), pp. 526–541.
139. J. Robin Fox, ‘Witchcraft and clanship in Cochiti therapy’, in Ari Kiev, ed., Magic, faith and healing (New York, 1964), pp. 174–200.
140. P. T. W. Baxter, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, in Max Gluckman, ed., The allocation of responsibility (Manchester, 1972), pp. 163–191.
141. Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in early modern Scotland (Exeter, 2000)
142. Bryant, Olden times in Zululand, pp. 650–651
143. Clyde Kluckhorn, Navaho witchcraft (Boston, MA, 1944), ch. II.3
144. A. F. C. Wallace, The death and rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1972), pp. 102–110.
145. Sharpe, Instruments of darkness, pp. 128–147
146. Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft persecutions in Bavaria (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 115–211.
147. Edmunds, The Shawnee prophet, pp. 5–97.
148. Audrey Richard, ‘A modern movement of witch-finders’, in Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 164–177
149. Max Marwick, ‘The Bwanali-Mpulumutsi anti-witchcraft movement’, in Witchcraft and sorcery, pp. 178–183
150. P. Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga cult among the south-western Yoruba’, Bulletin de L'Institut Frangais d'Afrique Noire, 18 (1956), pp. 315–334
151. Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of sorcery control in central Africa’, in Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery, pp. 123–141
152. Barbara Ward, ‘Some observations on religious cults in Ashanti’, Africa, 26 (1956), pp. 47–60
153. Alison Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’, in Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 103–128
154. R. G. Willis, ‘Instant millennium’, in Witchcraft confessions and accusations, pp. 129–139.
155. Susan Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi witchcraft, subversion and changing gender relations’, Africa, 63 (1993), pp. 531–549
156. Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft suppression practices and movements’
157. Rutherford, ‘To find an African witch’
158. Mark Auslander, ‘Open the wombs!’, in Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its malcontents, pp. 167–192.
159. Paul Bohannan, ‘Extra-processual events in Tiv political institutions’, American Anthropologist, 60 (1958) pp. 1–12.
160. David J. Parkin, ‘Medicines and men of influence’, Man, n.s. 3 (1968), pp. 424–439
161. R. G. Willis, ‘Kamcape’, Africa, 38 (1968), pp. 1–15
162. Daniel Offiong, ‘The social context of Ibibio witch beliefs’, Africa, 53 (1982), pp. 73–82
163. Suzette Heald, ‘Witches and thieves’, Man, n.s. 21 (1986), pp. 65–78
164. Douglas, ‘Sorcery accusations unleashed’
165. Simon Mesaki, ‘Witch-killing in Sukumaland’, in Abrahams, ed., Witchcraft in contemporary Tanzania, pp. 47–60.
166. Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, power and politics (London, 2001), pp. 130–182.
167. This process is the main theme of Ronald Hutton, The triumph of the moon (Oxford, 1999).
168. The triumph of the moon, pp. 84–150.
169. Hallen and Sodipo, Knowledge, belief and witchcraft, pp. 86–118
170. Hallen, ‘“Witches” as superior intellects’.
171. The classic extant study of these writings is Clark, Thinking with demons.
172. See, for example, Owen Davies, Cunning-folk (London, 2003).