Lecture Notes: Contemporary Examples of Witchcraft

Acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.
Week 8 of the trimester. Focus on contemporary examples of witchcraft and witchcraft crazes/hunts.
Ethnography of witchcraft in France, based on Jean Fabrizada's book Deadly Words.
Today's Image: A spellcaster's notebook from the Hort Sonne in Northeast France as an icon of understanding of witchcraft.
- Witchcraft as a discursive, literary practice bound up in the power of words, contrasting with Evans-Pritchard's view of Zande witchcraft.
- The notebook includes notations in French and Latin, and a numerological chart.
Review of course topics:
- Weeks 1-4: Human origins and differences.
- Weeks 5-7: Zande witchcraft, magic oracles, ethic vs emic views, the political & social structures and role of oracles in relation to power and knowledge.
- This week & next week: Witchcraft in other contexts.
Key questions:
- What is a person in a cosmology where witchcraft occurs?
- How is witchcraft a mediation of social anxieties?
Assignment due this Sunday.
- A public social setting is accessible to anyone.

Martin Mills: Witchcraft remains a ubiquitous supernatural concern, explaining misfortune and coincidence.
Zande Kingdom in the 1920s: Social and political transitions, territorial expansion, social tensions (strangers living together, inequality).
Role of oracles: Provide information and revelations to ground interpretations.
- Different oracles in Zande society: Benge (most authoritative), Iwa, and Dakpa.
- Binza: Corporation or institution to interpret oracle findings.
- Secondary elaboration: Ability to add personal interpretation to oracle results.
Knowledge-power nexus: Powerful members of society shaping truth production.
Paradigm shift: Moving from witchcraft to scientific rationality (germ theory, physical laws) to explain cause and effect.
Enlightenment theory: Scientific reasoning dispelling magical reasoning.
Magic persisted through the 19th and 20th centuries, and persists today.
Anthropologists after Evans-Pritchard were interested in societies where witchcraft is the dominant rationality.

Fabriz Sarda's Study Location: Bonvenu eau bocage in Northwest France (Normandy).
History: Vikings (Norsemen/Normans) settled, Norman Conquest of England, later integrated into France.
Agricultural Area: Wealth tied to familial land.
System of primogeniture: firstborn son inherits land and wealth.
Mayenne: 80% agricultural economy. Most people are farmers.
Normandy: People speak Norman French which is mutually intelligible to rest of France.
Fabriz Sarta's Interest: inspired by French media coverage of scandals involving a mage/wizard in Normandy.
Fabriz Sarta notes that witchcraft usually indexes other things going on.
1960s and 70s in France: Financial downturn, loss of colonial holdings (e.g., Algeria), industries in decline, urbanization, geopolitical decline.
May '68 student uprisings as a symptom of France's declining role in the world.
Period of social turmoil, relevant to understanding witchcraft and anxiety.

Fabriz Sarda (born in Algeria, studied in Paris) lived in the Bocage from 1968-1971.
Critique of previous portrayals of locals in Normandy as backward by folklorists, psychiatrists, occultists, and journalists.
Instead, she takes it seriously, lives with the people, and tries to understand what they are trying to express by means of a witchcraft crisis.
Disinterested in the mechanics of witchcraft but interested in how it works at a social level.
Dubious about structural tensions being the only explanation for witchcraft.

Witchcraft is not ubiquitous, unlike in the Zande Kingdom.
Occurs at the end of convention, after a series of misfortunes.
Example: cows giving sour milk, car in a ditch, child breaks a leg, bread doesn't rise, package lost in mail.
Victims first turn to orthodox sources of truth, like the local priest.
If unsatisfied, they turn to a desorcillier (unwitcher).
Functions of the Unwitcher:
- Authenticate experiences.
- Diagnose the cause of the misfortunes. What is the etiology of the disease.
- Intervene as a medium between victim and witch.
Victim is subject to witchcraft and needs the unwitcher's help.

Witchcraft occurs as an accusation after the fact.
Angry words spoken in a crisis situation are later interpreted as having a powerful effect.
Example: Tim says nasty things at the pub, then misfortunes occur.
Fabriz Sarta says that witchcraft is where it's the words that wage war, its about being caught and getting out of the grasp of those words.
Primary form of witchcraft: occurs through words people say to one another. Even a handshake.
The body and belongings of the person are the target.

The "person" is the head of a family (a man).
This includes the man's physical body, immediate relations, land, and possessions.
The unwitcher understands this as a single surface full of holes, site in which bad things and misfortunes might happen and be understood as an attack.
Witchcraft accusations are addressed to neighbors.
Vulnerabilities and conflicts are internal to families.
Conflicts are related to uncertainties about distributing wealth.
Witchcraft as a remedial institution: mediates a step that a family has failed to take.

Bacage is in a moment of social transition, wealth held in farms.
Conflicts within families regarding wealth.
Misfortunes happen; witchcraft gives a rational explanation based on conflict and crisis.
People go to a dulcericillier or an un-witcher for therapy and mediation.
The drama or force of evil coming from outside is actually coming from within the family.
Farmer as firstborn son doesn't want the farm often explains his situation as being cursed.
Julian Bonhomme notes within a society in which you're used to knowing everyone, in a time of social change where you move to another city, town, or marry someone outside your social group, in that anonymity, to recall fravaritsada, people can experience themselves as full of holes, as full of vulnerabilities to other forces, other forms of people's will. And so again, witchcraft has kind of persisted as a good explanation for some of the misfortunes that can happen.

Recap of week 6 and 7
Normandy and the Bocage and Mayenne
Focus is on Zande Kingdom where witchcraft is the dominant explanation, however in current case the focus is on witchcraft is a kind of marginal explanation
Discursive form. It's about kind of what people say to you and how that might be interpreted as not just mean, but perhaps evil, perhaps powerfully evil.
Understand as people wanting to mediate anxieties about social transition.