Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (original) (raw)
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Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa: Introduction
2012
Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa reconstructs the biography of an ordinary South African, Jimmy Mohale. Born in 1964, Jimmy came of age in rural South Africa during apartheid, then studied at university and worked as a teacher during the anti-apartheid struggle. In 2005, Jimmy died from an undiagnosed sickness, probably related to AIDS. Jimmy gradually came to see the unanticipated misfortune he experienced as a result of his father’s witchcraft and sought remedies from diviners rather than from biomedical doctors. This study casts new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between South African politics, witchcraft, and the AIDS pandemic.
Review of Isak Niehaus’ Witchcraft and a Life in the new South Africa
Anthropology Southern Africa, 36(1&2): 93, 2013
Published in 2013 in Anthropology Southern Africa, 36(1&2): 93 Witchcraft and a Life in the new South Africa. By Isak Niehaus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxi + 239pp. £57 hardcover, £40.98 Kindle edition. Isak Niehaus's Witchcraft and a Life in the new South Africa is an elegantly written but disturbing book. Breaking the mould of much of the scholarship on witchcraft in South Africa, and that of Niehaus' previous work, it steers clear of macro-political and economic analyses in favour of a biographical approach. Like Adam Ashforth's Madumo, the book traces the story of a man who gradually becomes convinced that he is a victim of witchcraft.
Journal for the Study of Religion, 2015
Religion, magic and witchcraft are conceptual, socially constructed categories, the boundaries of which have been contested under diverse religious, cultural and intellectual conditions in the west. This paper focuses firstly on the polemical relationship between religion and magic in the context of colonial South Africa, namely, the historical factors that privileged the category religion and the multiple effects of the social and legal imposition of western epistemologies on colonised communities whose practices constituted ‘magic’, and, therefore, were synonymous with ‘witchcraft’. Secondly, examples of strategies to reinforce the religion/magic dichotomy, to collapse their subjective boundaries, and the complexity witchcraft discourses bring to both positions are provided in the context of the religious and cultural hybridity of postcolonial South Africa. A parallel discussion is on the influence Christian and Enlightenment thought had on category construction in the study of re...
Religion, magic and witchcraft are conceptual, socially constructed categories, the boundaries of which have been contested under diverse religious, cultural and intellectual conditions in the west. This paper focuses firstly on the polemical relationship between religion and magic in the context of colonial South Africa, namely, the historical factors that privileged the category religion and the multiple effects of the social and legal imposition of western epistemologies on colonised communities whose practices constituted 'magic', and, therefore, were synonymous with 'witchcraft'. Secondly, examples of strategies to reinforce the religion/magic dichotomy, to collapse their subjective boundaries, and the complexity witchcraft discourses bring to both positions are provided in the context of the religious and cultural hybridity of postcolonial South Africa. A parallel discussion is on the influence Christian and Enlightenment thought had on category construction in the study of religion and questions the extent to which Religion Studies today engages in decolonising the categories religion, magic and witchcraft in ways that do not contradict religious realities in our society.
Witchcraft and the Exchange of Sex, Blood, and Money Among Africans in Cape Town, South Africa
2002
In post-apartheid South Africa witchcraft is an ever-growing concern, as political liberation has not led to liberation from occult forces. The study of modernity and globalisation has revealed the significance of the study of witchcraft in contemporary Africa. Among Xhosa migrants in Cape Town the discourse on witchcraft also revealed very specific problems that people encountered within close relationships. The lived conflicts, anxieties and desires were revealed in the exchange of sex, blood (as a metaphor for life itself), and money. This same pattern of exchange appeared in witchcraft, and particularly the role of witch familiars. Witch familiars embodied the anxieties and desires that people experienced on a daily basis concerning sex, blood, and flows of money in intimate relations. The structural problems that were part of the migrants’ social configurations were thus revealed in a structural pattern of exchange within witchcraft.
1997
Evans-Pritchard's classical text Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) lay the foundations for contemporary scholarly understandings of witchcraft. Yet the author's central contention that witchcraft presents a logical explanation for misfortune has been less inspirational than his suggestion than that witchcraft accusations express regularly recurring socio-structural conflicts [2]. This idea was developed most fully by Marwick (1970) who argued that witchcraft accusations present a social "strain-gauge". This formulation is based on two closely related assumptions. First, that at a general level, the distribution of witchcraft accusations, between persons standing in various relationships, reveals tension points in the social structure. Anthropologists and historians have contended that witchcraft accusations indicate different sorts of tensions in different social contexts. Witchcraft accusations have been shown to cluster between different matrilineal segments among the Chewa of Northern Rhodesia (Marwick 1965), agnates and affines among the Zulu of South Africa (Gluckman I960), youths and elders among the Gisu of Uganda (Heald 1986), competing work parties among the Hewa of New Guinea (Steadman 1985), commoners and new state elites in Cameroon (Geschiere 1988), and between men and women in colonial Peru (Silverbladt 1987). Second, the social strain hypothesis assumes that tense relations are the prime determinants of whom the accused shall be. For example, Macfarlane argues that in sixteenth century Essex witchcraft accusations arose from quarrels over gifts and loans, rather than strange events. "Although there was sometimes an emphasis on the strangeness of an event, for instance when a woman's body was sometimes covered with lice which 'were long, and lean, and not like other lice', strangeness, in itself, was not enough to produce a suspicion of witchcraft" (Macfarlane 1970:296) [3], This article critically reexamines the relationship between social tensions and witchcraft. It draws on fieldwork conducted between 1990 and 1995 in Green Valley, a village situated in the lowveld of Mpumalanga, South Africa. In 1991 Green Valley had a population of approximately 20 000 Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers [4]. In the article I aim to focus on how individuals subjectively inferred the existence of witchcraft and the identity of alleged witches, rather than to explore the quantitative distribution of witchcraft accusations. From this perspective, I suggest that social tensions by themselves are less accurate predictors of witchcraft attributions and accusations than the literature may lead us to believe. Anthropologists and historians, who propose that social tensions are the prime determinants of witchcraft accusations, often view witchcraft as an idiom of social relations and processes. Questions of evidence are deemed to be peripheral. It is either assumed that proof is impossible, or alternatively, that tension is the only proof of witchcraft. They hereby downplay the views social actors have of their own situations. This is an important oversight as it is emic understandings which motivate, guide, and justify action. For believers, who regard the existence of witches as a reality, questions of i
Witchcraft and the South African Bantustans: Evidence from Bushbuckridge
South African Historical Journal, 2012
The press has, from time to time, reported on the occurrence of episodes of witchcraft-related violence in the northeast of South Africa. Social analysts often attribute witchcraft beliefs and accusations to the persistence of 'traditional' beliefs in the contemporary world. This article challenges such interpretations and asks whether it is possible to see witchcraft beliefs and accusations as a product of people's exposure to the South African system of Native Reserves and bantustans. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Bushbuckridge, a district of the South African lowveld, I endeavour to show how witchcraft beliefs have been structured by the historical processes of population relocation, the implementation of agricultural betterment schemes, labour migration, and by ideologies of cultural difference, that were central to the bantustan system. At the local level, I suggest that accusations have been fuelled by experiences of social confinement in 'closed' communities, relative deprivation and of competition for scarce resources.