Witchcraft

Scholars continue to debate the question of how well scholarly concepts like witchcraft convey the meanings of local terms, and how much a term like witchcraft can reduce the diversity and complexity of ideas and actions to which it is applied. Regarding the history of scholarship around the terms magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, we see that, although magic can be indigenously conceived as having both harmful and helpful potentials, the latter can be deemphasized by scholars who are more interested in its harmful potential. While these questions are not entirely new—both Victor Turner and Malcolm Crick encouraged anthropologists to use local terms and their specific meanings as much as possible in their work—current scholarship is more sensitive to the possibility of misrepresenting the cultures it attempts to describe. In view of the political history of witch hunts in Europe, and the ways non-Christian religious ideas and practices were demonized, it is possible to ask if a similar process continues in the structure of contemporary academic discourse.

Some scholars regard witchcraft as a discourse of power that requires knowledge about the historical and ethnographic conditions that shape understandings about it. This might entail a more careful analysis of the semantic range of terms for magic and harmful magic, with an attempt to separate local discourses from wider regional or national ones. Ciekawy (1998) does this in her analysis of the application of the Witchcraft Act in colonial and postcolonial coastal Kenya. She describes different words that Mijikenda people use for harmful magic: utsai is a Kimijikenda term, the kiSwahili words are uchawi and ulozi, and some people use witchcraft. Mijikenda employ these terms in different contexts. She concludes that, for conceptual and analytical purposes, the terms must be distinguished because utsai refers to a discourse on harmful magic that is created and operates within local social and political settings largely under the control of Mijikenda who use them, while witchcraft is best understood as a technology of power that emerged under European colonialism, supported largely through discourses of mission Christianity and colonial law and administration.