Witchcraft

Jeanne Favret-Saada's study of witchcraft in the Bocage of western France examines the power of words used by people to talk about witchcraft. She distinguishes this approach to witchcraft as power from its more conventional use in anthropology as knowledge or information, pointing out that in the Bocage there is no neutral position that a person can have when it concerns such socially and politically powerful speech. She also questions the way academics have viewed witchcraft as the backward and untrue beliefs of people who do not use academic forms of reasoning. This is consistent with the general approach used to study many forms of magic offered by Arens and Karp. Rather than use the words magic and witchcraft, they advocate the use of the terms transformational capacity and power.