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aspect. An adequate theory of war must await the solution of the larger problem of the
theoretical understanding of violence, which is poorly developed in anthropology.
SIMON HARRISON
See also: feud, violence

Further reading

Chagnon, N. (1990) ‘Reproductive and Somatic Conflicts of Interest in the Genesis of Violence and
Warfare among Tribesmen’, in J.Haas (ed.) The Anthropology of War, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Ferguson, R.B. (1990) ‘Explaining War’ in J.Haas (ed.) The Anthropology of War, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
——(ed.) (1984) Warfare, Culture, and Environment, Orlando: Academic Press
Foster, M.L. and R.Rubinstein (eds) (1986) Peace and War: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, New
Brunswick: Transaction
Gluckman, M. (1955) Custom and Conflict in Africa, Glencoe: Free Press.
Harrison, S. (1993) The Mask of War: Vialence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia, Manchester:
Manchester University Press
Howell, S. (1989) “To be Angry is not to be Human, but to be Fearful is”: Chewong Concepts of
Human Nature’, in S.Howell and R.Willis (eds) Societies at Peace: Anthropological
Perspectives, London: Routledge
Rosaldo, M.Z. (1980) Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press

witchcraft and sorcery

The terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ are words taken from pre-Enlightenment Europe and
applied to reported occult agencies in, for the most part, non-European, small-scale or
tribal societies. The distinction in anthropology between the two kinds of malign occult
action is usually credited to †Evans-Pritchard (1937), who was translating a category
difference in the thought of the Azande peoples of Central Africa.
The essence of Evans-Pritchard’s (or rather the Zande’s) influential distinction is that
‘witchcraft’ is an inherited ability to cause occult injury to others which, at least for the
Zande, can be exercised unconsciously by its possessor. ‘Sorcery’ is a conscious activity
associated with the skilled manipulation of certain substances, with the intention of
causing harm, a usage that long predated Evans-Pritchard and had been employed in
ethnographic accounts of Australian and Melanesian peoples. The witchcraft/sorcery
distinction is widely reported in other parts of Africa and elsewhere. However, it is not
always made. Over much of East-Central Africa, for example, the notion of inherited
ability to cause occult damage is largely absent; instead the emphasis is on the use for
malign purposes of occult techniques involving ‘medicines’. Middleton and Winter
(1963) have interestingly suggested an association between witchcraft in the Zande sense
and the importance of *descent as a principle of social organization. They suggest that
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where descent is not of prime significance in social organization the occult emphasis will
be on sorcery, but that where descent largely determines social †status witchcraft is likely
to dominate. The distinction is obviously related to that in *sociology between †ascribed
and †achieved social roles. A pioneering attempt to explain the specific forms assumed
by witchcraft/sorcery beliefs is †Nadel’s (1952) comparative analysis of four African
cultures, including one (the Korongo of Sudan) where such beliefs are said to be absent.
Nadel’s explanation for this comparatively untypical situation is that Korongo social life
is unusually free of conflict; and their *mythology provides a comprehensive account of
causality in terms of non-human spiritual agencies.
The sociological approach to the understanding of witchcraft/sorcery was further
developed by Marwick (1965) in a study of the Cewa-speaking peoples of Northeast
Zambia and Malawi. In what came to be known as the ‘social strain-gauge’ theory,
Marwick showed that in this †matrilineal society sorcery accusations were particularly
likely to be levelled by a young man against an ageing or incompetent village headman
who was also the accuser’s maternal uncle. If the accusations ‘stuck’ they could be used
to turn the older man out of office and to install his presumed victim. A similar process
by which witchcraft accusations are used to get rid of unpopular elders has been
described for the Lugbara of Northern Uganda by Middleton (1960). Although
illuminating to a degree, this ‘obstetric’ reading of witchcraft accusations, as it was
labelled by †Douglas (1963), clearly leaves many aspects of the phenomenon in
obscurity. Once again it was Evans-Pritchard who identified an important function of the
witchcraft concept among the Azande, and many other peoples. Witchcraft, according to
Evans-Pritchard, explained otherwise inexplicable events. His famous example was the
Zande granary which collapsed, killing the people who had been sheltering under it.
Zande understood how the granary had collapsed: its supports had been eaten away by
termites. The further question to which ‘witchcraft’ provided the answer was why the
collapse had occurred when it did and not at some other time when no-one would have
been hurt. *Science had no explanation on why the two chains of causation had
intersected at a certain time and place. But the concept of witchcraft provided that
missing link (1937:69–70). The historian Keith Thomas has similarly argued that in pre-
modern English society ‘witchcraft…served as a means of accounting for the otherwise
inexplicable misfortunes of daily life’ ([1971] 1978:638).
Other studies have focused on the ideas, or constellations of ideas, present in
indigenous thought in the areas of witchcraft and sorcery. Marwick maintains that the
witch or sorcerer is always conceived of in terms that are antithetical to local concepts of
the ‘good’ and socially acceptable person. Thus witches or sorcerers are often associated
with murder, *incest and *cannibalism—all actions generally held to epitomize the
antisocial. Frequently there are images of the witch or sorcerer as literally inverted. The
Lugbara of Northern Uganda, for example, describe witches as travelling on their heads
rather than their feet (Middleton 1960), as do the Kaguru of Central Tanzania (Beidelman
1963). Witches and sorcerers are also commonly associated with darkness, night, dirt and
wild animals (cf. Mayer [1954] 1970).
†Kluckhohn (1944) seems to have been the first to note the socially levelling effects of
witchcraft fears on the Navaho group of Native Americans. In Navaho society those who
made themselves conspicuously different from their fellows by accumulating wealth were
believed to be using witchcraft to gain their ends, and were liable to be persecuted and
 Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 846

even killed. Similar observations have been made in Africa, for example by †Monica
Wilson (1959) for the Nyakyusa of East-central Africa. In the different context of Tudor
and Stuart England, however, MacFarlane (1970) has shown how the contemporary fear
of witches was manipulated by upwardly mobile villagers to free themselves from the
customary obligation to support older and poorer kinsfolk.
*Postmodern developments in anthropology have given a new twist to the tortuous
semantic history of the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcerer’. Inaugurated with the
controversial works of Castaneda (1968), who dubs his Yaqui Native American hero a
‘sorcerer’ (today he would probably be called a *shaman), other and more
ethnographically substantial works have cast doubt on the past assumption that witchcraft
and sorcery, however ‘real’ to indigenous peoples, were based on unfortunate delusions.
Where Evans-Pritchard could declare magisterially, in the name of modern science, that
such ‘mystical’ notions had no basis in fact (1937:12), Favret-Saada (1980) has testified
to what she sees as the objective reality of ‘sorcery’ among present day inhabitants of
Normandy, France. In Africa, Stoller and Olkes (1989) have described their own
experience of attack by sorcery among the Songhay people.
In the industrial societies of the West, feminist scholars have resuscitated the thesis of
Margaret Murray (1921), according to which many of the persecuted ‘witches’ of
medieval Europe were members of a religion of the Mother Goddess which originated in
the Palaeolithic era. Under the name of Wicca (Anglo-Saxon for ‘witchcraft’) the re-
emergent cult has succeeded in attracting adherents among middle-class professionals in
England (Luhrmann 1989).
ROY WILLIS

Further reading

Beidelman, T.O. (1963) ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’, in J.Middleton and

E.H.Winter (eds) Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul
Castaneda, C. (1968) The Teachings of Don Juan, Berkeley: University of
California Press
Douglas, M. (1963) ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control’, in J.Middleton and
E.H.Winter (eds) Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the
Azande, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Favret-Saada, J. ([1977] 1980) Deadly Words, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Kluckhohn, C. (1944) Navaho Witchcraft, Boston: Beacon Press
Luhrmann, T. (1989) Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, Oxford: Blackwell
 A–Z 847

MacFarlane, A. (1970) Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul
Marwick, M. (1965) Sorcery in Its Social Setting, Manchester: Manchester
University Press
Mayer, P. ([1954] 1970) ‘Witches’, in M. Marwick (ed.) Witchcraft and
Sorcery, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
Middleton, J. (1960) Lugbara Religion, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul
Middleton, J. and E.H.Winter (eds) (1963) Witchcraft and Sorcery in East
Africa, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Murray, M.A. (1921) The Witch-cult in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Nadel, S.F. (1952) ‘Witchcraft in Four African Societies’, American
Anthropologist 54:18–29
Stoller, P. and C.Olkes (1989) In Sorcery’s Shadow, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press
Thomas, K. ([1971] 1978) Religion and the Decline of Magic, London:
Penguin Books
Wilson, M. (1959) Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, London: Oxford
University Press

work

Whether seen as drudgery and humiliation or as honoured art, the work that humans do is
a key site for understanding both material and cultural reproduction: how we survive and
what it means to persist. The transformations which humans produce through work are
read by anthropologists as distinct cultural markers, e.g. as *archaeologists identify a
stone adze of a specific period or cultural anthropologists distinguish Mayan from Maori
carving. Humans not only transform †material culture through work, but we can also
believe ourselves to be transformed through the work we do, or work to demonstrate our
transformation, as †Max Weber pointed out so well in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (1930). Anthropologists of work have endeavoured to understand not only
the basic needs humans work to accommodate in any culture, following *Malinowski’s
*functionalism, but also the inequalities that are reproduced through the organization of