Anthropological study of witchcraft beliefs and practices

¶ … Witch: Cultural Memory in the Present, James Siegel explores the historical anthropological treatment of witchcraft and witches and whether that treatment is applicable to modern claims of witchcraft, especially sorcery. He looks at how modern countries that contain elements of more primitive societies deal with the clash between modernity and technology. Siegel specifically discusses witchcraft trials in Cameroon, which seemed to have had the goal of convincing people that witchcraft does not exist, but, because they employ witchcraft experts, actually lend legitimacy to the idea that witchcraft is a force in society.

After providing an interesting backdrop for the discussion of witchcraft, Siegel gives a detailed explanation of a modern witch hunt. East Java, a region in Indonesia, was under the control of President Suharto for several years. As Suharto's regime began to lose control, people began to make accusations of witchcraft. Many people accused of witchcraft were killed as a result of those accusations, making for a modern witch hunt. Siegel believes that the witchcraft allegations in Java were not readily explainable by existing anthropological explanations for witchcraft and magic.

Instead, Siegel uses his background, which focused on violence in Indonesia, to develop an alternative explanation for witchcraft. He posits that witchcraft is a way for cultures to deal with things that have been previously been considered unexplainable. He links witchcraft with fear, especially the fear of death and accidents. Moreover, he shows that witchcraft can be an explanation for a fully understandable event, because people can blame magic for the time and date of particular occurrences.

Author's arguments

One of Siegel's main arguments is that prior explanations of witchcraft are inadequate to explain modern accusations of witchcraft, because the focus on placing witchcraft in opposition to modernity. In other words, prior explanations of witchcraft have been that those who believe in witchcraft dismiss scientific evidence in favor of mystical explanations. Siegel does not do a very good job supporting the argument that prior anthropological explanations of witchcraft have made that dichotomy the center of their explanations. On the contrary, when Siegel explains how Christina Larner, Robert Muchembled, and Michel Foucault explained witchcraft, he makes it clear that these theorists believe that accusations of witchcraft are linked to the acquisition and exercise of power and control. These explanations are not nearly as far away from his own explanations as Siegel maintains they are later in the book.

Siegel suggests that witchcraft is a way for cultures to explain difficult uncontrollable phenomena such as death and accidents. Moreover, even as scientific learning develops explanations for things that are unexplainable, witchcraft can coexist alongside these modern explanations. One might no longer say that a person died merely of witchcraft, but that he died of a heart attack, which was the result of witchcraft. Siegel does not go so far as to suggest that witchcraft really exists, but he does acknowledge that there is a cultural bias in assuming that witchcraft does not actually exist because that is the position taken by the researcher's culture and is a little ethnocentric.

Siegel also links witchcraft with times of social or political upheaval. Throughout the book, he gives examples that support this argument, even when not linking them directly to the argument. His evidence suggests that witch hunts have been linked to major social changes, such as the creation of large and powerful states, transitions in religious authority, and silencing dissidents. He reinforces his previous examples by showing how the witchcraft accusations in East Java have followed on the heels of significant political upheaval.

Strengths and weaknesses

The greatest strength of the book is that it does a very good job discussing a cultural phenomenon of a specific area. Siegel's background in Indonesian violence places him in a unique position to study witchcraft, because witchcraft allegations are intimately linked to violence. First, accused witches are generally subjected to violence, directly linking them to violence. In addition, witchcraft is often seen as the explanation for death and its practice might be linked to violence. Regardless of whether or not a practitioner can cause harm, if the culture perceives that a practitioner can cause real harm, then the practice of witchcraft or sorcery is going to be linked to violence, and Siegel's explanation makes that very clear.

Siegel also does a good job of distinguishing between the practice of sorcery and the more commonly understood practice of witchcraft. The persecution of witches has traditionally been linked to anti-female sentiment in the population, because the majority of targeted witches have been female. More importantly, especially in American witch persecutions, targeted women have been those who have failed to completely comply with accepted gender norms. Sorcery is not gender- specific and does not have the same sexist underpinnings, which means that hunts targeting sorcerers are substantially different from hunts targeting traditional witches.

The greatest weakness of the book may be its lack of a more in-depth investigation into the links between politics and witch hunts. Siegel does show that the two are currently linked and have been linked in the past. However, he does not explain whether he feels this link is intentional. I did not feel that he adequately explained whether these witch hunts were the result of people in power intentionally manipulating the masses to eliminate political rivals or whether they were both somehow linked to other factors. It would seem that a concerted effort to exploit local cultural beliefs would not really be an anthropological explanation, but more of a political explanation.

Finally, Siegel seems to caution his readers against dismissing the idea of witchcraft as a valid belief, though he acknowledges that he does not share the belief. He suggests that, because witchcraft is a reality for the people in Java, it should be treated as a reality by researchers, in so far as they should not dismiss its validity as a concern. However, given that he, as a researcher, does not believe in magic, it seems ridiculous for him to argue against the idea that the belief in witchcraft is incompatible with modernism. How can he take as an accepted fact the idea that highly educated people are not going to believe in witchcraft and then argue that the belief in witchcraft is compatible with modernism? The lack of a cohesive argument explaining this apparent dichotomy was the books' major weakness.

Relevance

Obviously, this book would be of interest to anyone interested in Indonesian history and politics. It would also be of interest to people with an interest in cultural magical beliefs. Both groups would find the book very informative about Indonesian cultural beliefs about magic. However, the book would probably be equally fascinating for people who have studied any historical periods of scapegoating and genocide-like conditions. One of the first things one notices in the book is that, for people outside of the culture, the persecution of witches seems to have very little to do with beliefs in magic. Instead, when witches are persecuted, it seems to be for a failure to comply with social norms, especially for female witches. Being able to identify someone to exclude from society and to blame for societal ills has been a successful tool for nation-building. Therefore, this book would probably be of interest to people who study the Holocaust and other genocidal events.