ABSTRACT

Very broadly we may distinguish three major anthropological interpretations of witchcraft beliefs suggested in recent years. Although no investigator limits himself to any one type of analysis, we may for convenience group each approach round one book. Firstly, there was the pioneering work of Professor E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), upon which most subsequent study has been based. This represents the ‘explanation’ approach. It asks how witchcraft beliefs are related to a people’s system of thought, how far they form a logical and coherent structure, explaining to members of the society various unusual or unpleasant phenomena. In 1944 Clyde Kluckhohn’s Navaho Witchcraft presented what may be termed the ‘functional’ approach. The investigator working on these lines asks how witchcraft is related to the personal tensions and anxieties of the individual, how such beliefs and accusations function as a release for otherwise unbearable emotions and as a form of social control. Such a set of questions naturally includes a discussion of the nature of inter-personal conflicts, and here they merge into the third type of analysis, the ‘structural one’. The recent study of Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (1963), containing essays by a number of distinguished anthropologists, represents an approach in which the primary concern is to see how witchcraft accusations mirror tensions between different groups within a society. Such approaches are complementary rather than opposed. Each has its value for the historian of witchcraft faced with the strange evidence contained in Tudor and Stuart court records.