ABSTRACT
Evans-Pritchard argues that the everyday immediacy of witchcraft was shown by the time-specific way that Azande consulted the oracle: "A man never asks the oracles whether a certain man is a witch. He asks whether at the moment this man is bewitching him". In Witchcraft, belief in witchcraft works to ensure everyday moral decorum in the opposite direction as well: not only do people wish to avoid being accused of witchcraft, they also want to avoid unduly antagonizing anyone who might be a witch and harm them. The notion that witchcraft beliefs were oppressive and painful endured through much of the rest of twentieth-century anthropology. Mary Douglas's advocacy of anthropological investigation of the relationship between knowledge and action would in due course be fruitful in medical anthropology of the 1990s and beyond. EvansPritchard's interest in the limits of conceptual knowledge would also reemerge in later anthropology, in particular, that of the emotions.
