Abstract
This book represents an ending of two things. The first is of the author’s tenacious desire over 40 years to write a book about a very minor incident of alleged witchcraft and black magic in Northern Ireland. The second is of the author’s illustrious career as a professional social anthropologist-come-sociologist. There seems something symmetrical about a young undergraduate’s first obsession with allegations of ritual killings and the writing up of the data as his final book before retirement in September 2014.
To me it also marks a beginning. This is the need to start a thoroughgoing sociology of rumour. Four things strike me as important to the sociology of rumour: the motivations and interests of the teller in spreading the allegations; the motivations and interests of the hearer in wanting to believe them enough, or to take them seriously enough, to retell them; the socio-cultural modes of dissemination by which the allegation is transmitted; and the way in which the purpose or function of the allegations links them to deeper structural issues of class, power and inequality. I am sure other sociologists will think there are more. Although Jenkins’s analysis is not structured around a sociology – or social anthropology – of rumour, some of these considerations are dealt with.
The first thing to note is how very paltry are the original allegations; the second is how very skilfully the author builds an edifice on them. The (real) disappearance and murder of a young Protestant child is associated with allegations of sheep killings, sacrificial goats, and occult and devil worship made by cheap sensationalist journalists and politicised Protestant prelates, to become a window into understanding Northern Ireland’s troubled times in the worst years of its civil conflict. Jenkins opens up the malevolent role of spooks and spies in disseminating rumours about black magic to manage the threat of political violence, linking the occult with the dirty war. We see the role of so-called ‘experts’ in trying to authenticate and legitimise what more sensible people knew as nonsense. And we get to see the political conflict at the back of the process, as only some categories of people were thought to be affected by beliefs in fairies and bogeymen, or to engage in devil worship. Northern Ireland’s distorted social structure helped elicit and circulate the rumours for a short time.
The book functions well as a lens into a distant world outsiders may have forgotten, making the allegations seem more parochial than they were at the time because they are so historical. Three comments are worth making though. First, in locating the allegations in the anthropological literature on popular folk beliefs – with the de rigueur references to the Azande – the author gives them an attention I do not think they deserve. These allegations were ridiculous and we should not be constrained by moral relativism from saying they are just plain crazy. There are other, better ways of illuminating that localised, violent and dysfunctional world that was 1970s Belfast than through magnifying a few absurd allegations about the occult. The dirty war of British propaganda has long been exposed; so too the connections between Protestant paramilitaries, politicised Protestant churchmen, and child sex abuse in Kincora Boys’ Home that Jenkins hints at (further details about which the publisher’s lawyers may well have deleted).
Second, the author spends so much effort on explaining why the allegations disseminated and were taken seriously in small corners that not enough is said about the many more who did not take them seriously and who attacked their popularisation. A thoroughgoing sociology of rumour addresses why rumours fail as much as succeed. This means that the author does not emphasise enough for me the sort of social structural context in which these rumours gained a short life. References to ‘Black Masses’, and to the ‘Celtic nature’ of some of the rituals, is code for the conservative evangelical idea that Catholicism is pre-Christian and pagan; views that had much wider provenance and popularity in Northern Ireland than any about witchcraft and wizardry. That some of the so-called ‘experts’ called upon for comment were Protestant clergy should have given this game away.
Third, the analysis of why the rumours ended, which locates it in changing news agendas, does not do justice to the social structural factors in which they circulated and which gave them meaning for a time. Such a structural context endured long after the rumours ended and, in my view, anti-Catholicism just took on different forms.
My ending will not be there, however. This is a very clever book – some readers may think too clever by half – but Jenkins’s skill as a writer and his sharp intellect will be sadly missed by professional sociology. This reviewer wishes him well and looks forward to reading his next in what I know will be a very prolific and productive retirement.