Book review: Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan. Witch Hunts: Culture Patriarchy and Structural Transformation

Witch Hunts: Culture Patriarchy and Structural Transformation is a remarkably ambitious book, offering an overview of the phenomenon across a range of contemporary societies. Characterising witchcraft as ‘the plane of beliefs about people who use supernatural and mystified practices to cause harm’ (p. 11), the familiar witch hunts of medieval and early modern Europe form the historical backdrop. The authors make a sound case for relating witch hunts to questions of political economy—more specifically, placing witch hunts in the context of developing capitalist economies. Thanks to this effort, we now have a wide range of perspectives on the subject, assembled from within the existing anthropological literature.

Discussions about witchcraft in Africa are known to students of social anthropology through the canonical texts of E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1937) who invited us to examine the logic of inexplicable phenomena in the simplest of societies, thereby providing common bases of the rationality underlying human action everywhere. However, taking Enlightenment rationality as a given, this book entertains no possibility of alternative cosmologies and asks if beliefs in witchcraft are justified, where evidence cannot be produced for supposed supernatural actions. Further, the authors question the reliability of acquiring knowledge about witchcraft accusations. Interspersed throughout the text, judgements aimed at establishing the irrationality of local practices mar an otherwise laudable scholarly effort. A more productive approach would perhaps have been to further nuance the rich analyses outlined in the concluding sections of the book.

The authors move swiftly from one case to the next, describing brief contours of each, along with location and methods deployed to first identify and then condemn witches to harassment, physical torture, denunciation or excommunication. The reader wishes they had paused to reflect on at least some, provide more context, tell us how to read them or follow up with an analysis of the forces at play. At one place, offering a clue about their method, they mention their day-long discussion with merely three survivors, of listening to them and marking the case as belonging to one or another category illustrative of accusations or persecutions (p. 71). This seems methodologically weak, but it also serves to clarify their interest in the macro-picture.

The overload of factual information comes at the cost of interviews or conversations with community members, those identified as witches, family members, diviners, witch-finders and, in fact, practitioners. What do people themselves think of their practices, what meaning does witchcraft have in their lives and how do they live in close proximity with the effects of witch hunts? How is a social group scarred by such trauma within? These and related questions await answers by future scholars.

Grouping cases under distinct criteria would have helped. Also confusing is the inability of the authors to separate examples of the caste context of Rajasthan from indigenous societies of Central India. Papering over such major differences is methodologically problematic. Moreover, since in several indigenous societies both women and men had enjoyed their own separate and dominant spheres of influence, this must be teased out in order to assess the extent to which pre-existing gendered spheres of influence have gradually got eroded. Although the motif of struggles over land and land seizure emerge as common features in cases of women hunted as witches, this is by now so well established in the literature that the reader looks for more analytical insights. In fact, Chapters 2 and 3 abruptly end with brief descriptions, while the narrative moves on to a discussion of the European experience. Nor are the cases that are collated—probably from newspaper reports, and crime and police records—to convey a sense of how the hunts are carried out against vocal, assertive, independent women exercising their agency particularly helpful.

One wades through many diverse geographical contexts, including China, Latin America, North America and Europe, before coming to inferences and discussions on patterns. That the rich Indian material stands unconnected with the analytical part of the book is not only a lost opportunity but also a major flaw.

The chapters rely largely on secondary sources, sifting through but barely touching upon discussions and arguments made by anthropologists ranging from Taussig to the Comaroffs, Geshiere, Guyer, Evans Pritchard and others^. The African material is the most interesting, and the authors draw attention to similarities with the Indian case. In fact, since anthropologists of African societies have analysed witchcraft at length, there is indeed plenty for us to learn from the African material, some of which I reference further.

Since witchcraft is largely an intra-community affair, referred to by Peter Geschiere (2003) as ‘the dark side of kinship’, neighbourhood inequalities in close-knit communities should be our primary concern, along with how new inequalities are produced though differential access to new forms of income. It is precisely because of the diversity of ways in which witchcraft has adapted, adjusted and transformed contemporary African societies in transition that the African evidence holds enormous lessons. For example, the Comaroffs showed how people’s vision of modernity was itself tied to witchcraft (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1993); in Soweto, witches replaced former apartheid regimes as explanation for people’s suffering (Ashforth, 2005) while a marked increase in witchcraft accusations were found where matrilineal descent had motivated repatriation of Congloese refugees (Apter, 2012)—all highlighting the paradoxical ‘modernity’ of witchcraft (Geschiere, 1997; Kahn, 2011).

Striking parallels in terms of the nature of societies and gender relations, as well as valuable arguments about the intensity of the phenomenon, relate to the coming together of a number of transformations—from matriliny to patriliny, the consolidation of patriarchy and the primary accumulation of capital. The authors argue that the simultaneous articulation of witchcraft beliefs with massive structural changes produces the spiritual insecurity’ characteristic of much of African and Indian indigenous peoples (p. 201). Further, since witchcraft emerges in zones where institutional flux is the highest, and value systems are in competition, the witch may be seen as the product of ‘normative ambiguity’ (p. 168). The later chapters constitute some of the major theoretical contributions of the book.

In spite of this, since no attempt is made to integrate such insights with the Indian cases outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, the reader must work out for themself which of the cited cases represent a transitional phase from hoe to plough agriculture; from matriliny to patriliny and why; what the consolidation of patriarchy means in terms of actual processes on the ground and how we might identify shifts from more egalitarian to patriarchal forms. For example, in the instance of Jharkhand, 50 of the 56 accusers of witchcraft practiced by witches were close relatives, which endorses the importance of intimacy. We also learn that confessions could only be extracted through torture. The example from Rajasthan, of women landless labourers or those working in brick kilns and other kinds of manual work to support themselves, exemplifies how families turn against them, enough to evict women from their own homes. In other cases, relatives encroach onto the lands and houses of these vulnerable women.

A perspective missing from this study is that of victims of witches, or those whom the latter are supposed to have bewitched. Moreover, since witches function within familial settings, it may sometimes be impossible to identify the offender as a witch.

In highlighting this ambivalence, it must be underlined in conclusion that the assumptions in the book are about an identifiable witch figure, either through newspaper accounts or through general acceptance. Left out of its purview is the larger plethora of everyday cases in the Indian context by which the unsuspecting may come under another’s spell and adverse intentions. In such cases, the exorcist or diviner is also called upon to play the role of ‘healer’. Then the aim may not be to identify a witch as much as to heal the victim.