Anthropological study of witchcraft: Toward a hermeneutical approach

Witchcraft, a topic of perennial interest in anthropology, is seen to be problematic due to the absence of its putative central figure, the witch himself or herself. Witchcraft is shown to pose two overriding challenges for anthropology: (1) how to describe it and (2) what kind of accounting to give for it. By calling in question the role of the informant and the person of the ethnographer in production of ethnographic knowledge and by taxing the resources of anthropological theory in the attempt to account for it, witchcraft is seen to raise issues that lie at the very center of the anthropological enterprise. The first challenge of description leads both to analytic distinctions between witchcraft and sorcery in defining the unit of study and to substantive distinctions differentiating witchcraft in traditional African, Melanesian, and Native North American societies from the Gardnerian Wicca movement current in the United States and England. The second challenge shows anthropological theory to have had recourse to a variety of psychological, sociological, and physiological explanations in its attempt to account for witchcraft phenomena. Through analysis of a number of anthropological discussions of the topic, it is shown that any single-valued approach is inadequate to account for the complexity of witchcraft data. The analysis builds toward the conclusion (1) that witchcraft is an unstable compound remanufactured in every locality out of elemental bodily, psychological, sociological, and intellectual ingredients according to local cultural recipes, (2) that epistemology and worldview have primacy among the ingredients as being the component which establishes the value assigned to the other elements, and (3) that therefore a fourfold interpretive grid or hermeneutic is required to account for the witchcraft complex--or, by extension, any complex cultural phenomena