Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande

click here for more details, find new or used items	E.E. Evans-Pritchard Our price £25.64 (£26.99) New from £16.56 Used from £8.39 Pages: 462 (Paperback) Editor: Eva Gillies ISBN: 0198740298 Pub: Oxford University Press Pub date: 1976-05-13 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 49183

Reader Reviews:

How studying witchcraft can help make sense of a society! (12/12 people found this helpful)

I first came across this book over thirty years ago when I studied social anthropology for the first time. At first I protested that witchcraft beliefs could have nothing to do with social science and I should not be required to apply my rational intellect to such mumbo jumbo. But then I buckled down and soon began to learn how wrong I was.

Evans Pritchard was one of the pioneering anthropologists who set out to understand what others thought was familiar in 'advanced' societies by looking at life in unfamiliar, supposedly 'primitive' societies. He took himself off to live among tribal communities in the non-muslim south of colonial Sudan. One such community was the Azande, at the time ruled - under Anglo-Egyptian supervision - by King Lobengula. One method of investigation included training Azande 'informants' to tell him how their society worked. But his main apprapoch was 'participant observation.' He used his own eyes and ears and an acute brain to find out and interpret for himself.

One thing he observed was that whenever something unfortunate happened to an Azande he - or she - suspected witchcraft, and was not backward in accusing whomever was suspected of using it. It wasn't that the Azande denied common sense explanations and observations. if a gourd falls on my head its because it's ready to drop. But why did it fall on my head? That's witchcraft. What he also noticed was that - unsurprisingly - victims tended to accuse people they didn't like very much. He used witchcraft accusations as a way of mapping all the tensions in the community.

One doesn't get too many accusations of witch craft in British or American society these days - but local gossip or the media still 'demonise' individuals and groups in subtle and not so subtle ways. The patterns and nature of modern scapegoating and worse can still tell us a lot of how our own societies work. How we deal with immigrants, aliens, asylum seekers can tell us much about the tensions in our own nations and communities - housing, jobs, wealth creation and Distribution........

Evans Pritchard also used his study of witchcraft among the Azande to understand how people can hold beliefs that mey be mutually contradictory or plainly at odds with fact...... and lots more. But that means buying the book!

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