I don't know anything about Ghana, but it's also possible that to the extent it has a functioning democratic state, taking witchcraft seriously is in fact a response to the will of the people. Where I did my fieldwork in rural Bolivia, more than once people expressed frustration that the state didn't assume its obvious responsibilities in the matter of witchcraft: they saw this straightforwardly as a matter of good public order.
It is the case there as well that a central attraction of evangelical Christianity is direct access to the Bible in Guarani: many Bible passages straightforwardly assume witches exist and are evil. Catholic priests --- even very beloved ones -- were seen as pitifully naive when they discouraged witch talk and witch persecution. When I told people that back in my homeland no one really believed in witchcraft this was similarly treated as laughably unworldly, not as evidence of modern sophistication.
I think the state is caught between wanting to appear as a 'grown up' secular rational body that rejects witchcraft, and wanting to appear strong on anything problem of social tension. As you say, churches which agree that witchcraft is dangerous are growing and popular, and recent academia has this phrase 'taking it seriously', of accepting that the witchcraft worldview causes legitimate harm both to the victims of persecution and the victims of the 'witchcraft'. Ultimately I think many African countries will go down the road of allowing witchcraft trials with the caveat that noone is ever punished, thereby allowing grievances to be heard.
"I think the state is caught between wanting to appear as a 'grown up' secular rational body that rejects witchcraft, and wanting to appear strong on anything problem of social tension"
Similar to what was happening in Afghanistan and other places "liberated" by Western NGOs.
Neoliberalism's commitment to a wholly materialistic view of the universe prevents them from seeing the world as these Ghanaians do. They are not witches, they are oppressed; that person is not cursed, they are mentally ill; the livestock died because of climate change, not from the hex the weird old lady down the road put on your younger brother after he ran across her yard.
The whole story is quite confusing, but your writing helps to untangle it. This sort of highlights for me the uselessness of having foreign organizations come in and attempt to impose a solution to a problem that they don't understand.
One of the great problems with modern society is the large number of people who don't 'have a place'. We tend to have a few categories and anyone who doesn't fit neatly into one of these categories has no place and winds up 'homeless', on drugs, essentially a lost person. The camps, problematic as they may be, offer these people a better place in society than our lost or homeless people often find, although like anything I suspect that this is highly situation dependent.
I initially heard of the story through BBC and other reports and I thought my summation would be quite simple, but digging into the history of the camps showed how poorly understood they are, even by the local authorities and the central govt. NGOs have a set of liberal lenses through which they view the world - poverty and gender being the big ones, but it doesn't work. I think many of the women there are widows, socially isolated, mentally ill and just outcasts, like you said, don't have a place. I don't see them closing any time soon.
Yeah people rarely benefit from being shoved into pigeonholes, even if it is by a highly trained shover. So many human problems are highly nuanced and top down solutions rarely match the solutions that a community developed over time. I don't know enough about it to defend or accuse these camps, I so wander though how much of our own milieu we are importing into our understanding of them to our detriment.
Great, illuminating piece. Sounds like the punishment of witchcraft is useful, and unless it stops being useful then it will continue. The public hanging of anyone making allegations of witchcraft might work, as might less draconian punishments combined with the creation of other social institutions that replicate at least some of the functions of the punishment of witches (state funded old age pensions? Nunneries?). Extensive NGO support targeted at those in witchcraft camps would be a plausible proposal if you were looking to increase the role of witchcraft in Ghanaian society.
Professor Sean Redding of Amherst College, writing in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia seems to have little difficulty explaining the cause of modern witchcraft in Africa:
"Systems of global trade, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later colonial production of various commodities, both created wealth for a few and inflicted harm on many people. The perceived immorality of these economic and social networks was often captured in stories of witches ambushing people and selling them or consuming their life forces. The spiritual insecurity represented in these beliefs in witchcraft has continued into the postcolonial era."
I'm not sure which is more repugnant: the the persecution and murder of harmless old ladies or the crass cretinism of modern academia.
Tediously predictable, even just looking at Ghanaian history its easy to see that witchcraft predated the Atlantic slave trade, and the Saharan trade. These people will just rewrite the entirety of African history to fit a morality tale of slavery rather than engage honestly.
Roughly matches with other scholars I've read, although someone like Carlo Ginzburg would argue differently.
This line seems the most salient to me from the essay you linked:
"Nothing could be further from the truth. "Community-based" courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches. National courts condemned only about 30% of the accused."
We often think that remote justice will be less fair, less just. But witchcraft is an intensely local and domestic problem, between intimates and neighbours. I don't see it going away without a collapse of the entire communitarian ethos which underpins agrarian African life.
I read years ago, somewhere, that people accused of witchcraft were generally old women who owned land. The suggestion was that the accusers wanted to inherit the land. I don't take that as a proven fact, but a suggestion that most witchcraft accusations are at root competition over resources. Outside of the most marketized societies, a lot of resources are controlled within families, so within families there are plenty of resource conflicts. If one takes these situations and "turns off the sound track", that is, strips off the reasons people give for their behavior, do their actions appear to be rational from a realpolitik viewpoint?
To a degree. It's certainly the case that elderly widows are disproportionately targeted for witchcraft accusations, but whether the community or accuser benefits directly from this I'm not sure. There has been modest success in reintegrating women back into their villages, suggesting their property has not been confiscated.
I think the formatting to this bit might need a quick edit:
> In another source from 1969 Cardinall writes: In Dagomba, Mamprussi and Nanumba and to some extent in Gonja, separate villages are set apart for the use of witches. In Gonja confessed or “convicted” witches become the slaves of the sub-divisional chief (Cardinall, cited in Parker 2006: 353).
I don't know anything about Ghana, but it's also possible that to the extent it has a functioning democratic state, taking witchcraft seriously is in fact a response to the will of the people. Where I did my fieldwork in rural Bolivia, more than once people expressed frustration that the state didn't assume its obvious responsibilities in the matter of witchcraft: they saw this straightforwardly as a matter of good public order.
It is the case there as well that a central attraction of evangelical Christianity is direct access to the Bible in Guarani: many Bible passages straightforwardly assume witches exist and are evil. Catholic priests --- even very beloved ones -- were seen as pitifully naive when they discouraged witch talk and witch persecution. When I told people that back in my homeland no one really believed in witchcraft this was similarly treated as laughably unworldly, not as evidence of modern sophistication.
I think the state is caught between wanting to appear as a 'grown up' secular rational body that rejects witchcraft, and wanting to appear strong on anything problem of social tension. As you say, churches which agree that witchcraft is dangerous are growing and popular, and recent academia has this phrase 'taking it seriously', of accepting that the witchcraft worldview causes legitimate harm both to the victims of persecution and the victims of the 'witchcraft'. Ultimately I think many African countries will go down the road of allowing witchcraft trials with the caveat that noone is ever punished, thereby allowing grievances to be heard.
"I think the state is caught between wanting to appear as a 'grown up' secular rational body that rejects witchcraft, and wanting to appear strong on anything problem of social tension"
Similar to what was happening in Afghanistan and other places "liberated" by Western NGOs.
Neoliberalism's commitment to a wholly materialistic view of the universe prevents them from seeing the world as these Ghanaians do. They are not witches, they are oppressed; that person is not cursed, they are mentally ill; the livestock died because of climate change, not from the hex the weird old lady down the road put on your younger brother after he ran across her yard.
The whole story is quite confusing, but your writing helps to untangle it. This sort of highlights for me the uselessness of having foreign organizations come in and attempt to impose a solution to a problem that they don't understand.
One of the great problems with modern society is the large number of people who don't 'have a place'. We tend to have a few categories and anyone who doesn't fit neatly into one of these categories has no place and winds up 'homeless', on drugs, essentially a lost person. The camps, problematic as they may be, offer these people a better place in society than our lost or homeless people often find, although like anything I suspect that this is highly situation dependent.
I initially heard of the story through BBC and other reports and I thought my summation would be quite simple, but digging into the history of the camps showed how poorly understood they are, even by the local authorities and the central govt. NGOs have a set of liberal lenses through which they view the world - poverty and gender being the big ones, but it doesn't work. I think many of the women there are widows, socially isolated, mentally ill and just outcasts, like you said, don't have a place. I don't see them closing any time soon.
Yeah people rarely benefit from being shoved into pigeonholes, even if it is by a highly trained shover. So many human problems are highly nuanced and top down solutions rarely match the solutions that a community developed over time. I don't know enough about it to defend or accuse these camps, I so wander though how much of our own milieu we are importing into our understanding of them to our detriment.
Masterfully written, I learned a lot, thank you!
Thanks VC
Great, illuminating piece. Sounds like the punishment of witchcraft is useful, and unless it stops being useful then it will continue. The public hanging of anyone making allegations of witchcraft might work, as might less draconian punishments combined with the creation of other social institutions that replicate at least some of the functions of the punishment of witches (state funded old age pensions? Nunneries?). Extensive NGO support targeted at those in witchcraft camps would be a plausible proposal if you were looking to increase the role of witchcraft in Ghanaian society.
Professor Sean Redding of Amherst College, writing in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia seems to have little difficulty explaining the cause of modern witchcraft in Africa:
"Systems of global trade, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later colonial production of various commodities, both created wealth for a few and inflicted harm on many people. The perceived immorality of these economic and social networks was often captured in stories of witches ambushing people and selling them or consuming their life forces. The spiritual insecurity represented in these beliefs in witchcraft has continued into the postcolonial era."
I'm not sure which is more repugnant: the the persecution and murder of harmless old ladies or the crass cretinism of modern academia.
Tediously predictable, even just looking at Ghanaian history its easy to see that witchcraft predated the Atlantic slave trade, and the Saharan trade. These people will just rewrite the entirety of African history to fit a morality tale of slavery rather than engage honestly.
Quite. Still, they provide the rest of us with our own morality tale, or at least, an epistemological one.
Reading this text about witchcraft and witch-burning in Europe changed my views on the topic significantly:
https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/witch_hunt.html
Is there anyone here knowledgeable about the subject who can comment on how reliable this account is?
Roughly matches with other scholars I've read, although someone like Carlo Ginzburg would argue differently.
This line seems the most salient to me from the essay you linked:
"Nothing could be further from the truth. "Community-based" courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches. National courts condemned only about 30% of the accused."
We often think that remote justice will be less fair, less just. But witchcraft is an intensely local and domestic problem, between intimates and neighbours. I don't see it going away without a collapse of the entire communitarian ethos which underpins agrarian African life.
I read years ago, somewhere, that people accused of witchcraft were generally old women who owned land. The suggestion was that the accusers wanted to inherit the land. I don't take that as a proven fact, but a suggestion that most witchcraft accusations are at root competition over resources. Outside of the most marketized societies, a lot of resources are controlled within families, so within families there are plenty of resource conflicts. If one takes these situations and "turns off the sound track", that is, strips off the reasons people give for their behavior, do their actions appear to be rational from a realpolitik viewpoint?
To a degree. It's certainly the case that elderly widows are disproportionately targeted for witchcraft accusations, but whether the community or accuser benefits directly from this I'm not sure. There has been modest success in reintegrating women back into their villages, suggesting their property has not been confiscated.
Do you have a specific citation for claims of penis-stealing mobile phones? I could only find claims of killer mobile phones with Google.
My bad, was an editing error. Should have been penis-snatching and killer mobile phones
I think the formatting to this bit might need a quick edit:
> In another source from 1969 Cardinall writes: In Dagomba, Mamprussi and Nanumba and to some extent in Gonja, separate villages are set apart for the use of witches. In Gonja confessed or “convicted” witches become the slaves of the sub-divisional chief (Cardinall, cited in Parker 2006: 353).