Anthropologists' Declining Productivity in the Sociology of Witchcraft 1

Abstract

There are two main lines of research stemming from Euans‐Pritchard's classic study of witchcraft among the Azande. The first is the comparative study of cosmologies, which , inter alia, has thrown light on modern debates regarding the nature of scientific cosmology. The second has been concerned with the part played by accusations of witchcraft in micro‐political processes. Even in the second of these research fields, the contributions of anthropologists have in recent years been eclipsed by those of scholars in other disciplines, in particular, historians and a lawyer. The virtual retirement of anthropologists from a field once indisputably their preserve has resulted, not from their clinging to an outworn paradigm, but rather from their failure to distinguish between the dogma derived from informants' statements and the social characteristics of accusers, witches, and victims aggregated from samples of case histories large enough to yield statistically significant results.