Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa

by Moore,Henrietta L.

• ISBN13: 9780415258678
• ISBN10: 0415258677
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134575572
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2002-02-01
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

This volume sets out recent thinking on witchcraft in Africa, paying particular attention to variations in meanings and practices. Using recent ethnographic materials from across the continent, the volume explores how witchcraft articulates with particular modern settings. Examples discussed in the text include the State in Cameroon; Pentecostalism in Malawi; the university system in Nigeria and the IMF in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The editors provide a timely overview and reconsideration of longstanding anthropological debate about 'African witchcraft, while simultaneously raising broader concerns about the theories of the western social sciences.

Table of Contents

List of figures	ix
List of contributors	xi
Magical interpretations and material realities: an introduction	1	(27)
Henrietta L. Moore
Todd Sanders
Delusions of development and the enrichment of witchcraft discourses in Cameroon	28	(22)
Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Cannibal transformations: colonialism and commodification in the Sierra Leone hinterland	50	(21)
Rosalind Shaw
Vulture men, campus cultists and teenaged witches: modern magics in Nigerian popular media	71	(26)
Misty L. Bastian
Witchcraft and scepticism by proxy: Pentecostalism and laughter in urban Malawi	97	(21)
Rijk Van Dijk
Black market, free market: anti-witchcraft shrines and fetishes among the Akan	118	(18)
Jane Parish
Betrayal or affirmation? Transformations in witchcraft technologies of power, danger and agency among the Tuareg of Niger	136	(24)
Susan Rasmussen
Save our skins: structural adjustment, morality and the occult in Tanzania	160	(24)
Todd Sanders
Witchcraft in the new South Africa: from colonial superstition to postcolonial reality?	184	(22)
Isak Niehaus
On living in a world with witches: everyday epistemology and spiritual insecurity in a modern African city (Soweto)	206	(20)
Adam Ashforth
Witchcraft, development and paranoia in Cameroon: interactions between popular, academic and state discourse	226	(21)
Cyprian F. Fisiy
Peter Geschiere
Index	247