Palpating history: Magical healing and revolutionary care in Rural Serbia and Macedonia

Abstract

Marxist feminist Silvia Federici has identified the figure of the witch as exemplifying a non-capitalist worldview. While Federici’s analysis has significantly nuanced understandings of primitive accumulation, its significance for traditions of magical healing remains to be studied. While Federici focuses on the violent campaign against witchcraft in Western Europe, she does not deal with those people who still practice ways of healing glossed as ‘witchcraft’ or ‘magic’ in the present, which have been largely subsumed by the academic discipline of folklore. As the Ottoman Empire was exempt from the early-modern witch craze, the ongoing practices of magical healing found in Serbia and Macedonia provide a particularly rich site for such an investigation. Grounded in ethnographic research on incantation-based healing practices in the Balkan region, this article reveals the contemporary significance of vernacular healing practices in cultivating a relational view of the body. While folklorists have anticipated the death of these practices since the 19th century, the continuation of these practices in the Balkan region tells us that these premonitions of cultural death did not come to fruition. By revealing the false distinction between the social body, the physical body and the mind, healers recognize the body as not only a sack of organs, but as a historical subject embedded in a specific set of material relations. Health is constituted not only by the absence of disease, but by intersubjective relations with the natural world and an ongoing obligation to act ethically toward the dead, toward one’s neighbors and toward future generations. Refusing to accept a vision of time and history that regards incantations as archaic, the dead as foreign and the village as the site of the past, the healing practices discussed in this article provide a fertile agenda for revolutionary planning.