The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative

Abstract

By analysing the formation of one bewitchment narrative, the paper argues that narratives on bewitchment primarily serve as communicative de- vices by which one can negotiate his social position in the community, even in cases when overt social conflict is not involved. In case of misfortune the local bewitchment theories give rise to several competing interpretations in the com- munity (a Hungarian village in Romania). The different versions also assign different roles to the bewitched: some put them into the position of the guilty while others show them as wholly innocent victims. By following the interpreta- tional strategies applied during the construction of the bewitchment narrative of a family whose social position was shaken, the paper aims to show how the bewitched managed to reach a version which has put them into a favourable position, and how this narrative was employed to 'save their faces'. Most of the anthropological, socio-historical and folkloristic studies of witch- craft see the essence of the institution in its function to express and channel existing social tensions by interpreting them as pretexts for certain misfor- tunes. While this is evidently true for certain periods, communities and cases, the few anthropological studies on contemporary rural witchcraft show that the importance of witchcraft may lie elsewhere than in manifesting social con- flicts. The first to challenge the absolute validity of this interpretation was Jeanne Favret-Saada, who in her thorough study on contemporary witchcraft in France (Favret-Saada 1980) argued that in reality witchcraft accusations were mostly targeted at people engaged in a rather neutral affair with the victims (neigh- bours), instead of being aimed at those with whom the bewitched had tense relationships (relatives). In her view, witchcraft was to be considered a special language constituting a discourse which, putting otherwise unexplainable events to a certain perspective, offered the bewitched an explanation and solution to their problems. During her fieldwork, and in her analysis as well, J. Favret- Saada decidedly took the perspective of the bewitched 1 and concentrated on bewitchment narratives as inner explanations - explanations that the be-