Witchcraft, spiritual worldviews and environmental management: Rationality and assemblage

Abstract

This article interrogates the interrelationship between witchcraft, spiritual worldviews and environmental management. Drawing on diverse literatures from anthropology, conservation science and geography, this article explores how witchcraft and spiritual worldviews have been rationalised in order to explain their continued significance, for society as a whole and for the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity specifically. Using an assemblage framework, this article examines how the agencies of spirits and witches are entangled with other social and material entities, drawing on examples from three communities in Tanzania. It argues that thinking through assemblage allows the agentic capacities of spirits and witchcraft to be recognised, whilst also acknowledging their inseparability from other expressive and material components of assemblages, including social organisation and more-than-human actors. Finally, this article turns to evidence for the deterritorialisation, or breaking apart, of these assemblages around spiritual worldviews and witchcraft, and considers their future role in local conservation.