Abstract: Witches get attention in ways that women do not. Referencing historical witch hunts serves to substantiate the ways that women and other marginalized people have been harmed by institutions of power and the individuals that constitute them. Like historical trials themselves, scholars’ anxieties around popular feminist witchcraft narratives are about power. In this Afterword to the Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft Discussion Forum: Revitalizing the Feminist Historiography of Witchcraft, I ask: what is actually on trial, in the here and now, in all these stories about witches and about who embodies the authority to tell them?

Abstract: Marshall Sahlins's understanding of kinship as cultural rather than biological has been salutary to kinship studies, but his definition of kinship as "mutuality of being" leaves untheorized those aspects of kinship relations experienced as negative, burdensome, or ambivalent. In defining witchcraft as "negative kinship," Sahlins gets at something important, but also overlooks the tradition deriving from Emile Durkheim in which kinship connection is understood as in tension with egoistic self-regard, such that amity and resentment are flip-sides of the same coin.

Abstract: The Twelver Shi'i hadith corpus features wide-ranging discussions of astrology, including theology, permissibility, and technique, paralleling the scientific, theological, and cultural evolution of Islamicate astrology and cosmology. While many Twelver Shi'i hadith treat astrology as a valid science of divine origin, the corpus nevertheless contains conflicting viewpoints on the acceptability of astrology. This article argues that individual hadith themselves reflect evolving notions of astrology, ranging from ancient Arabian astrolatry to Islamicate mathematical astrology. Ultimately, astrology became theologically acceptable through its conceptual separation from pre-Islamic Arabian practices ( jāhiliyya ); while concerns about it being a "foreign science" due to its association with the Hellenic, Persian, and Indian heritages were allayed through absorbing it into the intellectual inheritance of the Prophet Muḥammad's household to support Twelver Shi'i theological concerns.

Abstract: This Materia Magica contribution concerns an extant 62-line textual amulet (Zurich, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, LM 24097), which contains Latin text and German explanatory instructions about its magical powers and possible positioning on the body. The amulet dates from the last quarter of the fourteenth century and was found among documents of the von Wellenberg family, lesser nobility from northeastern Switzerland. The purpose of the article is to more firmly date and localize the amulet based on paleography and other evidence; identify its intended end-user, a noblewoman of childbearing years named "Greta" (i.e. Margaretha or another Germanic version of Margaret), and position her family in its historical time and place; analyze the amulet's multiple textual components and their functions, including general protection, medical magic, safe childbirth, and forms of aristocratic magic promising embattled nobles advantages in the military, political, and legal realm. The article includes a modified diplomatic edition of the text and instructions.

Abstract: Marshall Sahlins's lifelong championing of the American culturalist school of social anthropology was motivated by culture critique: it enabled his criticism of modern "Western" disenchantment as its own, disastrious, form of enchantment. This was true of his earliest work, and remains true in The New Science of the Enchanted Universe , which explores "transcendentalist" ontologies as dangerous to a right relationship with the natural world.

Abstract: The role of images in the construction and circulation of belief concerning magic and witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries has been the focus of a number of studies. But what was their role from the 18th century onwards, when the elites' criticism of that belief became ever stronger? The article starts from an iconographic reinterpretation of Crepy's famous engraving The Witches' Sabbath (1710). Far from being the first figurative parody of the witches' nocturnal gathering, as Chares Zika has argued, it is actually an image that makes use of a different communicative technique to counter superstition. The results are however ambiguous and show all the limitations of images for this purpose. It is no coincidence that the elites entrusted the controversy to the printed word and not to illustrations: although the latter were easier for the illiterate to understand, the risk of misunderstanding was too great.

Abstract: Marshall Sahlins's final, posthumous New Science of the Enchanted Universe contributes importantly to our understanding of metapersons across cultures, especially in what Sahlins describes as immanentist ontologies. As such it provides a bridge between anthropology and Indigenous Studies. Sahlins rectifies or discards many classical categories of anthropological thought, including "religion" and "magic" and "spirits," but he strangely insists on retaining "gods;" this choice imports a transcendentalist (and Christian or post-Christian) cosmology into Indigenous ontologies.