Sorcery Practices Research Articles

Psychomedicinal plnts of District Udhampur, Jammu and Kashmir, India

People of Udhampur district in Jammu and Kashmir have been traditionally using many medicinal plants for the treatment of different psychological disorders and mental illnesses. These plants are also used in different religious practices like sorcery, rituals and ceremonies since time immemorial. Extensive and intensive field survey carried out during the period of 2017-2021 and found that there are 27 plant species are being used by local inhabitants for the purpose of psycho-medicinal uses. The information gathered from local inhabitants of the study area like old folk, tribal people, shepherds, Vaidyas or medicinal practitioners etc. The collected plant species are properly identified with the help of local floras and authenticated from regional herbaria like Botanical Survey of India, Northern Circle (BSD), Dehradun and Forest Research Institute (DD), Dehradun. The study enlists 27 plant species from 27 different genera belonging to 25 different families. The botanical name alongwith the local name, plant parts used and their uses is included for each plant species. The different psychological disorders or mental illnesses treated through the mentioned psychomedicinal plants are epilepsy, headache and migraine problems, hydrophobia, insomnia, weak memory, sychoneurosis and insanity. Religious ceremonies, rituals and sorcery practices, like exorcism, are performed using these plants to treat insanity, snake bite and to keep away negative energy.

FAKTA PRAKTIK ILMU HITAM DI FLORES DAN DAYA ILAHI AIR BERKAT

<p><strong>Abstract:</strong> This article aims to present that sorcery and witchcraft<br />is still widely practiced in Flores. It is one of the main thorny<br />sources of social conflicts in almost every village. There have<br />been a hot-witch hunts at many regions of the islands. Numerous<br />witches or sorcerers caught red-handed practicing it were tried<br />according customary laws of the villagers and then killed publicly.<br />This article also presents that a number of paranormals can prove<br />the existence of the sorcery practices. The mediums used by the<br />perpetrators can be detected. These mediums were claimed to<br />emit a kind of toxic gas which is thought to cause the victim to<br />get sick and die. This poisonous gas will, however, disappear only<br />if it is sprinckled by the sacramental holy water and its victim will<br />slowely recover.</p><p><br /><strong>Keywords:</strong> black magic, sorcery, witchcraft, paranormal, divine<br />power, holy water.</p>

The Regulation of Witchcraft and Sorcery Practices and Beliefs

This article reviews and analyzes the growing bodies of literature on the regulation of sorcery and witchcraft beliefs and practices. The most visible problems relating to these beliefs and practices are the violent exorcisms, banishment, torture, and killing inflicted upon those accused of practicing sorcery and witchcraft in many parts of the global South. Sorcery and witchcraft are also (once again) becoming a challenge for countries in the global North, mainly within migrant communities in relation to children accused of witchcraft and exorcized and also in the context of claims to refugee status and freedom of religion. The article covers scholarly literature (legal, anthropological, economic, historical), law reform commission reports, nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports, and UN documents over the past 15 years concerning the regulation of the negative societal impacts of sorcery and witchcraft practices and beliefs. It concludes that there is a need for greater empirical study of the impacts of various regulatory initiatives adopted and promoted by national governments, NGOs, and international organizations.

English

Among the Digo of Kenya the belief and fear of sorcery is most prevalent that many things are explained in relation with it. Over the years, major sorcery-detection and eradication ‘crusades’ conducted by individuals alleging to be endowed with supernatural powers to detect and neutralize purported sorcerers have been witnessed among the Digo. During the eradication ‘crusades’ a considerable amount of money is collected to pay for the services of the presumed experts, indicating how serious the problem is regarded in Digo region. Islam is the religion of majority of the Digo, which has influenced their thinking and world-view, and has specific teachings on the practice of sorcery. Despite substantial influence of Islam on the Digo, the people continue to belief and practice sorcery leading to the development of popular religious therapy. This article will demonstrate that popular Islamic rituals and talismans have been adopted by the Digo to assist the traditional healers in countering the forces of sorcery as a means to restoring health to individuals and the general well-being of society. In exploring the practice of sorcery as experienced by the Digo, this article demonstrates how the traditional techniques of countering sorcery are rooted in the indigenous belief system of the Digo. Both the traditional and the popular Islamic approaches of countering sorcery reveal the ability of the different world views in making remedies and medicines for the victims. Key words: Witchcraft, Sorcery, Islam, Digo and Magic

Sorcery in the Black Atlantic: The Occult Arts in Comparative Perspective

Three recent volumes—Parés and Sansi (eds.), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic; Paton and Forde (eds.), Obeah and Other Powers; and Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World—set a new bar for scholarship about Caribbean and Latin American sorcery, stressing its contingency as well as its transnational and cosmopolitan aspects. Their richly contextualized case studies of African-derived practices related to illness and health, as well as the quotidian experience of slaves outside the plantation, challenge the most entrenched assumptions about sorcery and extend its use to a range of social actors, not just slaves. In the process, they serve to relocate the practice of sorcery in Latin America within a broad comparative framework that includes Europe and the Americas as well as Africa.

"El hechicero no es gente": consideraciones para pensar el conjunto multiétnico xinguano (MT, Brasil) desde la hechicería y el parentesco

The article analyzes the sociopolitical dynamics of the xinguano multiethnic system, located in central-west Brazil, drawing from the logics revealed by sorcery practices. Based on fieldwork with the Aweti, a Tupi xinguano group, the analysis of this logic enables a description of the xinguano sociocultural unity and of the groups that constitute it not only as historical products —something that has already been shown by the region’s ethnology— but also as continuously historical products, always to be recreated. The article’s key argument is that sorcery is the dark side, the unwanted effect of the process of becoming kin, a process central to the constitution of xinguano identity. Thus, sorcery would be what makes the xinguano people never seem perfectly xinguanos/humans to themselves.

Between Hollywood and Bandjoun: art activism and anthropological ethnography into the mediascape

Audio-visual media are a powerful vehicle of globalization engaged in the creation of widespread mediascapes shaping the imagination and the feelings of the people all around the world. As a consequence the audio-visual media are not only a means of anthropological research but a constituent part of the ethnographic field as well.It was in this perspective that in 2009 I asked the Italian artistic collective of Alterazioni Video to accompany me to the Bamileke chiefdom of Bandjoun (Cameroon), where I usually conduct my research. The main topic of our work was fear, an emotion we investigated by filming some traditional masquerades of secret societies (which also made use of some Hollywood-inspired masks) and by making a horror movie with a local cast, using the set and the backstage as an ethnographic field. The vampires and the zombies who were the subject of the film form a part of a shared global imagery but they are also an invisible, effective presence in local sorcery practices. We have tried to stay on the border between facts and fictions, feelings and actors’ performances, as well as art and anthropology, but also to question it, in order to test the way in which anthropology and artistic activism could find a meeting point on the terrain of ethnographic practice.

‘Operation Restore Public Hope’: Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper explores the measures known as ‘Operation Restore Public Hope,’ which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these ‘clean‐up measures’, I argue, undermined the state's claim ‘to restore public hope’ and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence.

Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law: Magic, Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people's contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a new imaginary space of national belonging.

Ethnographic Sorcery (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnographic Sorcery James R. Brennan Harry G. West. Ethnographic Sorcery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 132. Harry West has written a short reflective follow-up to his 2005 study Kupilikula, an important ethnography of sorcery practices in the Mueda plateau of northern Mozambique during its postsocialist liberalization period in the [End Page 145] 1990s and early 2000s. Kupilikula, a Makonde-language verb meaning roughly "to invert," refers to the transcendent maneuvers of both destructive and constructive sorcerers of the Mueda plateau who create phantasms such as man-eating lions and make magical medicines in a never-ending game of one-upmanship. Where the eponymous monograph investigated kupilikula through the lens of contemporary local politics, Ethnographic Sorcery juxtaposes Muedan sorcery with the very ethnography that West himself carried out in Mozambique. Using Jose Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" as his prologue—a story where the protagonist realized he was "a mere simulacrum … a projection of another man's dreams"—West argues that the ethnographer also participated in never-ending transcendent maneuvers by attempting to gain an interpretive ascendancy over a confusing and hostile environment, only to become himself an object of the sorcerer's practice. This potentially glib proposition serves, fortunately, as a useful frame to speculate on the meanings of sorcery and participatory ethnographic fieldwork, as well as to consider the limits of symbolic anthropology. Ethnographic Sorcery addresses several vital themes of contemporary Africanist witchcraft studies and has already attracted much scholarly attention, including a published roundtable discussion (in African Studies Review 51.3 [2008], 135–47). It is a short book comprised of very short chapters that trace the arc of one ethnographer's assumptions, experiences, and epiphanies. Having given up on a preliminary project to study Muedan conceptions of the future, West began to investigate sorcery practices in the 1990s by first seeking classical sociological patterns of accusations. Yet this strategy, itself representative of an earlier anthropological literature (a classic text being Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa [1963]), yielded no discernible patterns, leading the author to embrace a symbolic approach to gain his own "interpretive ascendancy" over the subject—an interpretive strategy that remains the prevailing approach in Africanist witchcraft studies. Speaking at a conference in Mozambique, West suggested that phantasmic man-eating lions were symbols of social predation but also of nobility and power, only to be corrected by a Muedan who objected, "they aren't symbols—they're real" (p. 5). The book's great strength lies in its honest and thoughtful reckoning with this objection. West challenges anthropological strategies that interpret sorcery as metaphors for something else by countering, "whose metaphor is it?" Does the metaphor belong to the riddle-solving anthropologist who stands above the confusion and false consciousness of witchcraft believers by discerning internally coherent but objectively "wrong" social facts, or limning discursive structures otherwise invisible to Muedans who "mistook allegories [End Page 146] for identities" (p. 38)? Uncomfortable with this conceit, West instead offers an analysis of metaphor by calling on the insights of anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers. He comes to endorse the perspective of phenomenologists, who assert that reality exists "only through its apperception" (p. 46), resulting in a "life-world" made out of the meanings people give to it. From this unconventional and often revealing discussion of metaphor, West invokes the conventional and quite durable ontology of coexisting visible and invisible realms, which he argues comprise the key dimensions of the Muedan "lifeworld." The interpretive shift from symbolic anthropology to a phenomenological approach coincides in the text with a serious illness West suffers during his fieldwork, after which his recovery comes to be understood by both himself and others "in Muedan terms." The adoption of this phenomenological approach—heralded by the frequent use of expressions such as "made world," "life-world," and "(re)making of the Muedan world"—has the advantage of taking seriously the experienced reality of sorcery discourse, but at the cost of dulling the riddle-solving impulse to offer up interpretations that risk being right or wrong. What can West or his Muedan interlocutors possibly get wrong interpretively if Muedan sorcery is to be...

Piaroa Sorcery and the Navigation of Negative Affect: To Be Aware, To Turn Away

An overemphasis on the interpretation of language has impeded understanding of the cultural and cognitive logic of sorcery's focal acts: divination and sorcery battle. Among the Piaroa of southern Venezuela, divination and sorcery battle are conducted during hallucinogen‐induced visions, and are predicated on an epistemology that privileges forms of knowing that are neither linguistic nor language‐like. I suggest that Piaroa sorcerers use hallucinogen‐induced visions to map the social ecology of emotions in ways partially explainable by cognitive science, and that mature contemplation may provide the anthropologist with a means of understanding relationships between nonlinguistic thought and culture. I interweave an account of my participation in a sorcery battle with neuropsychological interpretations of cognition and emotion to present a navigation of a negative affect theory of sorcery. The navigation of negative affect theory complements sociological and psychoanalytic approaches while emphasizing the cognitive skills and visionary experiences that underpin the practice of sorcery by shamans.

Literal Meanings: The Case of Mekeo Sorcery

In a recent article in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA), Bergendorff (2003) offers a new approach to the interpretation of traditional sorcery practices among the Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea involving the transcendence of certain conceptual divisions of the indigenous cosmology and local understandings of personhood and the institutional order. On the basis of the ‘literal meaning’ for various words of the Mekeo language, Bergendorff argues that his interpretation resolves an earlier debate on the topic of Mekeo sorcery between Stephen (1998) and me (Mosko 1997). This essay examines the ethnographic data that Bergendroff brings to bear in support of his new interpretation and juxtaposes his methodological use of literal meanings against authoritative linguistic analyses of the Mekeo language and its several dialects (Desnoës 1941a, 1941b; Jones 1998). It is concluded that Bergendorff's analysis is internally inconsistent, that his use of literal meanings is unsupportable, and that the resulting view of Mekeo sorcery, personhood, society and cosmos is profoundly distorted.

Sorcerous Technologies and Religious Innovation in Sri Lanka

This essay examines the importance of sorcery in the dynamics of religious inno vation in contemporary Hindu and Buddhist Sri Lanka.1 My interest stems from two observations. First, in almost stark contrast to other Hindu ritual forms that emphasise unchanging text-based rites, the sorcery practices I describe display an almost modernist preoccupation with innovation. Second, much of this innova tion originates, or is seen to originate, from outside the cosmic order both of the pantheon and of society. Consequently, sorcery practices manifest a dynamism that often results in the appearance of sorcery having sprung up from nowhere or of being on the sharp increase. However, such an appearance of growth is less of an increase by degree than a shift in visibility. Moreover, it is a characteristic Sri Lankan sorcery practices share with practices elsewhere. When social scien tists whose gaze has been primed for spotting anomalies light upon these shifts in visibility, the reaction is usually one of alarm. Scholars whose basic orientation is to the problem of social order and stability tend to judge these apparent aber rations in terms of social breakdown and anomie. Instead of considering what sorcery reveals anthropologically, they instead analyse sorcery as a symptom of a social pathology. The restless dynamism of sorcery and its role in religious innovation remain unaddressed, and this contributes to a conservative view of both the phenomenon of sorcery and the study of religion in general. I commence my discussion with the Tamil Hindu Bhadrakali temple at Munnesvaram on the north-west coast of Sri Lanka in order to introduce a major site for sorcery practice in present-day Sinhala Buddhism. Having situ ated the Hindu goddess Bhadrakali (or more simply Kali) in the contemporary pantheon and introduced some of the sorcery practices associated with her, I turn to an analysis of a special ritual event held near the west-coast town of Kalutara and sponsored by a female trance specialist, or maniyo, who is a devotee of Kali. Sorcery is a practice that looms large in this maniyo's world, but so too is the pursuit of new sorcerous technologies. Followers of the maniyo include a significant number of women who are returned labour migrants to

Javanese-Malay: Between Adaptation and Alienation

This paper examines the interaction between the imposed image of otherness and its manipulation. Descended from migrant workers who came over in the 1920s and 1930s, the Javanese-Malays form a latent sub-category within Malay society. They are generally known as powerful sorcerers or medicine men in Malaysia. Although this is partly due to their Javanese syncretic tradition, their alleged power could also be explained in relation to their marginal position in Malay society. Pragmatically, the Javanese-Malays also took advantage of the imposed image by carving for themselves a niche in the practice of sorcery that the Malays with their stronger Islamic orientation tend to avoid, officially at least. However, in the process of becoming Malay, the JavaneseMalays inevitably began to depart from their niche and thus their alleged magical power, which has served as their cultural resource.

Tolai Sorcery and Change

Despite the considerable literature on the Tolai that has been produced by modern anthropologists as well as earlier ethnographers, we still lack a contemporary account of their notions of sorcery and its practice. This article is an attempt to plug this gap. Of all the ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea, the Tolai have had the longest and closest experience of the wider society that came into being with the onset of colonial rule. Over the past hundred years and more, the Tolai have seen momentous changes that have touched almost every aspect of their society and culture. Since, as with so many other tribal societies, magic was such a central feature of their world-view, the question arises of how the traditional belief in and practice of sorcery have been affected by their changed circumstances. This is the question that the article seeks to address. (Witchcraft, sorcery, social change, Tolai) In a valuable paper in which he explores the nature of Tolai sorcery as it had been examined by Josef Meier and Carl Laufer, two early Catholic missionaries, Peter Sack (1974), a jurist, finds that the gap between the relevant facts remains too wide to allow for more than speculation, and he concludes his essay with the observation that even the best thesis is of limited use if it is not backed up by specific evidence which allows the reader to satisfy himself of its validity. Accepting this view, it has seemed best to build my own analysis around instances involving the attribution of sorcery that I encountered in the course of fieldwork on the island of Matupit.(1) But before turning to this task, I first set out the forms of sorcery recognized by the Tolai. FORMS OF SORCERY In his paper on Tolai sorcery Meier (1913) concentrates on what he calls e magit. E magit, he explains, is understood by the natives of my district as an evil principle of the worst kind.... This evil principle is none else but the dark soul of a sorcerer contriving injury, discord, misfortune and death.... The soul with all its powers leaves its original body to take possession of an animal's body or to take the shape of a new independent human being. (Cited in Sack 1974:402) Elsewhere, Meier (1913:287 ff.) speaks of e magit as no longer having one's own, original shape or appearance, but to have a new shape. It seems clear from this account that the form of sorcery that Meier is talking about is more commonly referred to as iniet. Missionaries and other Europeans with some familiarity with Tolai ways usually refer to iniet as a society of sorcerers although, as far as I am aware, this carries no suggestion that it was a solidary group covering the whole of Tolai society. Meier cites the chant or incantation of an initiated member or a tena iniet, which again I take from Sack's article (1974:403): Invisible I will assail my many victims. Numberless corpses shall lie about and their cadaverous smell shall poison the air.... Quickly I shall murder them so that on the death of the second the first's grave will have not yet been closed. Corpses and graves will tumble in a landslide down the hill. They shall fornicate with the devil himself, fornicate with the most horrible and repulsive spirits, even fornicate with devils who step up to them, painted black like widows mourning for their husbands, so that I can seize them and maim them and push them into deepest misery. Like a sharp-beaked parrot I will hack their genitals, like a greedy ravenous fish I will mangle their genitals and destroy them completely. (Meier 1913:292). The passage just quoted surely presents a vision of evil incarnate(2) that is fully in line with Laufer's (1951) denunciation of the iniet as sheer primitive destructiveness. As in others of his articles, Meier's data consists of written texts prepared by Tolai informants, in this instance former iniet members who had become Catholics, and he offers little empirical data from which the reader can draw his own inferences about the nature of the phenomenon. …

Sorcery in an Australian Tribe

This article compares how sorcery operates among the Lardil of Mornington Island, Northern Queensland with beliefs and practices in other Australian tribes and then examines several relevant theoretical issues. Sorcery has been examined with a cosmological, or sociology of perception, approach by Evans-Pritchard (I937) and with a relationship approach by Marwick (I952, I965). In theory there is nothing hindering one from using both these and other interpretations simultaneously. In this article I use the relationship approach, concentrating on the relationship between sorcerer and victim, because} although the relationship approach has often and fruitfully been used to analyze sorcery and witchcraft in African tribes, it has never been used for an Australian tribe. That sorcery has not received much attention from present day Australianists is surprising because its occurrance in other parts of the world, especially Africa, has. It was often mentioned, though usually briefly, in the early ethnographic literature on the Australian Aborigines. Spencer and Gillen (I899) describe different sorcery techniques (e.g., bone pointing and singing weapons and wounds) among the tribes of Central Australia. They mention some cases of social conflict (e.g., marital disputes) culminating in sorcery and also describe how obtain mystical power and counteract some sorcery practices. Warner (I937) describes sorcery among the Murngin and presents several case histories collected from self-confessed sorcerers. Elkin (I 946) discusses men who were believed to possess exceptional mystical powers, but (Elkin I938:308) was more concerned with healers than with reputed evil doers, which may account for his claim that sorcerers are very rare. My fieldwork at the Gulf of Carpentaria (Mornington Island, Doomadgee, Aurukun, and Weipa) in Northern Queensland and my reading of the ethnographic literature suggest that Elkin's claim is erroneous. Perhaps he means that the role of medicine man is institutionalized, men rarely admitting to being sorcerers. Nevertheless, belief in sorcery is widespread among the Australian Aborigines and death and misfortune are often attributed tO sorcery. Inter aliv, the many reports of inquests support the view that sorcery is ubiquitous, for they are held tO determine what caused the death of the deceased and who was the sorcerer responsible. I describe below Lardil sorcery beliefs and practices and some case histories. Thirty seven sorcery cases are analyzed for the relationship of the reputed sorcerer and believed victim in terms of the kinship system, in generation terms, and in terms of the local social organization. Suspected sorcerers fall into two main categories (affines and classificatory brothers) and conflict between people standing in these relationships often revolve around women.

Sorcery in Early Renaissance Florence

In the published studies of European witchcraft ajid sorcery, Italy does not stand out as a fertile field for the practice of the diabolical arts. Both Hansen and Lea noted the higher incidence of sorcery cases in northern Europe, and particularly in the Alpine regions, where powerful and uncontrolled manifestations of natural phenomena strengthened belief in demons and devils and thus contributed to the practice of sorcery. From the printed evidence, it might be concluded that, in the more rational and skeptical milieu of Renaissance Italy, sorcery was neither practised extensively nor taken seriously by the authorities.It is true that Italy did not experience the extremes of fanaticism and terror which occurred in Germany and the Low Countries from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century.