Sick Again,Well Again: Sorcery,Christianity and Kinship in Northern Aboriginal Australia

This article concerns the ways in which Yolngu people of the Galiwin'ku settlement in northern Australia employ contemporary constructions of sorcery doctrines and Christian practices to rearticulate their kinship relations. In particular, I discuss the adaptation of sorcery ideas and accusations to present-day circumstances and the Christian healing processes that have emerged alongside traditional healing behaviours and biomedicine. Sorcery and Christianity at Galiwin'ku, I argue, are intertwined ethical models that enable the person and community to heal over and over again in accordance with the vicissitudes of postcolonial life. They continue the moral imperative of ‘looking after’ kin even as the net of ‘looking after’ has expanded to encompass new experiences, behaviours, and persons.     

From dividual and individual selves to porous subjects

The distinction between understanding persons as dividuals versus individuals began to develop in the latter half of the twentieth century. Originating in Louis Dumont’s comparative work into the differences between Western and Indian subjects in the 1950s, it perhaps reached its zenith in the 1980s when Marilyn Strathern used it to differentiate between Melanesian and Western concepts of the person. By the end of the century, critique and reconceptualisation of the individual:dividual distinction was so well established in the anthropological literature that its explanatory capacity was largely negated. The aim of this paper is to attempt to clarify the different modes of personhood that the dividual:individual distinction sought to elucidate by introducing a useful distinction between the self and the human subject and further developing Charles Taylor’s distinction between porous and buffered selves.     

Sorcery, corruption, and the dangers of democracy in Indonesia

Magic is the continuation of politics by other means. This, at least, has been the case in North Maluku since the political reshuffle that followed the fall of Suharto and the implementation of decentralization in Indonesia. The strategies pursued by the regional elite to obtain lucrative positions in the new landscape opened up by regional autonomy are thus seen to be thwarted by sorcery from political rivals. Following the life and death of Muhammad, a North Malukan political entrepreneur, I show how sorcery plays an integral part in the new politics of democratization in Indonesia. Political sorcery thrives, I argue, in a complex moral economy that mixes local ideas of sociality, political practices of patrimonialism, and global discourses of democracy. Sorcery and corruption are part of the same political imagination, because both speak ambivalently to the problems of power in times of change. Rather than being anathema to democracy, as the new global discourse on transparency would have it, the occult politics of corruption and sorcery are among the means through which a contested form of democracy is conceptualized and implemented in Indonesia.     

Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge

Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge . Don Handelman and David Shulman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 246 pp.     

The Morbid Nexus: Reciprocity and Sorcery in Rural East Java

For the past few decades, the idea that witchcraft and sorcery are closely linked with the experience of capitalism has proven captivating. Leading international anthropologists, such as the Comaroffs, Geschiere, Ong and Taussig have argued for the modernity of the supernatural. They have demonstrated that, instead of declining in the modern period, beliefs and practices associated with evil spirits and magic are regularly invoked to explain the experience of capitalism. As useful as this approach is, focusing on capitalism's connection with evil spirits and magic does not necessarily imply a break from the classical anthropological accounts of reciprocity. In Banyuwangi, a district of Java, Indonesia, harmful magic is deeply embedded in reciprocity and local relationships as much as in relationships of capitalism. In other words, these classical accounts of intimate ties between harmful magic and reciprocity can be usefully married with the ideas of the modernity of the supernatural.     

Sorcery in the Era of 'Henry IV': Kinship, Mobility and Mortality in Buhera District, Zimbabwe

Recent studies of witchcraft and sorcery in Africa have described this domain as an all–powerful and inescapable discourse. This article, on a migrant labour society in Zimbabwe, discloses a situation in which this discourse and its interpretation are contested. It shows how existential insecurity, which gives rise to witchcraft accusations, relates to the high incidence of HIV/AIDS–related illnesses and death – euphemistically called Henry IV (HIV). Witchcraft accusations arise within kin–based networks that span rural and urban geographical areas, as it is these networks that people depend upon for their livelihoods. Thus, this article stresses the important link between witchcraft and kinship in a society that is not geographically bound, revealing how witchcraft discourse is assigned a place relative to other social phenomena.