Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in a Teapot. By Soma Chaudhuri. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. xvi+191. $80.00.

How to explain witchcraft accusations and witch hunts in 21st-century India? Why is it that traditions generally considered “premodern” continue to be practiced today, and what purpose do they serve? Soma Chaudhuri’s Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India seeks answers to these difficult questions through a case study of witch hunts among tea plantation workers inWest Bengal, India. Chaudhuri’s research deals with a particular group of people, indigenous (adivasi) workers who live and work in isolated tea plantations in the district of Jalpaiguri, West Bengal. The book is based on rich qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2007 and a combination of methods and data (archives, interviewing, and ethnography). Research on witchcraft is bread and butter for anthropologists and has recently gained popularity among historians, but the phenomenon has rarely been of interest to sociologists. In this respect, Chaudhuri’s work is a welcome exception. It engages explicitly with sociological concepts in setting the phenomenon in a broader framework of wageworker versus management versus labor union. The key concept throughwhichChaudhuri explains witchcraft accusations is alienation in the context of labor relations. Thus, unlike existing research, which has highlighted the importance of gender conflicts and disputes over land ownership as the causes for witchcraft accusations, Chaudhuri convincingly shows the limitations of such explanations in the case of adivasi workers in Jalpaiguri’s tea plantations. Disputes over land do not explain why adivasi workers resort to witch hunts, because they do not own agricultural land. Instead, Chaudhuri argues that witchcraft accusations and the witch hunts that follow are individual responses to the sense of alienation that the workers experience in the wage economy of the tea plantation. Instead of protesting against their oppressors, the plantation owners and union leaders, adivasi workers resort to blaming the weakest members of their community, mostly women, for witchcraft.Witch hunts are then best understood, according to Chaudhuri, as means by which communities deal with alienation, exploitative wage labor relations, and sudden illnesses and death. Women are targeted as a result of their oppressed status in the community. Chaudhuri argues that the adivasi workers are not only alienated from the product of their labor in the way Karl Marx intended, but also from the American Journal of Sociology