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The opposite of witchcraft: E vans‐ P ritchard and the problem of the person
Author(s) -
Mills Martin A.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.12001
Subject(s) - ethnography , misfortune , indigenous , agency (philosophy) , fallacy , rationality , action (physics) , sociology , skepticism , anthropology , ethnology , philosophy , epistemology , linguistics , physics , narrative , quantum mechanics , ecology , biology
The principal legacy of E vans‐ P ritchard's 1937 ethnography W itchcraft, oracles and magic among the A zande has been to associate debates over the rationality of witchcraft with its social categorization as a facet of misfortune and enmity. In combination with E vans‐ P ritchard's own scepticism regarding witches, this allowed the rationality debate to isolate witchcraft as a distinctive special case. This logical exceptionalism was at odds with E vans‐ P ritchard's own assertion of witchcraft's ordinariness, and is not supported by comparable ethnography from the L adakh region of the H imalayas or by the unabridged versions of O racles , both of which point towards an indigenous understanding of witchcraft as one variation on a spectrum of everyday action and craft. Instead, a revised reading of O racles suggests that even the most basic quotidian representations of personal agency raise larger questions as to anthropology's understanding of how humans ascribe action and personhood, a debate which stands at the heart of its status as a science.