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The production of witchcraft/witchcraft as production: memory, modernity, and the slave trade in Sierra Leone
Author(s) -
Shaw Rosalind
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1997.24.4.856
Subject(s) - sierra leone , modernity , constitution , production (economics) , representation (politics) , ethnology , witch , sociology , history , anthropology , political science , law , economics , ecology , politics , biology , macroeconomics
In this article, I examine how memory is entailed in the constitution and representation of global modernity. During four centuries of Atlantic slave trading in Sierra Leone, Temne witchfinding developed as a technique for the ritual production of slaves. Today, Sierra Leone's integration into an earlier Atlantic world is “remembered” both in witchfinding ritual and in cosmological images of an ultramodern witch‐city built from the extraction of human life and value.