Witch Craft of the Azande free essay sample

From highly involved communal practices to individual daily life, witchcraft and such happenings can take place at any time and to anyone. During his time among the Azande, Evans Pritchard originally thought of the Azande’s belief in witchcraft as naive, believing that all mishaps were caused by bewitchment instead of taking personal responsibility. I personally find this interesting as it is a fine example of how people universally do not typically take responsibility for their misfortunes; instead they blame it on another. Why is this? Well, think to yourself, have you ever been stuck in traffic cursing at everyone else’s poor driving? The answer is probably yes because most people do not turn inwards towards themselves to see a potential problem. This is because we are sensory beings designed to sense and experience the world outside of ourselves. Turning inwards and seeing ourselves as the problem naturally is not something we as individuals do, this takes years or even a lifetime of fulfillment and maturity to realize. But this is further than I want to take us for now. Let us get back to our authors interpretation of Azande witchcraft and how his understanding of this topic changed the more time he spent among the Azande people. The author notes that a common argument to mishaps taking place among the Azande is that witchcraft is the only explanation, since the Azande take numerous precautions to certain things and yet misfortunes still take place. For example, a young boy who despite knowing there are bushes to watch out for when walking still happens to stub his toe. The young boys argument is that if all precautions were made and that he knew to watch out for such mishaps, how then could stubbing his toe take place? It must be witchcraft the young man argues. Or when an expert potter who spends much time in finding only the best clay to kneed with, and constructing his pottery carefully and heating it to bake in a slow fire; such careful craftsmanship could never lead to their pot’s breaking, it must therefore be witchcraft if the pot’s break, the Azande would argue. Witchcraft among the Azande, Evans Pritchard Wintrich III suggests, seems to be something that happens to someone after careful measures to do something are made and yet the individual still sustains misfortune and injury. Logically this sounds like a reasonable argument, but to me I would suggest that such misfortunes occur because accidents happen and are not necessarily caused by witchcraft. However, this of course is my etic interpretation of witchcraft among the Azande since I do not believe in witchcraft. The Azande, however, do believe in witchcraft, so what then is the emic meaning of witchcraft among Azande culture? Let’s get back to our authors study of the Azande. Our author uses an analogy; to the Azande, witchcraft attempts to explain specific phenomena that are not universal truths, such as fire’s universal truth as being hot versus its specific characteristic of potentially burning you. Fire’s hotness is not owed to witchcraft because hotness is fire’s nature. Therefore, it is fire’s universal quality to burn, but not to burn you. Being burned by fire may never happen to you, our author tells us, but to the Azande to be burned by fire, as being burned by fire is not fire’s universal quality, must then be caused by bewitchment. So what then does it mean to be bewitched, and how does someone come to be bewitched? An interesting puzzle arises from this question. Suppose you have a granary that has termite damage in the support beams, and on a hot day part the community seeks shelter from the hot sun under this granary. Should the granary fall, the Azande argue, would be caused by witchcraft. The argument is this; â€Å"We say that the granary collapsed because its supports were eaten away by termites. That is the cause that explains the collapse of the granary. We also say that the people were sitting under it at the time because it was in the heat of the day and they thought that it would be a comfortable place to talk and work. This is the cause of people being under the granary at the time it collapsed. To our minds the only relationship between these two independently caused facts is their coincidence in time and space. We have no explanation of why the Wintrich IV wo chains of causation intersected at a certain time and in a certain place, for there is no interdependence between them. † (Pritchard, pg. 70) To the Azande, the only explanation, of course, is witchcraft. I don’t know about you, but for me so far, all of our author’s attempts to get an explanation about what witchcraft is has failed. We know that witchcraft is the cause of misfortun es and personal injury sustained by the Azande people through what they believe to be no fault of their own, but I think we have yet to have any understanding of what causes witchcraft itself. Where does it come from, who causes it, and is it in any way like a sort of karma believed to be punishment for bad deeds like in eastern philosophies? I think we need to take a deeper look into witchcraft and what the Azande people are actually talking about, because from what I’ve gathered so far, the Azande believe that witchcraft is an unexplained phenomena of independent events that in no way should have had any reason to take place simultaneously without the assistance of some magical energy force they call witchcraft. I ask the author again, what is witchcraft and where does it come from? This may be a crude explanation, however, it is the crude explanation I have come to about Zandeland witchcraft from reading our authors work on the Azande people. So perhaps we need to further our reading into Evan Pritchard’s book, and then we will come to a better understanding of this seemingly abstract explanation of his; let us continue. One suggestion that our author gives us as to why witchcraft and what causes it is so obscure is that in Zande philosophy the gaps in between the causation of events are left to the individual to fill instead of through communication, otherwise they would be left astray by linguistic conventions. Another explanation would be that, â€Å"Witchcraft explains particular circumstances of events in relation to their harmfulness to people. Witchcraft explains why events are harmful to man and not how they Wintrich V happen. † (Pritchard, pg. 72) A Zande sees how witchcraft happens as anyone does. They see an elephant charge a man, not a witch cast a spell. They see a termite damaged granary fall, not a witch cast a spell. They don’t see witches casting spells, only the harmfulness of particular circumstances of events in their relation to man. Witchcraft is a causative factor in the production of harmful phenomena in particular places, at particular times, and in relation to particular persons. It is not a necessary link in a sequence of events but something external to them that participates in them and gives them a peculiar value. † (Pritchard, pg. 72) However, as our author notes, the Azande do not neglect the physical cause of witchcraft; if a man dies from a spear, a snake bite or disease the Azande accept this as the physical cause of the man’s death. But witchcraft is the explanation of the effect, not the cause of a situation. The cause, whether it’s from a spear, snake or disease is not the witchcraft, the witchcraft is the effect of the individual dying from these causes, as spears, snakes and disease do not have the natural purpose of killing man, otherwise all men would die immediately from spears, snakes and disease and no one would exist. But wait, people are biologically designed to age, decay and die. Death, therefore, is a natural purpose of people, what about death caused by natural reasons? Is death from natural means accounted for by witchcraft? To the Azande, our author tells us, death caused by witchcraft and a natural death supplement each other. â€Å"It is not simply that the heart ceases to beat and the lungs to pump air in an organism, but it is also the destruction of a member of a family and kin, of a community and tribe. † (Pritchard, pg. 73) My take on this is that a natural death is measured by witchcraft in how the death of the individual affects the community. In this sense, there is a physical and a social cause in death in either case of death caused by witchcraft and death caused by natural causes. Now, it is critical at this point to understand witchcraft as having a physical and social aspect. Witchcraft, according to Wintrich VI Pritchard, is the mystical explanation of natural phenomena and their misfortunes on people. However, social circumstances of wrongdoing by people are judged by laws in Azande culture. You cannot, therefore, commit a crime and blame it on witchcraft, as witchcraft resides in the person who is esponsible for breaking the law and â€Å"is not necessary in such a case to seek a witch, for an objective towards which vengeance may be directed is already present. † (Pritchard, pg. 74) The Azande separate the circumstances of law and witchcraft for the same reasons that we do in our culture; â€Å"As in our own society a scientific theory of causation is deemed irrelevant in questions of moral and legal resp onsibility, so in Zande society the doctrine of witchcraft is deemed irrelevant in the same situation. We accept scientific explanation of the causes of disease, and even of the causes of insanity, but we deny them in crime and sin because here they militate against law and morals which are axiomatic. The Zande accepts a mystical explanation of the causes of misfortune, sickness, and death, but he does not allow this explanation if it conflicts with social exigencies expressed in law and morals. † (Pritchard, pg. 75) In Zandeland, not all human errors are blamed on witchcraft; witchcraft is only attributed to failure when all possibilities of personal error have been exhausted. Azande people do accept that misfortunes can and are caused by accidents, lack of experience, ignorance and even simply from stupidity. If we use simple logic, our author shows, it would be naive of the Azande to believe all human error to come from witchcraft, since a person would never better themselves at a trade had they always blamed witchcraft for their failures since one becomes good at something by learning from their past mistakes and from the mistakes of others. The Azande would of course agree which is why witchcraft is typically reserved to define phenomena which only cause misfortunes to innocent people. Learning from ones past mistakes is not a misfortune but in fact is how humankind excels as a species. According to the Wintrich VII author, the Azande do not believe in a separation between the natural world and the supernatural world and in fact the supernatural world, as it exists in our culture as something that exists in a different realm of spatiality, to the Azande does not exist. Witchcraft, therefore, is not something that is supernatural, although it transcends sensory experience, is simply a concept of why bad things happen to good people. The only ones who truly understand witchcraft are the witches themselves, who in fact, could be anyone. Anyone can break a law or taboo which seems to be the causation of collective negative energy within Azande society, and it is this energy which manifests itself into misfortune and folly within the community of the Azande people.