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Contribution short abstract

What can we learn from witchcraft about ecological care, via a design anthropology lens? By unpacking witchcraft's praxical transgression of binaries to maintain networks of worldly and otherworldly relations, we engage emerging academic theory and everyday practice in more-than-human relationality.

Contribution long abstract

Witchcraft ontologies center practices of ecological relationality that create and maintain other(ed) worlds, simultaneously transgressing Western one-world binarism. For example, human/more-than-human, material/immaterial, good/evil, or man/woman. Yet the variability of practices under the umbrella of ‘witchcraft’ reveals a homogenization of complexity that often results in neatly pitting ‘new age’ witchcraft against Western Enlightenment disenchantment (Sheedy 2023), or cleaving relationships between Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and white Western practices, leaving gaps for appropriation (Fisk 2017).

A design anthropology perspective can engage these complexities by exploring how witches co-design with our ecologies, through the materiality of magical (design) practice. For example, a witch’s altar creates and maintains a network of worldy and otherworldly (im/material) relations through a thoughtful design process, which accounts for the witch’s own relationality to more-than-human beings and non-beings.

Though under-theorized, this relationship to the more-than-human aligns with praxis at the intersections of new materialism and Indigenous Knowledges. Indeed, the magic of witchcraft is recognition of and manifestation in the moment of intra-action (Barad 2003). Still, much of what is being proposed through new materialism is related to and in some instances far behind relationality understood by Indigenous theorists (Roseik et al 2020). In turn, research on more-than-human worlds and kinship is divided and limited.

This proposal asks that we take to task institutionalized academic practices of romanticization, projectification, and objectification that de-legitimate witchcraft as epistemology and praxis. Instead, we might learn from everyday witchcraft practice to move across binaries and work in intersections, embracing the worldly and otherworldly as ecological care.