Paper short abstract

Through a restudy of Azande witchcraft, the paper will call for a reevaluation of Evans-Pritchard’s classic. By showing the evolution of oracles in witchcraft trials, EP’s timeless description needs a reconsideration, and the relationship of power and magic must be taken seriously.

Paper long abstract

Hundred years after the original fieldwork, Evans-Pritchard’s ‘Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande’ (WOM) still crucially shapes the way anthropologists think about belief-systems, witchcraft, and cultural relativity. WOM remains one of the most celebrated case studies of modern anthropology. Every undergraduate student learns about the collapse of the Zande granary, and the worldview derived from the explanation of the unfortunate events. Unlike the ‘Nuer’, Zande witchcraft remains without any serious ethnographic revisits. Building on two decades of intermittent fieldwork among the Azande, the paper will show the change in the system of oracles. A new oracle, ‘dabaya’, replaced ‘benge’, the famous chicken poison oracle method vividly described by Evans-Pritchard. ‘Dabaya’ is a similar oracle method deriving answers to questions of witchcraft based on the death of a chicken, however it is fundamentally different in certain key aspects. The evolution of oracles raises important questions of change and adoptative nature of witchcraft, an aspect clearly lacking in Evans-Pritchard’s work. By collecting fragments and hints of the nature of oracles in the past one hundred years, the paper will shed light on the historical oscillation between private and public witchcraft accusations. In times of great calamities witchcraft is a public explanatory method, while in calmer times, it retreats into private realms. The paper will call for methodological ‘tricks’ for the reappraisal of ethnographic classics. One such epistemological trick is the constant balancing act between using the classic ethnography as historical source, while engaging with it on a theoretical level.