Witch

About: Witch is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1899 publications have been published within this topic receiving 18073 citations.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Abstract: The work Caliban and the witch is the result of a more than thirty years research project developed by the historian Silvia Federici. Its central aim is to rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist point of view with the care not to delimit and segregate the history of women in the working-class male sector. It retakes Marxist concepts, feminist critical theories and an analysis on the body and its politicization in the light of the Foucaultian theory. For Federici there are aspects that are hidden in the said theories in what concerns the discussions on domination and exploration. It also highlights how many analysis on the witch-hunting period has been neglected over the years and what this period essentially has to contribute to the analysis of the consolidation of capitalism. The concept of primitive accumulation developed by Karl Marx in his work Capital is fundamental for the unfolding and understanding of this historical process marked by violence, domination and exploitation and that redefined structures of the sexual division of labor. Federici is concerned about the contemporary context in which intensification of violence against women and the resumption of witch-hunt albeit in a “new outfit” in some countries, with a major emphasis on countries that have suffered colonization.

Poverty and Witch Killing

Abstract: Many observers have noted that poverty and violence go hand in hand. There is a strong negative relationship between economic growth and crime across countries, as well as across districts in India, and a link between low income and the occurrence of civil war.1 Yet existing studies are typically unable to resolve the key econometric identification issues of omitted variable bias and endogeneity. To illustrate, the unobserved quality of local government institutions may affect both income growth and crime rates, and poverty could lead to violence if desperate people with "nothing to lose" commit more crimes, but violence itself may in turn affect economic productivity. This paper uses local rainfall variation to identify the impact of income shocks on murder in a rural Tanzanian district.2 Extreme rainfall-resulting in drought or floods-is exogenous and is associated with poor harvests and near-famine conditions in the region, and a large increase in the murder of "witches": there are twice as many witch murders in years of extreme rainfall as in other years. The victims are nearly all elderly women, typically killed by relatives. These econometric results, across 11 years in 67 villages, provide novel evidence on the role of income shocks in causing violent crime, and religious violence in particular, and also provide insights into witchcraft-an important social phenomenon in Africa rarely studied by economists. The view that economic conditions are a driving force behind witch murders is bolstered by the fact that most witch killing in Tanzania takes place in poor rural areas largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, and that most victims in our sample are from poor households. However, it is difficult to definitively disentangle this income shock theory from alternative socio-cultural explanations. The concentration of Tanzanian witch murders in a region dominated by one particular ethnic group (the Sukuma), and the especially high number of witch murders in villages where indigenous religious beliefs are strong both point to the important role of non-economic factors. Economic theories and cultural theories are perhaps best viewed as complements: the empirical findings demonstrate the power of economics to rationalize a phenomenon that has previously been understood almost solely through a socio-cultural lens.3

The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The intellectual foundations 3. The legal foundations 4. The impact of the Reformation 5. The social context 6. The dynamics of witch-hunting 7. The chronology and geography of witch-hunting 8. The decline and end of witch-hunting 9. Witch-hunting after the trials

Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England

Abstract: Profiles the surprising number of otherwise normal people who practice magic and witchcraft in England today, detailing how they became involved in witchcraft, the history and tradition of magic, and other fascinating details.