Entertaining Satan by Demos John Putnam;

Author:Demos, John Putnam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1982-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

Communities: The Social Matrix of Witchcraft

Recent scholarship in early American history declares, as one of its central presumptions, the primacy of local experience. The “little community” appears as the single most apposite unit of study. Within narrow and wholly familiar bounds—so the argument goes—did the vast majority of colonial Americans encounter the forces which shaped their lives. Decisions of state, made in the king’s court an ocean away, concerned them rarely and remotely, or not at all. Enactments by provincial governors and assemblies came closer in their effects—but not (by and large) very close. More important by far were the activities of local institutions, the informal structures of neighborhoods, the whole dense fabric of face-to-face exchange.1

This viewpoint finds powerful support in the present study. Witchcraft belonged, first and last, to the life of the little community. Indeed, scores of New England communities created their own individual histories of witchcraft, no two entirely alike. Suspicion and gossip, charge and counter-charge, the resort to private magic and/or formal proceedings in court: all were geared to local conditions. To be sure, the lore of witchcraft was common to the region, indeed to the entire English-speaking world. And reports of particular episodes were easily carried from one locale to another. But the episodes themselves—their human shape and substance—reflected a progression of village events.

The same has been true of other witchcraft, outside New England, and before and after the seventeenth century. The local frame stands clear in the present (or recent) experience of Cewa tribesmen in central Africa, of Dobu islanders in the Pacific, of Navajo Indians in the American Southwest, and also in the premodern experience of peasants in southern Germany and of mountain folk along the French-Swiss border.2 Cultural anthropologists have seen in this a special opportunity: witchcraft as a pathway to the inner structures of community life. Thus witchcraft has obtained an important place in anthropological studies generally. Articles and monographs proliferate, and few ethnographies seem complete without some pages (or chapters) on the subject. The roster of contributing scholars includes some very honored names: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clyde Kluckhohn—to mention only a few.3

Of course, historians no less than anthropologists are drawn to comparative research; and in this topical area they are fortunate to have such sharply drawn markers to guide their way. In fact, several historians have travelled the route already. Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane made extensive use of anthropological literature in carrying out their own research on witchcraft in sixteenth- and seventeendi-century England. William Monter and Erik Midelfort canvassed the same literature, and “applied” it somewhat more cautiously, in studying other parts of premodern Europe.4

The anthropology of witchcraft is, in its present state, a rich and complex structure—difficult to summarize in a few paragraphs or pages. Still, there are certain recurrent themes which can be outlined here as a way of introducing subsequent parts of the discussion. In the first place, anthropological study presents witchcraft as an index of fundamental human relationships—as a signpost to “weak points” in an overall social “system.

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