Witchcraft Dialogues : Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges

Authors

• George Clement Bond
• Diane M. Ciekawy

Files

Series

Research in International Studies, Africa Series

Description

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the occult. It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of witchcraft and sorcery and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences.

While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of witchcraft as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that witchcraft encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and have their equation in the logic of other human practices such as racism and its various crafts. Thus, the focus on witchcraft is not just a concern with the occult, but a manifestation of the convergence of interest in mediating and transcending disciplinary domains.

The contributors to this volume embrace the challenge of exploring witchcraft as a mode of experiencing and explaining human circumstances as well as confronting the limitations of their own intellectual traditions and paradigms. The range of their explorations takes us in new directions, making use not only of their academic training but also of their personal experiences, to reframe the conceptual terrain of the occult and the epistemological orientations of their various academic fields of inquiry.

Copyright Statement

Witchcraft Dialogues © 2001 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780896804272

Publication Date

8-1-2026

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

witchcraft studies, sorcery, occult practices, anthropology of religion, philosophy of the occult, sociology of belief, metaphysics, cultural anthropology, African studies, Africanist scholarship, cross-cultural analysis, lived experience, human condition, belief systems, magical thinking, epistemology, interdisciplinary studies, intellectual traditions, social constructs, ritual practices, spiritual experiences, cosmology, symbolic systems, power and agency, knowledge systems, comparative religion, discourse analysis, critical theory, race and racism parallels, cultural narratives, phenomenology, social imagination, experiential knowledge, conceptual frameworks, paradigms of thought, moral economy, community belief, folk traditions, unseen forces, supernatural phenomena, ethnography.

Disciplines

African Studies | Comparative Methodologies and Theories | Ethnic Studies | Philosophy | Religion | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Bond, George Clement and Ciekawy, Diane M., "Witchcraft Dialogues : Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges" (2026). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 121.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/121