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Witchcraft and African Culture

The purpose of this research is to examine effects of witchcraft on African culture. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and cultural context in which witchcraft has been shown to achieve relevance to indigenous African cultures and then discuss the pattern of ideas and analysis of the phenomenon in selected cultures in Africa, with a view toward identifying the implications of witchcraft belief and practice for the shape and content that such cultures might assume in future

Modern Africa is the setting for evidence that witchcraft is embedded in the belief systems and the social and political practices of the many indigenous peoples of the continent. That is significant because this same Africa is also the locus of tension between emergent, technology-driven, and largely Western-controlled globalization and modernization on one hand, and the legacy of reliance on supernatural explanations and analyses of experience on the other. That the title of a recent collection of ethnographic essays dealing with witchcraft in Africa is Magical Interpretations is instructive in that regard (Moore & Sanders, 2001). Similarly, Parish (1999, p. 427) observes that despite the formal declarations of the postcolonial African states against witchcraft, "it is precisely in that apparently modern arena . . . that witchcraft discourses have come to be lodged, incorporating new images and objects and providing one way of defining modernity through the 'local' consumption of global commodities."

What seems most important to recognize is that, from the earliest period of historical records to the present day, witchcraft, or sorcery, which is linked to human interaction with the world of spirits both malevolent and powerful enough to affect human experience, has informed social and religious praxis in many African cultures. Further, the inexorable march of expansionist industrial capitalism and the exploitation (development/moder...

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Witchcraft and African Culture. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:11, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681226.html