ld approach the irrational thought system of another culture with a good measure of both respect for that system and an awareness that one's own thought system is perhaps just as vulnerable to an assault on its alleged rationality.
Gillies writes in the Introduction to this book that most studies of witchcraft conclude that the perceptions or claims of such practices increase during times of social strife and instability:
From such analyses it was only a small step, though perhaps an ill-advised one, to see an increase in witchcraft accusations as a symptom of a "sick" society . . . Leaving quite aside the unacknowledged and half-formed moral judgments implicit in phrases like "a sick society," such an hypothesis is completely unverifiable (xxiv-xxv).
Are the mass suicide and conspiracy theories and the proliferation
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