Decolonising the imagined geographies of ‘witchcraft’

Decolonising the University Curriculum

The student protests of 2015 precipitated a renewed interest in the decolonisation of the university in South Africa, and by association the decolonisation of the university curriculum. The decolonisation of the curriculum is an important conversation, and long overdue, given that the Western model of academic organisation on which the South African university is based, remains largely unchalle...

Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft

Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials

This paper re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with “elf-shot.” Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationship of these beliefs to witchcraft itself.

Salem possessed. The social origins of witchcraft

PAUL BOYER and STEPHEN NISSENBAUM, Salem possessed. The social origins of witchcraft, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974, 8vo, pp. xxi, 231, illus., $10.00. Reviewed by Edwin Clarke, M.D., F.R.C.P., Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NW] 2BP. Of all the outbreaks of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, that at Salem Village, Massachusetts, in...

Geographies of the information society

This article presents the Varenius perspective on the societal dimensions of geographical information technologies and the geographical dimensions of information technologies in general, and puts them in the context of the research literature of the last ten years. The central themes examined are: theoretical perspectives on the societal implicationsof geographical information technologies; the...