Adam Ashforth arrived in Soweto more or less by accident in 1990. A historian preparing to do research on the transition to democracy in South Africa, he hired a room in the vast African township outside Johannesburg. He was adopted into his host family, and he has returned every year but one since 1990, making him perhaps the first professional researcher to write about Soweto on the basis of ...

Recent analyses of prehistoric multiple inhumations in Anasazi sites in the American Southwest have argued that cannibalism best explains evidence of defleshing, cutting, and bone breakage. The validity of this explanation is questioned in a review of ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature on Pueblo witchcraft and witch execution. A model based on Puebloan procedures for witch destruction is...

force within the cosmological landscape, a danger to anyone’s well-being and described as an evil spirit (gbɔgbɔvɔ). In this sense, they are commonly referred to in daily conversations as “our friends” or gbɔgbɔ (spirit), alongside other unknown gbɔgbɔvɔ, as a way to discuss adzetɔ covertly and without attracting their attention. However, adzetɔwo are also described as being a quality of a pers...

OBJECTIVE The persecution of children as witches has received widespread reportage in the international mass media. In recent years, hundreds of children have been killed, maimed and abandoned across Africa based on individual and village-level accusations of witchcraft. Despite the media focus, to date, very little systematic study has investigated the phenomenon. In this case study, the perse...

RICHARD DEACON, Matthew Hopkins; Witch Finder General, London, Frederick Muller, 1976, 8vo, pp. 223, illus., £6.50. The current interest in witchcraft and the occult continues unabated, and no doubt this book is intended for this insatiable appetite. In addition, however, the author, who is a professional writer, claims the relevance of historical witchcraft to similar practices today, which is...