This concept paper examines and documents the evidence of witchcraft and social life in Zimbabwe. The information contained in this article was largely derived from literature. However, oral data also formed part of the information used in this article. This paper reveals that beliefs in witchcraft are deeply rooted in Zimbabwe. The paper also reveals that in Zimbabwe, witchcraft is associated ...

This paper examines the relationship between witchcraft beliefs, a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon, and various elements of social capital. Using novel survey data from nineteen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa we establish a robust negative association between the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs and multiple measures of trust which holds after accounting for country fixed effects and potential...

'Much nonsense has been written on this subject', wrote Keith Thomas in a famous and influential footnote to his own pioneering chapter on English witchcraft in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In similar vein, Robin Briggs remarks near the st art of this magnificent new survey that 'common assumptions about the subject tend to have one very marked feature in common, which is that they...

We present Witchcraft, an open-source framework for the evaluation of prediction models for spoken dialogue systems based on interaction logs and audio recordings. The use of Witchcraft is two fold: first, it provides an adaptable user interface to easily manage and browse thousands of logged dialogues (e.g. calls). Second, with help of the underlying models and the connected machine learning f...

Linguistic factors played a significant role in the origin and spread of accusations of witchcraft in Early Modern Spain. The preoccupation with witches’ words is at its root a preoccupation about the power of speech and, to a great extent, of female speech. Studies in some Early European countries have connected aggressive female speech styles with accusations of witchcraft, and this article o...

The Workbench for Intelligent exploraTion of Human ComputeR conversaTions is a new platform-independent open-source workbench designed for the analysis, mining and management of large spoken dialogue system corpora. What makes Witchcraft unique is its ability to visualize the effect of classification and prediction models on ongoing system-user interactions. Witchcraft is now able to handle pre...

Since the publication (in 1977) of her book on witchcraft in the Bocage of western France, the author has received numerous requests to help dewitch people. These requests came from readers convinced, despite the fact that they were raised in a cultural context devoid of witchcraft, they had been bewitched in the same way as Bocage peasants. How could they rid themselves of the series of incomp...

The majority of peasants in late nineteenth century Russia believed in the power of magic and its ability to affect their lives in both beneficial and harmful ways. An important aspect of this outlook was witchcraft, which can be defined as “the attribution of misfortune to occult human agency” (Thomas 1971: 436). Nearly any personal misfortune, including impotence, illness, death, crop failure...

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.

This paper formally examines the hypothesis that the historic slave trade contributed to the propagation of persistent witchcraft beliefs on both sides of the Atlantic. As documented in archival records and case studies, the Atlantic slave trade, a source of hardship for millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, was commonly perceived by the locals as a form of witchcraft, and its perpetrators ...