CHAPTER THREE EVIL AND WITCHCRAFT Reference has already been made in the first chapter to the theoretical significance of E. E. Evans-Pritchard's anthropological work as marking and effecting a change from functionalism to what might be called a weak form of structuralism. This is not the strong form of Levi-Strauss's work, which itself marks the foremost French contribution to a paradigm of meaning in the study of man, and which presupposes a theory of mind and mental operations, but is more pragmatic in seeking so to analyse social phenomena as to allow their inner structure to be fully manifest to the anthropologist. The 'anthropologist seeks to do more than understand the thought and values of a primitive people and translate them into his own culture. He seeks also to discover the structural order of the society, the patterns which, once established, enable him to see it as a whole, as a set of interrelated abstractions' .1 In his most influential early work on witchcraft among the Azande of the southern Sudan Evans-Pritchard demonstrated how this structural order could be identified and communicated to a reader unfamiliar with the native context. The wide significance and influence exerted by this study can be assessed from the fact that the 1968 meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists was devoted to the theme of witchcraft and the ensuing volume dedicated to Evans-Pritchard. In its editorial Mary Douglas emphasizes the importance of Evans-Pritchard's work, and the significant comment is made that Witchcraft and Oracles among the Azande was, in effect, a study in the sociology of knowledge. Because anthropologists had tended to read it as some kind of functionalist analysis Mary Douglas felt it necessary to 'establish that the study of Azande witchcraft was indeed offered as a contribution to the sociology of perception' .2 Similarly in The Nuer and Nuer Religion his concern with issues of social values, experience and mind is obvious and in this his intellectual affinity to Durkheim is marked as he seeks the abstract system of thought underlying native culture. Yet he does not present any abstract set of models expressing the rationale of indigenous thought: 'interpretations are contained in the facts themselves, for I have described the facts in such a way that the inter­ pretations emerge as part of the description' _3 The 'purposive description' presented by Evans-Pritchard is, perhaps, one of the most sophisticated social scientific examples of the paradigm of meaning to be found in ethnographic literature, for in his description ofZande life Evans-Pritchard sets forth the 'how', or the indigenous rationale, of life-phenomena but he does so in a way which itself presupposes, at an academic level, that the culture as a whole possesses a meaning which can be understood by his readers who do not begin with Zande presuppositions. So it is that Evans-Pritchard discusses the subject of witchcraft as one aspect of the problem of explanation as such, asking why any metaphysical system should 1 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1962: 22. 2 Douglas, M., 1970: xiv. 3 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1937: 5. EVIL AND WITCHCRAFT 43 be accepted. In an interesting way his basic question is the opposite form of Berger's interest in the nature of social reality: the latter views problematic areas of life as the major tensions on plausibility systems while Evans-Pritchard is more occupied with the constraints supporting belief in a system of explanation.4 Mary Douglas identifies three elements of the Azande study as having been significant for later work and which demonstrate the significance of witchcraft as a plausibility maintai~ing process. In terms of this book these elements also demon­ strate the way evil, defined as implausibility, can be viewed and dealt with apart from reference to transcendent sources of evil. In the first place witchcraft accusations 'allowed grudges to be brought out into the open and ... provided a formula for action in misfortune. Secondly such accusations were clearly associated with areas of life and persons involved in conflict and rivalries, while, thirdly, the witch beliefs were directly related to the moral code inasmuch as witches were characterised as possessing anti-social features of behaviour as also of physical appearance. While this kind of analysis is open to criticism focusing on functionalism of too static a kind it nevertheless shows how witchcraft operates as a kind of homeostatic device for social friction. In addition it provides an explanatory framework for evil experienced in social intercourse 'based on the idea of a com­ munication system'.5 Even when other anthropologists such as Marwick, Middleton and Turner developed witchcraft studies in directions other than a functionalist-like way they, nevertheless, utilized Evans-Pritchard's insight that witchcraft was, 'essentially a means of clarifying and affirmal social definitions'. 6 Whether witchcraft processes led to the maintenance of social relations or their disruption they served the purpose of fostering a system of plausibility. As far as the Azande study is concerned witchcraft demonstrates clearly that plausibility is a notion relating to both intellectual and emotional factors, and Evans-Pritchard takes pains to show that the emotional and experiental dimension may even predominate inasmuch as witchcraft is a method of actually coping with a problem in terms of action rather than one of elaborate intellectualizing upon a problem. 'In truth Azande experience feelings about witchcraft rather than ideas, for their intellectual concepts of it are weak and they know better what to do when attacked by it than how to explain it. Their response is action and not analysis. The Zande actualizes these beliefs rather than intellectualizes them, their tenets are expressed in socially controlled behaviour rather than in doctrines'. 7 The fact that an entirely coherent and systematic logic of witchcraft is not held by the Azande, not merely an uncompleted system in western terms of system or rationality, but one which they know and feel to be 'peculiar' and which they do not 'profess to understand entirely', in no sense appears to reduce the plausibility conferred by the beliefs' .8 For the rites performed by the Azande appear to them to achieve the desired end, whatever is wrong is righted and since the very implausibility exists at the level of experience it is at that same level where the resolution occurs. 4 Ibid., p. 4. s Douglas, M., 1970: xvii. 6 Douglas, M., Idem., p. xxv. 7 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1937: 82-3. 8 Ibid., p. 99. .