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Abstract
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Vicious attacks on women often accompany economic upheavals
It's an old story: A woman is accused of witchcraft by someone close to her--a neighbor, a relative, a rival. Often the original accuser resents or envies the woman or has a property dispute with her. At first the complaints are just whispers. But then something happens--a child gets sick, or an accident occurs. The woman's name is said again, loudly this time, and more people echo it. Then she is dragged from her house and killed.
This is what happened to Iquo Edet Eyo, a 69-year-old woman from Cross River State in Nigeria. Along with four others, she was murdered in October 2022, allegedly by a group of young men who charged that her witchcraft had caused a recent motorcycle crash. Her family says that suspicions had been dogging her for years, arising from jealousy of her prosperity. It is also the tale of Martha Carrier, the ancestor of one of us (Markham-Cantor), who was hanged in Salem, Mass., in 1692. Of the accusations against her, one of the most salient was by a neighbor with whom her family had a property dispute. Carrier became one of 35 people executed for witchcraft in the British colonies of New England--"crimes" of which some of them still have not been exonerated.
The narrative could be set in Germany in 1581, India in 2003, Uganda in 2018 or Papua New Guinea in 2021. Every year more than 1,000 people around the world, including men and children, are tortured, expelled from their homes or killed after being charged with witchcraft--using magic, usually to cause harm. Far from declining with modernization, as some 20th-century scholars predicted, witch hunts are holding steady in some places and may be happening more often in others.
Multiple roots entwine to produce a witch hunt. A belief in sorcery, a patriarchal society, sudden and mysterious deaths resulting from a paucity of health care, inaccessible justice systems that give impunity to attackers, a triggering disaster--all of these contribute. But as one of us (Federici) has argued in her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch and subsequent publications, what sustained periods of witch-hunting have in common, across time, space and culture, is a backdrop of social and economic dislocation...
Language: en |