[Reading this in-depth study presupposes knowledge of the content presented in the cultural test relating to this practice]

The 'new' witchcraft
 
1. Approaches to witchcraft and 'new witchcraft' in anthropological studies
 
In this in-depth study, an attempt will be made to analyse the main anthropological arguments put forward regarding witchcraft in the present day. An attempt will be made to reflect on its capacity to adapt to various contexts and on the social importance it assumes, so that useful elements may emerge from a legal point of view that is also complete from an anthropological point of view. In doing so, studies on the subject will be followed, with particular reference to those works that take into consideration the link between witchcraft and its economic aspects, i.e. those studies that refer to the more remote contexts in which globalisation has made available (more or less illusorily) the goods produced by capitalism. Many of these works are part of that current of studies defined as postcolonial studies, i.e. works produced in a period that saw the imposition of the supremacy of the capitalist system internationally, at the turn of the 1970s and 1990s. Among these studies, it is important to point out that the work of the Comaroffs, Modernity and its Malcontents,[1] and that of Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft,[2] will largely guide us in this reflection.
Studies on 'witchcraft' have long envisioned two dominant typologies: one formed by the works of anthropologists, folklorists and historians of religions, who sought to advance general considerations on the explanation of the phenomenon of witchcraft, mainly by focusing their attention on its social function. The other type of study, on the other hand, was represented by historiographical investigations, which kept away from general considerations to focus on studies of local cases.[3] In the 1970s, however, witchcraft seemed to be only an 'anthropological affair', a phenomenon that had disappeared in the West and was therefore destined to vanish, due to the assertions then in vogue about a supposed continuity between the processes of decolonisation and modernisation.
From then on, however, the issue of witchcraft was destined to resurface, and so it did in the 1980s and, even more so, in the 1990s, which saw the publication of the aforementioned Geschiere text (1997), the title of which is a tangle of terms (especially the occult and modernity) that would hardly have been accepted side by side in previous decades. Today, it can be argued that the areas of interest concerning the subject of witchcraft in recent decades have become numerous, and vary according to the researcher's interests.[4] Witchcraft, that 'social event and/or phenomenon that was thought to have ethnographically disappeared, at least after the 1940s, and certainly after the Second World War',[5] has become a 'fashionable' topic again, but above all a topic whose analysis can be extremely useful in understanding the complexity of 'modernity'.

The new witchcraft as resistance to the inequalities of capitalism
 
Mr and Mrs Comaroff's work on 'Modernity and its Discontents' (1993), is one of the most important and relevant works on witchcraft in the 1990s. The two scholars focus their attention on the problematic relationship between culture and globalisation, blaming the resurgence of witchcraft on the international processes of the economy. According to the Comaroffs, witchcraft presents itself as a kind of 'resistance' to the great suffering and unequal distribution of goods to which the globalisation of capitalism has led, and is capable of translating the incomprehensible and irrational laws of the market into the comprehensible idiom of occult forces, thus finding and carving out a piece of the world to oppose the economic imbalances of capitalism. The Comaroffs argue, in short, that the fact that the economic mechanisms for the distribution of goods do not appear clear to certain populations produces contradictory and unbearable effects, and the response to these inequalities is one of jealousy and envy in which the subjects of certain contexts, feeling impoverished by the market, attribute the causes of social inequality to witches. ‘Modernity' here becomes a vehicle for the ideas of witchcraft, a source of powerful new forms of nightmares of the imagination, in which economic processes constitute the material on which they feed.
 

Peter Geschiere, in his 1997 work, also analysed the relationship between modernity and witchcraft, albeit with a different perspective from that of the Comaroffs. The main themes discussed by the author, apparently quite contradictory, concern the idea that people accumulate power and wealth through witchcraft, and that the fear of witchcraft cancels (or at least this is his intention) the inequalities between people and induces them to share their resources. Geschiere points out that the villagers in the south-west of Cameroon, in which he studied, regard witchcraft as a tool used by the elites to achieve their own ends, while for the elites it is a weapon of the weak against the state; thus, while witchcraft strengthens power, it also weakens it.
According to Geschiere, there is a profound conceptual continuity between the discourse of the past and the sentiment of the present; that is, the author believes that witchcraft is an expression of older notions and images that reflects and reinterprets new circumstances. It is a way of redistributing both wealth and bad fortune, and would create a kind of occult economy that has a dual character: on the one hand it commiserates new means to achieve otherwise unattainable goals (such as improving life in situations of extreme social exclusion), while on the other hand it gives voice to the desire for punishment and serves to eliminate those towards whom one feels envy, i.e. to annul inequalities.
Picking up on the Comaroff thesis, it too considers the economic component in relation to witchcraft to be important, but from a different perspective than Geschiere. The Comaroff theory emphasises the strong change that occurred in the second half of the 20th century and the contrast with the transition from industrial capitalism to post-capitalism. The Comaroffs attribute the 'rebirth' of witchcraft to processes of international economics; for them, the witchcraft dynamic belongs to the register of responses, typical of the Third World, to the tendencies of globalism, which indeed generalises the commodity, but at the same time drastically increases economic and social differences. Witchcraft is therefore a form of resistance that occurs through a reshaping of the local within the grids of the global.

Looking at Geschere's and Comaroff's works, it becomes clear that the most stimulating attempts to renew the study of witchcraft and to understand its extraordinary modernity come from authors who, by not reducing the discourse of witchcraft to an opposition between good and evil and by distancing themselves from the moralising discourse, have best succeeded in understanding the ambiguity of representations of witchcraft and their persistence in contexts characterised by new relations of production and power. 

Hans Baldung (c. 1480 - 1545), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

These authors attempt to show how the discourse on occult forces intervenes in the uncertainties of modernity through resistance. Thus, witchcraft, which may seemingly be fleeting and intangible, destined to have no location as witches are everywhere, fly, and never take root, is actually a tangible support tool for many social groups that use it as resistance to manage uncertainty.
This apparent 'intangibility and invisibility' of witchcraft, in the eyes of a careful scholar and its proper analysis, can therefore be a valuable tool for understanding numerous aspects, and can make us observe how witchcraft can be indicative of characteristics of our modernity that we would otherwise find difficult to grasp.
With all its ritual and magical practices of the occult, witchcraft presents itself as a revealing spy, as a storehouse that encloses within itself all those economic-cultural contrasts and 'resistances' that are not made explicit, but which manifest themselves in the symbolic systems of occult practices. It also allows us to reflect on the social actors' interpretation of reality, on the understanding of situations at the micro-social level and, as the Comaroffs have shown, also at the macro-social level.
 

notes

[1] Comaroff, J. and J. L., 1993, Modernity and its Malcontent. Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

[2] Geschiere, P., 1997, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia.

[3] Simonicca, A., 2019, 'The Return of Witchcraft', in P. Clemente, C. Grottanelli, eds., Comparatively, Florence, SEID, 189-222.

[4] Other very interesting and important studies that we could point out include, for instance, that of the French anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada (1980; 1989), who emphasises the discursive constitution on which witchcraft would be constituted.

[5] Simonicca, Alessandro, op. cit., p. 194.