Academic Papers: Exorcism

Paper on Sorcery and Witchcraft-related Killings in Melanesia: Culture, Law and Human Rights Perspectives Conference at The Australian National University, Canberra, 5-7 June 2013. By Dr Miranda Forsyth

Overcoming sorcery 2016

Available here

An article concerned with the linkage between ill health and Witchcraft (Available here…)

Rasmussen – tienou festschrift final revised

An investigation of discourses, practices and social explanations relating to Witchcraft (Available here…)

Final Dissertation 2015

African Study Bible on Witches by Steven Rassmusun: available here

ASB witch article final 11-1-2015

The War of Lions: Witch-Hunts, Occult Idioms and Post-Socialism in Northern Mozambique

The year is 2002, the place Muidumbe, northerly cradle of the Mozambican Liberation Struggle. Lions devouring people, and people lynching sorcerers suspected of magically fabricating lions, unleash a crisis that soon assumes a political dimension. Widespread rumours accuse the local post-socialist elite of manipulating a group of lion-men and engaging in organ trafficking with an international alliance of vampires. Disempowered  youth lynchers stage a paradoxical uprising. This article details the unfolding of this crisisover a year, and discusses its broader implications. Are contemporary sorcery crises adeflected effect of ‘millennial capitalism’? To what extent can occult rumours be interpreted as idioms that express political agency in metaphors? What is the role of the media and of cultural brokers in propagating rumours and crystallising collective anxieties inrecognisable forms? How is one to understand the rationality, if any, of witch-hunts? Focusing on the forms and the effects of violence, a symptomatic reading of witch-hunts reveals their linkages with Frelimo’s project of ‘total politicisation’. Finally, the article discusses a contradiction inherent in sorcery scholarship, hovering between repeating the Enlightenment’s baptismal naming of witchcraft as superstition and producing populist representations of subaltern consciousness dismissive of dramatic experiences of violence

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Sorcerers and Folkhealers: Africans and the Inquisition in Portugal (1680-1800)

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Sorcery and Contemporary Warfare in Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands

In the eastern districts of the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, sorcery-related violence is mainly an inter-community affair. Sorcery beliefs in various parts of the Eastern Highlands hold that sorcery is an exclusively male domain. Furthermore, violent retribution for deaths attributed to sorcery in the Eastern Highlands is primarily directed against other communities, and not against individuals suspected of conducting sorcery. Sorcery-related violence thus has the propensity to quickly spiral out of control, escalating to large-scale inter-community warfare often causing further casualties. This state of affairs contrasts starkly with recent media portrayals of witchcraft-related killings in Papua New Guinea in which angry mobs single out usually defenceless (and often female) individual victims and torture them to death. 

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Papua New Guinea: Overview Presentation. Sorcery and Witchcraft Accusations: Developing a National Response to Overcome the Violence.

This paper draws on research that includes the torture and ill treatment of the accused sorcerers and witches. Richard Eves includes details of his fieldwork and draws on evidence from New Ireland.

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Albinism, Witchcraft and Superstition in East Africa

An Anthropological Study of Witchcraft-related Crime in the Eastern Cape and its implications for Law Enforcement Policy and Practice, Jan 2009