Arquivo da tag: Bruxaria

Behind Argentina’s World Cup Magic, an Army of Witches (N.Y. Times)

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nytimes.com

Magalí Martínez, a self-proclaimed witch, is one of hundreds who has used magic to try to help Argentina’s soccer team.
Magalí Martínez, a self-proclaimed witch, is one of hundreds who has used magic to try to help Argentina’s soccer team. Credit: Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York Times

France might have its star Kylian Mbappé, but Argentina has hundreds of “brujas” casting spells to protect Lionel Messi and the rest of its national squad.

Jack Nicas and Ana Lankes

Jack Nicas and Ana Lankes met with witches in Buenos Aires and in Lionel Messi’s hometown, Rosario, Argentina, for this article.

Dec. 17, 2022

Magalí Martínez knew something was off: The seemingly invincible soccer star Lionel Messi was scuffling on the soccer pitch. To her, it looked like he was afflicted with a supernatural curse that has roots in different cultures across history, the “evil eye.”

So Martínez, a self-proclaimed witch and part-time babysitter, got to work. She focused intensely on Messi, began repeating a prayer and drizzled a bit of oil into a bowl of water. If the oil remained dispersed, he was safe. If it collected in the middle, he was cursed.

“It came together like a magnet,” she said. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to cure him alone.”

She went to Twitter and called on her fellow witches across Argentina. “Evil-eye healing sisters, Messi is very affected,” she said. “I need your help.”

A thousand people shared her tweet, with many saying they, too, were witches and would work to protect Argentina’s golden boy.

Argentina has not lost since.

The bookkeepers have set their odds, gamblers have placed their bets and the experts have made their picks for Sunday’s World Cup final between Argentina and France, but their analysis of the matchup — focused on just the 22 players on the field — might not be considering a wild card: Argentina’s army of witches.Witches in Argentina have formed groups to give their soccer team a magic boost ever since the team’s first loss in the World Cup.Credit…Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York Times

In recent weeks, hundreds, if not thousands of Argentine women who call themselves “brujas,” or witches, have taken up arms — in the form of prayers, altars, candles, amulets and burning sage — to protect their nation’s beloved soccer team in its quest to secure a third World Cup title and its first in 36 years.

“We think of ourselves as agents that, from love, can take care, protect and sow happiness,” said Rocío Cabral Menna, 27, a witch and high-school teacher in Messi’s hometown, Rosario, who burns a bay leaf inscribed with her predicted score in a ceremony before each match. The players are competing on the field, she said, and at home, “the witches are taking care of them.”

The trend caught fire after Argentina’s shocking loss to Saudi Arabia in the opening match, causing Argentines to search for any way to help the team on which this nation of 47 million has pitted its hopes.

After that match, several witches started a WhatsApp group to instruct other witches on how to help the national team. They called it the Argentine Association of Witches, or La Brujineta, a play on “bruja” and “La Scaloneta,” Argentina’s nickname for its national team.

“I thought there were going to be 10 people at most,” said the group’s founder, Antonella Spadafora, 23, a witch who runs a convenience store in a city in northwest Argentina. Within days, more than 300 people had joined the group. Last week, there was so much demand that they started a Twitter account. It has gained 25,000 followers in seven days.

“We got tired of being closet witches,” said Andrea Maciel, 28, a witch and graphic designer in Buenos Aires who now helps manage the group.

The witches said their main focus is to use rituals to absorb negative energy from Argentina’s players and exchange it with good energy. That, however, leaves them exhausted.

Rocío Cabral Menna is a witch, poet and literature professor in Rosario, Argentina, the hometown of Lionel Messi.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times
Cabral Menna works with tarot cards and candles to help Argentina’s team.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times

“Headaches, dizziness, vomiting, muscle pain,” Spadafora said. “We are absorbing all the bad vibes,” she added. “It wears you down a lot, because these are very public figures who have so much negative energy from other people.”

So, to divide the burden, the group leaders now split the witches into groups before every match, each focused on protecting a certain player.

While many of the witches said they are working to look after Messi and his teammates, others are attempting to cast spells on opposing players, particularly the goalkeepers. One ritual involves freezing a slip of paper with the name of a player on it, saying a curse and then burning the frozen paper just before the match.

But the Brujineta group warned that trying to curse France could backfire, particularly because of the team’s star forward, Kylian Mbappé.

“We do not recommend freezing France, as their players are protected by dark entities and the energy can bounce back!!” the group announced on Twitter on Wednesday. “We saw very dark things in the French team and especially in Mbappé. Please share!!!”

The witches focused on the World Cup represent a wide variety of occult disciplines, more New Age than ancient and Indigenous. Practices include black magic, white magic, Wicca, Reiki, Tarot, astrology, and healers of the evil eye and other ailments.

Some women said they were born with special abilities, while others said they developed their skills through study. Several said they began practicing witchcraft as part of a growing feminist movement in Argentina that began in 2018 with the fight for legal abortion.

“I think we all have magic inside,” said Cabral Menna.

But the witches are far from the only Argentines trying to help their team in the supernatural realm. On game days, many more Argentines have been practicing some sort of cábala, or superstition designed to avoid causing any bad luck to their team. The cábalas often involve people sticking to the exact same routine if the team is winning, including where they watch the game, with whom, in what clothes, at what volume and on which channel.

Jesica Fernandez Bruera, an astrologer in Rosario.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times
During Argentina’s matches, Fernandez performs several rituals, such as burning laurel leaves.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times

The practice is so mainstream that millions of Argentines likely practice some sort of cábala, a word that derives from kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition. Cábalas have been especially pronounced this year after Argentina’s loss in its opening match.

Adrián Coria, Messi’s childhood coach in Rosario and later on the national team, said that he watched the first loss with his family in his living room. Then his wife and daughter sent him to a small cabin in the backyard for the second match. “Alone,” he said. He has since watched the rest of the World Cup there.

Cabral Menna, the witch from Rosario, said she and her mother watched Argentina’s first victory in her mother’s bedroom. “It’s the only part of the house without air conditioning,” she said. “It’s very hot. But we’re not going to move.”

And Sergio Duri, the owner of a restaurant in Rosario with Messi’s signature on the wall, said he now watches the matches in his kitchen with one dachshund, Omar, while his wife watches them in their bedroom with the other dachshund, Dulce. “If this comes out, everybody will know that we’re all completely crazy,” he said. “But these are cábalas, you know?”

The players are also practicing cábalas. Alejandro Gómez, Leandro Paredes and Rodrigo de Paul, three midfielders, have taken to walking around the pitch an hour before kickoff while chewing candy, a tradition they started last year when Argentina won the Copa América, South America’s premier soccer tournament.

During Argentina’s matches, Maia Morosano performs rituals to lead to a win, such as burning certain herbs.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times
Morosano, who is from Rosario, is also a poet.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times
Morosano casting spells for the national team.
Credit: Sebastián López Brach for The New York Times

So now the question for the witches is: What will happen on Sunday?

“We don’t want to give information as if we have the absolute last word,” Spadafora said. “But obviously we have started working, and obviously we have checked with most of the means at our disposal — esoteric means, for example, pendulums, Tarot, all the divination methods — and it indicates that Argentina is going to win.”

Azucena Agüero Blanch, a 72-year old professional fortune-teller once consulted by former President Carlos Menem, has also explained that she is working with magical stones to ensure an Argentina victory. “Many people who are pushing for Argentina to win have called on me to work on this,” she told an Argentine newspaper.

On Friday night, Martínez was in her candlelit home in Buenos Aires wearing a robe covered in tigers and lighting candles at an altar that included burned sandalwood; Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god; and a photo of Diego Maradona, the late Argentine soccer star who is something like a deity to many in this country.

Martínez said she has a series of methods to protect the national team, including a practice that involves swinging a pendulum, or a wooden cylinder on a string, above a player’s jersey number and then burning cotton doused with a mistletoe tincture. She said she follows the news for updates about players’ ailments and then uses the pendulum to help alleviate them. “The pendulum is the most powerful tool I have,” she explained.

She said she has also had psychic moments during matches. During Argentina’s match against Australia on Dec. 3, she said she had a vision of the Argentine forward Julián Álvarez celebrating a goal.

At 5:13 p.m., she tweeted: “Julian Alvarez I want your goal 🕯👁🕯👁🕯.”

Four minutes later, Álvarez scored.

Tarot sets used by Violeta Parisi, a witch in Buenos Aires.
Credit: Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York Times
Parisi, 24, is one of the hundreds of witches across the country practicing magic to help their national team.
Credit: Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York Times
An altar in Parisi’s bedroom.
Credit: Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York Times

Natalie Alcoba contributed reporting.

Is herbalism another form of magic? (The Irish Times)

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Patients less likely to be fobbed off these days with a vague promise they will get better

Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 06:00

Peter McGuire

Ireland has a rich ethno-medical knowledge and a history of traditional healing,” says Helen Sheridan, professor of pharmacology at Trinity College.

“Ireland has a rich ethno-medical knowledge and a history of traditional healing,” says Helen Sheridan, professor of pharmacology at Trinity College.

 GPs in Ireland used to give people a bottle of medicine. It was pink or it was blue, and if one didn’t work you tried the other one. Then, as now, most ailments got better with or without medication.

Many people in Ireland, until at least the mid 20th century, believed that their health and wellbeing, as well as that of their animals, were routinely threatened by envious and ill-intentioned neighbours, witches and fairies.

Biddy Early, the famous wise woman of Clare who is said to have died in 1874, reputedly had a magical power to cure illnesses and ailments.

Stories collected by Lady Gregory say Biddy Early had a magic bottle – in the same vein as a crystal ball – which she used to communicate with the fairies and to heal people. People came to her and told them her problems. She listened.

Along with another healer, Moll Anthony of Kildare – who was such an outcast the priest is said to refused her a Christian burial – both of these women gave out bottles containing some kind of unspecified liquid which people were told to drink. Exactly what was in these bottles, nobody is sure.

Today, the work of herbalists is subject to far more scrutiny, and their patients are less likely to be fobbed off with a vague promise they will get better. Now, they want to know what’s in the bottle.

“Ireland has a rich ethno-medical knowledge and a history of traditional healing, but it is not as culturally embedded as in other countries like France, Germany and Austria,” says Helen Sheridan, professor of pharmacology at Trinity College.

Dr Ronnie Moore, a lecturer in sociology and a lecturer in public health medicine and epidemiology at UCD, is a critic of the power of modern biomedicine and takes a different perspective.

“The herbs or minerals are all props: this is about magic and to belief systems,” he said.

“Magic?” I ask incredulously. “That’s a loaded word.”

“I like to use the word because that is exactly what is at play here,” he says. “Talk of placebo and nocebo if you want, but you’re buying into medical discourse. I introduce my students to placebo by calling it witchcraft, because it does the same thing and has the same functions.”

What’s so wrong about medical discourse? I ask. Hasn’t it greatly expanded the human lifespan, saved hundreds of millions of lives and led to massive improvements in our quality of life?

“Biomedicine tends to see the body as a machine, but to use that approach ignores psychosocial responses – of which there are many – to healing,” says Moore.

“Which has done more harm: herbs or biomedicine? [The disgraced obstetrician] Michael Neary needlessly removed 129 women’s wombs; the drug Thalidomide led to birth defects; and people have died on drug trials.”

When Moore started to write a book on the topic, he realised that his ideas would be controversial and decided that he needed to work with other academics.

But there’s increasing evidence that this “magic”, to use Moore’s term, might actually work, and it seems to be due to one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern healthcare: the placebo effect.

Helen Sheridan, associate professor at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in Trinity College Dublin and an advisor to the subcommitte on herbal medicines with the Health Products Regulatory Authority, says placebo applies to people when they may be some element of the immune system brought into play, that is controlled by the mind.

In her recent book Cure, the author Jo Marchant lays bare a catalogue of studies showing that the placebo effect is deeply complex and so much more than just a curious trick of the mind where we believe we are better.

Marchant tells of Ted Kaputchuk, who trained and worked as a traditional Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist for many years before becoming professor of medicine and professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. While practicing as a herbalist, he watched people visibly improve before they had even left his office, but he became uncomfortable with the idea that it was the herbs at work.

Placebo effect

In a more recent experiment, Kaputchuk teamed up with his colleague, Dr Anthony Lembo, a gastroenterologist. In a trial of 80 patients with long-term irritable bowel syndrome, half were given a placebo and told it was a placebo but it might help with self-healing, and they still did better than those who got no treatment. A study of 20 women with depression showed up similar results, while a study on migraine patients found that those who knew they were taking a placebo still felt 30 per cent less pain than those receiving no treatment.

Evidence is mounting for the placebo effect. The mere belief we are being looked after, with medicine and care from nurses or loved ones, can help to ease symptoms, boost the immune system and even prevent us from getting sick in the first place.

Studies conducted by Jon Levine, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, have shown that our brains can release endorphins – “the happy drug” but also a natural painkiller – which is part of the opiate family of chemicals that includes heroin and morphine – when we take placebo. Our mind doesn’t just influence our health, it is inextricably linked with it.

But Marchant also shows that the placebo effect – or call it “a belief in the infinite healing power of the universe” over modern medicine, or whatever else you want to – won’t cure many illnesses, including diabetes, asthma and cancer. Nor will it lower your blood pressure. So it’s not the panacea either.

Herbalists have tended to emphasise the importance of good digestion and gut health, exposing themselves to the claim that they’re similar to reflexologists who say that different parts of the hands or feet correspond to different parts of the body and that ailments can be cured by stimulating them.

Unlike reflexologists, however, there’s at least some solid evidence to support them.

Earlier this year, researchers at University College Cork found that the microbes in our gut influence how our nerves work.

We already know that bowel disorders, the immune system and obesity are influenced by the microbiome (the 1kg+ of bacteria and other organisms living in our gut) and now there is evidence that it can influence stress, anxiety and depression.

Professor John Cryan, head of the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience at UCC, told this newspaper’s science editor, Dick Ahlstrom, that our brains have developed with signals from the microbes all the time.

Irving Kirsch, a lecturer in medicine at Harvard University, has produced a body of research showing that the effect of pharmaceutical drugs used for depression had little more effect than placebo.

Kirsch put in a freedom of information request to the US Food and Drug Administration on clinical trials of antidepressants.

The response suggested what pharmaceutical firms had not been telling us: with the exception of severe cases, most antidepressants (such as Prozac) performed little or no better than an inert sugar pill placebo.

His research has been criticised on the basis of flaws in those trials and the difficulties in measuring improvements in depression.

But between the placebo effect and the influence of the microbiome on our body and mind, could the herbalists be onto something?

Research in the National Folklore Collection shows many herbal remedies were accompanied by some kind of ritual: usually a chant, prayer, incantation, or sometimes a symbolic rite such as passing a sick person three times around a bush or animal.

People get better, says anthropologist Dan Moerman of the University of Michigan, because of the meaning that is attached to the treatment, whether that’s from a medical doctor or a traditional herbalist.

A range of researchers suggest that how we take our pills is important and they work better if there’s a little ritual around them: take them with a prayer or meditation, before bath time or get someone else to give them to you which will help you feel more cared for.

Bethann Roche is one of the founders of the Irish Medical Anthropology Network, and her own background is in anthropology and medicine.

She has spent most of her working life as a public health doctor in Ireland and many years examining the phenomenon of faith healing. She says anthropology has a contribution to make to health – and she emphasises the word health as distinct from medicine.

Regarding magic she say: “it is helpful to look at this in total context rather than blaming health professionals for being too narrow-minded or patients for being too superstitious”.

Isn’t placebo just a polite way of saying “it’s all in your head” I ask Dr Dilis Clare, a GP and practicing herbalist based in Galway.

She laughs heartily. “And isn’t that a wonderful place to be? Your healing is all in your head. That is fantastic.”

I grimace and prevaricate. Well, I say, the implication is that you were imagining it all along.

The smile falls from her face.

“So?” she asks. “If imagination is so powerful that it can stop coals burning feet, why would it not be strong enough to either give you IBS or be a part of it?”

If you have an abnormal microbiome it produces hormones which are like small protein molecules going straight to the brain, easily absorbed across the gut barrier and blood brain barrier.

“Which came first, the illness or the imagination, the chicken of the egg? Does it matter?”

Ask A Mind: Is Studying Witchcraft `Useful’ for Development? (Savage Minds)

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June 7, 2015
By Maia

Can anthropologists combine research on witchcraft with research on development? Why are some topics considered more relevant to understanding development issues than others? This post is a response to a question from a reader considering doing a research project in anthropology. It provides an overview of some recent work on witchcraft by anthropologists mostly working in Africa.

This reader’s question raises several issues- about development, about witchcraft and about defining a research problem.   Responding to it provides an opportunity to practice demand driven anthropology- an underutilized potential of the blog format. As an anthropologist who works on development institutions, and on witchcraft in East Africa, this is my take on it.

Ideas about witches and violence directed against those who are thought to practice witchcraft , including women and children, remain socially significant in many countries in the world.  The negative social impacts of witchcraft make it a development issue in relation to human rights violations and its contribution to social exclusion. Moreover, representations of witchcraft in popular culture consistently situate what witches are alleged to do in direct contradiction of aspirations to achieve personal and national development.

Our reader asks whether the study of witchcraft is distinct from the kinds of research which would be relevant to development, and whether witchcraft and development are distinct domains of social practice which demand different sorts of analysis.   Should she aim to study witchcraft in the hope that it may have something to say about development or is there, as one professor working in development told her, `more useful work to be done around behavior change and water, sanitation and health than witchcraft’?

These questions are partly influenced by our reader’s current situation within development practice (she works in an NGO), hence the professor’s concern for prioritizing the understanding of behavior change that could prove useful for designing more effective interventions. But they are also informed by the ways that witchcraft has been addressed within contemporary anthropology as a field of symbolic practice.   The well known work of Jean and John Comaroff, for example, interprets witchcraft beliefs at least partially as a vehicle through which experiences of peripheralization, including global social relations, can be symbolically articulated (1999).

If witchcraft enables the articulation of an `occult economy’   it is at the same time materially grounded with effects in the real world (Moore & Sanders 2001). Witchcraft as a social institution frequently operates as a means through which human relations are restructured sustained by expanding economies of the occult comprising healers, unwitchers and diviners. It is often accompanied by violence.

The social inseparability of these two dimensions of witchcraft is the focus of ongoing ethnographic work by Isak Niehaus and Adam Ashforth. Both Niehaus and Ashforth have spent many years researching the everyday politics of witchcraft in South Africa. In the years immediately after the   ANC victory, witchcraft accusations, murder and expulsions were widespread in rural areas and townships as deadly weapons in local conflicts centered on political allegiance and access to resources.

Violent practices justified by witchcraft were an important part of the local political system, supported by vested interests. Accusations of witchcraft were invoked to escalate disputes with serious social consequences (Niehaus 1993; Ashforth 2005). Those affected by witchcraft include those who believe they are bewitched and those who find themselves accused of witchcraft . The personal experiences of the affected in South Africa are sensitively examined by both authors (Niehaus 2012; Ashforth 2000). A new book by James Howard Smith  and Ngeti Mwadime explores related issues in Kenya (2014).

Certain social categories can find themselves liable to accusation and the violence or expulsion which follow.   Attacks on older women accused of witchcraft in Western Tanzania have attracted international media attention since the 1990s (Mesaki 2009). More recently in Tanzania people with albinism, particularly children, have been at risk of murder by practitioners of witchcraft who seek to use their body parts to make powerful medicines (Bryceson et al 2010).

It is evident from these examples that practices related to witchcraft are strongly rooted in the ideas that people hold about witches and their powers. The tenacity of these ideas is not simply explained by what ideas about witches mean. It is equally a product of what Mary Douglas called `entrenchment’ (1991: 726) ; that is the actions people take which sustain ideas about witchcraft and the practices through which it is realized institutionally. In Western Tanzania, as in South Africa (Ashforth 2005 ), diviners play a crucial role in diagnosing witchcraft as the cause of personal misfortune and in identifying alleged witches, responding to demand to resolve personal and political differences through severing relations (e.g. Green 2009).

While what is categorized as the `traditional’ healing sector promoted through the political valorization of African medicine provides support for the institutional foundation for the sustained presence of witchcraft across the continent (Langwick 2011; Ashforth 2005) , sub disciplinary boundaries within anthropology have generally worked against the problematization of the institution of witchcraft , both within medical anthropology and in relation to the wider political economy. Consideration of witchcraft primarily in terms of the ontological deflects from the interrogation of   the economics which sustains it and creates lucrative small business opportunities for the countless individuals who set themselves up as herbalists, diviners and healers.

Anthropological uncertainty about the situation of witchcraft feeds into ways in which various state authorities, colonial and post colonial, have approached it and inadvertently promoted it. If witchcraft is understood as essentially a matter of culture and belief it can potentially be attacked through education and political campaigns, while legal sanctions are directed against those who practice witchcraft and against those seeking to make them knowable.

It is clear from recent media reports in a number of countries that neither approach is working. Evangelical Christian churches proliferating on the continent readily assume responsibility for addressing perceived witchcraft threats within and beyond their congregations (Meyer 2004; Hasu 2012). Social media fuels the extension of transnational economies founded on the occult, dispersing witchcraft through the diaspora while offering a means for those afflicted to address it.

If the transnational appeal of healers and preachers such as the hugely popular TB Joshua in Nigeria are testament to the enduring salience of notions about witchcraft, they are also indicators of the consistent imbrication of witchcraft with innovation and social transformation. Witchcraft is not , despite systematic condemnation by the governments seeking to prohibit it, a traditional and static social institution. It is a continually evolving assemblage.

The institution of witchcraft, wherever it occurs, is not only wholly implicated in modernity (Geschiere 1997). Those engaged with witchcraft either as purchasers of its powers, such as the miners of Western Tanzania, or the diviners offering protection from it consistently seek to adapt the ways in which they do so; through new forms of protective practice, changes in how clients seeking protection are dealt with or the contexts in which certain medicines come to be viewed as efficacious (e.g Green & Mesaki 2005; Englund 2007). It is not witchcraft in the abstract but the practice of it which in many settings is perceived to be antithetical to modernization and moving forwards. Personal ambition may be thwarted by witches whose jealousy prevents a person from getting ahead. Witchcraft as is therefore consistently viewed by those affected by it as getting in the way of development (Smith 2008).

Governments tend to claim that witchcraft related practices and ideas are backward and anti- development, a political position certainly, but one which borrows its legitimation from certain kinds of anthropology. In constituting witchcraft as a matter of culture anthropologists and African states fail to acknowledge the ways in which it comes to be institutionally entrenched in various settings.   The study of witchcraft is inherently entangled with development as ideology and in terms of the interventions at social reform undertaken by successive African governments.

The study of witchcraft , in Africa and elsewhere, demands some kind of engagement with the politics of development in various institutional forms. It is also important. However much we contribute to understanding witchcraft, however meaningful it may be, witchcraft as an institution amounts to symbolic, structural and actual violence. It causes significant social harm. If anthropologists can help unpick its institutional tenacity we will have made a useful contribution.

References Cited

Ashforth, Adam. Madumo, a man bewitched. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Ashforth, Adam. Witchcraft, violence, and democracy in South Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, Jesper Bosse Jønsson, and Richard Sherrington. “Miners’ magic: artisanal mining, the albino fetish and murder in Tanzania.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 48, no. 03, (2010): 353-382.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. “Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony.” American ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279-303.

Douglas, Mary. “Witchcraft and leprosy: two strategies of exclusion.” Man (1991): 723-736.

Englund, Harri. “Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 2 (2007): 295-311.

Geschiere, Peter The Modernity of Witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. University of Virginia Press, 1997.

Green, Maia, and Simeon Mesaki. “The birth of the “salon”: Poverty,“modernization,” and dealing with witchcraft in southern Tanzania.” American Ethnologist 32, no. 3 (2005): 371-388.

Green, Maia. “The social distribution of sanctioned harm.” Addison et al, Poverty Dynamics (2009): 309-327.

Hasu, Päivi. “Prosperity gospels and enchanted world views: Two responses to socio-economic transformation in Tanzanian Pentecostal Christianity.” Pentecostalism and Development: Churches, NGOs and Social Change in Africa 1 (2012): 67.

Langwick, Stacey Ann. Bodies, politics, and African healing: The matter of maladies in Tanzania. Indiana University Press, 2011.

Mesaki, Simeon. “The tragedy of ageing: Witch killings and poor governance among the Sukuma.” Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives. Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (2009): 72-90.

Meyer, Birgit. “Christianity in Africa: From African independent to Pentecostal-charismatic churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology (2004): 447-474.

Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. “Magical interpretations and material realities.” Magical interpretations, material realities: modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa (2001): 552-566.

Niehaus, Isak A. “Witch-hunting and political legitimacy: continuity and change in Green Valley, Lebowa, 1930–91.” Africa 63, no. 04 (1993): 498-530.

Niehaus, Isak. Witchcraft and a life in the new South Africa. Vol. 43. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Smith, James H., and Ngeti Mwadime. Email from Ngeti: An Ethnography of Sorcery, Redemption, and Friendship in Global Africa. Univ of California Press, 2014.

Smith, James Howard. Bewitching development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal Kenya. University of Chicago Press, 2008.