In this lecture, we consider several famous cases from Europe’s Great Witch-hunt. We cover aspects of the late Medieval and Early modern period that form the backdrop to the events. We also consider various theories which purport to explain the Great Witch-hunt, including Cohn’s idea about the merging of witch and heretic.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Secularization theory holds that with increasing modernization of the world, magic and religion would decline. Most scholars now argue religion and magic have grown in the past half-century. To explain this, scholars have developed ideas of the “religious resurgence” and “modernity of witchcraft”

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Now we have an idea of what we are talking about with “magic”, we need to understand how anthropologists account for its existence. In this lecture, I want to explain what anthropology can tell us about magic and particularly sorcery and witchcraft.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

If we are going to study the persecution of alleged witches and sorcerers, we first need to understand what we mean by “witchcraft” and “sorcery”. In this unit, we will use specific definitions for these concepts. But there are limitations to these definitions.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In this unit, we use the anthropological perspective to analyze witch-hunts and persecution. What is unique about anthropologists is that they use data obtained from participant-observation fieldwork and analyze this data using principles of relativism, comparison and holism.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

The killing of witches and sorcerers is a pressing contemporary issue. Studying such killings will provide greater insight into persecution in general. In order to undertake this study, the concepts of anthropology can be very useful.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.