It's Everywhere!

Magic among the Azande is not a thing of awe, not something to marvel at when it occurs, but rather a normal happenstance in everyday life. It would be more unusual for an Azande not to expect some form or magic or sorcery on a day to day basis. This is because mangu, or magic, is something that every Azande is an authority on; even young children know all about witchcraft. It’s just commonsense. They could not imagine a world without witchcraft just as Europeans (and truly much of the rest of the world) cannot imagine a world with actual witchcraft in it.

As Oscar Chase eloquently puts it in his book Law, Culture and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context: “It was as hard for the Azande to understand how Europeans failed to see the witchcraft that is all around as for the Europeans to comprehend their belief in it” (18).

In my own culture, or really, just my own world view, nothing is as pervasive as witchcraft for the Azande. No sort of belief system feels that much like common sense in my culture other than empirical science. And yet no matter how prevalent witchcraft is to the Azande daily life, it doesn’t seem to be able to be proven (I will explore why in a later post about Poison Oracles). Some in my own culture would protest that their own particular god, in my case the Christian God, is an all encompassing force that cannot be proven. You know; he watches over all we do, knows the number of hairs placed on our heads even though you cannot see Him. But God, for me, is simply watching on the peripherals, just watching, not directly influencing. (This is my personal belief, not necessarily a general Christian perspective) For the Azande, magic is in everyday life, shaping coincidence and coming from people they know. It’s not some vague force.

So while Evans-Pritchard claims that witchcraft is a vague belief system (mysticism) among the Azande, it doesn’t feel much like my own far away, impersonal-feeling, overarching belief. It seems more like just a fact of life rather than something that you have to work at believing in.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon P: Oxford. Print.

Chase, Oscar G. "The Lesson of the Azande". Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context. NYU Press: New York. 2005. pp. 15-29.