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Given the circularity of the witchcraft complex in Africa, given its performative potential, isn't the flood of anthropological publications on the topic counter-productive insofar as it feeds what it pretends to analyse, and even stigmatize? Wouldn't the social scientists be well advised not to emulate the media and the Evangelical preachers and to avoid bestowing on Africa the dubious privilege of being no more than a shadow theatre devoid of substance on the stage of which everything - power, work, production, economy, the family - would actually be played in the occult? In this publication, eight scholars - namely: Jean-Pierre Warnier, Didier Péclard, Julien Bonhomme, Patrice Yengo, Jane Guyer, Joseph Tonda, Francis Nyamnjoh and Peter Geschiere - engage in a lively and contradictory debate on witchcraft/sorcery in Africa in a controversial historical context.

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9789956550029

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Didier Péclard is a Senior lecturer at the Global Studies Institute, University of Geneva. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences-Po Paris (2005). His research interests include religion and politics, nationalism, as well as the dynamics of peacebuilding and state formation in Africa. Jean-Pierre Warnier (PhD, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 1975, hororary Professor since 2006) taught anthropology in Nigeria, Cameroon, and, since 1985, at the University Paris-Descartes. Since 1972, he did research on the economic and political history of the Cameroon Grassfields. He later shifted to the study of bodily and material cultures as technologies of power. One of his latest books is The Pot-King. The Body and Technologies of power. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007.

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