“Witchcraft is ubiquitous,” Evans-Pritchard (1976:18) wrote,
I had no difficulty in discovering what the Azande think about
witchcraft, nor in observing what they do to combat it. These
ideas and actions are on the surface of their life. . . . Mangu,
witchcraft, was one of the first words I heard in Zandeland, and
I heard it uttered day by day throughout the months. (1976:1)
Edward Evans-Pritchard / 167
Witchcraft may be the cause for misfortune in any element of
Zande life:
There is no niche or corner of Zande culture into which it does
not twist itself. If blight seizes the ground-nut crop it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game it is witchcraft; if
women laboriously bale water out of a pool and are rewarded
with but a few small fish it is witchcraft; if termites do not rise
when their swarming is due and a cold useless night is spent
waiting for their flight it is witchcraft; if a wife is sulky and unresponsive to her husband it is witchcraft; if a prince is cold
and distant with his subject it is witchcraft; if a magical rite
fails to achieve its purpose it is witchcraft; if, in fact, any failure or misfortune falls upon anyone at any time and in relation
to any of the manifold activities of his life it may be due to
witchcraft. (Evans-Pritchard 1976:63–64)
This does not mean the Azande are unaware of other forms
of causation—for example, incompetence or carelessness, breach
of taboo or failure to observe a moral rule, or what we might call
“natural processes,” but witchcraft is an important explanatory
link.
Evans-Pritchard’s classic example of this is the case of the
falling granary. Granaries are heavy structures of wattle and daub
raised aboveground on wooden posts. Evans-Pritchard writes,
“Sometimes a granary collapses. There is nothing remarkable in
this. Every Zande knows that termites eat the supports in course
of time and that even the hardest woods decay.” In the heat of the
summer the Azande will sit in the shade of the granary:
Consequently it may happen that there are people sitting beneath the granary when it collapses and they are injured, for it
is a heavy structure. . . . Now why should these particular people have been sitting under this particular granary at the particular moment when it collapsed? That it should collapse is
easily intelligible, but why should have it collapsed at the particular moment when these particular people were sitting beneath it? Through years it might have collapsed, so why
should it fall just when certain people sought its kindly shelter? Zande philosophy can supply the missing link. The Zande
knows that the supports were undermined by termites and
168 / Chapter 12
that people were sitting beneath the granary in order to escape
the heat and glare of the sun. But he knows besides why these
two events occurred at a precisely similar moment in time and
space. It was due to the action of witchcraft. (Evans-Pritchard
1976:69–70)
Evans-Pritchard discusses Azande witchcraft in over five
hundred pages impossible to summarize briefly. The Azande believe that witchcraft is located in an organ by the liver and is
passed patrilineally from father to son, but that it is not present
in the royal lineage. This genetic theory of witchcraft transmission, Douglas observes, “was adapted so that questions about
transmission were directed away from those social relationships
where claims could not be collected” (1980:55). Such selectivity
in the organization of human thinking is one of the key points of
Evans-Pritchard’s theory of accountability. Douglas writes,
Evans-Pritchard’s implicit conception of human knowledge
starts from three principles. First, rational thought is exercised
only selectively over the possible field of attention. Second, the
principle of selectivity depends on the social demand for accountability. Third, the social patterns of accountability which
can be elicited by systematic observation provide a structured
anchorage for a particular kind of reality, with its own array of
beings invested with appropriate powers. In sum, each human
society, insofar as its members expect to hold each other accountable, has its own locally selected reality anchored to
agreement about moral objectives. (1980:132)
By focusing on the ways different segments of a society hold
each other accountable, the structures linking individuals and
institutions can be discerned. The identification of such local
structures was one of Evans-Pritchard’s goals in discussing social anthropology as a form of social history.