The Modernity of Witchcraft in the Ghanaian Online Setting

This study is focused on contemporary discourses on witchcraft in Ghana, and involves the internet as material for such a study. It is the aim to gather a broad range of voices and opinions from journalists, columnists, and readers of online newspapers, dealing with the topic of witchcraft. In recent years anthropologists have begun to involve modern media in the study of witchcraft (as for instance in video films: e.g. Meyer 2008a, 2010a; Austen and Șaul 2010; Haynes 2010). This opening and the resulting possibilities of reaching alternative discourses is an important step and a long overdue recognition of the growing importance of such media for human culture. This thesis takes the next consequent move forward which also includes the internet, and investigates how the topic of witchcraft is discussed in specific online settings. The online setting is a hitherto overlooked aspect in the study of witchcraft in Africa; it is a rich source of information which is equally relevant to the furthering of scholarly interest in this topic as other insitu studies. There are three major discoveries made in this dissertation project. The first point regards what I call the ‘problem of observation and projection’ in the study of witchcraft in Africa. This notion addresses the problem that African discourses on witchcraft from the European observer have not only for a long time stood at the center of the idea of Africa as the continent of the ‘Other’, but also has the topic of witchcraft in specific served as a projection surface for European ideas, which still holds on until today and resonates in contemporary Anthropology. Even though the latter field has brought forth most valuable insights, the problem of observation and projection still exists in form of the attempts to declare witchcraft to be first and foremost a symptom of the imbalances by capitalism; as is present in the prominent paradigm of the modernity of witchcraft (e.g. Geschiere 2000) Once more ‘African’ phenomena are used to account for the problems and failures of ‘European’ systems. The second major point in this thesis therefore asks for a contemporary African view onto the subject of witchcraft, which has resulted in the observation and collection of witchcraft critical voices from within genuine African discourses. Despite the scholarly attempts to assess witchcraft in terms of a consequent reaction toward the imbalances and injustice in capitalism, and the troubles with modernity, and to reintegrate it into the latter, thereby negating the supposed contradiction of modernity and magic (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xxxff.), one may not overlook those genuine African voices which insist on that very separation. The third major discovery made in this thesis regards an in-depth analysis of such witchcraft critical discourses, where it is revealed that to some extent such discourses show that the function of the concept of witchcraft also is metaphorical in nature. I demonstrate how the notion of witchcraft is used to illustrate the unjust and antisocial behavior of certain politicians who misuse their power to enrich themselves upon the livelihood of the communities. This study is to be understood as situated within the discipline of Religious Studies, and it is written predominantly for an audience interested in the religious aspects of witchcraft discourses. With this qualification I want to stress that the opposition between ‘rationality’ and ‘irrationality’ (even though not a useful concept in academic meta language), is not a trivial point when it comes to the description of the insiders view. The dominant paradigm in the study of contemporary witchcraft in Africa as suggested in the discipline of Anthropology reduces the notion to the clashes with modernity in Africa, thereby neglecting a distinctive element of human behavior and cognition: belief in the supernatural. I follow Freiberger (2009:21ff.) in highlighting the comparative aspect in the study of religion, which asks for a second material horizon, which can then be compared to the contemporary discourses. Considering a topic of such magnitude, it is necessary to place it into a context of historical comparison. This includes an entangled historical view upon the topic of witchcraft in Afro-European situations of cultural exchange. By comparing historical material to contemporary material, this research project advances and empirically underpins the observation that the discourses of contemporary participants in the Ghanaian online setting bear argumentative similarity to those early modern European thinkers that challenged the belief in witchcraft conceptually as well as theologically. In this way, this thesis contributes further to the deconstruction of Africa as the continent of the occult, and also enriches the study of witchcraft by highlighting its alternative African voices. Regarding structure, this thesis begins by delivering the literature review background of the study of witchcraft in Africa with a special regard to the history of the notion of magic in the European academic and social scientific discourse. The second Chapter assumes an approach which is sensitive to entangled histories (Conrad and Randeria 2002), and which informs the investigations of the contemporary material.