To Evans-Pritchard’s own time (his article was written in 1937) witchcraft practices were considered irrational. Evans-Pritchard showed that these practices were rational to their own society. A later anthropologist, Levi-Strauss enlarged on E-P’s argument to say that witchcraft belief was an over-determined explanation of causality. If you had some ‘bit of bad luck’ happen to you-- a brick falls on you from a building for example-- scientific explanation in our society would say it was a random event. It’s not about you and that moment in particular, but just a certain kind of statistical random event. You wouldn’t go assigning direct causality of the event to yourself. But what happens if you live in a universe in which nothing can be seen to happen by accident?
There are two dimensions to the over-determined explanation. One is that it is a kind of proto-science and what differentiates contemporary scientific explanations from events of that kind is that we accept the idea that many things happen on a random basis based on statistical probabilities. Whereas a kind of mystically informed science will seek to explain everything. But the second and more important dimension to Azande or Nigerian witchcraft beliefs is that causality isn’t restricted to a physical universe but is centered on a social universe.
Imagine that when you live in a small community of people who you know your whole life, the focus of all cause and effect is social rather than physical, as we take it to be. So, if you are sitting under a granary (as E-P’s example goes) and it falls on your head, then an explanation is sought. Anyone can say that you can see that the termites had eaten the wood that had held the granary up, but that’s not seen as a sufficient explanation. The termites in that sense were merely the messenger or mechanism by which the bad event happened. And so, they go looking in the social realm for who would want to curse you and make this happen. And because there are always social tensions, people doing each other social wrongs, these witchcraft accusations become a means by which social retributions are meted out.
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