We need someone to blame. When something bad happens, we don't want to hear that it's because of chance or nature, because then it's meaningless. We want a social explanation. That's what witchcraft delivered for the Azande people, studied by Edward Evans-Pritchard,

For the Azande, everyday misfortunes are caused by witchcraft. If you get sick, and the illness gets progressively worse, that's because of witchcraft. There are witches all around. Their envies and jealousies lead witches to bewitch friends, neighbours, even family members.

To us, this belief seems irrational. But it is no more so than our confidence in science or technology. We don't understand most technology, but we have experts who do, and we take their word for it. The Azande have experts too, and ways to identify witches. Suspected witches even effectively confess to the deed. And their experts can even conduct an autopsy to discover whether someone was a witch.

The only thing missing is a mechanism - the actual method that a witch uses to arrange it so that your hurt yourself on a stump, for instance. That's the one thing that science offers that witchcraft does not. But do you know how your phone works? All the mechanisms involved, from electromagnetism to just-in-time software compilers? Of course not. So it is with the Azande. It is easy to pretend superior knowledge, but we are not so different.

Witchcraft among the Azande is real. Even if no one is truly bewitched, from oracles to autopsies to the rituals of an accused witch promising to desist, witchcraft is a real social institution. As an example from a foreign culture, it provides us with an illustration of how social constructions work. In the next episode, I will bring that home, to a more familiar construction: race.

See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande.