[ Vicious attacks on women often accompany economic upheavals]
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SOCIAL TURMOIL HAS INCREASED WITCH HUNTS HISTORICALLY  
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Silvia Federici, Alice Markham-Cantor
April 22, 2023
Scientific American
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_ Vicious attacks on women often accompany economic upheavals _

A family member holds a portrait of Iquo Edet Eyo, who was killed in
Nigeria in October 2022, Kholood Eid

 

It's an old story: A woman is accused of witchcraft by someone close
to her—a neighbor, a relative, a rival. Often the original accuser
resents or envies the woman or has a property dispute with her. At
first the complaints are just whispers. But then something happens—a
child gets sick, or an accident occurs. The woman's name is said
again, loudly this time, and more people echo it. Then she is dragged
from her house and killed.

This is what happened to Iquo Edet Eyo, a 69-year-old woman from Cross
River State in Nigeria. Along with four others, she was murdered in
October 2022, allegedly by a group of young men who charged that her
witchcraft had caused a recent motorcycle crash. Her family says that
suspicions had been dogging her for years, arising from jealousy of
her prosperity. It is also the tale of Martha Carrier, the ancestor of
one of us (Markham-Cantor), who was hanged in Salem, Mass., in 1692.
Of the accusations against her, one of the most salient was by a
neighbor with whom her family had a property dispute. Carrier became
one of 35 people executed for witchcraft in the British colonies of
New England—“crimes” of which some of them still have not been
exonerated. [[link removed]]

The narrative could be set in Germany in 1581, India in 2003
[[link removed]],
Uganda in 2018 [[link removed]] or Papua New Guinea
in 2021 [[link removed]].
Every year more than 1,000 people around the world, including men and
children, are tortured, expelled from their homes or killed after
being charged with witchcraft—using magic, usually to cause harm.
Far from declining with modernization, as some 20th-century scholars
predicted, witch hunts are holding steady in some places and may be
happening more often in others.

Multiple roots entwine to produce a witch hunt. A belief in sorcery, a
patriarchal society, sudden and mysterious deaths resulting from a
paucity of health care, inaccessible justice systems that give
impunity to attackers, a triggering disaster—all of these
contribute. But as one of us (Federici) has argued in her 2004 book
_Caliban and the Witch_
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and subsequent publications
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what sustained periods of witch-hunting have in common, across time,
space and culture, is a backdrop of social and economic dislocation.

Witch hunts can erupt suddenly, as during the COVID-19 pandemic
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when terrified people searched for scapegoats. But when rates of these
assaults have stayed high over decades—such as in Europe in the 16th
and 17th centuries and in parts of Asia and Africa in the past 50
years—subsistence economies were in the process of being replaced by
monetary and capitalistic systems.

During these times the powerful and the wealthy were privatizing
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fields, ponds and forests previously held as commons, evicting
villagers from the natural resources that had sustained them for
centuries. Close-knit communities with relatively self-sufficient
economies disintegrated, leaving the newly dispossessed with wage work
as the only option for survival. This disruption of rural society
caused bitter conflicts between the emerging classes of haves and
have-nots that in places manifested as witch hunts.

As Federici and other scholars have further argued
[[link removed]], in
medieval Europe, as well as in much of the Global South, women
harvested food and medicinal herbs and had a close relationship with
the natural world. During expansions or intensifications of
capitalism, many rural women lost access to land and, along with it,
the economic and social power they had previously enjoyed. Among the
worst affected were older women, who in the new dispensation were
regarded as unproductive. Lacking social support and believed to have
destructive magical powers, in many places they came to be targeted as
witches. The pattern began six centuries ago with the witch hunts in
Europe.

Silver River

In the Medieval period, Europe had a feudal system in which kings
granted land to nobles, landlords and knights in exchange for military
assistance in wartime. Despite often brutal exploitation, peasants
could supplement whatever they earned from laboring on landlords'
fields with food and other resources harvested, hunted or fished from
commonly held fields, meadows, ponds and forests. Women enjoyed
relative economic independence. Apart from tending crops, women worked
as brewers, bakers, butchers, ironsmiths, retailers, and much more.
Between 1300 and 1500 in Frankfurt, Germany, for example, women
participated in more than 200 professions, with the municipality
hiring at least 16 female doctors for its public health-care program.

With the conquest of the “New World” in the 16th century, however,
silver from the mines of South and Central America began pouring into
Europe—paradoxically deepening the immiseration of the poor.
Inflation skyrocketed, and the purchasing power of wages collapsed,
making even the most basic foodstuffs prohibitively expensive. The
consequences were especially disastrous for women. They were primarily
responsible for feeding and caring for their families but could not
travel long distances to look for better-paying jobs. In the 14th
century, for example, women received half the pay of a man for the
same task; two centuries later they made only a third of the (reduced)
male wage—and that money went to the husband.

Landlords and wealthier peasants had been fencing off communally held
fields, forests and meadows since the 13th century, and this process
intensified. Rents escalated
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on whatever land was still available to the poor for farming. In the
1500s, writes historian E. B. Fryde, enclosure destroyed more than
2,000 rural communities in England alone. By the end of that century a
full third of the English population had no access to land—and thus
no ability to grow food necessary for survival.

Entire communities that had survived through cultivation in common
fields found themselves facing mass impoverishment, with two main
choices: emigrate or become wageworkers. Older women were particularly
affected. Previously, in many feudal estates, a widow had rights to
parts of her husband's holdings, as well as the right to glean crops
from other fields. The breakdown of this “manorial” system left
many of those women dependent on charity.

Caught between the collapse of wages and the loss of land, peasants
rioted across Europe. In Germany, the aristocracy brutally suppressed
a peasant rebellion between 1522 and 1525, murdering some 100,000
people. In most of these rebellions, men took the lead, but some of
the protests against enclosures during the reign of King James I of
England were made up only of women. In 1602, for instance,
“Captain” Dorothy Dawson led 37 women in an attack on laborers who
were fencing in a village commons in Yorkshire, England. Historian
Yves-Marie Bercé similarly notes that in six out of the 31 food riots
he studied in 17th-century France, all the protesters were women.

This is the economic ground on which the “Great Hunt” of witches
in Europe took place. Although popular imagination regards the trials
as outbreaks of mass delusion or superstition, the fact that they
peaked between the 1580s and the 1630s, a time of massive upheaval as
a capitalist economy emerged, suggests a different story.

Church leaders had initiated witch hunts in the late 15th century, in
part as a way of policing social mores. Now the state, which was
closely allied with religious, political and economic elites, took the
lead. In the 16th century rulers across Europe introduced new laws to
make sorcery punishable by death—and the trials moved from
ecclesiastical to secular courts, such as in duchies and towns.
Historian Christina Larner
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Scotland, authorities systematically incited panic against witches,
traveling from village to village to instruct people on how to
recognize them and sometimes even bringing along lists of women to
denounce.

Many of those accused as witches were older women who no longer had a
legitimate means of survival. As listed by
[[link removed]] historian Keith
Thomas, the following were the crimes of 65-year-old Margaret Harkett,
who was hanged at Tyburn, England, in 1585:

She had picked a basket of peas in a neighbor's field without
permission. Asked to return them, she flung them down in anger; since
when, no peas would grow in the field. Later, William Goodwin's
servants denied her yeast, whereupon his brewing-stand dried up. She
was struck by a bailiff who had caught her taking wood from his
master's ground; the bailiff went mad. A neighbor refused her a horse;
all his horses died. Another paid her less for a pair of shoes than
she asked; later he died. A gentleman told his servants to refuse her
buttermilk; after which they were unable to make butter or cheese.

Not all alleged witches were poor and landless, however, and sometimes
hunts served to dispossess them. Witch-hunting escalated when
[[link removed]] local edicts permitted
officials or judges to seize the property of the accused. And it
declined when the laws were modified to punish witchcraft without such
confiscation. Witch finding could also be lucrative. Matthew Hopkins,
England's most famous witch-hunter, reportedly made £1,000 over his
career—almost $200,000 today.

Anyone who tried to save a witch, such as a “gossip,” or a female
friend, also risked being killed. Women had organized protests against
enclosures with the help of other women, but conversations among them
were now so stigmatized
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that “gossip” came to mean frivolous chatter or backbiting. To
save their lives, gossips had to denounce their friends as witches.

Although the hunts targeted only some, the threat of being accused
affected the behavior of most women. The persecutions contributed to
the construction of a new patriarchal divide that degraded and limited
women, ranking them below men. Over the course of the witch hunts,
craftsmen in Germany pushed women out of guild membership, and even
practicing certain trades, like selling goods in a market, put women
at risk of sorcery accusations. In France, women lost the right to
make their own contracts. And when they married, women and all that
they owned effectively became the property of
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With a large population of laborers regarded as essential to
prosperity, sexuality came to be rigorously policed. Those accused of
witchcraft were often women who were believed to have sex outside of
marriage or village healers and midwives, among whose many tasks was
to provide contraceptives
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or abortifacients. As industrialization proceeded, many women were
allowed back into the workforce in manufacturing centers and
factories—but their husbands still received their wages.

In sum, witch-hunting was a systematic campaign of terror that
eliminated the resistance to dispossession that had simmered for
decades after the peasant protests were crushed. The accusations and
persecution died down only in the latter half of the 18th century.
Historical records indicate that by that time, roughly 50,000 people
had been executed for sorcery.

In the Colonies

The demand for silver and gold among Europe's elites also spurred
witch hunts in South America, where repression helped to crush
rebellions against colonization and round up laborers for the mines.
In 1562 in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, Spanish authorities tortured
some 4,500 people on the charge of worshipping idols, flogged them in
public to terrify the populace, and enslaved the survivors in mines.
When the Taki Onqoy movement in Peru sought to invoke the power of
_huacas_, or deities, against Spanish rule, a Catholic council
convened in 1567 decreed extirpation of “witch doctors,” and a
century of persecution followed.

As Indigenous people were being executed for devil worship in South
and Central America, witch trials arrived in the North American
colonies. When the elites of New England wrote Bible-inflected legal
codes in the early 1600s, they included witchcraft as a crime
punishable by death. The first official trial, in 1647 in Connecticut,
was probably influenced by a wave of executions in England. By 1725
more than 300 people had been accused of witchcraft in New England,
nearly four fifths of whom were women.

As in Europe, those persecuted as witches in the colonies were
commonly poor and marginalized, but women who transgressed Puritan
behavioral norms or who attained wealth or property were also at risk.
Martha Carrier did both. She became pregnant out of wedlock, and after
her immediate male relatives died in a smallpox outbreak, she may have
stood to inherit much of her father's land. Carrier refused to
confess, and in August 1692 she became one of the 19 people hanged for
witchcraft in Salem.

Across the world, including in other colonies, witch hunts spiked for
diverse local reasons but almost always in periods of social or
economic upheaval. Tanvi Yadav of the Central University of Rajasthan
writes that in 19th-century British India, when colonial authorities
seized the land of upper-caste people, the sufferers blamed the loss
on witchcraft by Dalit, or oppressed, women and started a campaign of
witch-hunting against them. Unable to punch up, the recently
dispossessed focused on the vulnerable target of the lower-caste
witch.

Modern Witch Hunts

Like those in premodern Europe, many contemporary witch hunts can be
traced to expansions or intensifications of capitalism. Across the
Global South, governments and corporations have appropriated fields,
forests and rivers for development projects such as highways,
hydropower plants and mines, displacing between 90 million and 100
million people
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the 1990s alone. The new wave of enclosures increased inequality;
fragmented communities; worsened child and maternal health
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and deepened social, gender and intergenerational conflicts. The
economic decisions that enriched some people while impoverishing
others were made in distant cities and, for the most part, in foreign
languages, and few people could discern their origins.

In a detailed analysis of the Gusii region of Kenya, anthropologist
Justus Ogembo, then at Harvard University, held international
development policies responsible for an explosion of witch-hunting in
the 1990s. To meet stringent conditions attached to an International
Monetary Fund loan in 1981, Kenya slashed public spending on education
and health care—just as the AIDS epidemic hit—and removed price
controls on food and other necessities. Witchcraft accusations surged
as people sought to assign blame for their suffering. Umar Habila
Dadem Danfulani, a professor of religious studies at the University of
Jos in Nigeria, similarly indicts the economic stresses induced by
austerity policies, noting that at that time fear of witchcraft beset
some ethnic groups with no prior history of it. The numbers of
homeless children in cities rose, as did an increase in witchcraft
accusations in the 1990s—especially of children.

Leo Igwe, founder of the Nigeria-based group Advocacy for Alleged
Witches (AfAW), which assists victims of witch hunts, observes that
when social welfare programs are cut, the accusations increase. The
less the presence of the state in people's lives, he says, “the more
of people scapegoating the disabled, scapegoating children,
scapegoating the elderly, scapegoating women in trying to make sense
of stressful economic situations.”

Economic rivalry contributed to an outbreak of witch-hunting in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2003. Members of a faction
competing for control of the Mongbwalu gold mines accused women who
were ethnically linked with an opposing group first of spying, then of
witchcraft. Human Rights Watch estimated that as many as 70 women and
men were executed in the resulting witch hunts.

Historian and missionary Hugo Hinfelaar similarly notes that in Zambia
in the 1990s, witchcraft allegations were “particularly rife in
areas earmarked for game management and game ranching, for tourism,
and for occupation by potential big landowners.” Because of the
paucity of reporting, just how many witch hunts derive from such
competition over resources is unknown. As Hinfelaar writes, however,
some chiefs and village headmen profit from selling land used by the
community to international investors, “and fomenting social
disruption in the villages facilitates such transactions.” A village
torn apart by sorcery allegations, he explains, “will not have the
power to unite and oppose attempts to having the land they cultivate
being taken over by someone else.”

As fertile fields available to the marginalized become scarce,
conflict over even a small plot can indirectly precipitate a
“witch” killing. In cultures that fear sorcerers, says Miranda
Forsyth, a researcher with Australian National University's Sorcery
Accusation Related Violence Project, “if you are in a land dispute
already and a misfortune happens to you, then you're far more likely
to think, ‘It must have been those people who have caused
this.’”

Around the world [[link removed]] witch hunts have
also been used to directly seize land. A 2021 report
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on attacks in Odisha, India, written jointly by a state government
agency and the social justice organization ActionAid, found that a
significant fraction of witch hunts involved explicit land grabs. In
Kilifi, Kenya, where hundreds of men are accused of witchcraft every
year, hunts often stem from a desire to liquidate an elderly man's
land. Mzee Samuel Kazungu, chair of a group of men from 15 Giriama
subtribes in Kenya who convene to address land disputes, told the
outlet AllAfrica [[link removed]] in
2021 that children “start demanding inheritance ... and since a
father is not ready to release his property, his family will gang up
against him and he will be branded a witch, killed and the land will
be sold.”

A close relative of Iquo Edet Eyo, who was murdered last October in
Nigeria, attributes the accusations against her to jealousy: she owned
land she cultivated, and she also got financial help from her
daughter, who lived in the U.S. “When I was growing up, there were
always accusations of witchcraft, but there wasn't anything like
this,” he says. “People didn't go and drag folks out in the square
and beat them up and club them with the machete.”

In Namibia, Berrie Holtzhausen, founder of Alzheimer's Dementia
Namibia, a group that defends elderly people with dementia (which can
be seen as signifying a witch) from accusations, notes that people who
have become wealthy will often hide their assets when visiting rural
family members. They arrive without their car, thinking, he says, that
“if people see that I'm doing well now, they will believe that I
somehow stole [through] magical powers.” There is also a
generational conflict at work, pitting young men who see no future
except through the monetary economy against an elderly population for
whom security is having land, trees or cows.

Professional witch finders make matters worse. In some places, they
double as pastors who, influenced by evangelical and Pentecostal
missionaries, encourage believers to attribute their daily misfortunes
to the work of Satan. Some witch finders may genuinely believe that
they are protecting communities from danger, but just like Hopkins in
17th-century England, many find the profession lucrative.

In Malawi, witch-hunters sometimes charge accused witches up to $100,
Igwe says. If the victims cannot pay, the witch finders may seize
their land or hold them hostage until their family members pay up. In
Namibia, “for a witch doctor to make a ruling on whether or not you
are a witch, you have to pay him a lot of money,” Holtzhausen says.
“To survive a witch-hunt accusation, you have to pay. The witch
doctors are all rich people—and the witch doctors are almost all
men.”

The Resistance

In recent years students and others have campaigned for justice for
the 17th-century victims of New England's witch hunts. Massachusetts
has exonerated those who were charged of witchcraft there and issued a
formal apology, but a similar effort
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Connecticut this spring received unexpected pushback. “Do you have
any evidence that this person was innocent?” State Representative
Doug Dubitsky asked
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a descendant of one of the executed women—apparently suggesting that
she could have been a witch after all.

Around the world women and organizations such as AfAW, Stop Sorcery
Violence in Papua New Guinea and the women's leadership nonprofit
Anandi in Gujarat, India, are fighting back against witch-hunting. In
the summer of 2021, after six years of lobbying by a coalition of
witch-hunt survivors, nongovernmental organizations, academics and
lawyers, the United Nations passed a resolution condemning
witch-hunting and ritual attacks.

Laws against witch-hunting, such as those passed in a number of Indian
states, make it easier to prosecute people who accuse others of
witchcraft. But Eyo's relative noted that in many places, poor people
who are victims of witch hunts have little access to legal recourse.
What may help reduce the persecutions, as in South Africa, is
providing pensions to the elderly, which appears to confer social
protection.

One of the most potent responses to modern-day witch hunts is the
struggle to hold back, and even reverse, the process of land
dispossession and wealth concentration that began centuries ago during
Europe's Great Hunt. In Brazil, women from a number of Indigenous
groups have led an effort to defend the Amazon forest and waters from
extractive industries. In Bolivia, they have marched repeatedly to
prevent the construction of highways—which bring loggers, ranchers,
settlers and oil drillers—through Indigenous lands. In Kenya, they
have planted millions of trees as part of the Greenbelt Movement, an
effort for which Wangari Maathai, its founder, won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2004. In India, they are engaged in numerous struggles
against logging and mining. And in the U.S., Native American women
played leading roles in the Standing Rock movement to safeguard water
from contamination by an oil pipeline.

These initiatives are not only oppositional but also constructive.
Even as they confront polluters and developers, women are involved in
restoring forests, rediscovering forms of agriculture that support
rather than destroy other creatures, and rebuilding a web of community
relationships that represents the best form of defense against
violence.

 

SILVIA FEDERICI is co-founder of the International Feminist Collective
and professor emerita at Hofstra University. Her many books include
_Caliban and the Witch_ (2004) and _Re-Enchanting the
World_ (2019). 

ALICE MARKHAM-CANTOR is a writer and fact-checker based in Brooklyn,
N.Y. Her book on witch hunts will be published by Llewellyn in 2024.

 

 

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