Mens Daemonica

Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2109236
AutoresSonia Rupcic (0000-0002-1412-0463, Brown University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen63
Número3
Páginas599-624
Fecha de publicación2021-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417521000165
PMID35548479
OpenAlexW3173220886
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas56

In winter 2014, the town of Thohoyandou, South Africa was gripped with panic after a series of rapes and murders. In this area, notorious for its occult specialists and witchcraft, stories began to circulate attributing the violence to demonic forces. These stories were given credence by the young man who was charged with these crimes. In his testimony, he confirmed that he was possessed by evil forces. Taking this story as a point of departure, this article provides an empirical account of the ambivalent ways state sites of criminal justice grapple with the occult in South Africa. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how spirit possession is not easily reconciled with legal methods of parsing criminal liability in courtrooms. And yet, when imprisoned people are paroled, the state entertains the possibility of bewitchment in public ceremonies of reconciliation. Abstracting from local stories about the occult, this article proposesmens daemonica('demonic mind') to describe this state of hijacked selfhood and as an alternative to themens rea('criminal mind') observed in criminal law. While the latter seeks the cause of wrongdoing in the authentic will of the autonomous, self-governing subject,mens daemonicadescribes a putatively extra-legal idea of captured volition that implicates a vast and ultimately unknowable range of others and objects in what only appears to be a singular act of wrongdoing. This way of reckoning culpability has the potential to inspire new approaches to justice

Credence · Criminal justice · Criminal law · Criminology · Culpability · Mens rea · Political science · Sociology · Voluntariness · Wrongdoing · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law