Witchcraft, gender, power and intimate relations in Mura compounds in Déla, northern Cameroon

Bibliographic Data

ID3919233
AuthorsD Lyons (0000-0001-9956-8656, Simon Fraser University, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume29
Issue3
Pages344-362
Publication date1998-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWorld Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-8243 • E-ISSN: 1470-1375
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00438243.1998.9980384
OpenAlexW2086585787
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited27

African witchcraft is a personal act of one individual using supernatural powers to harm another. This action is not random but is a strategy used within particular sets of social relations and contexts of interaction. Presented here is an ethnoarchaeological study of witchcraft in husband‐wife relationships amongst the Mura of Déla in northern Cameroon. In Mura society a set of social practices, including witchcraft, presents women as mobile and antisocial, justifying their exclusion from controlling major resources especially land and houses. Wives use men's fear that they will act as witches to curb husbands from abusing their authority. Men use differential site formation processes in men's and women's areas of domestic compounds to represent women as disruptive and impermanent members of households and unworthy of holding major resources. At the same time men must protect themselves from wives who might use witchcraft against them and do so by burying powerful amulets in the floors and through other material practices. It is argued that such practices are widespread and may have broader implications in the emergence of social differentiation

Criminology · Ethnology · Gender relations · Harm · Mura · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Wife · African Studies and Ethnography · Aging, Elder Care, and Social Issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · History · Law

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