Witches and Demons: A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism by Jean La Fontaine (review)

Jean La Fontaine’s most recent book, Witches and Demons: A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism, is a very convincing argument for anthropological comparison. It is also a powerful example of how the humanities and social sciences can aspire toward scholarship that makes a social impact in direct ways, from a scholar with extensive experience in work for universities, government agencies, and public charities.

Through eight brief chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion, La Fontaine argues that recent and rather gruesome examples of child witchcraft accusations in the U.K. should be properly contextualized to be fully understood. This is not in itself original or surprising. What is new and refreshing is her return to comparison across time and space, namely through the juxtaposition of past African cases of human sacrifice and present witchcraft beliefs with early modern cases of alleged witchcraft and corpse medicine in England and continental Europe, as well as the Satanism scare of our recent past. Through careful comparison of similarities and differences in beliefs, practices, and social contexts, La Fontaine shows how complex feedback loops between historical and modern cases can explain both the evolution of witchcraft beliefs and sorcerous practices on the two continents and the mutual interpretive scripts made available in the interrelation between them. In the globalized world of late modernity, new and old, near and far are activated in the meeting with the other in surprising ways.

The introduction sets the stage by discussing major aspects of the anthropological approach, specifically the comparative method; the neutral, unbiased scholarly ideal (and the ethnocentric reality); and the contextual shaping of ideas and behaviors in culture, society, politics, and economy (1). Although brief, it is a strong theoretical foundation for comparison based on empirical material in context, including a first look at the cases involved. As a thematic guide, La Fontaine quotes British anthropologist David Pocock: “It is necessary to consider the total context of a society’s morality that structures understanding of the world and the people in it, rather than merely attempting to understand the meaning of its symbolic manifestations” (7–8). In the following eight chapters, the total context of English and West African morality is examined through the lens of devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft.

The first two chapters discuss historical witchcraft beliefs in Europe and how they never really went away. The notion of hidden, monstrous enemies doing Satan’s work is still active as a secularized script to be used in the present. The secret conspiracies and atrocity catalogues form a framework to interpret modern cases of child abuse and murder in a ritualized context, whether these are committed by imaginary Satanists or African Christian minorities. As such, evil as inexplicable and inhuman can be found in both local and global frames of misfortune and myth, respectively, and they can be applied in both secular and religious contexts.

Chapter 3 is a bridge between Europe and Africa through the examination of ritual murder and human sacrifice. Together with the case study of the “Torso in the Thames” in Chapter 4, La Fontaine argues that there is a danger in conflating ritual and sacrifice, both of which denote public, communal, and moral activities, with murder and sorcery, which are secret, individual, and immoral. The entrepreneurial use of “ritual murder” and “human sacrifice” as catchall terms for the actions of the evil Other thus conflates real religious beliefs and practices, which can be explained and contextualized, with imaginary actions of imaginary beings, which cannot. Further, the magical and medicinal use of body parts spans these categories, as it is real and explainable, yet immoral. It is the responsibility of the anthropologist to demonstrate the difference and to advocate for the necessity of clear concepts rather than ethnocentric stereotypes to counteract the moral short...