The Witch Quotes

“human beings traditionally have great trouble in coping with the concept of random chance. People tend on the whole to want to assign occurrences of remarkable good or bad luck to agency, either human or superhuman. It is important to emphasize, however, that malevolent humans have been only one kind of agent to whom such causation has been attributed: the others include deities, non-human spirits that inhabit the terrestrial world, or the spirits of dead human ancestors.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“All have validity in the present, and to call anyone wrong for using any one of them would be to reveal oneself as bereft of general knowledge and courtesy, as well as scholarship.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“People tend on the whole to want to assign occurrences of remarkable good or bad luck to agency, either human or superhuman.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“historians have largely ignored the opportunity for a new dialogue, and anthropologists have largely ceased to offer it.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“the burgeoning of research that had occurred since, internationally, and taking ever more sophisticated forms, had passed them by completely.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“especially with its ruling elites of colonial European administrators and settlers, early twentieth-century Africa had been as socially and culturally complex as sixteenth-century Europe.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“He invited anthropologists to study research into the European trials, and termed their recent neglect of this ‘even more disconcerting’ than the loss of interest by historians of Europe in African parallels”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“Anthropologists who studied this phenomenon found themselves needing to dissuade fellow Westerners from attributing the persistence of a belief in witchcraft in Africa to any inherent disposition to ‘superstition’ or ‘backwardness’ on the part of its peoples. Such a strategy called for a new emphasis on the prevalence of such beliefs across the globe, including in the relatively recent European past, and a return to a comparative method; and direct calls for that were being made by prominent Africanists by the mid-1990s.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“he explicitly recognized the change in anthropology, acknowledging that its practitioners had become wary of using Western concepts to understand non-Western cultures and preferred to employ those of the people whom they were studying.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“Western historians now needed to back off from comparisons with extra-European cultures and concentrate on their own societies, for which their terminology was native and so well suited.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“She accused him of having adopted categories constructed by the British from the eighteenth century onwards, as cultural weapons to be deployed against other peoples; and questioned in general whether cultural particulars could be formed into general concepts and compared across time periods and continents.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“imposition of European terms and concepts on studies of other societies and the offering of comparisons between those societies which the imposition of the terms concerned made easier.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“such exchanges should be carried on with caution.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“some American anthropologists, who were already warning before the end of the 1960s that the term ‘witchcraft’ was being used as a label for phenomena that differed radically between societies.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“any formalized practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world’.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“those whom he termed ‘primordial characters’ of humanity.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“THIS BOOK HAS been over a quarter of a century in the making,”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as ‘someone who causes harm to others by mystical means’.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as ‘someone who causes harm to others by mystical means’. In stating this, he was self-consciously not providing a personal view of the matter, but summing up an established scholarly consensus, which dealt with the witch figure as one of those whom he termed ‘primordial characters’ of humanity. He added that no more rigorous definition was generally accepted.1 In all this he was certainly correct, for English-speaking scholars have used the word ‘witch’ when dealing with such a reputed person in all parts of the world, before Needham’s time, and ever since, as shall be seen. When the only historian of the European trials to set them systematically in a global context in recent years, Wolfgang Behringer, undertook his task, he termed witchcraft ‘a generic term for all kinds of evil magic and sorcery, as perceived by contemporaries’.2 Again, in doing so he was self-consciously perpetuating a scholarly norm. That usage has persisted till the present among anthropologists and historians of extra-European peoples: to take one recent example, in 2011 Katherine Luongo prefaced her study of the relationship between witchcraft and the law in early twentieth-century Kenya by defining witchcraft itself ‘in the Euro-American sense of the word’ as ‘magical harm’.3”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“magic had nothing to do with witchcraft because the former was mostly the preserve of men, who sought to control demons, while the latter was mostly that of women, who were servants and allies to them.5 The self-image of such magicians, in the medieval and early modern periods, drew on the established ideals of the clerical, monastic and scholarly professions, representing themselves as part of the elite of pious and learned men.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“In Central and Southern Africa, the ability to detect witches was also believed in several places to be inherent in chiefs, as one of that concentration of semi-mystical qualities that gave them the right to lead. In”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present