Witchcraft can be interpreted as the belief and practice of magic, it is a concept that has existed throughout recorded history and can be found in various cultures. Traditionally, witchcraft is associated with negative actions, from famine to disease and is often conflicting to the religion in which a person practices. In this essay, I am going to discuss the different forms in which witchcraft exists in the contemporary world and using various ethnographic examples such as, Jean Fontaine, where she discusses links between sexual abuse of minors and concepts of evil and witchcraft. I will also be looking at an article by anthropologists Isak Neihaus and Gunvor Jonsson on HIV/AIDs and how this virus can be linked to witchcraft.

An interesting …show more content…
Allegations of SRA involved reports of sexual and physical abuse of children in the context of satanic rituals. (Jean S. La Fontaine, 1992) discusses this crisis in terms of why it became a major issue and why children became a target of this so-called attack. Fontaine attempts to justify this panic by focusing on concepts of evil; pedophilia is considered a “horror” in not only Britain but in many parts of the world. She compares sexual abuse on children with incest and how whilst incest is considered a taboo, it does not “provoke such deep feeling” mainly because it is a forbidden sexual attraction between adults. “As a result, the idea of incest was separated from the concept of sexual activities with children” (Jean S. La Fontaine, 1992, p.7) The reason for the moral panic was the idea of an unknown person kidnapping a child and sexually assaulting them goes against the ideas of a society, predominantly parents, and protecting children. Children represent innocence and should be living carefree not becoming victims of sexual abuse. Reasoning as to why so many people blamed sadist for these actions is subject to each individual, the satanic ritual abuse panic repeated many …show more content…
They state that “HIV/AIDS provokes a crisis of meaning” and in South Africa, HIV/AIDS has been described as “an approaching tidal wave of death” (Ashforth 2002, pp.122). In order for the community to make sense of this virus, “popular understandings of HIV/AIDS are framed within the familiar witchcraft paradigm”. And that witches represent the “standardized nightmare” of social groups and any witchcraft accusation highlight the interpersonal tensions between people. Interestingly, in Bushbuckridge, villagers could easily distinguish between witchcraft and HIV/AIDs and in local knowledge if a person died; they died either of witchcraft or of AIDS. The main reason why some blamed witchcraft for the illness is given in this article and it involved disagreements between close relatives who invoked witchcraft in a “bid to deflect blame from the deceased”, whilst outsiders pointed to AIDs as the cause of death. They did not blame witchcraft for the virus, they knew that “sex was the potent source of contamination” and associated transmission with “sexual taboos”. They also believed married couples that regularly engage in intercourse and