Belief, Culture, and Sorcery
The enigmatic practices of things like sorcery are deeply embedded in our minds in the name of faith. Sorcery indicates the vibrant relationship between empirical and theoretical knowledge (Schapera 1952).
Anthropologists state that sorcery is another social phenomenon. The implicit understanding of individual psychology is purely grounded on the efficacy of the mystical practices. The study of the mental setup of individuals of a particular society expresses the psychological approaches towards the phenomenon. These approaches convey that individual’s psychology always triumph over the social actualisation (Middleton, Gilbert & Jolly 2021). Needless to say, the expression towards sorcery actually reflects an intellectual conflict between sorcery believers and non-believers (Kapferer 2002). Sometimes magical practices like sorcery depend on the change of cultural mechanism, stating whether the ‘teleological function’ remains the same or not against the structural performance (Spiro 1961). The pertinent terminology of sorcery is very much culture specific. However, its approaches towards society are static (Kunin 2003:40). Cultural myths or historical circumstances might be different in terms of the social structure of a community, but this mystical belief gains stability based on the ‘localised belief system’ which Frazer emphasised boldly (Palmer, Steadman, Cassidy and Coe 2010). Evans-Pritchard (1929) compared the structural and functional approaches of magical spells by studying rituals of the Trobriand and Zande people. According to him, magical practice is “not something discovered but as something co-existent in time with man, not as a vague impersonal power but as a tangible weapon of culture, not activated by the spirits of the dead but deriving its power from the knowledge of tradition and the abstinence of living men” (Evans-Pritchard 1929).In the case of the Sabar, sorcery is rooted in their major rituals, whereas in other domains its applicability is reducing. The Sabar people still have a mentality for sorcery. The effects of social advancement are the key factors of declining magical practice, indicating logical and rational thinking of the people. On the other hand, outsiders are getting involved with this magical practice. Here, credulousness of the people and a lack of analytical thinking are the primary capital to run sorcery. To breathe such kinds of practices, it must be embedded into a culture. The practitioner has gained a cultural tag, but the empirical data claims that sorcery is not bounded within a culture. It is a transcendental knowledge deeply rooted in belief systems and executed by means of cultural rites as per functional requirements (Spiro 1961).
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