Description
This book is about a spate of witch-killings that has been underway in Gusii, southwestern Kenya, since 1992. It integrates the testimony of participants of and witnesses to the incidents of witch-killing with other ethnographic and socioeconomic information in order to understand what led to the sudden rise of this violence in November 1992 and its rapid decline in July 1994. The book brings into the literature on witchcraft an analysis of the interface between the global and the local that is at the crux of individual experience. The significance of this book lies in its contribution to our understanding of how, in this era of globalization, the forces of the free market that are set into motion in one part of the world are experienced and interpreted in another as the workings of the supernatural. By focusing on collective violence, the book sheds light on our understanding of human aggression and is therefore of interest to many fields including sociology, anthropology, political science, social psychology, philosophy, and religion.
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