L’insaisissable légèreté du sorcier

Résumé 0

In a recent issue of Politique africaine, Jean-Pierre Warnier interrogated what he called the “Magritte effect” in the study of witchcraft (J.-P. Warnier, «  Ceci n’est pas un sorcier. De l’effet Magritte en sorcellerie », Politique africaine, n °146, 2017, p. 125-141). Looking back on his 45-year long experience in and with Cameroon, he wondered why he was experiencing a feeling of “cognitive dissonance” with regards to witchcraft. On the one hand, he noted, there has been a flood of publications on the topic over the past thirty years, many of them arguing that witchcraft is a sort of “coat lining” for any human activity. This contrasted starkly with the fact that, on the other hand, he only directly witnessed three “witchcraft crises” over the past four decades. Based on this, he called for a “sociology of witchcraft crises” that would allow to distinguish “the map from the territory, the image of a pipe from the pipe, the narrative from the object, the rumor from the actual crisis”. We invited six researchers to engage with Jean-Pierre Warnier’s propositions.