Cahiers d’Études africaines, LVIII (3-4), 231-232, 2018. Sandra Fancello & Julien Bonhomme How States and Institutions Confront Witchcraft Another issue on witchcraft in Africa? Hasn’t everything been said and written on the matter already? On the contrary: rapid social change, political crises, wars and conflicts of all kinds, and a tenacious religious vitality all mean our understanding of witchcraft must be constantly updated. These phenomena are prompting new kinds of accusation, particularly against the most vulnerable groups in society (foreigners, women, the elderly, children, and people with disabilities), and, in turn, provoking new outbreaks of violence. In 2007, Gerrie ter Haar edited a collection of essays on the subject of witchcraft in Africa. In the introduction, she reflects on what it means to study a social phenomenon that, no longer confined to traditional accusations of witchcraft and family or village conflict resolution processes, is giving rise to unprecedented levels and forms of violence, mainly but not exclusively in urban contexts. She highlights the increase in acts of violence (albeit difficult to measure) and the growing number of deaths linked to accusations of witchcraft in numerous African coun- tries. Thus, contemporary witchcraft presents a challenge to anthropology, par- ticularly in Africa. Local, Christian, and Muslim representations have become blurred, helping to fuel the enormous importance of witchcraft in the popular imagination, where it becomes conflated with evil, demons, and even the devil. All these categories are fused in one word—witchcraft—, a term that has never ceased to provoke debate within the discipline of anthropology. 1 Witchcraft has long been seen as a problematic concept (Crick 1979), and anxieties about how to define it have become an inescapable component of any introduction to the topic. Witchcraft is a hybrid notion: in academic contexts, it is used to translate, albeit roughly, a wide range of vernacular terms, from mangu to evu by way of kindoki, just to cite some of the most well-known examples in the history of the discipline. Moreover, this use of the word witch- craft derives largely from the colonial context in which it was first employed. Witchcraft was, to some extent, a category used both by missionaries and the colonial justice system. Since then, the word has undergone a series of shifts in meaning and working misunderstandings (Meyer 1999; Bernault 2009). 1. On the link between evil and witchcraft, see Olsen and Van Beek (2015). Downloaded on www.cairn-int.info - - FANCELLO Sandra - 81.64.22.134 - 29/06/2020 15:23 - © Editions de l?E.H.E.S.S.