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Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 228 pp.
Overall, this is a thoughtful, exhaustive, and, at times, original review of the copious literature on witchcraft and rumors, as well as an attempt to synthesize the two literatures and to collapse the conceptual boundary separating them. Impressively, the authors review the entire anthropological corpus on these subjects, and the chapters following the introductory section on witchcraft and rumors engage the literature on Africa, New Guinea, India, Europe, and the Americas with impressive scope and attention to detail. The tone is descriptive, and the structure is oriented around the diverse ethnographies the authors summarize and draw relationships among; they make few original analytical points of their own. However, they do draw attention to all of the major themes in this subdiscipline, such as the relationship between witchcraft and class formation, and the responsiveness of witchcraft beliefs and accusations to larger social structural transformations. The volume is therefore an excellent primer to this growing subfield of anthropology. By synthesizing diverse literatures, the authors...