Jean Comaroff looks at ways people (both in various African contexts and in the United States) seek to characterize their anxieties about their place in the current world and their sense of a threatened future. She explores the kind of moral discourses that address these concerns in ordinary contexts, suggesting that notions of witchcraft serve widely to address these concerns: far from being some premodern, enchanted view of the world, these are commentaries on the mysteries of modernity. Once seen as such, notions of witchcraft make sense of certain perplexing and prevalent anxieties in the late-twentieth-century West.

Cosponsored by: Office of the Chancellor, Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Graduate College, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, The Council of Deans, The Center for Advanced Study, George A. Miller Endowment, George A. Miller Committee, Peggy Harris Memorial Fund, Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Department of Sociology, Center for African Studies, Institute of Communications Research, International Programs and Studies, United for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Women's Studies Program