The Witch Hunt Or The Triumph Of Morality

In the village of Bisipara in eastern India, an anthropologist is witness to a drama when a young girl takes a fever and quickly dies. The villagers find Susilla's death suspicious and fear that she was possessed. Holding an investigation to find someone to blame, they carry out a hurried inquiry because the stage must be cleared for the annual celebration of the birthday of the god Sri Ramchandro. However, they eventually agree on the identity of a culprit an extract from him a large fine. F.G. Bailey, who was doing fieldwork in Bisipara in the 1950's, tells what it was like to be living there during this witch-hunt. As his narrative unfolds, we sense the very texture of the villagers lives—their caste relationships, occupations, kinship networks, and religious practices. We become familiar with the sites, sounds, and smells of Bisipara and with many of the village men and women and we learn their ideas of health and disease, their practice of medicine and burial customs, their ways of resolving discord. The author's commentary opens the curtain on a larger and more complicated scene. It portrays a community in the process of change: from one aspect, the offender is seen as a heroic individual who has broken from the chains of the past, a dissenter standing up for his rights against an entrenched and conservative establishment. From the opposite point of view he is a troublemaker who rejects the moral order on which society and the good life depend, a man who has trespassed outside his proper domain. From Bailey's neutral perspective, the offenders conduct threaten those in power; their determined and successful effort to punish him was an attempt to protect their own privileged position. In doing so, of course, they could say that they were defending the moral order of their community. Bailey moves easily between field notes and memory as he takes a new look at his first impressions and reflects on what he has learned. His elegant book is a powerful reassessment of anthropology's most enduring themes and debates which will imprint on the reader's mind a vivid image of a place and its people.

Global criminology is an emerging field covering international and transnational crimes that have not traditionally been the focus of mainstream criminology or criminal justice. Global Criminology: Crime and Victimization in a Globalized Era is a collection of rigorously peer-reviewed papers presented at the First International Conference of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology (SASCV) that took place in Jaipur, India in 2011. Using a global yardstick as the basis for measurement, the fundamental goal of the conference was to determine criminological similarities and differences in different regions. Four dominant themes emerged at the conference: Terrorism. In a topic that operates at the intersection of international law, international politics, crime, and victimization, some questions remain unanswered. Is terrorism a crime issue or a national defense issue? Should terrorists be treated as war criminals, soldiers, or civil criminals? How can international efforts and local efforts work together to defeat terrorism? Cyber Crimes and Victimization. Cyber space provides anonymity, immediate availability, and global access. Cyber offenders easily abuse these open routes. As cyber space develops, cyber-crime develops and grows. To achieve better cyber security, global criminologists must explore cyber-crimes from a variety of perspectives, including law, the motivation of offenders, and the impact on victims. Marginality and Social Exclusion. Globalization is manifest in the fast transition of people between places, societies, social classes, and cultures. Known social constructions are destroyed for new ones, and marginalized people are excluded from important material, social, and human resources. This section examines how we can provide inclusion for marginalized individuals in the global era and protect them from victimization. Theoretical and Practical Models of Criminal Victimization. The process of globalization, as mentioned above, creates new elements of victimization. But globalization can also become an opportunity for confronting and defeating victimization through improved sharing of knowledge and increased understanding of the humanity of the weak. The emerging global criminology comprises diversity of attitudes, explanations, and perspectives. The editors of this volume recognize that in the global village, there is room for solid contributions to the field of criminology and criminal justice. This collection is a move in this direction. It is hoped that these articles will help to expand the boundaries of criminology, criminal justice, and victimology with a view towards reducing crime worldwide.

"This volume contains a selection of my essays that attend ethnographically to ethical life, to the action entailed in becoming and being a person, and to the relationship of acts and persons to value. The essays address central questions of social theory from an assumption and by means of a demonstration of the pervasiveness of what I elaborate as ethical. The ethical in my vocabulary is not an object, not a distinct compartment of the social, so much as a force, dimension, or quality of human existence. To attend to the ethical is to look at social life in a certain way and to put it under a certain kind of description. Ignoring the ethical leaves ethnographicl description thin and risks caricature in place of social analysis"--Preface.

At the close of the twentieth century the stereotyping and demonization of 'others', whether on religious, nationalist, racist, or political grounds, has become a burning issue. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to how and why we fabricate images of the 'other' as an enemy or 'demon' to be destroyed. This innovative book fills that gap through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach that brings together a distinguished array of historians, anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics, and feminists. The historical sweep covers Greco-Roman Antiquity, the MIddle Ages, and the MOdern Era. Antisemitism receives special attention because of its longevity and centrality to the Holocaust, but it is analyzed here within the much broader framework of racism and xenophobia. The plurality of viewpoints expressed in this volume provide fascinating insights into what is common and what is unique to the many varieties of prejudice, stereotyping, demonization, and hatred.

Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in Teapot is a unique book that brings together a holistic theoretical approach on the subject of witchcraft accusations, specifically those taking place inside a tea workers' community in India. Using a combination of in-depth and extensive qualitative methods, and drawing on sociological, anthropological, and historical perspectives, Chaudhuri explores how adivasi (tribal) migrant workers use witchcraft accusations to deal with worker-management conflict. Chaudhuri argues that witchcraft accusations can be interpreted as a periodic reaction of the adivasi worker community against their oppression by the plantation management. The typical avenues of social protest are often unavailable to marginalized workers due to lack of organizational and political representation and resources. As a result, the dain (witch) becomes a scapegoat for the malice of the plantation economy. Within this discourse, witch hunts can be seen not as exotic and primitive rituals of a backward community, but rather as a powerful protest by a community against its oppressors. The book attempts to understand the complex network of relationships—ties of friendship, family, politics, and gender—that provide the necessary legitimacy for the witch hunt to take place. In most cases examined here, seemingly petty conflicts within the villagers often escalate to a hunt. At the height of the conflict, the exploitative relationship between the plantation management and the adivasi migrant workers often gets hidden. The book demonstrates how witchcraft accusations should be interpreted within this backdrop of labor-planters relationship, characterized by rigidity of power, patronage, and social distance. Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India should appeal to criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, labor historians, gender scholars, labor migration scholars, witch hunt and witchcraft accusation global scholars, adivasi scholars, South Asian scholars, and anyone interested in India’s tribes, witchcraft accusations, gender in a global world, labor conflict, and Indian tea plantations.

This book is a unique intersectional analysis combining culture, gender struggles and structural including economic transformations, both in the formation of gendered class society, patriarchy and capitalism.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia inspired F. G. Bailey to consider the relations among ethnic groups that had seemed reconciled to living together and then broke into murderous conflicts. For his exploration of the ancient, recurring problem of ethnic strife, Bailey considers the village of Bisipara in the state of Orissa, in eastern India. Bisipara was a community in which different ethnic groups were seen as distinct breeds of people, arranged in a hierarchy of worthiness. In The Civility of Indifference, Bailey documents a case of ethnic strife that threatened the village forty years ago but did not consume it in bloodshed. The restraint, he suggests, reflected not compassion but a sense of inevitability. The people of Bisipara perceived the world in such a way that violence enacted as ethnic cleansing would have seemed to them a disastrous indulgence and a sure path to self-destruction. Their story serves as a parable of pragmatic indifference, in contrast to the fanaticism that justifies civil war. A seasoned ethnographer, the author considers the social structure of the community, examining the multiple castes with sensitivity and respect. His detailed description reveals the competing moral visions held by various groups and his conclusions open a new perspective on ethnic violence.

The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology and theology, and will set the agenda for future research in the field.