ANTH 209 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Zande People, Rationality, Saba Mahmood
16 Mar 2019
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Important because this book was the earliest cry for translation . Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the azande (1937) Non-scientific modes or types of reason are not understood to be misguided or wrong. Intention/belief does not seem to be sufficient to understand human behaviour. Context: might logic not depend on the context of an individual who acts and makes decisions. Relativist: concentrate on differences to the exclusion of common connections. Universalist: attempt to evaluate beliefs through a set of logical criteria free of local context. L-b primitive mentality not earlier but different. Pritchard: primitive people solve problems naturally, but europeans do so mystically. Give accounts for contradictions in the results. They appeal to initial conditions that explain the outcome. Human patterns of thought and behaviour vary. Everywhere in the world, there is an incest prohibition. Witchcraft has a systematic and coherent rationality. Witchcraft does not erase cause and effect, but gives a way to think about.
