A/HRC/11/2 page 14 1. Defining “witchcraft” 45. Defining witches and witchcraft is not an easy task. “Witchcraft” has denoted many different practices or beliefs at different times and in diverse cultures. In some cultures, belief in witchcraft is rare; in others, people see it as “everyday and ordinary, forming as it does an integral part of their daily lives”.24 Such beliefs are not confined to any particular strata of society, whether in terms of education, income or occupation. Both the concept and the terminology also vary from one scholarly discipline to another. In Western Europe and the United States, witchcraft and the persecution of so-called witches are often associated with the witch-hunts and trials that took place there through the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, in the social sciences, and especially in the disciplines of religious studies, anthropology and ethnology, a wide range of contemporary beliefs and practices termed “witchcraft” or “sorcery” are studied around the world. 46. In the popular imagination, witchcraft is often associated with the infliction of harm on people or property through the purported exercise of supernatural powers. In sociological and anthropological terms, it can be described as a phenomenon that is invoked to explain misfortune by attributing it to the evil influence of someone, either from within or outside the community. Thus witchcraft has historically been employed to bring about “the death of some obnoxious person, or to awaken the passion of love in those who are the objects of desire, or to call up the dead, or to bring calamity or impotence upon enemies, rivals and fancied oppressors”.25 47. Alternatively, witchcraft may refer to or be associated with, for example, neo-paganism, shamanism or traditional healers. Some have emphasized its close links to moral and broader belief systems and portrayed it more benignly as providing a framework of moral agency that enables believers to make sense of otherwise seemingly inexplicable coincidences or happenings.26 It is also associated with positive connotations such as healing or cleansing,27 and as a means for articulating and coping with psychological problems.28 In some regions, traditional communities had elders who acted as mediums in communicating with spirits from the other world and who were widely respected.29 24 See Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders (eds), Magical Interpretations, Material Reality: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, 2002. 25 See “Witchcraft”, in New Advent: Catholic Encyclopedia, available at www.newadvent.org/cathen/15674a.htm. 26 See E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937. 27 See, for example, James Howard Smith, Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya, 2008. 28 See Roy Allen, “Anger, Anxiety and Sorcery”, in C.W. Watson and R. Ellen (eds.), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 1993. 29 See Peter Geschiere, Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique: La viande des autres, 1995.