Paper short abstract:

This is a personal account of a recent criminal trial involving a young Zimbabwean woman who attacked her mother with a knife, when she was ‘possessed’ as the result of witchcraft. Utilising Harry West’s notion of ‘Ethnographic sorcery’, it discusses the consequences of how ‘courtroom sorcery’ can marginalise anthropological evidence, as it seeks to construct its own kind of certainty.

Paper long abstract:

This is a personal account of a recent criminal trial in the UK that the author was involved in as an anthropologist and expert witness, involving a young Zimbabwean woman who attacked her mother with a knife, when she (as she, her mother and relatives claimed) was 'possessed' by an evil spirit as the result of another family member's witchcraft. Evidence for her abnormal state of consciousness was corroborated by police evidence which described her as 'in a trance' on the night in question, and despite a wide range of medical and psychiatric assessments, no clear neurological, medical, psychiatric or sleep disorder causes for her 'possession' were ever established. The paper describes the difficulties involved in producing anthropological evidence for a criminal court, the limitations of conventional forms of 'cultural defence', and the difficulties encountered in trying to persuade the court to adopt the anthropological stance of 'suspending its disbelief' in order that it may recognise the limits of knowledge and the possibility of 'other possibilities'. Utilising Harry West's notion of 'Ethnographic sorcery', it discusses the consequences of how 'courtroom sorcery' can marginalise anthropological evidence, as it seeks to construct its own kind of certainty.