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Sorcery and witchcraft

A distinction made by Evans-Pritchard: witchcraft as an innate power, sorcery as harm done by learned technique.

A cord knotted with no loose end: knots for binding and protection, and the endless knot of Buddhist and Chinese art.

Also: Azande witchcraft, sorcery versus witchcraft, mangu and ngua

In Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), E. E. Evans-Pritchard separated two ideas. Among the Azande of what is now South Sudan and neighbouring areas, witchcraft (mangu) was an inherited substance in the body that could harm others, even without intent. Sorcery used spells and medicines and was a deliberate act. A man killed by a falling granary, Evans-Pritchard wrote, could explain the how by the collapse and the why by witchcraft. The terms became standard in anthropology, although later work shows that many peoples blur the two, and that the English words fit local ideas only roughly.

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