Stanford University Press Blog

Witches in our world

In light of last week’s release of the final Harry Potter book, we would like to draw your attention to Naming the Witch, a study of modern-day persecution of witches.

When Harry Potter was told he was a wizard (in J.K. Rowling’s universe, a wizard is a male witch; in Naming the Witch, witches can be masculine or feminine, as wizardry is perceived as a very different phenomenon from witchcraft), a new world opened up to him, one in which he felt more at home than the normal, non-magical world. Unfortunately, historical and modern accusations of witchcraft often lead to harassment, imprisonment, and death.

In Naming the Witch, James Siegel argues that explanations of witch-hunts have too often overlooked the extreme violence they entail, focusing on their social functions. Siegel grapples with the violence and takes the beliefs inherent to witchcraft seriously, bringing to the reader a sense of the fear and uncertainty driving those who kill witches.

What makes this book truly immediate is its focus on witch-hunts within the last decade. Today, people who are accused on witchcraft in Cameroon are judged in state courts. Much of Naming the Witch focuses on the witch-hunts that ensued in Indonesia after President Suharto left office in December 1998. Over the next three months, around 120 people were killed by mobs who believed them to be witches. Witch-hunts then continued on a smaller scale.

What causes people to torture, murder, and mutilate someone who has been their neighbor their entire lives? How is it that, while Americans immerse themselves in the world of Harry Potter, people are still being killed as witches? Naming the Witch delves into these disturbing questions and provides surprising answers.

In a review of America’s Kingdom in the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali writes that, “Critical academic works on the Saudi kleptocracy are rare. …Which is why America's Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first concessions to Standard Oil of California in 1933. Combining history with political anthropology, Vitalis sheds a bright light on the origins and less savoury aspects of the Saudi-US relationship in its first phase, when oil production was accompanied by the manufacturing of myths that prettified the US presence."

   
Robert Vitalis not only provides a historical basis (spanning more than seventy years, three continents, and an engrossing cast of characters) for understanding this “special relationship” between the United States and the Saudi monarchy, but he also argues that despite the constant media scrutiny after 9/11, the special relationship continues today. And there’s plenty of evidence going around. The Wall Street Journal reports in an article today that instead of taking explicit measures against a powerful Saudi bank in 2003 (or even earlier), which allegedly finances terrorist networks from the Middle East to Indonesia, the U.S. government has chosen to lobby the Saudi royal family quietly about its concerns, with little success so far.

The book  points to a major divergence between the official “myths” (perpetuated by both the U.S. and the Saudis) and the political and historical realities in the Middle East. It shows how the development of Saudi Arabia’s oil under a racist and unfair US-owned company generated a lingering resentment and hatred against the West. As Tariq Ali's review suggests, these feelings persist in our times, even among Saudi elite.

A Youthful New Direction in Postwar France

Richard Jobs’ recent book, Riding the New Wave, is described as a “fascinating study” in the July 6, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Examining how the idea of youth was conceptualized and experienced during France’s Fourth Republic, Jobs argues that “youth, both as a concept and as a social group, [was] a primary mechanism in France’s postwar rejuvenation and its cultural reconstruction because the young, through their buoyant energy and dynamism, symbolically pointed the way to the future.”

World War II destroyed not only France’s physical infrastructure, but its societal infrastructure as well. During the German occupation, France had essentially been fighting a civil war – Nazi collaborators against those fighting for independence. In Riding the New Wave, Jobs describes the war years as “a terrible experience for France… characterized as much by betrayal and treachery as they were by heroism and sacrifice.”

Faced with the difficult task of reuniting and rebuilding their society and weary from the long years of war, the French fixed on newness as a possibility of hope. The youth came to be seen both as new and as a reason to hope; “they represented the hope of a future unburdened by the devastation of the recent past.” Moreover, youth was a common denominator for all factions of society – everyone is young once – and therefore was accessible as a concept around which to unite.

Riding the New Wave examines a much-overlooked period of French history, providing insight into the years leading up to the radical student protests of the late 1960s. Readers will see that although France was dealing with a unique and difficult situation, many of its ideas of youth mirror those we currently hold.

Is Islam compatible with democracy?

In many ways the question, raised so persistently in our times, is not whether Islam is compatible with democracy, but rather how  Muslims can make these concepts compatible. Nothing intrinsic to Islam—or any other religion—makes it inherently democratic or undemocratic.

In Making Islam Democratic Asef Bayat draws our attention to an overlooked social movement in Muslim societies that represents an attempt to bridge the gap between Islam and democracy. Calling the phenomena “post-Islamism,” Bayat describes it as “an endeavor to fuse religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty (dīndārī ve āzādī). It is an attempt to turn the underlying principles of Islamism on its head by emphasizing rights instead of duties, plurality in place of singular authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scripture, and the future instead of the past.”

Since the late 1990s, against the backdrop of intensifying religious sentiment in the Muslim world, Bayat notes that there has been an emerging trend to accommodate aspects of democratization, pluralism, women’s rights, youth concerns, and social development. In Lebanon, the Hizbullah has, to an extent, transcended its exclusivist Islamist platform by adapting to the pluralistic political reality. In India, the Jama‘at-i Islami has transformed itself from a political party resting on an exclusivist Islam that rejected democracy into a movement that values democracy and pluralism. Even in a religiously orthodox and politically conservative country like Saudi Arabia, a post-Wahabi trend has attempted to incorporate notions of “liberal Islam” seeking a compromise with democracy. Recently, in Turkey, the country’s center-right AK party has sought to manifest a post-Islamist sensibility by combining modernism, nationalism, and democracy while cherishing religious precepts not withstanding an initial unease in the West about growing religious revivalism. The AK Party is poised to stay in power in  the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections.

It has been widely reported how the “war on terrorism” has increased the appeal of religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world, and Islamic political parties that have expressed opposition to U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, if Asef Bayat’s analysis is correct there are ways to combine Islam and democracy, and these emerging solutions will need to be sustained by the efforts of politically engaged citizens of the Middle East who feel “compelled to join a cosmopolitan humanity, to link up with global civil activism and to work for solidarity.”

Taxing the Family

In All In The Family, Patricia Strach shows how the family is used by the US government to implement policies and explores the challenges that arise when employing something as nebulous and uncontrolled as family relations to administer policy.

Since 1948, family has been the basic taxable unit in the US. This not only results in different tax rates based on an individual’s familial role (spouse, dependent, single parent, single childless adult, etc.), but also sets expectations for how members of a family act toward one another and taxes based on those expectations.

For example, parents are expected to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their offspring, and they are awarded tax credits, deductions, and exemptions to assist with those expenses. In using such tax expenditures to pay parents to support their children, the government saves itself the cost of creating an agency to accomplish that goal. At the same time, it presupposes that parents will use the savings from these tax expenditures for the goals the government intends, but there is no oversight to insure that this is the case, as their would be for an official government agency.

The government’s assumptions that family units have combined resources and act to help their members are seen in the prohibition from deducting student loan interest when the loan comes from a family member, whereas the interest on a loan from a stranger is tax deductible. This can be seen as a limit the government places on individual taxpayers to help their family financially.   

As the average American household increasingly moves away from the nuclear family with a single breadwinner around which these taxes were originally designed, definitions of family within various parts of the tax code struggle to keep up.  The so-called marriage tax penalty came about when a significant number of married women entered the workplace: suddenly, a tax code that had been seen as equitable and progressive for families with a single breadwinner was seen as taking resources away from families. Similarly, untraditional households—from unmarried parents to individuals or couples caring for children who are not their biological offspring—are not recognized in the same way across the tax code.

Amongst debates over gay marriage, the role of family in immigration, and adoption rights, our laws continue to use family as a determiner of responsibilities as well as rights. And responsibilities that are not given to or taken up by individuals often fall to the government itself.