No Peace in the House: Witchcraft Accusations as an Old Woman\u27s Problem in Ghana

In Ghana, older women may be marginalized, abused, and even killed as witches. Media accounts imply this is common practice, mainly through stories of “witches camps” to which the accused may flee. Anthropological literature on aging and on witchcraft, however, suggests that this focus exaggerates and misinterprets the problem. This article presents a literature review and exploratory data on elder advocacy and rights intervention on behalf of accused witches in Ghana to help answer the question of how witchcraft accusations become an older woman’s problem in the context of aging and elder advocacy work. The ineffectiveness of rights based and formal intervention through sponsored education programs and development projects is contrasted with the benefit of informal conflict resolution by family and staff of advocacy organizations. Data are based on ethnographic research in Ghana on a rights based program addressing witchcraft accusations by a national elder advocacy organization and on rights based intervention in three witches camps

QUEERING WITCHES: A QUEER FEMINIST EXPLORATION OF WITCHES IN MEDIA

This thesis is an exploration of witches, as depicted in entertainment media. "Queering Witches: A Queer Feminist Exploration of Witches in Media" analyzes the way history has contributed to the reinforcement of stereotypes about witches using queer theory and feminist analysis. "Queering Witches" also offers a broad view of the intersectionality inherent to the way witches are presented in media, specifically delving into definitions of witches, Satanists, witches of color, and the intersection of witches and the queer/LGBTQIA+ community. The introduction of feminist analysis and queer theory emphasizes the way stereotypes about witches and performance of power have been demonized by society in much the same way as the performance of gender and sexuality have been demonized

RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES:: STASIS SHMASIS - WHAT SALAMANDERS WERE REALLY DOING IN THE YULE LOG

Whether it is their nocturnal habits, their ability to regenerateentire limbs and tails with functional neurons,or simply their ability to emerge unsinged from a burningyule log, salamanders have long intrigued humansand witches alike. Salamanders are marvelous beasts inmany other ways

King James VI and I: Witch-Hunter and Protector of the Realm

After the discovery of a conspiracy to kill the king at sea, King James VI of Scotland became frightfully consumed with stamping out witches in his kingdom. He believed that witches were in league with the devil and that they were an imminent threat to his life and sovereignty as king. In the early 1590s, he bypassed legal precedent by directly interrogating and judging Scottish witches. He wrote a treatise in 1597 to warn of the existence of witches and the danger that witchcraft possessed. His involvement in the North Berwick witch trials was an interesting chapter in Scottish history. It was one that demonstrated a monarch personally engaged in the crusade against witches

Diseases of Economic Crops In Alaska

Inspection and control of imported plant materials will assist in preventing diseases from entering Alaska.General -- Methods of control -- Barley -- Oats -- Wheat -- Forage -- Potatoes: Blackleg, gianthill, haywire, late blight, leak, mild mosaic, Rhizoctania, ring rot, rugose mosaic, soft rot, storage rots, scab, witches' broom -- Cabbage -- Carrots -- Cucumber -- Lettuce -- Radishes -- Tomatoes -- Raspberries -- Strawberrie

Milk, Blood and Gall: Witches’ Bodily Fluids from the Treatise to the English Stage

The relationship between humoralism and literature has been broached by many critics, often in the lovesickness or in the melancholic‐as‐genius aspect. Yet, barring a few individual cases, there has been no general study linking witches with humours in the seventeenth century English dramatical corpus. The present study attempts to fill this gap by identifying the medical or demonological treatises that influenced playwrights’ representations of witches. Witches bodies are better understood by taking into account Thomas Laqueur’s theory of the one‐sex body, following the transformation of fluids into one another which is characteristic of their fundamental imbalance. Firstly, milk turns into gall inside witches‐mothers rejecting their motherhood, then into blood inside witches feeding familiars in a distorted image of motherhood. The absence of blood in amenorrhoeic witches is shown as a reccurent cause for their melancholy which has physiological and psychological consequences, in particular a licentiousness that makes witches seek blood in its semen form. Black bile is thought to be the devil’s humour, yet in the Weyer‐Bodin controversy theoreticians do not agree on whether witches are melancholic women suffering from hallucinations or real agents of the devil. On the other hand, plays ascribe either physical or emotional causes as well as symptoms coherent with a melancholy disease to witches, and playwrights use symbolical representations of melancholy on stage. In conclusion, it is difficult to establish a typology of such representations, given that each witch is uniquely composed with a particular playwright’s understanding of humoralism, often conflating several distinct ideas

Some Japanese Shakespeare Productions in 2014-15

This essay focuses on some Shakespeare productions in Japan during 2014 and 2015. One is a Bunraku version of Falstaff, for which the writer himself wrote the script. It is an amalgamation of scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor and those from Henry IV. It was highly reputed and its stage design was awarded a 2014 Yomiuri Theatre Award. Another is a production of Much Ado about Nothing produced by the writer himself in a theatre-in-the-round in his new translation. Another is a production of Macbeth arranged and directed by Mansai Nomura the Kyogen performer. All the characters besides Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were performed by the three witches, suggesting that the whole illusion was produced by the witches. It was highly acclaimed worldwide. Another is a production of Hamlet directed by Yukio Ninagawa, with Tatsuya Fujiwara in the title role. It was brought to the Barbican theatre. There were also many other Shakespeare productions to commemorate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth

Witch Pamphlets

The witch hysteria that overtook Christian Europe during the Early Modern era inspired a mass paranoia over the conspiratorial belief that the Abrahamic religion’s personification of the world’s evils, also known as Satan, the Devil, demons, or Lucifer interchangeably, was attempting to rise up and cause harm to Christian communities during this time period. It was believed that in order to achieve this goal the Christian version of the Devil had been recruiting humans within Christian communities and turning these chosen humans into witches by granting them the ability to wield magical powers to spread their destruction, murder, and terror amongst their own neighbors and families. Over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England, the impact of the witch hysteria resulted in the publication of illustrated witchcraft pamphlets through London’s printing houses, where news of witch trials would be recounted in detail. When compared against illustrations from other English pamphlets published during this same time period, the witchcraft pamphlets stand out as distinctly different through their portrayal of female witches as caricatures with the heavy visual symbolism representing the believed malicious capabilities that witches possessed against society. A comparison of witchcraft pamphlets against other pamphlets printed in different genres and countries also showcases the hypocrisies in which the witchcraft illustrations that are supposed to be presenting the sins of witches has been tamed down, with the witches always being portrayed as fully clothed despite the text going into detail on the accused sexual perversions of the witches, which indicates the printing houses had taken marketing into account. Likewise depictions of female witches versus male witches in illustrations show the female witches as ugly caricatures wearing lower-class clothing, while male witches are shown wearing garments of a higher class, and holding higher positions in society. These items point to witchcraft hysteria being partly fueled through the lucrative marketability of people’s fear, with the knowledge that an illustration should aim toward a balance of subtle symbolism of the maliciousness of witches so as to not put English readers off from buying the printer’s pamphlets