The social organization of the Azande of the Bahr-el-Ghazal province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

This thesis represents part of my Ethnological research carries out in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the years 1926 and 1927. After having worked for three months in the area between the White and Blue Niles, mainly amongst the Ingassana People of the Tabi Hills, and later for some seven weeks on the West Bank of the Nule, amongst the Moro Peoples, I arrived in that part of the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province which is inhabited by the Azande towards the end of March 1927. I left for England at the end of August, thus completing a residence of five months amongst the Azande. The Thesis is arranged in two books. The first book is a condensed analysis of the structure of Zande society. In the second book I have taken native customer or institutions, divination, magic, dancing and obscene songs, and I have en-deavoured to interpret them by showing their contexts, associa-tions and functions. It is by the method exemplified in the second book of this thesis that I hope to explain one by one the institutions of the Azande. In the parts on magic and obscenity I have used the comparative method of analysis. It is this method which must eventually be applied to all institu-tions if Social Anthropology is to put forward general state-ments, or laws, and so take its place in the ranks of other inductive sciences

Spiritual War: Revival, Child Prophesies, and a Battle Over Sorcery in Vanuatu

Sorcery and Christianity have been in an intimate and seemingly opposing relationship on the small Ahamb Island in Vanuatu for more than a century. While sorcery is seen as the most potent threat to the good life as it brings suffering and death, Christianity appears as the main tool to address this and other problems of cosmological and social character. During a turbulent time on the island in 2014, a Christian charismatic revival, largely led by children, became the subject of hope for change on Ahamb. A main event within the revival was a dramatic spiritual war that confronted the island community with the plain and unvarnished realities of good and evil, of God and sorcery, while revealing secrets that literally became a question of life and death