Deadly Words

This 1980 book examines witchcraft beliefs and experiences in the Bocage a rural area of western France. It also introduced a powerful theoretical attitude towards the progress of the ethnographer''s enquiries suggesting that a full knowledge of witchcraft involves being ''caught up'' in it oneself. In the Bocage being bewitched is to be ''caught'' in a sequence of misfortunes. According to those who are bewitched the culprit is someone in the neighbourhood: the witch who can cast a spell with a word a touch or a look and whose ''power'' comes from a book of spells inherited from an ancestor. Only a professional magician an ''unwitcher'' has any chance of breaking the succession of misfortunes which befall those who have been bewitched. He undertakes a battle of magic with the suspected witch a battle which is eventually fatal.