Date of publishing:
31.8.2014
The Český lid provides open access to all of its content under licenseCreative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
Abstract:
The paper deals with the role of gender in the context of witchcraft. It focuses on the situation in a rural area in eastern Slovenia, where the author and her students researched witchcraft in 2000 and 2001. The meaning of a gender in witchcraft accusations is presented with respect to various levels and types of witch (social level – neighborhood witches, village witches; supernatural level – night witches; counterwitches). Among neighborhood witches (about whom people believe that they perform some kind of magic: placing eggs etc. in the hope that they will hurt neighbors; intentional praise), women are typically assumed to be guilty; men appear only in the subcategory of people with evil eye. Similar holds for all the subcategories of village witches, except for those who earned their reputation because of the assumption of their possession of a book of magic (where men predominate). Night witches (in the form of lights or vague presences which make it diffi cult for people to fi nd their way) are always female (they are spoken about using the feminine gender; when they are recognized as people from the village, they are always women). In contrast, the ratio of men to women among counterwitches, to whom people turned for help against witches, rises dramatically. The most infl uential counterwitch whom people visited in this area was a men. The relationship between the sexes can also be seen through an analysis of (migratory) legends about witches whereby many of them reveal a concealed misogyny.
Keywords
witchcraft; Slovenia; gender relations; folk religion and beliefs; field research
Article Text
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A List of Informants:
2: A man, born in 1928, a miner and a doorkeeper. Taped in July 2000.
35: A woman, born in 1930, finished six classes of primary school, lives alone. Taped in October
2000.
38: A man, born in 1912. Taped in October 2000.
47: A woman, born in 1928, a farmer. Taped in October 2000.
48: I1: A woman, born in 1929, finished six classes of primary school; I2: A man, born in 1923,
finished primary school. Taped in October 2000.
56: A man, born in 1932, farmer. Taped in October 2000.
58: A woman, born in 1923, a maidservant and housewife. Taped in July 2000.
59: A man, born in 1923. Taped in October 2000.
60: A woman, born in 1931, a housewife. Taped in October 2000.
63: I1: A woman, born in 1930, a housewife. I1: A man, born in 1925. Taped in October 2000.
82: A man, born in 1921. Taped in October 2000.
83: A woman, born in 1941 in Croatia, married to Slovenia, a widow. Taped in March 2001.
84: A woman, born in 1919, a housewife. Taped in March 2001.
115: A man, born in 1921. Taped in March 2001.
116: A man, born in 1933, a housekeeper. Taped in March 2001.
119: A woman, born in 1934. Taped in March 2001.
130: A man, born in 1950, a farmer and a miller. Taped in July 2001.