Postcolonial South
Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic
rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for
material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from "ritual
murder, "the sale ofbody parts, and the putative production
of zombies to pyramidschemes and
other financial scams.And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions
against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the
major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation-mediated by
gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now?An answer to the
question, and to the more general problem ofmaking sense of the enchantments of
modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory
effects of millennia1 capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism.
This encounter, goes the argument, brings "the global"
and "the local"-treated here as analytic constructs rather
than explanatory terms or empirical realities-into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an "awkwardscale, on planes that transect the
here and now, then and there. [postcoloniality, modernity, millennia1 capitalism, occult economy, witchcraft, South Africa].
