social explanation of misfortune (Illness/Death)

Focus on one kind of misfortune. For example, illness. Or you could focus on explanations of deaths.

Then, I would pick just a couple of societies and compare them. That gives you a built in question to explore in the paper: how are the beliefs in the two societies the same, and how are they different?

If you want to, you could make one of those societies the Kwaio people I work with. One of the papers we will read is one that I wrote (“Concealment, Confession, and Innovation in Kwaio Women’s Taboos,” which we read for 10 April–you’d want to read it now) about how Kwaio people blame illnesses and also deaths on social causes. In the cases I talk about in the paper, the social cause is women supposedly breaking the rules of the group’s ancestral spirits. Then the spirits afflict people in the group, usually men, to express their anger. In ancestral cultures like that, you can just think of the ancestral spirits as social beings, who take part in daily social life, have personalities, are emotional, and so forth. That makes it fun to try to understand how people think about them.

Another social explanation of misfortune, including illness, that we will look at in the class, is witchcraft. People in some societies blame most serious misfortunes in their society on witches attacking people secretly (in others societies they blame sorcerers, instead, but as we’ll see, they’re different from witches). There is a good paper on witches and misfortune on our Canvas site by Evans-Pritchard, “The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events.” That’s a famous writing, about the Azande people of Africa, that anthropologists have drawn on as inspiration for a long time. Since you have to read it anyway later, I’d have a look at it now. One thing Evans-Pritchard was trying to show, at a time when Europeans saw people like Azande as irrational, magical thinkers, is that witchcraft beliefs are completely logical and intellectual, if you take on faith that there are witches.

Maybe you could compare how the Kwaio people I work with blame women violating taboos for illnesses with how the Azande blame witches for illnesses. That would make a good comparison since in some ways they are similar but in other ways different. If you decided to do that as a topic we could meet and talk about it.