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Mens Daemonica: Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2021

Sonia Rupcic
Sonia Rupcic*
Affiliation:
Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In winter 2014, the town of Thohoyandou, South Africa was gripped with panic after a series of rapes and murders. In this area, notorious for its occult specialists and witchcraft, stories began to circulate attributing the violence to demonic forces. These stories were given credence by the young man who was charged with these crimes. In his testimony, he confirmed that he was possessed by evil forces. Taking this story as a point of departure, this article provides an empirical account of the ambivalent ways state sites of criminal justice grapple with the occult in South Africa. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how spirit possession is not easily reconciled with legal methods of parsing criminal liability in courtrooms. And yet, when imprisoned people are paroled, the state entertains the possibility of bewitchment in public ceremonies of reconciliation. Abstracting from local stories about the occult, this article proposes mens daemonica (“demonic mind”) to describe this state of hijacked selfhood and as an alternative to the mens rea (“criminal mind”) observed in criminal law. While the latter seeks the cause of wrongdoing in the authentic will of the autonomous, self-governing subject, mens daemonica describes a putatively extra-legal idea of captured volition that implicates a vast and ultimately unknowable range of others and objects in what only appears to be a singular act of wrongdoing. This way of reckoning culpability has the potential to inspire new approaches to justice.

Keywords

possessionoccultlawculpabilitycriminal justicereconciliationlegal pluralism
Type
Hijacking the Human
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 599 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: I am grateful for the financial support of SSRC, Fulbright, NSF, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, and Rackham Graduate School, which made different stages of this research possible. This piece has benefited tremendously from the insights of mentors and colleagues. I am grateful for feedback from Jane Guyer, Natasha Myers, and the conveners of the Being with Others in More-Than-Human Worlds conference held at Johns Hopkins University in May 2018. Special thanks to Susanna Blumenthal and Riaz Tejani for their generous engagement with this work at the 2019 Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop as well as a fire hose-worth of comments from the other conveners and participants. From talk to chapter, Jamie Andreson, Nishita Trisal, and Nick Caverly helped me think through the development of these stories and ideas. I am especially thankful to Adam Ashforth and Jatin Dua for their sage counsel on multiple drafts of this. All my love to Max Risch and Otis for their support and love. And many thanks to the anonymous CSSH reviewers for their careful consideration of this work.

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