Jane Parish

• Keele University

!--[if gte mso 9]> While it has been extensively recorded how the West African occult economy allows for a metanarrative critique of modernity, this article analyzes a convergence between witchcraft discourses and the capitalist market, looking through the local lens of Akan spirit shrines in New York City. Rather than being in awe of the “mysterio...

At Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in New York City shrine-priests incorporate into their sacred discourses revelatory knowledge drawn from the American mass-marketing of celebrities, their fashions and lifestyles. Attempting to capture this powerful commodity fetish Hollywood stardom is tacked onto Kente cloth imported from Ghana. Through a powerful...

In treating illness and suffering, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine is often presented as a model of unchanging, tightly bounded and antiquated ideals. This fails to acknowledge the extensive repertoire of Ghanaian witchcraft discourses and contemporary divinatory practices uncovered at Akan anti-witchcraft shrines. This paper analyses how one of th...

This article is based on fieldwork from 2005 onwards among West African antiwitchcraft shrines in New York City amid the growing African diaspora. For many of the priests who have worked at shrines established since the 1980s, the recent economic recession was yet another blow to their love affair with New York high society and a distinct uptown ne...

This paper examines the moral economy of the African Diaspora through the illicit activities of secret Ghanaian gamblers in Europe. It follows a Ghanaian, Mr. Baba, a gambler, from North West England, who looks to the most unlikely of sources of information and certainty in a fast networked society, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine located not in Gh...

In this ethnography I examine the key features of occult discourses among middle-class Sierra Leoneans living in Britain, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Merseyside and Cheshire between 2001-2002. It is evident that the subjects of this study are quick to engage with the conspiracy-theorising besetting Euro-American popular culture in...

This article builds on research carried out at western Ghana’s anti-witchcraft shrines and on post-1996 fieldwork among Ghanaian gamblers in a major UK city-port, here named Northington. Unemployed or in a low-paid job, the gambler’s pursuit of excitement, financial respite and hope via his furtive endeavours tends, self-defeatingly, to add to his...

Cet article se propose d'étudier les certitudes et les incertitudes épistémologiques de la possession par les esprits et du savoir en sorcellerie chez les Akan. Nos recherches se basent sur une enquête de terrain effectuée entre 1990 et 1991 à Dormaa-Ahenkro, dans la région de Brong-Ahafo au Ghana. Nous examinons le savoir transcendantal découvert...

1. The Age of Anxiety: Jane Parish (School of Social Relations, Keele University). 2. Iloveyou: Viruses, Paranoia and the Environment of Risk: Peter Knight (Staffordshire University). 3. The Obscure Politics of Conspiracy Theory: Mark Featherstone (Staffordshire University). 4. Conjuring Order: the new world order and conspiracy theories of globali...

This article focuses on the way that Akan witchcraft invokes imagery of new forms of modernity, especially a feature of the post-colonial monetary economy, the credit card. Credit card spending encodes relations within a technological monetary network, and it affects personal relations at home and abroad. The article is based on fieldwork carried o...

This article deals with Akan perceptions of witchcraft at two different anti-witchcraft shrines. It is argued that contemporary fears about witchcraft symbolise moral uncertainties about identity, sociability and materialism. These ideas are expressed by means of a highly self-reflexive critique of the concepts of social admiration and transcultura...