Terror, Witchcraft and Risk

This paper was written in the spring of 2004 for a seminar series at a South African
university1. It was a moment in time when the war in Iraq had been declared officially
over by the President of the United States, but when a War on Terror had been
declared by both the US and UK governments. Since that time, events have moved
fast: the Madrid train bombings, the growth of the insurgency in Iraq, an election in
the UK which saw the Labour Party returned to power with a much reduced majority
(largely attributed to discontent over the war), the bombings of July 2005 in London,
to name but a few. The editors of AnthroGlobe could have asked me to ‘update’ my
paper but they did not do so, wisely in my view. All publications should be read in the
context of their time and place, and any publication which seeks to deal with current
events risks being out of date between completion and printing. So I have not
attempted to ‘update’ the paper - to do so would have required another one.