DAJ 19(1) 2013: 119121 Copyright 2013 Dina Vonnk ISSN 1742-2930

Durham Anthropology Journal

DAJ

BOOK REVIEW

La Fontaine, J. ed. 2009. The Devils Children. From spirit possession to witchcraft: New allegations that affect children. Farnham: Ashgate.
Reviewed by

Dina Vonnk (Durham University)

http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol19/iss1/vonnak2013a.pdf

After the eight-year-old Victoria Climbi, accused of being a witch, was murdered by close kins in London, February 2000 and a number of similar cases of child abuse were revealed in the subsequent years questions of possession, witchcraft and exorcism gained substantial public and scholarly attention. Lying at the intersection of equally prompting applied and theoretical needs of understanding and informed action, these topics can only be meaningfully addressed through a multidisciplinary approach. The fteen essays presented in The Devils Children aim to provide a complex and polyvocal understanding of contemporary possession phenomena, sharing the goal of writing against the demonization of reductionist accounts, but never forgetting to take the reality of the violence involved seriously. The presented essays emerged from two conferences organised by the charity Information Movement on Religious Movements (Inform) in 2005 and 2006, presenting a wide range of perspectives from anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to NGO or social workers, the police and religious practitioners, deliberately preserving them in their difference without tying them together in order to offer a blueprint for action. As the trigger of the intensication of research was related to publicly recognised policy needs, the book is balancing a sensitive position acknowledging the need of intervention, but trying to overcome methodological atheism (p.3) which often explains away the signicance of culturally informed perspectives. The core argument of the several accounts is that we must develop a value neutral standpoint of investigation if we are

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DAJ 19(1) 2013: 119121 Copyright 2013 Dina Vonnk ISSN 1742-2930

to overcome the possession is nothing, but type of explanations (Barker), which could easily result in harmful intervention strategies (see especially Dein, de Boeck and Stobart). The chapters of the book gradually zoom in the core problem of child accusations: in the rst part, The Meaning of Possession, gives a theoretical foundation and a number of cross-cultural examples, Possession as Contact with the Divine contains insider accounts of religious practitioners and the last, third part, Children Accused provides us with the most specic case studies. Chapter 1 by Littlewood locates the phenomenon at the intersection of mental health issues and cultural particularities, stating that over-emphasising local culture can lead to an ignorance of potential psychiatric problems involved, while ignoring insider explanations can result in misdiagnosis of mentally healthy people as ill (pp.3334). Mulhern (Ch. 2) outlines the history of possession in Western thought, its gradual medicalisation and the problematics of the deep intertwinedness between individual experience and social expectations in multiple personality disorder (MPD) accounts, proving that we hardly nd neutral diagnostic categories even in the highly standardised scientic approach. The following three chapters offer explanations of possession within different cultural contexts of a British Pentecostal Church in Kingston (by Gold), the Bangladeshi diaspora in London (by Dein), and the Haitian Vodou (by Schmidt). Gold and Dein both stress the importance of practice over theological knowledge: though the Biblical authority of exorcism is highly important, the positional authority of exorcist priests is more immediate and transformative; similarly the chief aim of employing black magic specialist among Bangladeshis is to overcome misfortunes regardless of the conict between these practices and orthodox Islam. The second part of the book, Possession as Contact with the Divine, is the most problematic one in the book. Offering two rst-person accounts, one of an initiated Wicca priestess (Harrington) and the other of a prophetess of The Celestial Church of Christ (Magbagbeola), this section aims to demonstrate the positive dimensions of possession, and to weaken the association with necessarily uncontrollable social practices. Both authors write from their personal spiritual point of view, mediated by their professional personas, a scholar of religious studies on the one hand, and a

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DAJ 19(1) 2013: 119121 Copyright 2013 Dna Vonnk ISSN 1742-2930

Durham Anthropology Journal

DAJ

psychiatric social worker on the other hand. Though Harringtons account can help to dissociate the Wicca tradition from Satanist associations, and demonstrate a largely regulated form of voluntary, ritual possession, it remains rather disconnected from the other chapters of the book, and the explanations offered are not connected to any theoretical frameworks. Similarly Magbagbeola offers a passionate shielding for her Churchs practices, stressing the lack of child accusations, but the only distinction she makes between mental disorder and possession is based on the consistency of the victims speech, which is rather problematic and not examined further. Thus despite their insightfulness, these two essays somewhat stem the zest of the book. The core part of the collection is unquestionably the last, Children Accused, analysing the relations between Pentecostal Christianity and exorcism (La Fontaine, de Boeck, Pearson). The two most outstanding contributions of the book are probably by La Fontaine and de Boeck. The former provides a historical outline of the emergence of syncretism of indigenous beliefs and Christianity, in which Christianity incorporates former beliefs in witchcraft as the work of Satan, offering an efcient weapon against it in the absence of state support and social stability. This is likely to be similar in the African, especially Congolese diaspora of the UK due to its severe marginality. De Boeck gives an ethnographically informed account on Kinshasas 2050000 street children, who were dislocated from families after being accused of possession. He stresses the double character of the problem, often neglected by humanitarian NGOs, that children are not simply at risk, but themselves constitute a risk for their families as they form an uncontrolled force. This, together with the fact that the younger generation acquires more powerful social positions due to the rapid socioeconomic changes, challenges the very concept of being a child. Stobarts quantitative overview, Anane-Agyeis case study from a social worker perspective, and Pulls and Pearsons accounts on Church-related organisations aiming to offer help through pastoral work and the police unit Project Violet close the book with a more practical angle. The Devils Children is a groundbreaking contribution to the comparative understanding of contemporary minority and sectarian practices, and despite the slightly uneven bits, it makes a solid basis for both theoretical and applied understandings.

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