Abstract

Religion, magic and witchcraft are conceptual, socially constructed

categories, the boundaries of which have been contested under diverse

religious, cultural and intellectual conditions in the west. This paper focuses

firstly on the polemical relationship between religion and magic in the

context of colonial South Africa, namely, the historical factors that privileged

the category religion and the multiple effects of the social and legal

imposition of western epistemologies on colonised communities whose

practices constituted ‘magic’, and, therefore, were synonymous with

‘witchcraft’. Secondly, examples of strategies to reinforce the religion/magic

dichotomy, to collapse their subjective boundaries, and the complexity

witchcraft discourses bring to both positions are provided in the context of

the religious and cultural hybridity of postcolonial South Africa. A parallel

discussion is on the influence Christian and Enlightenment thought had on

category construction in the study of religion and questions the extent to

which Religion Studies today engages in decolonising the categories religion,

magic and witchcraft in ways that do not contradict religious realities in our

society.