Witches

The definition is entirely relational, since nothing about the person qualifies them and what matters is the position their knowledge occupies relative to what authoritative power wants. A source of knowledge is a witch only where knowledge is unwelcome, which means the category is created by the authority rather than by anything the person is or does. Witches are one of the four roles Marsh names in the anatomy of power, alongside great men, commoners and wretches, and they are the role a commoner's uniformity is directed against, since a solid block of uniform opinion is the instrument that ostracizes witches and wretches. What happens to them is what happens to any source of primary anima with no method of self-protection. Marsh treats channelers as prey for the same reason, and she reads the historical case in energy terms, since burning women as witches and domestic abuse cruelty have the same goal, and the violence of the renewed witch hunts today can be read the same way. Someone allowed to keep their own achievement without an influx of new guilt will eventually be much stronger, which is what the arrangement prevents. She also points to the anthropological reading, quoting Malidoma Patrice Some on the traditional beliefs of his village in Burkina Faso, where witches possess knowledge, which is the definition arrived at from inside a tradition rather than imposed on it. Scientific superstition is the contemporary institutional form, refusing knowledge associated with the negative image.

Witch hunt historiography has moved decisively towards social explanations, with Silvia Federici arguing that the European hunts were part of the enclosure of women's labour and reproductive capacity in the transition to capitalism, and other historians emphasizing local conflict, property and healing knowledge. Anthropology after Evans-Pritchard studies witchcraft accusation as a mechanism for managing misfortune and social tension. Marsh's definition is closest to Federici's in identifying what was being suppressed, and adds the generality, since defining the role by the relation between knowledge and authority extends it to anyone holding knowledge that power does not want, in any period.