Women as Witches and Keepers of Demons: Cross-Cultural Analysis of Struggles to Change Gender Relations

Abstract

How did changes in gender relations, leading at some point to the establishment o f patriarchy, come about? D i d these changes come about through gradual processes of accretion, leading imperceptibly to the establishment of male domination? Or were there in this process, intense struggles during this process? This paper looks at some events which are evidence of struggle between the sexes in the process of establishing male domination. It analyzes ideas of persons as harbouring evil as symbos of relations between parts o f society, as symbols of hierarchy between women and men. It specifically analyzes the context and role of categorization of women as witches or harbourers o f evi l . The phenomena analyzed are those of dain (witches) among the Santal and Munda tribes of the Austro-Asiatic language group in Jharkhand, India; the pippa (evil spirit) o f the Da i belonging to the Sino-Thai language group in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province o f China; and the chao pu xi (keepers o f demons) among the N a x i and Mosuo of the Tibeto-Burman language group in Lij iang, also in the Yunnan Province of China. Our study began with the analysis o f the phenomenon of witches and witch-hunting among the Santal and Munda o f India. F rom this we formed an idea that such events represented the struggle o f men against women in setting up male domination and that evidence o f such struggles are l ikely to be found in a number o f tribal or minority peoples, those which had only been recently or loosely brought under states. W i t h this in mind we then looked at the communities o f the D a i , N a x i and Mosuo in China. In each case we found similar categories o f women as keepers o f evi l , o f struggles between systems o f religion and meaning. The phenomena o f pippa among the D a i and o f chao pu xi, among the N a x i and Mosuo, have not attracted much analytical attention among Chinese scholars, not as much as witches among the Santal and Munda in India. Whi l e earlier field work in India, in the eighties, could easily be combined with other analyses o f witches, in the case o f China it was more difficult. F ie ld work over five visits over the mid-nineties has been somewhat more tentatively combined with published material and discussions with Chinese scholars. But the material we have put together is sufficient to allow the basic outlines o f an analysis to appear.

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