Witchcraft has long been a touchy subject in anthropology. While it was quite popular to write about witchcraft during the colonial period, the decades following independence saw this line of inquiry go silent. It became unfashionable to study such ‘traditional’ themes when there were more exciting, more modern issues at hand. Moreover, witchcraft – as a theme – always risks carrying a sort of pejorative or even racist undercurrent of meaning: it cannot help but evoke the backward, the irrational, the pre-political. This began to change in the 1990s, owing in large part to the work of Peter Geschiere, whose book The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997) showed that concepts of the occult are dynamic and changing instead of static and timeless, and that they bear directly on people's experiences of capitalism, politics and the state.

In his newest book Geschiere takes this project a step further, setting out to show that the anxieties that many Africans express through the idiom of witchcraft are not at all unique or ‘other’. Once we strip away the trope it becomes clear that witchcraft hinges on a rather general human experience: the disturbing realisation that intimacy is always intrinsically dangerous – that the most threatening aggression comes from within families and among neighbours. In this sense, witchcraft can be read as diagnostic of intimacy, just as intimacy is a handy predictor of witchcraft. From this angle a new set of questions comes into view: What is the nature of intimacy in any given context? To whom does intimacy extend? How is trust negotiated? What are the dangers that lurk therein?

This perspective compels us to rethink some longstanding assumptions about sociality. The classic anthropological view regards the home as a zone of love and trust – a safe haven within a dangerous world. Exchange theory entrenched this view: it tends to regard the most intimate inner circles as characterised by generalised reciprocity and the outside as tainted by the tensions of negative reciprocity. We too easily forget, Geschiere argues, that in Marcel Mauss's original formulation the obligation to return the gift is always fraught with an element of fear and danger. Moreover, feminist scholars have pointed out that the supposedly safe sphere of the home is often shot through with violence and exploitation. And Freud – who appears repeatedly in Geschiere's book – taught us that intimate relationships within the family are underpinned by jealousies and anxieties.

Geschiere's focus on the link between intimacy and witchcraft opens up space for comparison, and this is where the book's true ballast lies. In the first part of the book Geschiere takes us back to his fieldwork among the Maka in Camaroon to illustrate how witchcraft rumours have changed as conceptions of intimacy have shifted over time to encompass new kinds of relationships. In the second part he draws comparisons with Europe and Bahia, showing in both cases that witchcraft relates closely to local conceptions of home and family. The concluding chapter takes us back to the core question of trust, drawing on theory from Georg Simmel and data from across Africa to explore how new forms of media are impacting the landscape of intimacy. While the most seasoned scholars of witchcraft may regard the book's contribution to be more synthetic than original, it nonetheless pushes the inquiry in new directions – toward a broader view of human relationships and well away from any exoticising tendencies.