Barend ter Haar, the distinguished author of many important books and articles published over more than three decades, has here given us a massive study unlikely to be superseded for many years. The topic, witchcraft in China, is one on which he has published previously (Telling Stories: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History [Brill, 2006]). Others, including J. J. M. de Groot, H. Y. Feng and J. K. Shryock, Philip Kuhn, Richard Von Glahn, Liang Cai, Xiaohuan Zhao, Paul Katz, and Christine Mollier, have also made important contributions on and around this topic. But there has been nothing quite like this book.

Its coverage is vast. (For chapter-by-chapter topical coverage, readers may consult the open-access Table of Contents under “Preliminary Materials” at https://brill.com/display/title/70314.) Chronologically, ter Haar utilizes sources dating from antiquity (oracle bone inscriptions, the Zuo zhuan, recently recovered manuscripts) straight through the twentieth century; he even cites some ethnographic accounts published just a decade or two ago. Geographically and socially, the main focus is on what he calls the imperial heartland and Han people, but he also devotes space to more marginal areas such as Gansu, Fujian, and Yunnan, and to several non-Han ethnicities. As for social levels, ter Haar observes that “the fear of witchcraft should not be dismissed as a ‘popular’ belief, since [the cases under discussion] involved political and social elites” (155), up to and including rulers and the highest levels of officialdom. Most of the source material consists of narrative texts of one or another genre.

One reason ter Haar was able to range so widely yet confine his findings to a single volume (albeit a lengthy one) is that he had great difficulty locating directly relevant materials. “My … attempts to find useful information on the persecution of witches in the extant imperial archives using publicly accessible source publications and websites have been an altogether unsuccessful venture” (39), he writes frankly. He notes that this dearth of textual evidence is due, in part, to people’s reticence to discuss such matters with strangers or visitors; “most communities will have some form of selective silence vis-à-vis the outside world, especially towards the state and its representatives” (43). In fact, witchcraft was a dangerous topic to discuss at all with almost anyone: “Since malicious ritual or worship was so widely feared, we might expect that people talked about it freely and in detail. However, it was decidedly risky to do so since one never knew what the suspected person or persons might do in return if they found out” (44). He points out that the scholar Qumu Weigu, studying the Ni ethnic group and herself a person of Ni heritage, found that “during her field visits she was only able to gather material from self-perceived victims and not from putative perpetrators” (44). In short, this book’s topic by its very nature is one that can only be glimpsed fleetingly, not focused on directly. Nevertheless, ter Haar has found and presented some wonderfully detailed cases of witchcraft accusations and their aftermaths, from the imperial palace down to counties. He notes that, as was the case in medieval and early modern Europe, false confessions of the practice of witchcraft were often elicited under torture—although the Chinese archive seems to lack the sorts of richly detailed records explored in Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976). “Only when so-called witches are subjected to physical, psychological and social pressure and torture, do they finally feel forced to take on the identity that is ascribed to them by their accusers” (420). He is right to point out in the conclusion that the persistence and prevalence of witchcraft accusations and (purported) practices contradict stereotypes of Chinese society as exceptionally harmonious (425).

Several times ter Haar belabors the point that the real topic of the book, as adumbrated in the title, is not the ritual practices he labels witchcraft per se, their cultural logic or implied cosmological foundation, but is instead the fear of such practices and the sorts of social contexts in which that fear arises. The book is organized around a distinction between two main foci of such fear: the use of ritually empowered figurines (a practice often attributed to carpentersFootnote ¹), and “practices involving animal or demon familiars associated with certain members of a local community and believed to be directed at other persons … within the same community” (3).

Three passages follow to illustrate the way in which ter Haar characterizes this emphasis on fear (there are others besides these, and the repetition is an example of the book’s often verbose style). First, the work is “not a conceptual history or an introduction to the study of magic, sorcery, ritual and witchcraft. It is instead a foray into the social and cultural history of fear in Chinese society” (21). Second, “The fear of witchcraft is fundamentally different from the practice of magic, sorcery or ritual, given that with ‘witchcraft’ we shift our focus from the ritual performance to the political, social and/or personal conflict informing a perceived ritual act—from the performer of the ritual to the targeted agent of the presumed ritual. Therefore, this is not a study in the history of magic, sorcery or ritual, but a social and cultural history of fear, specifically the fear of imagined (and sometimes real) malicious rituals” (25). Third, “This is a book about the fear of ritual, rather than the actual rituals … . My main argument is that this fear arose not so much from the putative ritual practices, but from the personal, social, and/or political contexts where they took place” (47).

Ter Haar is certainly right to emphasize the fear of sorcery as a pervasive aspect of Chinese society for many centuries and into the present era. As a corrective, however, I would suggest that the fear arose from both the social and political contexts that ter Haar focuses on and people’s knowledge that there existed ritual techniques by which people could bring about grave harm to other people through action at a distance, such action being in every society the essence of what is sometimes termed “magic.” Without the mantic techniques, the “distrust, jealousy and suspicion” (3) would not have been seen to be so readily weaponizable. To put the point differently, it’s one thing to acknowledge that “the fear of the ‘other’ is a constant in human society” (347), something that is undeniably true; it’s another thing when the society in question is characterized by rampant awareness that powerful methods existed which “the other” could deploy to harm or even kill human targets covertly, as well as by the widespread belief that such methods could be, and in many known cases already had been, highly effective. “The other” became much scarier when seen as potentially armed with such effective yet covert weaponry.

To my mind, then, the book’s true topic is not just the fear of witchcraft but also the explanatory functions performed by belief in witchcraft. Witchcraft was a way of making sense of misfortune, illness, and death, by identifying their roots. And it furnished a kind of theodicy, taking the blame off of the cosmos or the human condition writ large and placing it on much more specific, sometimes identifiable, and (this was key) local agents. Alongside such other cultural staples as “inherited burden” (chengfu 承負, in which case the responsible agents were members of one’s society in the distant past), “sepulchral plaints” (zhongsong 冢訟, in which case the responsible agents were dead individuals, potentially going back several generations, with whom one had some sort of family tie, whether by direct descent or by marriage), and karma (in which case the responsible agent was oneself in a former existence), witchcraft was one of many available ways of at once explaining why bad things happened to good people and in some cases, depending on one’s point of view, justifying their having done so. It was ritual specialists who sometimes identified the culprits and thus provided a crucial explanatory link between cause and effect. Ter Haar occasionally acknowledges the explanatory function of witchcraft accusations (see, e.g., 85 and 245), but, in my opinion, by repeatedly emphasizing that his topic is the fear of witchcraft per se he slights the cognitive or theoretical roles played by these ideas qua ideas as elements of a shared worldview with a solid basis in practice.

It is impossible to do justice here to this book’s many riches, the product of years of painstaking and conscientious research. For those interested in the topic, it makes for absorbing reading. It is stuffed with vivid examples. We owe Barend ter Haar a debt of thanks for this scholarly labor of love.