Counter-Witchcraft and the Fetish

Anthropologists have long demonstrated how witchcraft and magic are engaged with the modern, in some cases suggesting that witchcraft’s various manifestations are constitutive of modernity in its different forms. This scholarship pushes back against the inherited teleology of Protestant Enlightenment discourse, which in turn positioned itself against West African fetish practices, which were thought to evoke Europe’s more superstitious past. Similarly, we can ask how English witchcraft accusations of the sixteenth to seventeenth century were also caught up with modernity. This paper takes up the problem of counter-witchcraft in the form of English “witch bottles” to explore their relation to the fetish and to modernity.