Dear Members of the Forced Migration Network,
As a new interested member in the list, I should introduce myself.
I studied Ethnology (social anthropology) in Marburg with the subsidiary subjects "Peace and Conflict Studies" and "Graphics and Painting". My MA-thesis looked into the parallels and differences of modern witch-hunting and anti-Semitism. In 2008 I was awarded a PhD-scholarship at the Graduate School "Locating Media" at the University Siegen.
My field-research in Ghana lasted 9 months, leading me from the local cinemas and their Pentecostal occult imagery to the ghettoes and sanctuaries for witch-hunt Victims in the Northern Region. I was among the first to visit all the camps there, their eight locations today well-known. In conduct of my research I interviewed about 150 female witch-hunt victims, all being outcasts of their communities and families. As came out, my own research was only part of a broader interest, with books and films published in 2009 and 2010.
I arranged my PhD-Thesis around philosophical problems of witch-hunts: which specific parts of enlightenment philosophy were responsible for the destruction of witch-trials throughout Europe? Which allowed for resistance? I came to the conclusion, that witch-hunting as an ideology employed an unspecified mixture of both, empiricist and mysticist approaches to truth. Thus hallucination and experimental torture became both legitimate sources of witchcraft-ideologemes. Epicurean thought - and later on early and especially hegelian and marxian dialectical thought, was aiming at an integration of both, the visible and the invisible to reason and experience. The problem was later on disputed mainly by Adorno/Horkheimer in their "Dialectics of Enlightenment".
This interrelation of positivism and "secondary occultism" (Adorno) made me aware of the primitive positivism in the rituals and ordeals under the conduct of earth-priests in Northern Ghana. Nonetheless, not the chicken-ordeal, but the dream of an individual seemed to be the main trigger or legitimation of an accusation. The seen fact outlevels the belief: "If I had not seen it with my own eye". Which is the point, where rumour, media, ordeal and dream meet each other as the positivism of the seen - standing against the unseen doubts and thoughts.
In conclusion: Witch-hunts had ever been battled with specific philosophy. To learn from the dialectics of enlightenment sharpens against falling back toward a simplistic affirmation of the "seen", the "fact", the "evidence", the "system" and rather leads to dialectical thinking, to the specific eternal problems of philosophy that witchcraft-beliefs are concerned with. Especially psychological education about infantile trauma, sexual drives, pathic projection and dreams is a major factor in creating awareness.
I have also published a text on child-witch-hunts in Africa via WHRIN: http://www.whrin.org/felix-riedel-children-in-african-witch-hunts-an-introduction-for-scientists-and-social-workers/ (free download)
As a result of my research I founded the Ghanaian "Witch-hunt Victims Empowerment Project" together with the famous Simon Ngota. For fundraising I founded the charity "Hilfe für Hexenjagdflüchtlinge" (Help for Witch-hunt Victims). Today the WHVEP assists 200 women and 40 children in three sanctuaries in Northern Ghana, while outreaching to another in Tindang since 2014. The project is not the only one working witch witch-hunt-refugees in Africa, but it is nonetheless a major pioneer-project.
Further interest lead me to freelance-research into anti-Semitism, the Arab spring, the Syrian-Iraqi situation and Islamism in Africa. Other themes that never left me were asymmetric conflicts (guerrilla conflicts, insurgency), genocide-research and ecology.
Waiting for my PhD-results, I am planning forward towards a field-research in Northern Ghana among Konkomba-communities and especially among Konkomba-witch-hunt-victims. The current approach of all studies with them was doing case-interviews during short-term visits. I would like to focus more on group-interaction in the ghettoes and sanctuaries, on resilience, on traumatology and cosmological body-mind-concepts - and where they could be used or confronted successfully to prevent witch-hunts. Together with my wife, a physician and psychotherapist with focus on psychosomatic therapy, I intend to do a medical-ethnographic research under the headline: Psychosomatics of the Witch-hunt and the Witch-dream among the Konkomba. Body-Mind-concepts, concepts of disease and treatment, of biomedicine and genderized ritual medicine are equally involved.
I welcome any advice, remarks and invitations from the list and I'm looking forward to learn from the forced-migration-network.
With best regards,
Felix Riedel
www.witch-hunt.org (under construction)
www.felixriedel.net
www.hexenjagden.de
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