ABSTRACT:
Particular manners of reduction of complexity, and not different rationalities are the major distinction between African occult belief systems and Western rational reasoning. Generations of social anthropologists since Evans-Pritchard are right in stressing (apparently without much effect) that Western educated scientists, experts, and politicians should be especially careful not to cultivate the hybris of rationality in their dialog with African stakeholders. “Irrational behaviour” because of methodologically unsound reduction of complexity is common in Western societies, too. Although Evans-Pritchard was right in confronting common Western prejudices, this was just the half of the truth. Much of conventional economic anthropology, was probably wrong in underestimating the profound structural links between emotion and rational reasoning in human beings in general. Rational behaviour is influenced by deep seated emotions at least as much as by empirical knowledge. In fact, man can not act rationally without moving emotions. Human decision making, by its very biological structure, is never determined by rational reasoning alone, but guided by emotions grown on, and deeply embedded, in the respective culture of the actor. According to neuro-physiological theories on cognition, the perception of the world in the human brain has been directed through the filter of positive and negative sentiments from the very birth on. There exists a close neuro-biological link between feeling and thinking, which makes the existence of emotions, based on the respective socio-cultural setting, a precondition for any rational action of both Africans and Europeans. But even more important in this context, the linkage of ratio and emotions, born out of and developed within specific socio-cultural settings, is of immediate relevance for the resolution of pressing social and political problems related to witchcraft violence in Africa. Most education programs to erase the belief in witchcraft which concentrated on rational reasoning have utterly failed since the beginning of colonial rule, be it by missionaries, schools or the state. The state, NGOs or other concerned institutions of civil society would literally deprive the believers in witchcraft of their capability for survival, if they would deny them their belief, without providing, jointly within the framework of educational programs, a convincing source of equally strong alternative “development-enhancing” emotions.
