A peer-reviewed article published in The Review of Economic Studies in 2005, using household survey data from rural Tanzania. It is the study the atlas is resting on when it says that income shocks predict witch killings, and it is recorded here so that the claim can be followed to its source rather than asserted on the atlas's own authority. The finding matters to the way the whole subject is framed: it moves the explanation of a killing away from belief considered on its own and towards the conditions in which an accusation is acted on, which is also why the surrounding entry insists that present-day accusations are contemporary violence with contemporary causes and not a survival of the European trials.
Facts
Method
Method UsedStatistical analysis of household survey data from rural Tanzania, correlating drought-driven income shocks with the incidence of witch killings recorded in the same households and villages over time. 1 Investigators Evidence
Replication StatusNot established here. This atlas has not identified an independent replication on comparable Tanzanian data, and does not assert that none exists. Later development economics on economic shocks is not the same test, so whether the result has been reproduced is open rather than settled. 1 Publications
Notable PublicationPublished in The Review of Economic Studies, 2005. 1 Learn More
Rainfall, Income and the Timing of a Killing
Published in The Review of Economic Studies in 2005, this paper used household survey data from rural Tanzania to ask a question that belief alone cannot answer: not why people accuse women of witchcraft, but why an accusation turns into a killing when it does.
The finding was that extreme rainfall, drought and flood alike, and the income shock that follows, predicts a rise in the killing of women accused of witchcraft in the villages surveyed. Elderly women in a household were disproportionately the victims. Rainfall is the useful variable precisely because it is outside anyone's control: a village cannot choose its weather, so a correlation between weather and killings is difficult to explain by any prior difference between villages.
The argument that follows is about scarcity governing the moment of action. Accusation is widespread and constant; killing is not. What the paper identifies as varying with the shock is the point at which a household under acute economic pressure acts on an accusation against a dependent member. That reframes the phenomenon from a question about what people believe to a question about the conditions under which belief becomes violence, and it is the study the atlas rests on when it makes that claim.
Contemporary Violence, Not a Survival
The reason this study is recorded in an atlas of religion is the framing it makes possible. Present day witchcraft accusation is frequently presented, in popular writing and occasionally in serious writing, as a survival of the European witch trials, as though the same phenomenon had persisted in some places and ended in others. A result that ties killings to current economic shocks undercuts that reading directly. Whatever the beliefs involved, the violence has contemporary causes and responds to contemporary conditions.
Other work supports the same framing from different directions. Anthropological studies of children accused of witchcraft in parts of Africa, and comparative work on sorcery accusation in Melanesia, describe accusation as embedded in present day social conflict rather than inherited intact from anywhere. A United Nations Human Rights Council resolution in 2021 on harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations treats the matter as a live human rights question rather than a historical one.
The replication position should be stated honestly. The atlas has not identified an independent replication of this result on comparable Tanzanian data and does not assert that none exists. Later development economics on economic shocks is not the same test. Whether the specific finding has been reproduced is therefore open, and the atlas records the claim as resting on this study rather than on a settled literature.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
2005, Years Poverty and Witch Killing, a survey, is dated here from 2005. Whether an income shock predicts the killing of women accused of witchcraft, in rural Tanzanian villages.
Studied
The entry says that a peer-reviewed study found extreme rainfall predicting the killing of women accused of witchcraft. This is that study, so the claim can be followed rather than taken on trust.
Sources
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