GLOBALIZATION AND THE POWER OF INDETERMINATE MEANING - WITCHCRAFT ANDSPIRIT CULTS IN AFRICA AND EAST-ASIA

The obsession with witchcraft in many parts of present-day Africa is n ot to be viewed as some sort of traditional residue. On the contrary, it is especially present in the more modern spheres of society. In a c omparative, global perspective, this linking of modernity and witchcra ft is not particular to Africa: in other parts of our globalized world , modern developments coincide with a proliferation of what the Comaro ffs (forthcoming) call 'the economies of the occult'. In this article, representations in South and West Cameroon about ekong, supposedly a novel form of witchcraft explicitly associated with modern forms of we alth, are compared to Weller's study of the upsurge of spirit cults in Taiwan, during the recent economic boom of this 'Asian tiger'. The po wer of such discourses on occult forces is that they relate people's f ascination with the open-endedness of global flows to the search for f ixed orientation points and identities. Both witchcraft and spirit cul ts exhibit a surprising capacity for combining the local and the globa l. Both also have specific implications for the ways in which people t ry to deal with modernity's challenge.