Comparing Evan-Pritchard's Pact With The Devil

Anthropology helps historians to make sense of the belief in witchcraft by presenting facts. Such scholars such as Francesco Maria Guazzo, who wrote “Pact with the Devil”, and Evan-Pritchard who wrote “Sorcery and Native Opinion”, each interpret witchcraft differently. Evan-Pritchard uses anthropology, or the study of humans past and present, to examine a group in Africa, the Azande and their understanding of witchcraft. Guazzo defines witchcraft by listing specific steps on how to identify a witch, and explaining them extensively. Is it the facts of misfortune that are in the experience of the Azande people, explained by Evans-Pritchard or the identification of witchcraft described by Guazzo that ultimately lead to the execution of Tempel Anneke?
Evans-Pritchard insists that witches defined by the Azande, do not exist. But “the concept of witchcraft nevertheless provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relationship between man and unfortunate events are explained ...” (Evans-Prichard, 63). In other words, witchcraft does not exist as we understand it, but only exists as a way to explain day to day occurrences for which we have no explanation. Witchcraft principles also contain a standard by which
Witchcraft is the root of all evil, it is an excuse for bad things going wrong to man. Evans-Pritchard learned this, first hand, living among the Azande people. The people did not try to account for situations of misfortune, instead they explained “particular conditions in a chain of causation which related an individual to natural happenings in such a way that he sustained injury” (Evans-Pritchard, 67). If someone in the village were to become ill and had received an injury prior to becoming ill, the explanation was witchcraft-it had nothing to do with the