Template talk:Witchcraft sidebar

Inappropriate lumping together of healers and those who do harm

@Darker Dreams: This is not ok. This is all muddled up, and really not necessary with all the other templates we already have. All sources define difference between Indigenous healers and witches, and cunning people and witches. This falsely conflates all of the above. If it's about "witchcraft" the content I removed doesn't belong. Take it to talk instead of yet more edit-warring, Darker Dreams. I also took out the articles at AfD as duplicates and redlinks. - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 00:27, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

@CorbieVreccan What's not ok is your insistence that you have the single valid set of definitions despite even your own references flagrantly contradicting you. Every source you provide that narrows witchcraft down to "evil" does so with the acknowledgement that is not the only definition. Further, "indigenous cultures" is plural and have much broader interpretations of this concept, and the English word, than you allow.

• [1] The Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions states in the mandate’s 2009 Report that human rights abuses carried out due to beliefs in witchcraft have “not featured prominently on the radar screen of human rights monitors” and that “this may be due partly to the difficulty of defining ‘witches’ and ‘witchcraft’ across cultures - terms that, quite apart from their connotations in popular culture, may include an array of traditional or faith healing practices and are not easily defined.
• [2] "I challenge the notions that witchcraft and sorcery invariably lead to violence, that there is only one type of witchcraft and sorcery, and that what is labelled witchcraft and sorcery in English is entirely superstitious nonsense."

"Despite early Christianisation, belief and practice of witchcraft continues to be prevalent in this primarily matrilineal province. Even outside the province, the flying witches of Milne Bay are legendary and Milne Bay itself has been described anecdotally as the witchcraft centre of PNG. In contrast to other chapters from PNG in this volume which speak of witchcraft and sorcery accusations that generate brutal violence on the accused, violence against women is much less in this province where witchcraft is highly articulated, and it is said to empower and contribute to the status of Milne Bay women.")

• [3] Abstract in part; "The argument that contemporary examples of witchcraft belief demonstrate an alternative form of modern subjectivity has been doubted by many anthropologists, who claim that so-called modern witchcraft is often only a reflection of traditional cultural epistemologies. [...] I argue that witchcraft imagery takes [a negative] form because Christianity has reshaped the cultural conception of personhood, space, and time, detaching witchcraft from the ethos of kinship."
• [4] It is incredibly difficult to escape the reflex of defining witchcraft as a means to explain misfortune. This approach is not only central to Western studies of African witchcraft, it has also greatly informed local conceptions of witchcraft in the past and present. In my own fieldwork (Roxburgh 2014), individuals in Ghana and Cameroon would defer to anthropological works employing this definition when discussing witchcraft in their own milieux. In one interview, a respondent did not want to answer the question of how to define witchcraft and instead instructed me to find an anthropologist to define the concept.
• [5] In the context of the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, the category of brujería encompassed a range of culturally-syncretic spiritual practices marginalized colonial subjects used to restructure social relations and acquire power that they were otherwise denied in their patriarchal environment. The intensity of women’s socio-political abjection at this time meant they had a particularly urgent need to counteract white men’s dominance, a desire that played a key part in the creation of an inter-caste, inter-class, mostly feminine network of relations focused on the commerce of magical knowledge, herbs, and rituals. Centuries later, we find the legacies of these relations in Latin American spiritual traditions, such as curanderismo (a form of traditional healing) and chamanismo (shamanism), which disenfranchised, majority Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) women, still utilize in everyday life as part of their efforts at overcoming systematic subjugation.

Darker Dreams (talk) 00:39, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

What you miss in all of this wall of text is that, like with the Biddy Early mess, you are calling people "witches" who do not and did not call themselves "witches". They don't use the word because, to them, it means "evil". This is not "my" definition. I don't know how else to explain this to you. "Traditional" doesn't mean what some neopagans came up with in the 1940s. It means, for everyone else, living traditions, global traditions, family traditions, and not what revisionists tell these people to call "witchcraft". - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 19:38, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

What you miss in all that wall of text is citations and sources. You keep saying things without sources. When you do have sources you want to extend their support far past what they say. Or you just make things up, like using edit descriptions to say Drawing Down the Moon (book) supported the witch-cult theory[6] (the book doesn't). Darker Dreams (talk) 23:12, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Sidebar image

The current image takes up a lot of vertical space making the sidebar more likely to displace images and other templates in articles unnecessarily. While I generally think images improve sidebars, the primary purpose of a sidebar is to provide links for navigation not show off artwork. Assuming this template is not deleted entirely, the image should be replaced with a cropped version or replaced by an entirely different image which already has square or landscape proportions.

The current image could easily be cropped to square proportions by trimming some of the bare ground at the bottom and all the largely empty sky occupied only by the smoke column at the top. None of the most relevant details would be lost in doing so. – Scyrme (talk) 00:51, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

I've made a losless square-ish crop, feel free to improve on it.—Alalch E. 01:36, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Saves a fair a bit of space. – Scyrme (talk) 02:26, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

@SWinxy: I liked it when the picture was larger. Can we make it larger again?—Alalch E. 16:44, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd prefer if the image was the default size to be consistent with the size of the sidebar, but it's not a dealbreaker. SWinxy (talk) 17:23, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

How to group neopagan witchcraft and feminist witchcraft

@Darker Dreams: I disagree that they can be grouped under "types" or "forms" because navigation template lists are in fact assumed to be all-inclusive by readers, and this is about the readers. These templates serve navigation, but they also create implicit statements by virtue of presenting a certain organization of a topic. These statements should not be misleading statements. There is nothing delegitimizing in either "novel forms", "modern forms", "non-traditional forms" or "20th-century forms". Please discuss. —Alalch E. 14:16, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

@Alalch E.: I agree that this is about readers, and that presentation creates implicit statements by virtue of organization which should not be misleading. Wikipedia is, by policy supposedly not able to be superseded by "consensus," supposed to cover sourced subjects - meaning that there should be other entries for the "forms" or "types" categories which are not "novel," "modern," or "20th-century." Further, all of these presentations share a particular undercurrent of "recentism" and "neologism." This is particularly concerning when we consider that the religious aspects (neopagan) have often been targeted for their "newness" in attempts to discredit them as "real" religions. Darker Dreams (talk) 16:09, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Hey, how about this: special:permalink/1173989888. No label? —Alalch E. 16:21, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Feels a little weird, but it addresses all the concerns raised so it works for me. Darker Dreams (talk) 16:27, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Okay, let's see how it goes with the others. —Alalch E. 16:30, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

They should be grouped under "Modern forms". It's neutral and accurate. There was no neopagan or feminist witchcraft until the 20th century. There wasn't even any neopaganism or feminism as such until modern times. – Asarlaí ^(talk) 11:26, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Referring to the four types of magic he acknowledges, Hutton goes on to say; "Although the latter two are distinctively modern senses of the word, rooted in the nineteenth century but flowering in the late twentieth, the others are both many centuries old." The latter two being feminist and neopagan. The former two being diabolical/malevolent/evil and "general use of magic." - Darker Dreams (talk) 10:19, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Darker Dreams, so Hutton agrees with myself and Alalch E. that Neopagan and Feminist are "modern senses of the word". Why then did you revert me for putting them under "Modern forms"? – Asarlaí ^(talk) 10:27, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Because Hutton also acknowledges non-malevolent forms of witchcraft that are centuries old. Something that you've consistently failed to mention in arguing against such coverage. Plus, of course, all the points I made above. - Darker Dreams (talk) 11:28, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

We're talking about Neopagan and Feminist. Myself and Alalch say they should be grouped under "Modern forms". You post a quote from a reliable source which agrees that they are indeed "modern senses of the word". But when I go ahead and put them under "Modern forms", you revert me. Absolutely bizarre. – Asarlaí ^(talk) 12:34, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

You are most correct in saying that I support the "Modern forms" list name, but I do not oppose the status quo. (Equally good? Bit worse? Bit odd? I'm not sure.) And if you don't oppose the status quo either, then maybe we do not need to prosecute this dispute, so to say. But if you, unlike me, do actually oppose the status quo inasmuch as you do not think that it's equally good and that it is certainly worse, if only a tiny little bit worse, for some cogent, non-subjective, reason, I will probably agree that the status quo is untenable, and will probably not feel comfortable supporting it. But, please, say the reason. —Alalch E. 16:38, 27 September 2023 (UTC)