Cette thèse est le résultat d’une enquête empirique menée au Gabon de 2012 à 2014 auprès de deux coopératives, la COOPEAN et la COOPAM, situées respectivement à Libreville et Ntoum. Dans cette thèse, je fais une analyse comparative des relations et pratiques coopératives en prenant appui sur les comportements et les représentations sociales des acteurs. J’interroge la responsabilité de l’État et celle des membres de ces coopératives en regard de la faible dynamique de ces structures. D’une part, le rôle de l’État se manifeste dans son absence de maîtrise des systèmes coopératifs modernes et son faible soutien à ces structures ; d’autre part, les coopérateurs, face à la compétition économique et aux croyances locales, adoptent des stratégies et comportements allant plutôt dans le sens des ambitions et intérêts particuliers, voire claniques. Les enquêtes et les observations de terrain montrent que la coopération des membres dans les différentes coopératives se déploie dans des dynamiques où se mêlent les affinités, les complexes de supériorité et d’infériorité, une rupture de confiance, la jalousie, les tensions, les contradictions, les incertitudes économiques et sociales. Le recours aux forces occultes et l’emploi des pratiques sorcellaires et fétichistes liées aux compétitions, rivalités productives et commerciales et les conflits associés au pouvoir inégal et à la gestion des ressources communes, constituent de sérieux obstacles à la coopération des membres et au développement des coopératives. Tout se passe comme si les coopérateurs avaient du mal à s’approprier les valeurs de liberté, d’égalité, de transparence, de démocratie, de considération et d’éthique propres aux coopératives. / This thesis is the result of an empirical survey carried out in Gabon from 2012 to 2014, with two cooperatives: COOPEAN and COOPAM respectively located in Libreville and Ntoum. In this thesis, I make a comparative analysis of the cooperative relations and practices through the behaviors and the social representations of its actors. I put into question the responsibility of the State and that of the members of these cooperatives in relation to the weak dynamics of these structures. On one hand, the responsibility of the State is summed up by its lack of control over modern cooperative systems and its weak support for these structures; On the other hand, cooperators, in the face of economic competition and local beliefs, adopt strategies and behaviors that are more in keeping with their particular ambitions and interests. Surveys and field observations show that the cooperation of the members in the various cooperatives is deployed in dynamics in which affinities, complexes of superiority and inferiority, a break in confidence, jealousy, tensions, contradictions, Economic and social uncertainties. The use of occult forces and the use of sorcery and fetish practices related to competitions, productive and commercial rivalries, and the conflicts associated with unequal power and the management of common resources, constitute serious obstacles in the cooperation of members and the development of cooperatives. These internal realities of cooperatives show that the members do not show a real will for freedom, equality, transparency, democracy, consideration and ethics specific to cooperatives.

Over the years, there has been much Anthropological inquiry into witchcraft and how it functions in the lives of people. Most of the research conducted in South Africa concerning witchcraft has been carried out amongst black South Africans with very little attention paid to white South Africans. Having come across a group of white, Afrikaans-speaking women who are practicing witches, I decided to investigate how they use their craft in their daily lives to make sense of their past and present. Given that white South Africans have largely escaped anthropological analysis due to privilege, I found no literature pertaining to white, Afrikaans-speaking people being connected to witchcraft. I decided to establish a historical trajectory through the existing literature and then connected my coven to this. I was also given the opportunity to be initiated and the chance to engage in becoming a witch myself. Apart from participant observation, I was able to interview the women and construct detailed life histories which were the primary sources of data that I used for this project. I found that the women primarily use their craft to make sense of their positions as Afrikaans-speaking women in post-apartheid South Africa as well as redefine their connection to nature through their gender and use it to empower themselves. This is an area that warrants much more investigation and as such I will be continuing this project into a PhD in order to explore all that which I did not have the space for in this project. / Mini Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Anthropology and Archaeology / MA / Unrestricted

La recherche interroge, par la création de projets de design et par une thèse écrite, le rôle et le pouvoir de la visualisation de données dans l’approche des problématiques économiques. Dans cette étude critique et théorique, je me demande d’abord en quoi les visualisations de données qui construisent des accès aux informations et aux questionnements économiques façonnent des représentations et des comportements singuliers. Je fais l’hypothèse que les « technologies intellectuelles » (Goody) qui rendent visibles ces données – les diagrammes, les réseaux, les cartes – ont construit depuis le début du XIXe siècle, une vision particulièrement étroite, désincarnée et dépolitisante de l’économie. Cependant, le design dispose de moyens favorisant, dans certaines conditions, la réappropriation des sujets économiques par les non-expert·e·s. Il s’agit alors de comprendre, en étudiant l’évolution de ses méthodes, la nature du régime contemporain de visualisation des phénomènes économiques, que je qualifie de néolibéral, et d’explorer ensuite les espaces d’intervention du design où des alternatives peuvent se déployer.Dans un second temps, au-delà de décrire, de comprendre ou de faire comprendre des phénomènes économiques, il m’a semblé que le rôle du design dans la visualisation de données était d’opérer des actes de « saisie » : saisir les données et les phénomènes, sur le plan cognitif, pour les comprendre ; mais aussi saisir les phénomènes économiques, dans leur sens, leur signification et leur raison d’être, le sens de l’économie et les objectifs qu’elle poursuit ; enfin, saisir par les sens, sur le plan sensoriel et sensible, en nous rappelant qu’au-delà de l’œil et de la vue, c’est le corps tout entier qui peut opérer la saisie. Ne parvenant pas à saisir l’économie, en me concentrant sur la performance cognitive ou communicationnelle des visualisations de données, l’hypothèse d’une « emprise sorcière » (Stengers et Pignarre), s’est alors imposée comme un terrain d’expérimentation fécond et comme une clé de lecture précieuse pour positionner, dans mon travail, l’imagination, les corps, les sens, les représentations mentales en tant qu’éléments essentiels pour penser l’économie. La magie qui habite nos rapports à l’économie m’oriente d’abord vers le pouvoir de rendre visible l’invisible, que détiennent les visualisations de données, et m’amène à questionner leur puissance liée à leur nature d’image. J’esquisse ensuite, avec la magie des liens (Bruno), une théorie de la visualisation comme pouvoir de relier et introduit la méthode des microcosmogrammes. Enfin, avec la sorcellerie, c’est la capacité à rendre tangible l’impalpable qui est examinée et confrontée au concept de désorcèlement (Favret-Saada), d’où j’extrais des principes méthodologiques et un questionnement sur la figure de la ou du designer-désorceleur. / Through the creation of design projects and a written thesis, the research questions the role and power of data visualisation in the approach to economic issues. In this critical and theoretical study, I first wonder how data visualisations that construct access to economic information and issues, shape specific representations and behaviours. I hypothesise that the 'intellectual technologies' (Goody) that make these data visible – charts, diagrams, networks, maps – have built a particularly narrow, disembodied and depoliticising view of the economy since the early nineteenth century. However, under certain conditions, design has the means to encourage the reappropriation of economic subjects by non-experts. I try to understand, by studying the evolution of its methods, the nature of the contemporary regime of visualisation of economic phenomena, which I describe as neoliberal. I then explore the design spaces where alternatives can be deployed.Secondly, beyond describing, understanding or making economic phenomena understood, it seemed to me that the role of design in data visualisation was to allow to grasp: to grasp data and phenomena, on a cognitive level, in order to understand them; but also to grasp economic phenomena, in their meaning, their significance and their raison d'être, the meaning of the economy and the objectives it pursues; finally, to grasp through the senses, on a sensory and sensitive level, reminding us that beyond the eye and the sight, it is the whole body that can carry out the grasping. As I was unable to grasp the economy by focusing on the cognitive or communicative performance of data visualisations, the hypothesis of a 'sorcerer's capture' (Stengers and Pignarre), became a fertile field of experimentation and as a precious key to understanding. It has allowed to position, in my work, imagination, bodies, senses and mental representations as essential elements for thinking about the economy. Firstly, with the magic that inhabits our relationship to the economy, I focus on the power of data visualisations to make the invisible visible, and then I question their power linked to their nature as images. Then, with the magical bondings (Bruno), I sketch a theory of visualisation as a power to bind and introduce the method of microcosmograms. Finally, with witchcraft, it is the capacity to touch the impalpable that is examined and confronted with the concept of unbewitching (Favret-Saada), from which I extract methodological principles and a questioning of the figure of the designer-unbewitcher. / Doctorat en Art et Sciences de l'Art / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Bibliography: pages 58-62. / This study focuses on stories of witchcraft within the Batlokwa - a sub-group of the Northern Sotho community living in the northern Transvaal. Having grown up in this society where witchcraft beliefs are predominant, my fears, as a child, of witches were very real. In later life I have attempted to ignore these fears. However, I do not think they will ever disappear entirely, as I will never be able to extricate myself from my origins. This experience of the dangerous witch is one of the reasons that compelled me to respond pictorially to some of these perceptions for the purpose of highlighting the concerns of ordinary people and the extent to which they have been affected by belief in witchcraft. My paintings are a translation of real and unreal incidents fused together producing a visual narrative.

Witchcraft beliefs were a vital element of the social, religious, and political landscapes of England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. English society, buffeted by ongoing processes of social, economic, and religious change, was increasingly polarized along material, ideological, and intellectual lines, exacerbated by rising poverty and inequality, political factionalism, religious dissension, and the emergence of Enlightenment philosophical reasoning. The embeddedness of witchcraft and demonism in early modern English cosmologies and quotidian social relations meant that religious and existential anxieties, interpersonal disputes, and threats to local order, settled by customary self-regulatory methods at the local level or prosecuted in court, were often encompassed within the familiar language and popular discourses of witchcraft, social order, and difference. Using trial pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and intellectual texts, this thesis examines the imbrications of these discourses and their collectively- determined meanings within the increasingly rationalized legal contexts and widening world of Augustan England, demonstrating the often deeply encoded ways in which early modern English men and women made sense of their own experiences and constituted and re-constituted their identities and affinities. Disorderly by nature, an inversion of natural, religious, and social norms, witchcraft in the Christian intellectual tradition simultaneously threatened and preserved order. Just as light could not exist without dark, or good without evil, there could be no fixed state of order: its existence was determined, in part, by its antithesis. Such diacritical oppositions extended beyond the metaphysical and are legible in contemporary notions of social difference, including attitudes about the common and poorer sorts of people, patriarchal gender and sexual roles, and nascent racial ideologies. These attitudes, roles, and ideologies drew sharp distinctions between normative and transgressive appearances, behaviours, and beliefs. This thesis argues that they provided a blueprint for the discursive construction of identity categories, defined in part by alterity, and that intelligible in witchcraft discourses are these fears of and reactions to disruptive and disorderly difference, otherness, and deviance—reactions which could themselves become deeply disruptive. In exploring the intersections of poverty, gender, sexuality, and race within collective understandings of witchcraft in Augustan England, this thesis aims to contribute to our understandings of the complex and dynamic ways in which English men and women perceived themselves, their communities, and the world around them.

This design project explores the complexity of witchcraft, focusing on the socio-cultural and ecological levels. The project’s transdisciplinarity bridges the historical facts of witchcraft, folktales, culture, and natural science practice with speculative design. It studies how, in the past, witchcraft was used against women as a patriarchal system of oppression and the ways in which it has been reclaimed through feminism in the present. It also looks into how women’s scientific participation and contributions have been partly and entirely erased or wrongly credited to men. Through practice-based research and multispecies collaboration, this project aims to empower women to learn and experiment with natural science through an ecofeminist lens and framework. The project offers a speculative design exploration of how today's witches can contribute to environmental restorative practices, through a communicational tool with the incredible mycorrhizal network found underground. This is directed toward young women who represent the future of environmental science and justice.

The European Witch-Hunts reached their peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Betweeen 1590 and 1661, approximately 1500 women and men were accused of, and executed for, the crime of witchcraft in Scotland. England suffered the largest witch-hunt in its history during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, which produced the majority of the 500 women and men executed in England for witchcraft. Evidence indicates, however, that only three women were executed in Ireland between 1533 and 1670. Given the presence of both English and Scottish settlers in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the dramatic discrepancy of these statistics indicate that conditions existed in early modern Ireland that tended to suppress the mechanisms that produced witchcraft accusations and larger scale witch-hunts. In broad terms those conditions in Ireland were the persistence of Gaelic culture and the ongoing conditions of open, inter-religious conflict. In particular, two artifacts of Gaelic Irish culture had distinct impact upon Irish witchcraft beliefs. The office of the Poet, or fili (singular for filid), seems to have had a similar impact upon Gaelic culture and society as the shaman has on Siberian witchcraft beliefs. The Gaelic/Celtic Poet was believed to have magical powers, which were actually regulated by the Brehon Law codes of Ireland. The codification of the Poet’s harmful magic seems to have eliminated some of the mystique and menace of magic within Gaelic culture. Additionally, the persistent belief in fairies as the source of harmful magic remained untainted by Christianity throughout most of Ireland. Faeries were never successfully demonized in Ireland as they were in Scotland. The Gaelic Irish attributed to fairies most of the misfortunes that were otherwise blamed on witchcraft, including the sudden wasting away and death of children. Faerie faith in Ireland has, in fact, endured into the twentieth century. The ongoing ethno-religious conflict between the Gaelic, Catholic Irish and the Protestant “New English” settlers also undermined the need for witches in Ireland. The enemy, or “other” was always readily identifiable as a member of the opposing religious or ethnic group. The process of dual confessionalisation, as described by Ute Lotz-Huemann, facilitated the entrenchment of Catholic resistence to encroaching Protestantism that both perpetuated the ethno-religious conflict and prevented the penetration of Protestant ideology into Gaelic culture. This second effect is one of the reasons why fairies were never successfully associated with demons in Ireland. Witch-hunts were complex events that were produced and influenced by multiple causative factors. The same is true of those factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations. Enduring Gaelic cultural artifacts and open ethno-religious conflict were not the only factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts in Ireland; they were, however, the primary factors.

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