Annotating Witchcraft
For activity 5 of the Website project, a passage from “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico.” by Ruth Behar will be annotated to serve as an example on how to read a scholarly work in history.
The Basics:
The first step in annotating any paper is to simply read it a few times and note down descriptions of the text as well as your own reactions to the text. This helps to locate key information and quotations, and to recall your thought processes more easily and quickly. It is also very important that you mark any words that are unfamiliar to you and write down their definitions somewhere. Having a key is usually really important to distinguish what each marking means. Additionally, highlighting or underlining claims raised in the passage will make understanding the passage a lot simpler at the end.
For a Scholarly Work in History:
For this type of passage, the thing to focus on apart from the claims is the evidence used by the authors and its relevance. For instance: is the evidence a primary or secondary source, what is the significance of the type of evidence, why was that specific evidence used instead of another, does the author agree with the conclusions in the evidence if any were drawn. Then also consider the authors intent in writing this, by examining the context in which the passage was written.
If you do this combined with the basics, you will have properly annotated a scholarly work in history.
The Sample:
Key:
Pink: claims
Red= comments on the claims
Green: evidence
Lighter green= comments on evidence
Purple: key words
Black: personal opinions
- Excerpt from “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico.”, page 35 and 36
My response to this passage:
In this passage, Behar is arguing that unlike in European culture, witches in the Spanish colonies were less persecuted. In fact, she claims that women often used witchcraft accusations to their advantage. She builds her argument slowly not clearly stating anything drastic at first. She starts off by making an obvious claim that “women of social levels lost their legal autonomy”( Behar). She then proceeds to expand on this claim and makes newer and bolder claims all the while supporting each of the claims with primary and secondary sources as evidence. She continually cites other authors who agree with her individual claims so when all of them come together at the end, she has a very solid basis upon to make the claim that women self reported to being witches to escape marriages they were unsatisfied with and to escape other legal prosecution. While on its own this claim would be very “out there”, with how she slowly built it up over the course of the passage, it becomes a very understandable outlook on what happened. Since she presents her thought process so clearly, it also makes it very easy open up the whole argument for an academic debate.
I found the whole passage extremely engaging and interesting to read. While I know she expands on this on the following pages of the article, I would like to see more detailed examples of people actually taking advantage of the witch system in the Spanish Colonies. While such an account would be extremely unlikely to be found, as the whole idea is a conclusion based on different pieces of information, it would be an extremely interesting read and would of course prove Behar right without a doubt.
Citation
Behar, Ruth. “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico.” American Ethnologist, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 34–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/645632. Accessed 20 Feb. 2020.
