Abstract
Despite my best efforts, quantifiable methods proved to be of limited usefulness for studying sorcery and conspiracy suspicions in Zimbabwe. The
data underlying this Zimbabwean case study come from multiple sources, a common strategy in ethnographic fieldwork. I used various types of
quantitative methods, including not only door-to-door interviews with a
randomly selected sample of the target population but also several techniques of modern cognitive anthropology including free listing, pile sorting, and paired comparison, along with their concomitant analyses-but
the results were disappointing. I will get to the reasons for this later.