Abstract
Regarding the social function of witchcraft accusation, it has often been claimed that the accusation of witchcraft releases tension between the accused and the accuser and is able to restore smooth human ralationships. However, such a carthartic theory is not sufficient to explain the mechanism of witchcraft accusation; the problem of how a person belonging to a particular category comes to be accused of being a witch, something said to not actually exist, is not addressed.
Those who come to be accused of witchcraft are situated in the category of " structural inferiority" and therefore do not belong to the system of authority. For example, at the kinship level they are on the mother, s side in patrilineal systems and on the father's, side in matrilineal systems, of course, there do occur cases where the accused are situated in the category of structural superiority, but only when the whereabouts of authority is ambiguous or unclear.
Witchcraft accusation is an action to produce a being labelled "bad"and to make certain of the boundary between the inner group and the outer group. Furthermore, from a functionalistic viewpoint, it is one of the means to confirm the orthodoxy of the accusing side and to secure the cohesion of the group.
