Beliefs in witchcraft in the generic sense are conspicuous in most small-scale communities (e.g., in preliterate cultures), where interaction is based upon personal relationships that tend to be lifelong and difficult to break. In such societies belief in witches makes it possible for misfortunes to be explained in terms of disturbed social relationships; and the threat either of being accused of witchcraft or of being attacked by witches may well be a source of social control, making people more circumspect about their conduct toward others. Witches who are blamed for misfortunes, while often near kinsmen and neighbours, are conceived of as inhuman and beyond the pale of decent society. They are, thus, convenient scapegoats who are blamed for events otherwise inexplicable in terms of the limited empirical knowledge prevailing in a society with a poorly developed technology--e.g., events such as sudden death or persistent illness or even accidents.

This explanatory function of witchcraft is widespread. So too are some of the details of the witch's supposed habits and techniques, such as operating at night; flying through the air on broomsticks (in Europe) or saucer-shaped winnowing baskets (in Central Africa); employing animal familiars (assistants or agents), such as cats, dogs, and weasels in Europe, dogs and foxes in Japan, or hyenas, owls, and baboons in Africa; stealing or destroying property; and injuring people in a variety of ways, eating them while they are still alive (an African explanation for tropical ulcers), or killing them first and exhuming their corpses for ghoulish feasts.

Beliefs in witchcraft provide the mystical medium in which deep-lying structural conflicts, especially those not susceptible to rational adjustment by social intervention and arbitration, may be expressed and in some measure discharged. The inherent disharmonies in the social system are thus cloaked under an insistence that there is harmony in the values of the society, and the surface disturbances that they cause are attributed to the wickedness of individuals. This is why the witch and sorcerer become the villains of the society's morality plays (as personified vices), the ones to whom the most inhuman crimes and characteristics are attributed. So numerous and so revolting are the practices ascribed to witches that to accuse anyone of witchcraft is a condensed way of charging him with a long list of the foulest crimes--and much the same may be said of sorcery, except that the alleged sorcerer might find some room for defense in the ambiguity as to when the use of destructive magic is legitimate and when it is to be regarded as sorcery.

Because accusations of witchcraft, if they are successful, are devastating attacks on reputation, they punctuate the micropolitical processes relating to many forms of competition for some scarce status, power, resource, or personal affiliation. For example, among the matrilineal Cewa of east central Africa the generally accepted succession rule states that a headman's office should pass to his younger brothers in turn, followed by the eldest son of their eldest sister. In practice, however, the Cewa take personal qualifications into account and would not permit the succession of the rightful heir if his competence as a headman were seriously challenged by a convincing accusation of sorcery. The supposed victim of witchcraft or sorcery may also sometimes be regarded as getting his just deserts if he has, by tactless folly, incurred the wrath of powerful persons in the community.

Because in such belief systems the transgressors of a society's ideals are depicted with dramatic disapproval, witchcraft and sorcery are usually powerful brakes upon social change. In many preliterate societies in modern times it is often those who have progressed economically and educationally who are most obsessed by fears of attack by witches and sorcerers or of accusation of employing witchcraft or sorcery. This is because they find themselves either out of line in social orders that economically at least are equalitarian or with a new-found status that lacks a niche in the traditional hierarchy; and their fears of the consequences of their eccentricity are expressed in beliefs that witches and sorcerers in the community will take their revenge or that they themselves will be accused of advancing their interests through mystical means at the cost of their kinsmen and neighbours.

On the other hand, belief in witchcraft may, under certain circumstances, have the effect of accelerating social change; e.g., by facilitating the rupture of close relationships that have become redundant but are difficult to break off. In such a situation an accusation of witchcraft has the effect of making a public issue out of what started as a private quarrel.