Brill Telling Stories: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History

This scholarly work by Brill examines how oral storytelling shaped witch-hunts across Chinese history, offering crucial insights into the cultural mechanisms behind persecution and scapegoating. The book traces interconnected narratives including Chinese interpretations of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, ritualistic use of human body parts and foetuses in folk belief, accounts of supernatural creature attacks causing wounds and afflictions, beliefs surrounding Drought Demons found in deceased women's corpses, and historical records of forced imperial harem recruitment. Each chapter reveals how stories functioned as both explanation and justification for social violence, with particular attention to the victims-children, women, and the vulnerable-who bore the consequences of collective fear. Essential reading for historians, anthropologists, and folklore scholars investigating how narrative traditions encode and perpetuate systems of blame, this work illuminates the dark intersection of storytelling, superstition, and state power in pre-modern Chinese society.