Justified Work

Hoodoo's practitioners distinguish between work that answers a wrong and work that starts one. A justified work is a response - to theft, to adultery, to assault, to a broken obligation, to the ruin of a family - and an unjustified work is one done out of envy, spite, jealousy or for money against someone who has done nothing. The distinction is the tradition's own, argued by workers and clients rather than imposed by an outside moralist, and it is what makes sense of a practice that contains both protection and attack.

The distinction decides what a worker will take on. A client comes with a story, and the worker judges whether the story amounts to a cause; the collections contain accounts of workers refusing cases that were merely envious, and of clients being told that what they wanted was not justified. It also structures the defence of the tradition against its critics: a community that distinguishes justified from unjustified work is a community with an ethic, not a collection of people casting spells at random.

The concept is reported across the interview collections, and the explicit analytic use of the words 'justified' and 'unjustified' is Anderson's; the reasoning behind them is the informants'. The difference matters for how the tradition should be read: an ethic that is articulated by scholars and lived by practitioners is not the same thing as one invented by the scholars. What the tradition does not offer is a licence - a justified work is still an attack, still dangerous to the worker, and still something many workers will not do.