art I. There Must Be a Subject; Section 1. The Way Things Are Said: 1. The mirror-image of an academic; 2. Words spoken with insistence; 3. When words wage war; Section 2. Between 'Caught' and Catching: 1. Those who haven't been caught can't talk about it; 2. A name added to a position; 3. Taking one's distances from whom (or what)?; Section 3. When the Text Has its Own Foreword; Part II. The Realm of Secrecy; Section 4. Someone Must Be Credulous; Section 5. Tempted By the Impossible; Section 6. The Less One Talks, The Less One Is Caught; Part III. Telling It All; Section 7. If You Could Do Something: 1. A bewitched in hospital; 2. She a magician?; 3. The misunderstanding; 4. Impotent against impotence; Section 8. The Omnipotent Witch: 1. The imperishable bastard; 2. Speaking; 3. Touching; 4. Looking; 5. A death at the crossroads; 6. Ex post facto; Section 9. Taking Over: 1. Inexplicable misfortunes; 2. The other witch; Section 10. To Return Evil for Evil: 1. Madame Marie from Alençon; 2. Madame Marie from Ize;; 3. If you feel capable; Section 11. Mid-way Speculations: 1. Concepts and presuppositions; 2. Attack by witchcraft and its warding off; Appendices; References.

This book examines witchcraft beliefs and experiences in the Bocage, a rural area of western France. It also introduces a powerful theoretical attitude towards the progress of the ethnographer's enquiries, suggesting that a full knowledge of witchcraft involves being 'caught up' in it oneself. In the Bocage, being bewitched is to be 'caught' in a sequence of misfortunes: a heifer dies, the wife has a miscarriage, the child is covered in spots, the car runs into a ditch, the milk cannot be churned, the geese become panic-stricken, or the bride-to-be wastes away. According to those who are bewitched, the culprit is someone in the neighbourhood: the witch, who can cast a spell with a word, a touch or a look, and whose 'power' comes from a book of spells inherited from an ancestor. Only a professional magician, an 'unwitcher', has any chance of breaking the succession of misfortunes which befall those who have been bewitched. He undertakes a battle of magic with the suspected witch, a battle which is eventually fatal.