Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "巫術" in Chinese language version.
What is a witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as 'someone who causes harm to others by mystical means'. In stating this, he was self-consciously not providing a personal view of the matter, but summing up an established scholarly consensus [...] When the only historian of the European trials to set them systematically in a global context in recent years, Wolfgang Behringer, undertook his task, he termed witchcraft 'a generic term for all kinds of evil magic and sorcery, as perceived by contemporaries'. Again, in doing so he was self-consciously perpetuating a scholarly norm. That usage has persisted till the present among anthropologists and historians...