witchery

A word that can be substituted for witchcraft, witching, sorcery, or magic, used by Tony Hillerman to refer to the work of people known in some Native American traditions as witches. It is useful to keep in mind that "witch" is a word imposed on some aspects of indigenous cultural traditions by anthropologists, who did not have the knowledge to understand or the language to describe what they witnessed in these traditions. In Hillerman's Navajo detective novels, witches are believed to cause imbalances associated with greed, violence, and other maladies associated with modernity.