In my Sukuma society, people believe that there are witches or people who use witchcraft to take somebody via witchcraft and use him or her working for them. The person taken may seem to be dead at their home and being buried but in a real sense the person is not dead but taken as 'msukule'. Some believe that most crazy people have been taken as 'msukule'.
How do you respond on this? Is such kind of belief in your society?
There is such a belief in mant, most societies. It sounds somewhat similar to being possessed. I, for one do not believe in any of it. As far as, "crazy people," these were the beliefs in the early days, probably 1500-1900s, before modern psychiatry and medicine discovered and developed knowlege about mental illnesses.
Not going on the detaqil if believing or not, there are many studies on the subject of witchcraft in connection to death. One of the most famous is the work of Sell 1953, dealing with deviant burial rites as result from "Bad death", so sudden and therefore not seeming "right" deaths in melanesian societies.
But on the other Hand, you could be interested in the works of Reimann 1998, sadly only in german language, who was dealing to problematic phenomen, how an ethnologist can measure the appearance of "believe" and "witchcraft" during his fieldworks. There he also gives case studies from central and southern asia, focussing on shamanism and witchcraft.
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