Responsibility versus responsibilization Mafiacraft, witchcraft and the rise of conspiracy thinking today

What can anthropology contribute to analysing “responsibility”? Kinship suggests a focus on taking responsibility. But “witchcraft”, in many African settings seen as the reverse of kinship, rather raises issues of responsibilization, in the sense of attributing responsibility. In her challenging book Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den signals that for both social scientists and Sicilians such responsibilization became a major challenge in order to grasp an unnamed form of agency that insisted on hiding itself. There are striking parallels with my research on “witchcraft” in African settings. Moreover, studying responsibility as responsibilization might be relevant for present-day contexts, all over the world marked by an intensification of conspiracy theories. “Witchcraft”, mafia or QAnon are of course quite different, also in the “realities” they create, but all three express precarious claims about accountability ascribed to actors who try to remain hidden. Can a comparison suggest what responsibility the academic researcher should take in such contexts?