The triumph of scientific rationalism in Western Europe formed the backdrop of anthropological theories about magic since the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars increasingly held only the material world, as apprehended through the senses, to be ontologically real. From this vantage point they dismissed magic — the art of influencing events through occult means — as the very antithesis of rationalism, and as a product of the ‘primitive’ as quintessential other.
In Primitive Culture (1871) the Victorian scholar, "Edward Tylor, describes magic as ‘the most pernicious delusion that has ever vexed mankind’. But Tylor, nonetheless, understood the appeal of magic, and postulated that there were several reasons for its generality and persistence in ‘primitive societies’. Magic harbours analogical consciousness and is associated with practical behaviour: rain often follows rain rituals. There is also flexibility in the use of evidence to judge success, and magical failure can easily be attributed to errors in prescriptions, rituals or spells, to the breach of special taboos, or to the machinations of rival magicians. Though Tylor was convinced that science was becoming the dominant mode of thought in contemporary Europe, he was anxious that magic might not be securely relegated to a primitive past.
"James Frazer upheld many of these ideas, but developed a more explicit evolutionary perspective. In The Golden Bough (1890), he argues that the deceptive power of the magician is the first agent of intellectual progress and that human thought develops from magic to religion, to science. Frazer describes magic was ‘spurious science hiding behind bastard art’. Magic, like science, presumes that one natural event follows another necessarily and inevitably, and rests on faith in the order and uniformity of nature. But magic is based on mistaken ideas of causality, and universally exhibits one of two underlying principles: those of imitation or contamination. ‘Imitative’ (also called homeopathic) magic is based upon analogy or perceptions of similarity. This principle is exhibited by the ancient belief that the gaze of a stone curlew would cure jaundice, the virtue of the bird lying in its golden eye, which naturally, it was thought, drew out yellow jaundice. ‘Contagious’ magic is based on the assumption that things which had once been in contact continue to act on each other at a distance. An example is the practice of working on clippings from a person’s hair or nails in order to change his or her condition. Frazer defined region as the propitiation and conciliation of powers or deities superior to humans. He saw religious thinking as more advanced than magic, because the conception of personal agents is more complex than the mere recognition of similarity. Frazer posited that during his own lifetime, religion was being superseded by true experimental science.
In France "Emile Durkheim contrasted the private and secretive nature of magical operations with the public form of religious congregations. His nephew, "Marcel Mauss, echoed his suspicions that acts of magic tend towards evil-doing (malfice). Mauss, nonetheless, observed that magical thought displayed a systematic character, with properties similar to language. It was not merely the association of ideas that determined the action of like on like, as Frazer had implied. One particular quality of the object was always selected as a vehicle of magical action, and this choice reflected social convention. In any given system, the classification of sympathetic and antipathetic items reflected collective representations.
In the United States, Robert Lowie argued against both Tylor’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, and Frazer’s evolutionary theory of magic. Lowie saw this distinction as foreign to primitive thought. Ruth Benedict argued that magic consisted of wish fulfilment, and exemplified the universal capacity of reasoning by analogy.
Fieldwork on magic
These speculative and ethnocentric theories were soon eclipsed by more grounded ones, based upon detailed ethnographic fieldwork on magical ideas and practices in various non-Western settings.
Bronislaw Malinowski (1935; 1948) refused to believe that preliterate people were ‘incurably superstitious’. His studies on the Tro-briand Islands of Melanesia led him to argue that there were no societies without magic, religion, nor some scientific knowledge. The science of ‘primitive societies’ consists of a body of traditional knowledge that provides a working understanding of the natural world, and that can be put to practical uses. A scientific attitude is also apparent in beliefs in the regularity of nature and in critical reasoning. But he insisted that magic, religion and science had different places in human affairs. The significance of magical beliefs and practices can be explained by their social and psychological utility. Public rituals unify social groups. Magic also offers an emotional response to frustrating situations, where there is an impasse because technical knowledge provides inadequate control. When people are forsaken by scientific knowledge, we deploy magic to gain confidence, poise, hope and optimism. Therefore magic flourishes in dangerous enterprises such as hunting, fishing, warfare, disease, love, rain and the weather.
Malinowski observed that in the Trobriand Islands magical acts comprised three essential elements: the spell or actual words used (these were private property, inherited within families);a standard sequence of symbolic acts; and the moral or ritual condition of the performer (frequently involving sexual and dietary taboos). Magic coordinated actions for which controls were lacking. For example, the performance of magical rituals during canoe building ensured the mobilization of the necessary labour force. He found that magical rites were used to ensure safety and good results in open sea fishing, which was full of danger and uncertainty. But no magic was required in lagoon fishing, where the islanders could rely completely upon their own knowledge and skill. His studies of horticulture showed the complicated relationship between magic and science. The Trobriand Islanders cleared plots by practical procedure and skilfully planted crops. But they fumigated the cleared ground by magical ceremony to prevent blight, pests and insects, and to make crops strong.
During the 1930s "Edward Evans-Pritchard also broke new ground by showing how, amongst Azande people of Sudan, magical ideas and practices formed a logical and coherent belief system. Beliefs in magic, along with those in witchcraft and oracular divination, provided Azande with explanations for the occurrence of unfortunate events, such as sickness and death. Though Evans-Pritchard insisted that these beliefs were reasonable, he did not accept these occult forces as empirical reality.
Subseqeuntly, studies of these phenomena became scarce, and the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ often replaced ‘magic’. Peter Pels (Meyer and Pels 2003) suggests that the pejorative ‘magic’ became an embarrassment to anthropologists, wishing to protect non-Western people from accusations of irrationality. Those who did not avoid the topic emphasized the meaningful symbolic elements in these practices.
Magic in the West
Horace Miner and George Gmelch offered incipient cultural critiques of Euro-American arrogance, by showing that magic is not the prerogative of non-Western societies. In a satirical essay on the Nacirema (American spelt backwards), Miner (1956) points to the salience of mystical beliefs and practices, focusing on the body. He writes that Nacireman households have shrines devoted for private rituals. The focal point is a box built into the wall, where charms are kept without which it is believed no native can live. The preparations are secured from specialized practitioners, such as medicine men who write down what the ingredients should be in an ancient and secret language. This language is only understood by the medicine men and by herbalists, who provide the required charm. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were. Yet the Nacirema believe that their presence in the charm box will protect the worshipper. Beneath the charm box is a small font, in front of which all household members bow their head, mingle different kinds of purified water, and perform rites by inserting a bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders. Men scrape and lacerate the face with sharp instruments, and women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour four times each lunar month. The Nacirema also perform ritual fasts to make fat people thin and rites to make women’s breasts larger if they are small and smaller if they are large. According to Miner (1956) these rites express ‘pervasive aversion of the body and its natural functions’. By using language devoid of cultural recognition, he makes everyday American behaviour seen alien, showing how it is permeated by magic.
Gmelch (1971) shows how American baseball players, much like the Trobriand islanders, use magic to manage anxiety generated by uncertainty and to ensure success. Magic is more common in the activities of pitching and hitting than in fielding, which like Trobriand open-sea fishing, depend as much upon skill as upon the ineptitude of the opposition, and upon luck. Baseball magic includes rituals, taboos and fetishes. Players ritualize any activity that they somehow link to good performance. A pitcher might listen to the same song on the Walkman on days he is to pitch, and a batter might tap the home plate three times before each innings. When in a slump, players often change their routines to shake off bad luck. A player might switch from wearing contact lenses to wearing glasses. The breaking of certain taboos — such as stepping on foul lines, watching movies or shaving on game days — are believed to generate undesirable outcomes. The fetishes that are somehow imagined to embody luck include coins, crucifixes, items of clothing, or certain numbers. Their use often coincides with a streak of good fortune. Younger players might use the number of a former star, wishing to achive the same success. Gmelch (1971) argues that baseball magic does not make a pitch travel faster, or a batted ball find the gaps between fielders, but gives practitioners a sense of confidence and control.
Modernity and postmodernism
The 1980s saw a small revival in studies of magic as postmodern anthropologists began to challenge the worldview of the Enlightenment. Carlos Castaneda, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Paul Stoller, Edith Turner, and Roy Willis began to write about magical phenomena as objectively real — even if inexplicable in terms of scientific knowledge — and to celebrate the existence of alternative realities. They reject the assumption that magic is a ‘logical error’ or someone else’s belief, and take the phenomenon of magical forces seriously, in their own terms.
This view is related to the resurgence of interest in New Age religions, spiritualism, shamanism, and yoga in Western countries. Tanya Luhrmann (1989) describes the conversion to belief in Renaissance-style ritual magic amongst middle-class English people in the town of Cambridge. She shows how the converts explicitly rationalize the validity of their practices to themselves and to outsiders. Some of her informants argue that there are precepts that differ from those recognized by orthodox science, but which can be proven empirically valid. Others believe in the existence of separate realities, governed by different laws. Another category is relativists, who argue that there are different ways of knowing, with no one way having absolute worth. A final category emphasize the subjective value of their experiences.
In his introduction to Magic and Modernity (Meyer and Pels 2003), Peter Pels suggests that modernity reinvents magic to distinguish itself from it. He sees the distinction between the rational modern subject and the backward pre-modern subject as no more than a modernist myth that needs to be scrutinised by empirical research. Peter Geschiere’s essay in Meyer and Pels 2003 responds to this challenge, by comparing the hidden dimensions of African and American politics, and the parallels between ‘witch-doctors’ in Cameroon and ‘spin-doctors’ in the United States. Geschiere points to the inadequacy of distinctions between magic and science, transparency and occultism.
Furthermore, Jojada Verrips writes in Meyer and Pels 2003 about the enchantments of biomedicine. He detects a popular suspicion that biomedicine can create unnatural beings. Modern doctors themselves contribute to this discourse by bringing medical metaphors (such as germ theory) into everyday life. Doctors also anthropomorphize their work as struggles against evil entities within the body.
