In this ancient sense, the word was associated with practices that were outlandish because they were foreign. Apparently irrational beliefs. Matteo Benussi (PhD, Cantab.) Comaroff 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Despite this shift in orientation, the concept of magic retained its association with notions of weirdness, mysteriousness, and unorthodoxy (Stratton 2013). It was only as Europe entered early modernity that wizards and sorceresses became a real problem and the witch-hunts started. Hostile or envious attitudes carried the risk of attracting ruinous witchcraft accusations. Social Analysis 56(2), 152-67. Brewer. Under these unfavourable conditions, anthropologists are interested in exploring how people who are socialised in a secular, non-magical, scientific cosmos, actively learn to ‘believe’ in magic. Fantasy is not dismissed as mere ‘pretend’, but valorised as a ‘serious play’, a realm in which things and events are meaningful and wondrous. Interestingly, witchcraft accusations did not undermine social cohesion in this analysis. The occult philosophy in the Elizabethan age. Chicago: University Press. In spite of the fallacies of evolutionism outlined so far, the works of Victorian anthropologists remain relevant today. While in this section we have focused on Western magic, it should be stressed that this form of ‘erudite’ occult craft is by no means the only one that underwent a revival in recent years. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Chicago: University Press. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 126, 1-12. Yet unlike their predecessors, latter-day Western occultists inhabit a post-Enlightenment, Cartesian mainstream anxious to exorcise the unruly spectre of magic (Pels 2003) or at least push it out of sight – either into the disreputable category of the ‘primitive’ or into the sanitised realm of ‘art’ (Mazzarella 2017). New York: TarcherPerigee. Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality: 1984 (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures). In A reader in the anthropology of religion (ed.) This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Though scholars agree that late modernity has witnessed a resurgence of organised religions as well, magic, with its experimental, do-it-yourself character, appears particularly well-aligned with the post-secular spirituality of the twenty-first century. Buy this product and stream 90 days of Amazon Music Unlimited for free. Mainstream ideas of magic and sorcery are linked to the stereotype of the broomstick-riding witch that crystallised during the Euro-American witch-hunts (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). Paper presented at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference, SOAS University of London, September 2016. Buyandelger, M. 2007. In Transparency and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order (eds) H. West & T. Sanders, 258-85. A culture of conspiracy: apocalyptic visions in contemporary America. 2013. In addition to recognising the social meaning of magic, anthropologists have also drawn attention to its therapeutic efficaciousness vis-à-vis experiences of the negative, especially illness and trauma (Lévi-Strauss 1974; Lindquist 2005; Favret-Saada 2015). Mazzarella, W. 2017. It then explores magic as a ‘craft’ – a set of techniques through which practitioners creatively shape their relationships with the world and their own selves. Indeed, a major implication in Evans-Pritchard’s work is that it draws attention to the fact that all humans are likely to ask the question ‘why me?’ when visited by misfortune, with recourse to supernatural strategies. Magic continues to be widely perceived as an archaic worldview, a form of superstition lacking the intrinsic spiritual value of religion or the rational logic of science.