Making Magic: Religion Magic and Science in the Modern World

Abstract

Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating religion's relation to science. Many of the most important scholars in these disciplines have debated the relation of magic to religion and science, yet traditional efforts to formulate distinctions among these categories have proved notoriously unstable, the subject of repeated critique and deconstruction. The notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. This book seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. The book argues that the persistence of scholarly debates over magic can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity--norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.