Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy

by Graham M. Jones

In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine.

Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Occult, Theory

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 6, 2017

About the author

Graham M. Jones is associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Reviews

[David Dinaburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an American teen in the 1990s, the disaffected were my icons, aloof cynicism and arch sarcasm the hallmarks of high intellect, and Catcher in the Rye felt completely sincere. Though a book written in the 1940s touching the zeitgeist should have been a hint, I only now begin to recognize that pressing down on others to lift yourself up isn’t unique to the flannel-clad era of my youth:

[Edward Burnett] Tylor [founder of cultural anthropology] positioned himself as a prominent opponent of Spiritualism, and his hostility fundamentally shaped the social theory he produced. The apparent resurgence of magical thinking in the midst of modern [1870s] civilization posed a major problem for his teleological model of cultural development according to which magical modes of thought should progressively dissipate…[H]e concepted primitive magic as an edifice of illusion maintained by the connivance of clerics mainly interested in protecting their positions of prestige.

In fact, justifying colonial oppression as “rational scientific progress” is so standard that it nearly banal; Manifest Destiny for us Americans, the European Enlightenment for the rest of the world. Most modern racism comes down to the fact that a few hundred years ago white people had machine guns first and needed an excuse for why it was okay to murder others with them.

Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy expounds an elegant theory of the cultural magician being the perfect counterpoint to self-justify Europe’s expanding dominion:

What I ultimately want to show is how deeply comparisons between modern and primitive magicians enacted by illusionists like Robert-Houdin and theorized by anthropologists like Tylor, can take us in thinking about the cultural construction of European modernity, with its cognitive hallmarks of rationality, skepticism, and disenchantment.

Outside of Statin Island—a work of fiction that I read directly prior to Magic’s Reason wherein an anthropologist runs around trying to connect the meaninglessness underlying the world—my experience with anthropology was basically zero. That novel makes the offhand reference to a similar connection, though:

What does an anthropologist working for a business actually do? We purvey cultural insight. What does that mean? It means that we unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its wefts and warp—the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it—and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider it or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product). Ethnographers do field research, creating photomontages out of single moments captured in a street or cafe; or they get sample citizens—teenagers, office workers, mums—to produce video-diaries for them, outlining their daily routines in intimate detail, confiding to the camera the desires, emotions, aspirations and so forth that visit them as they unload a dishwasher, lace up trainers, or sip foam through that little slit you get in plastic coffee-cup lids. It’s about identifying and probing granular, mechanical behaviours, extrapolating from a sample branch of these a set of blueprints, tailored according to each brief—blueprints which, taken as a whole and cross-mapped onto the findings of more “objective” or empirical studies (quantitative analysis, economic modeling and the like), lay bare some kind of inner logic, which can be harnessed, but to use. In essence it’s not that much different from what soothsayers, ichthyomancers, did in ancient times: those wolfskin-clad men who moved from stone-age settlement to stone-age settlement, cutting fish open to tease wisdom from their entrails. The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds.
—Statin Island.

Anthropology is a tool used to explain why violence is the right—if not the duty—of cultures more advanced the then ones it can functionally exploit. The tool that anthropology based itself upon was cultural magic; a shorthand for societies where less advanced technological states applied. “All ethnography,” Herzfeld writes, “is in some sense an account of a social group’s ethnocentrism,” and “as a European-originated discipline...anthropology cannot evade the Eurocentric character of its criteria of comparison” in spite of the “potent yearning to escape the constraints of bias.” Anthropology is a field where the subject—culture—needs external comparison points, else everything is subsumed and it becomes so ubiquitous it loses all meaning and any applicable value. It isn’t bias if, like, those brown people believe in wizards and we white folk are clever enough to view magic as chicanery, see it all with a cool detached irony, yeah?

The primitive magician, suspected of using legerdemain to exploit an irrational and unreflexive primitive public of which he is also, simultaneously, a part. My emphasis has been on showing that this figure, the primitive magician, is less a historical fact than a conceptual trope, a personification of alterity that anthropologists and illusionists collaboratively fleshed out and exploited as an analytic resource.

That is the largest pull from : value. The value that early (white, European) cultural anthropologists drew from the image of magic as a defect of primitive society; “...embedded in a historical narrative of cultural progress that opposed tradition, occult magic, and irrationality, on the one hand, with modernity, entertainment magic, and rationality, on the other. Often the people making these arguments would assert an equivalence between medieval or premodern France—a time when Europeans still believed in magic—and contemporary cultures in the global south, particularly Africa—places where people still believe in magic.” The value in pressing down on the rest of the world for not having sufficient wartime technology, the value of proclaiming yourself above the fray, too aloof to engage, too smart to fall for the trick; the value of being a 90s teen. And as we thirty-something Americans know, it sure is a lot easier to be shitty to other people when you tell yourself they are dumb enough to deserve it.

[Alex Golub · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does it mean to 'compare' two things? For Graham Jones the answer to this question can be found in a magic show performed in Algeria in October 1856. This show -- in which a French 'entertainment magician' supposedly mystified myopically superstitious Sufis -- is the leaping off point for a piece of 'ethnohistorical reflexivity' in which Jones traces the relationship between entertainment magic and anthropological theory from the late 19th century to the present. Enthusiastic endors of enlightenment, entertainment magicians sought to differentiate themselves from the primitive magic supposedly found amongst the colonized, as well as from the rude antics of the fairground. A more romantic Spiritualism movement (read: the seance crowd), on the other hand, embraced 'primitive magicians' as fellow travelers in a fight against disenchanted modernity. It was in this context that intellectualist anthropologists such as Tylor generated their evolutionary theories of the increasing rationalization of society. Jones shows how this field of comparison continues to haunt anthropology -- and his own fieldwork -- today. Following Strathern (among others -- there is a Kockelmanesque connection to cognitive psychology and philosophy of language), he argues that concept formation is inherently analogical (that is, comparative). This take on theory formation is appealing for its optimism about anthropology's potential to grow even as it is bashful in the long odds it gives for us to become Pure Omniscience. Less a symphony and more a suite of dances, the individual chapters hang together as well as they do less because of thematic development and more because of Jones's great skill with intellectual counterpoint. An easy read for specialists, this small gem of a book tacks between ethnographic detail and anthropological macro in a very satisfying way indeed.

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't expect that the book is about the making of analogies. It's an interesting take and can be a good reading material to be read along with the historians' approach to historicize the Euro-American fascination with magic in the late 19th cent/ early 20th cent. While the historians show more possible "futures past," anthropologists like Jones are still working around the contemporary predicaments...Nonetheless, the use of the idea of disanalogy and coutner-analogy (that Jones got from someone else) is brilliant in this ethnographic treatise of modern-contemporary history.