21 - Susan Greenwood

Summary

“Magical Consciousness: A Legitimate Form of Knowledge”

Susan Greenwood is a British anthropologist. She is the author of a series of publications on “magic” including Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology (2000), The Nature of Magic: An Anthropology of Consciousness (2005) and The Anthropology of Magic (2009). Contrary to the anthropologists appearing elsewhere in this book, Susan Greenwood writes also as a practitioner: “When I first started my doctoral research in the 1990s, I made the decision to study magic from the inside, as a practitioner of magic as well as an anthropologist. I wanted to discover what could be learned through direct experience. Over the years, I have explored various approaches to magic with Western magical practitioners, and I have participated in many witchcraft rituals, trained as a high magician, and worked with shamans” (Greenwood 2009: 1). In her case, the border between researcher and researched breaks down (she is not an outsider to an insider); instead, she wants to build bridges between practitioners and the academic discourse. Key notions for her understanding of magic are participation (which she adopts from Lévy-Bruhl), emotional relationships, subjectivity, analogy and mythological imaginations – elements that appear anathematic to the self-understanding of anthropology as a “rational” science. In her contribution to this volume, Greenwood proposes the concept of “magical consciousness” as an ancient, “intrinsic” and imaginal “mode of mind” and a “holistic engagement with material and non-material realities”. She explores several theoretical avenues that could lend support to that experience-based claim.