Part III - Mid-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Magic

Summary

Introduction

In Part II we have seen that the formative period of the academic debate yielded very diverse definitions and theories of “magic”. Whereas Frazer imagined the “magician” to perform “sympathetic” rites for the sake of his community, Durkheim labelled communal rites “religious” (or “mimetic”) and instead shaped the image of the “magician” as an antisocial, egoistic and individualistic service provider at the margins of society. Bronislaw Malinowski tried to synthesize some of Frazer's and Durkheim's ideas within his own functionalist interpretation of the magic-religion-science triad (see Chapter 17) but thereby complicated matters even more – now “the increase ceremonies of the Arunta are classed as religion by Durkheim but magic by Frazer, and Trobriand garden rituals, which Malinowski terms magic, would be religion according to Durkheim” (Hammond 1970: 1351). The fact that already the early scholarly discourse put forth not only inconsistent but even contradictory definitions of “magic” has been one of the major obstacles of the debate and forced later authors to engage in various coping strategies.

One of these strategies was to deny a clear-cut distinction between “magic” and “religion” (or “science”, respectively) and instead advocate a continuum between these concepts, thereby following Marett's criticism of Frazer and his idea of the “sphere of the magico-religious” (see the Introduction to Part II). Ruth Benedict, in her article “Religion” (1938), picked up this idea and distinguished the poles of “animism” (where the supernatural is personified) and “animatism” (where the supernatural is impersonal - for example, an attribute of a material object).