THE CLUES OF THE OWL (original) (raw)
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The Owl, the Dragon and the Magician: Reflections on Being an Anthropologist Studying Magic
Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 2015
This article documents the life of an anthropologist studying magic; it chronicles her trajectory of finding a place between the rationalized, analytically based academy on the one hand, and a life infused with spirits on the other. Not wanting to prioritize either critical thinking or the reality of a non-material world, Susan Greenwood shows how she has explored a magical terrain engaging sensory experiences, the imagination as a 'doorway' into an inspirited reality, and critical thinking through her anthropological work. Greenwood shows how she has negotiated often uncomfortable -but highly relevant -subjective and theoretical domains with the aim of not reducing or privileging one to the other. In the process she has sought to legitimize magic as an important aspect of knowledge that can bring academic -as well as individual -insights.
L’animal magique : une introduction | The Magical Animal: An Introduction
Magikon Zōon: Animal et magie dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Âge | Animal and Magic from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 2022
The overlap of two marginal topics in history – magic and animals – may at first seem more marginal still, but the purpose of this volume is to demonstrate that from these vital margins we may find new perspectives on and understandings of ancient and mediaeval societies. Recent decades have seen increasing interest in magic and related topics. The publication of the corpus of Greek magical papyri by Karl Preisendanz and his collaborators (1928-1931), and the History of Magic and Experimental Science by Lynn Thorndike (1923-1958), marked a clear turning point. While the immediate impact of these publications was demonstrated by the increasing number of important works by authors such as E.R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951) and A. Festugière (La Révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste, 1950-1954), the last thirty years have seen a resurgence of interest. Recent research has increasingly sought out new theoretical perspectives, focusing on the relationship between religion, ritual and magic, and on questions of materiality and transmission. The hitherto Eurocentric focus, influenced by Judeo-Christian conceptions of magic, has been thoroughly interrogated, leading to new approaches, and new vantage points from which to examine ancient and mediaeval societies. Similarly, animals have recently become important as subjects of history as part of the overall “animal turn” which has developed within several academic disciplines. Much of this interest stems from two works – Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Jacques Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis (2006). While these were works of philosophy, the increased attention they have brought to animals has encouraged several academics within the humanities and social sciences to re-evaluate the place of non-human animals within their research, studying them both in their interactions with humans and as worthy objects of inquiry in themselves. This volume thus brings together the contributions of a group of scholars invited to think about animals and the Animal through the texts and objects of magic and the other “occult sciences” in their respective geographical areas and chronological periods, in the Mediterranean basin and its surrounding regions, from the ancient world to the Middle Ages.
Outside All Reason: Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology
Social Analysis, 2002
Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are at the epistemological centre of anthropology. They embed matters at the heart of the definition of modern anthropology, and the critical issues that they raise are of enduring significance for the discipline. But the questions these phenomena highlight expand beyond mere disciplinary or scholastic interest. They point to matters of deep existential concern in a general quest for an understanding of the human forces engaged in the human construction of lived realities. Anthropology in the embracing Kantian sense is involved. The phenomena that are deemed to be magic and sorcery (including all that which such scholars as Durkheim (1915) and Mauss (1972) would include under the label 'profane') project towards the far shores of human possibility and potentiality. The human profundities to which they might lead are already there in the imagery and metaphors of thinkers, both abstract and concretely pragmatic, worldwide. Within European traditions the world of the magician and the sorcerer is routinely evoked to explore the continuing crisis that is faced by humankind, more recently, for example, in the works of Dante, Goethe and Nietzsche right through to the most contemporary philosophers and social commentators. The essays in these pages contend with some of the overarching existential issues towards which a concern with the magical must extend. This introduction begins with a consideration of the somewhat narrower confines that have developed in the discipline of anthropology. But this should not obscure the fact that at the outset, the anthropology of magic and sorcery dealt with weighty issues-the foundations of religion, the underlying features of the human psyche and, indeed, the very nature of science. While these interests have persisted, over time they became narrowed or deflected onto smaller, more empirically manageable concerns. However, of late, via a renewed interest in magic and sorcery, anthropology is once more opening up to the larger
WITCHCRAFT IN AFRICAN UNDERSTANDING
Our attempt in this paper is to examine African traditional Metaphysics in the understanding of witchcraft. There are two strategic hurdles to overcome. First, is how we can meaningfully talk about African Metaphysics and secondly, is how we can cover the breadth and depth of African notion of witchcraft. What we attempt therefore to do is to carry out some intellectual stock – taking on African witchcraft. Perhaps, the consoling goad is the fact that no work can claim to say all that needs be said on any subject matter. What is important in any given work is to have a clear vision of what is intended to achieve. In this light, we feel persuaded that these hurdles can be safely handled and overcome.
2010
This paper is an attempt to investigate the structure of a folktale and to give to each of the three structural sites that almost always constitute its narrative their distinctive emotional, moral and social qualities. Further, its three structural spaces are chronologically arranged. I should like to term the first spatial and temporal order, which exists “somewhere in the country beyond the river...” and “once upon a time,” as the site of sorrow or the structure of curse. Here time is frozen and human beings are paralyzed. The second structural element, which is at the heart of every folktale, can be called the artifice of enchantment. Its boundaries are fluid, forest-covered or unmapped. And time is either a succession of instances or an eternity depending on who is recording or who is suffering. I should like to call the third structural element of the folktale as the site of renewal of energies or the structure of communitas. It emerges from the realm of enchantment and restore...
Witchcraft in Folk Magical and Religious Contexts
The witching hour: a brief discussion on time contours and contested contexts. Peter Hamilton-Giles. This article proposes to explore the dimensions of the witching hour as well as its potential applicability to the formation of lineage ideation as used within the confines of traditional witchcraft. As a proposition for the foundation of this exploration, the primary coordinate for theoretical orientation will be to examine how time is used as a signifying marker. Having identified this as the focus, there is, what some might consider as a prosaic requirement to compare and contrast various interpretations about the use of time. In particular, this endeavour will reduce the extent of time down to two primary conceptual contexts which, as will be explained, are intrinsically linked to the making of oppositional approaches for knowing the inhabited world. The two identified for the purposes of this exercise are the historian's and the practitioner's perception of time. Both contribute towards making significances by applying the notion of time as a device by which to justify specific claims about the past1. For each has the capacity to feedback, informing as it does the subsequent formation and maintenance of knowledge, as well as determining its adaptability and relevance when subsequently applied. Future studies in traditional witchcraft will inevitably have to consider these processes, whereby terms are integrated into the witchcraft lexicon as part of an ongoing and unfinished elucidation. This article attempts to make an inroad into this otherwise under researched area. There is an implicit assumption being made however about addressing terms as part of an ongoing problematic exercise, this being that by questioning the 1 It is important to identify the exact remit that these two operate under. Following David Carr's approach in Time, Narrative and History this article will argue that history generates knowledge about the past which is itself premised on the historian's knowledge of the past. This knowledge is acquired by having scoured available archival sources so as to make objective claims. Past events are then reconstructed from extant material which the historian cannot fully or directly know. In contrast to this the practitioner's perspective is formed from a " non-thematic awareness of the past " (1986:3). A pre-thematic or non-thematic awareness of the past extracts the etic aspect and aims to replace it with emic connections considered real for the individual. As a consequence, the disembodied engagement with the past produces alternative narratives that are based on the perspective of the narrator. Revealing the formation of various explorative pathways for understanding and making claims about the past informs our perception of time. But rather than dismiss the non-thematic approach I will attempt to explain that it is exactly when slippages occur in the usage of terms by applying them to what may seem on the surface as disparate connections, that the living element of belief appears at its most vibrant and most open to further innovation. It is therefore not about studying an already established Truth which is important but rather how truths to I, you or we become so significant that we can then claim them as our own. Carr, D. 1986. Time, Narrative, and History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology
British Journal For the History of Philosophy, 2010
Review of: R. G. Collingwood: The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, edited by David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007, 1st edn, 2005, pp. cxx þ 380. £24.00 (pb.). ISBN 0-19-922808-9 The publication of the papers included in this volume is part of a larger project to make available previously unpublished writings by R. G. Collingwood, that in turn is part of a growth of attention to Collingwood in recent years, primarily from philosophers and historians. This volume extends the known scope of his already unusually wide disciplinary and thematic compass, especially to cultural criticism and anthropology and to the study of folktale, magic and literature. In so doing, it not only illuminates the breadth of Collingwood’s scholarship and interests but also offers further insight into some of his key ideas and concerns.
Knowing Primitives, Witches, and the Spirits: Anthropology and the Mastery of Nonsense
Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 2013
In this article I am taking up an argument originally offered by Jonathan Strauss regarding the notion of the irrational as a privileged space in medical discourses in France in the nineteenth century. Strauss argues that the role of irrationality and “nonsense” was that of a “legitimizing force” for medicine in that “the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes.” Building upon Strauss’s argument that the mastery of the irrational in the medical sciences was an essential ground legitimizing the expertise they purported to offer, I will demonstrate that a similarly privileged space was claimed by early anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the discipline’s purported ability to understand the seeming “nonsense” of “the native.” The empirical mastery of domains consigned to the illogical realm of human social life translates into the characteristic anthropological concerns with non-Western ritual and belief and the foundation of an empirical method based on experience that would allow field-workers to “see” unknown or irrational forces. I will demonstrate this central point by starting with an analysis of how figures of the invisible and irrational drove Bronislaw Malinowski’s foundational ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands. I will then go back in time to outline the precursors of these figures as seen in the problem of evidence and the modes of investigation deemed proper to the investigation of witchcraft in the context of the “witch craze” in sixteenth-century Europe. Arguing that the problem of establishing proof in reference to invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life ever since, I then bring this epistemological thread forward in time via an analysis of the irrational in Jean-Martin Charcot’s nineteenth-century research on hysteria. The essay then draws to a close roughly in the time period in which it began with a brief account of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s expulsion from an anthropology that was by the 1930s dominated by Malinowski’s vision of ethnographic method and the evidence this method could produce.