RECENT TITLES 18 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGIO‘ REFLECTION AND THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION SERLES| um Wetzel, Colgate University lication Series of ‘ated by Dard Loy Roots of Relational Bice Responstiy n Origin and atti Richard Nic “he Daath of God Deland S. Anderson Newnan and Gadaner eof Religious Kuoaldge "Thomas K. Ctr “erence. Marin Like and Unlike God aligiusInginations in Maern and Ctoporary Bon Jot Neary ni the Necessary God he Thught of Ebhard Jang align, Magic, and Science Ranll Sirs Making Magic Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World RANDALL STYERS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 200424 MAKING Macte Apter offers some clues in her discussion of tat venerable magical trope, the fetish. As scholars from 2 broad range of disciplines have taught the fetish is a focus of inordinate and immodest attention, regulary invested magical import. Yet ae Apter points themselves have fetish- ized the concept, seeing it as a key psychology, art. In seeking to account for this ironic preoccupation, Apter looks to the power of the fet 1g" —fetishism as a discourse weds its y as a synonym for sorcery and witchcraft (ei tegy of dereification. .. a consistent displac- paradoxically, as @ result of so much fixing If, unfixes representations even as it ena monolithic “signs” of culture. ion, has been the persistent of the fetish. Refusing to stay in its allotted place as the property of the Other, the fetish has worked its way through bourgeois curiosity cabinets and the Europea Furope has capacity to reinscribe and simultaneously to subvert modi representations. And further, modern theories of magic have exercised the paradoxical and expansive magical power of words, 2 power w satisfactions and one to which we truth, even as they have cisely because of thelr capacity to. disguise themselves as transparencies,"* I The Emergence of Magic in the Modern World It is natural, that superstition should prevai ous ages, and put men on the most earn —David Hume Magic has a long and complex history. And crucial to any recount ing of that awareness of the broader context which magic takes shape. The effort to mark off region of the con: ceptual and social terrain as magical involves, at the most basic lev ial practices and modes of knowledge. As the social context shifts, s0 also magic is tansformed, assuming new forms and exerting new powers, ‘The mature and role of magic in Western society have changed profoundly over recent centuries as the social order itself has tant shifts in the demarcation and social position of re ‘ence. By the latter decades of the nineteenth c the nonmadern. As discussed in the intro- fe very notion of modernity involves a sense of self: differentiation from, and opposition to, the nonmodern, One of the central strategies in efforts to define modernity26 MaxrNe acre been the attempt to reify nonmodern, superstitious thought and social prac- tices in @ manner that configures them as modemnity's foil. In scholarly liter- ature this foil has commonly assumed the form of magic. The position of magic terrain of the modern West has thus been and material factors todernity but also of modemity's need to consolidate its gave shape 10 ty ‘primary objective in this book modern discursive structures since the late ineteenth century, to explore the sought. In order to approach this is important to begin with an account of the social and intellectual in which def (of magic emerged in the latter decades of the h century. Three major epistemic changes profoundly affected the shape of magic in the modern world. First, through the course of the Refor- mation and the Enlightenment, religion came increasingly to be s the late nineteenth century saw the consol ich of Asia and Affica, and colonial conquest gave rise to new forms of scholarly analysis of “primitive” culture. These three ments exerted profound most every aspect of European poses here, they p perspectives on the natural world and the proper role of religion, in modem society. As various thinkers struggled to come to termns ms for life in this seemingly disenchanted new world, to ‘modem forms of piety, efficiency, and rational control, magic emerged as 2 remarkably useful analytical tool. A host of social theorists, phi- ligion turned to magic asa central there in their ture of the moder. the differentiation between magic and “in the context of ‘The purpose of explore the social and i category of modem cultural analysis, In order better to understand this context, itis productive to excavate important elements of Europe's past. The chapter begins with an examination of central aspects of the history—and historiog raphy—of early modern witeheraft and magic, including the role ofthe Euro- pean Reformations on the witchcraft persecutions and on evolving discourses concerning magic and superstition. Through this period we find significant THE EMERGENCE OF MAGIC 1X THE MODERN WORLD 27 cultural contestation over the proper understanding of the “natural” world and the relation between the natural and supernatural realms. Many of of argument raised in opposition to the witeh-hunts are echoed in ly theories of magic, particularly those arguments that move to co lief in witchcraft not as heresy but as pathology. ‘The chapter then explores the rise of new mechanical views of related notions of natural religion feeding the Enlightenment war against st pel ition, | will conclude by examining the colonial and racial context that ¢ rise to new Western theories of cultural and larly with the tremendous spread of European colonial power in the latier nineteenth century, Western social thought —including theories of religion and ‘magic—was profoundly shaped by the interests of co Through the historical period traced in this chapt ‘transformation occurs in the understanding of magic. A\ ‘modern period, magic was understood by European intellectuals within the negative manifestations of magic were seen as constituting grievous sin. By the nineteenth century, Europe's intellectuals would no longer frame magic primarily as sin, but instead as an aberrational mode of thought antithetical to the dominant cultural logic—a symptom of psychological impairment and ‘marker of racial or cultural inferiority Early Modern Witcheraft and Magic is account of the development of magic as a modern social and category with a consideration of early modern perspectives on witch craft and magic. Lyndal Roper underscores that “itis in the arena of the mag, ical, the irrational, in witchtrials that—paradoxically enough—the individual subject ofthe early modern period unfolds.”” As demonstrated, these p: views on these issues, modemity itself becomes more clearly de marcated, During the carly modern period, concern magic took two distinct from around 1450 to at least 1750, secular and religious author ‘ous patts of Europe and its colonies engaged in a prolonged effort to identify and punish suspected practitioners of witch- craft. Over these three centuries, tens of thousands of people were accused of and executed for witche ated that the period saw around one hundred thousand witchcraft trials, with between forty and fifty thousand executions. As Briggs underscores, these numbers must be un forms in European culture, anne