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Thursday, November 18, 2004, 08:16
How far have we come since anthropologists began to think about magic & religion
Hugh Gusterson, associate professor of anthropology at MIT, Anthropology News (AAA) November
When anthropology was established as a discipline in the early 20th century the relationship between magic, science and religion was one of its central preoccupations. If anthropologists have backstaged these issues in recent decades, today they are more than ripe for revisiting and reworking.
If Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard were alive today, they would surely be intrigued to find that, while Americans often construe their global dominance in terms of their superior science and technology, they also have a president who lists Jesus as his favorite thinker and regards evangelicals as his most important voting bloc.
As an anthropologist of science I am increasingly struck by the way that magic and science, far from being opposites, are increasingly fused at the hip. Technology itself has an aura of infallibility that makes it an instrument of magic. The stakes are bigger and the interventions more expensive, but have we really traveled so far from the complex mixture of paranoia, logic and magic that characterized Evans-Pritchard’s Azande? >> continue
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