Understanding Magic From Different Perspectives
Magic can be defined numerous ways in anthropology. For some individuals, magic is methods that are created to attain power over the supernatural. Beginning in the 15th century, Sir George Ripley created the Ripley Scroll which was a series of texts and images that was essentially a manual for the practice of alchemy. Alchemy was considered as “natural magic” and was largely based upon a view that the properties of physical materials; especially the compositions of metals, were larger determined by hidden forces or spirits. Alchemists were trying to find ways to devise techniques to find these forces and try to harness it. The Philosopher’s Stone was the ultimate magical element capable of magical transmutation. However, politicians and the Church in Medieval Europe were opposed to anything deemed as magic. The fear was that people were trying to tap into power that should be God’s jurisdiction and was dangerous to tamper with.
In the 19th century, anthropologist James G. Frazer hypothesized that magic was a primitive form of science. He believed that magical practices were misguided efforts and that people got it wrong because they don't understand the true principles of natural law. James Frazer stated that as people realized magic was faulty, that was when they would work their way up to religion. However, he characterized religion as a lesser evolved form of human thinking (Frazer, 1929, p. 53). Furthermore, he believed that science captures the truth of things whereas magic just gets everything wrong. Frazer proposed that magic had faulty associations and was a misunderstanding of the world. He claimed that there were two principles of thought on which magic is based on; the Law of Contact or Contagion and the Law of Similarity or Imitative Magic. Contagious Magic infers a magical association between things that have been in contact. An example of this would be performing magic on a strand of someone’s hair. Therefore, whatever is done to the material object, will be done to the person whom the object was once in contact with. On the other hand, imitative magic states that any effect one desires can be produced merely by imitating it.
Functional anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski claimed that magical practices served a functional approach to people's lives. Malinowski studied the Trobriand islanders and found that their fishing and agricultural practices had magic rituals embedded in it. However, these magical rituals were never confused with agriculture itself. There was a very clear separation between the levels of magic (Malinowski, 1922). The tribal people relied heavily on their “natural knowledge” and material technology as much as they could, but when faced with uncertain outcomes, they would turn to magic for a little extra help. The magic was always performed in accompany with the building of canoes. Malinowski also believed that magic was not primitive sciences, nor was it being confused with practical technology. On the other hand, anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl debated the idea of primitive mentality. This implies that the mind is stuck in a pre-logical state and is incapable of determining what is rational and irrational.
Finally, Stanley J. Tambiah viewed magic as persuasive analogies in which doing certain rights portrays a performative element. With magic being seen as a “performance”, it now involves rights and actions of people doing something and is done as a statement of meaning. Tambiah gives the example of the Azande people in which they use crocodile teeth to cut banana leaves, ultimately asking for the leaves to grow back in the same way as they teach do (Tambiah, 1973). The analogy between the two is that one of the objects have a desired quality that the people want to bring out. Ultimately, rationalizing “magic” would not matter because it can be interpreted and explained in multiple ways depending on the cultural contexts.
