Sorry Francis, but I disagree with your comments. I recommend
all Greenwood’s work to my students, including this one. Her contribution
to the academic investigation of this and related areas is positive and
important, and I recommend it to other members of the list.
Nick Campion
From: Society for The
Academic Study of Magic [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Francis Cameron
Sent: 29 January 2010 18:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] review of Greenwood (2009) Anthropology
of Magic
Susan GREENWOOD The Anthropology of
Magic (2009), reviewed
Susan Greenwood is Senior Visiting Research
Fellow at the University of Sussex. She has to her credit two previous
ethnographies : Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld (2000) and The
Nature of Magic (2005).
In a message posted to Google Mail
[ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] on 25 January 2010, she states : ‘I have been
writing about magic from a subjective anthropological approach for over twenty
years.’ and on the following day she continues : ‘I have tried to communicate
between what has seemed like two different worlds – the world of
science-orientated anthropology and the world of magic.’ Perhaps this is
one of the things that disturb me about the present book. As a qualified
ethnologist I do not know what is meant by ‘a subjective
anthropological approach’. In the last resort an anthropologist’s
presentation must be critically objective. Anything less just will not
do.
My greatest problem in striving towards a
balanced assessment of Greenwood’s text lies with the way in which she
uses the English language. After weeks of endeavour I still fail to comprehend
the statement she makes on the very first page of her introduction where she
proposes magic as ‘an aspect of human consciousness’. As an
experienced Wiccan, and therefore an insider, I think I know what she is
getting at. As a thoughtful scholar, in my rôle as an outsider, I still do not
know what is meant by ‘an aspect of human consciousness’. The fact
of the matter is – from both an insider and an outsider point-of-view
– I find the statement fallacious. Magic is not ‘an aspect’
of anything. Magic is a process, a skill which can be exercised. And while it
may be true that this skill is exercised in a state of alternative
consciousness, that does not mean that the skill and the consciousness are one
and the same.
The practice of anthropology offers a full
opportunity for participation in both ethnography and ethnology : the telling
of the story and the writing of the explanation. The former invokes the Arts.
The latter demands the rigour of the Sciences.
When the subject under investigation takes
place in the alternative reality of magical states, ethnography needs must face
two ways. First it deserves expression in the lexicon and idiom of the insider.
Second it requires translation into the lexicon and idiom of the outsider. The
reader must be informed when words are used in a specialised sense, and when
actions or apparatus are likely to be unfamiliar to the outsider. Sometimes
this process will overlap with other explanations and interpretations expected
of an ethnology.
Consider, for example, how this applies to
the first three pages of Greenwood’s chapter 7, ‘Magic in everyday
life’.
Here the insider ethnography comes close to
the insider technique of visualisation : the description of a real or imagined
scene in such a way that the reader/listener may, as it were, step into the
landscape and experience the actuality of the surroundings even while the
writer/speaker has them in mind. In such a context it can be important to
instance Aubrey Beardsley’s frequenting of a particular church in
Brighton.
For an outsider ethnography such an aside
is an irrelevant diversion, particularly when accompanied by Beardsley’s
dates and status as an English art nouveau illustrator, author and
caricaturist. The information of outsider importance is that during a street
festival in Brighton on a rainy day in July, the anthropologist and her
informant Jo were prepared to embark on tarot readings in public. At this
point, and for the benefit of the outsider, it would have been helpful to
describe a tarot pack, to say how it is used and what it is used for. What
message did these two women sitting at a table spread with two tarot packs
intend to convey to passers-by? Given the particular time place and context of
the action, was it in any sense exceptional? or was it not in the least
unusual? It is not sufficient to write of tarot readings as ‘a gateway
into magical consciousness’ (whatever that means) and it is quite unacceptable
to refer to Luhrmann’s Persuasions (1989) for the origins of the
tarot when there are, for example, Decker & Dummett on the Occult Tarot (2002)
for the academics and Eden Gray’s Complete Guide (1970) for
general readers.
I do regret that here and elsewhere in the
text I become uncomfortably aware of a lack of a sufficiently deep critical
penetration of the matters under consideration and, since Greenwood is both her
informant and her observer, I would be happier if she included the writings of
current practitioners – such as Starhawk, Paddy Slade, and Vivianne
Crowley – along with those essays from the shelves of the anthropology
section where even Marcel Mauss A General Theory of Magic (from the
French original of 1904) still has a surprising amount of relevance to the
present day.
In short, and reluctantly, I come to the
conclusion that Greenwood’s title claims too much. Her essay is too slim
to justify claim to The Anthropology, or even An Anthropology. As
for Magic, it is sadly deficient. The focus rests on a limited account
of contemporary shamanism. There are whole fields of current magical practice
which are not included.
© francis cameron, oxford, 27 january 2010
--
Francis Cameron, MA, Dip.Ethnology (Oxon)