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

 

 

 

 

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)