David et al.,

There seems to be an assumption here that scholars and practitioners are so different from one another that there can be no mutual understanding – or at least, that a scholar could never understand a magic-worker.  First, I want to point out (as has been pointed out many times before on this list) that there are many academic scholars of magic who are also practitioners.   Presumably, their magical experiences equip them to understand magical practice both as insiders, from an insider’s perspective, and as scholars, from a more theoretical or analytical perspective.  Many of us are comfortable with that shifting, contextual, dual perspective.  We all participate in different social worlds, and adapt to them relatively easily, so it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine how a person could feel comfortable and be effective in both worlds.

In the case of scholars who are not practitioners, you ask whether an act of devotion (let’s broaden it to any spiritual practice, for the sake of argument) can truly be understood by an outsider.  It depends on what one means by “truly understand.”  At one extreme, it’s possible to say that no human being can ever truly comprehend the experience of another, and that therefore no real dialogue about human experience, or between people, is practicable.   But there are enough similarities between and among humans that I don’t actually think this is the case.  With some empathy, imagination and training, I believe human beings can indeed reach some kind of mutual understanding beyond the mere surface.  In my disciplines, which are anthropology and folkloristics, methodological training aims to make the ethnographer the instrument of research, to take her/ him into the cultures of others in order to make them understandable to outsiders.  While this process is by its very nature flawed, if I didn’t believe it were possible on some level, I wouldn’t be doing it.

Many academicians investigating esoteric matters wind up experimenting with magic themselves.  I think it was the German folklorist Lutz Roerich who in the 1960s experimented with recipes from early modern grimoires to make witches’ flying ointment, and wrote a paper about it.  That was considered an academic investigation.  When I was actively researching the rituals of San Francisco Bay area Wiccans and Pagans, I not only participated in them, I designed and led them.  That was well within the purview of academic research; In fact I wrote about it at length in Witching Culture.

Finally, I want to say that what makes academicians scholars is not so much the content of their knowledge as the way they approach a question.  Scholars tend to approach things from a particular point of view that is informed by theoretical conversations about it that have taken place in the scholarship of our particular discipline.   My disciplines have a specific methodology and a code of ethics that preclude our using field materials (e.g. The 3^rd Chapter of the Book of the Law, or the Satanic Principles) as guides for our professional investigations; to do so would mean the loss of funding, professional credibility and denial of permission to conduct research from our institutional internal review boards.  At the end of the day, it’s our theoretical and methodological training that make us scholars.  We are experts at scholarship – but not necessarily at the various things which we study.

Lay and expert knowledge are thus terms that need to be understood in context.

Best,

Sabina

Sabina Magliocco, Ph.D.

Professor

Department of Anthropology

California State University – Northridge

18111 Nordhoff St.

Northridge, CA  91330-8244

[log in to unmask]