mapremshya wrote:
> 1. First, Tomoko Masuzawa in her brilliant book, "In Search of the
> Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion", in relation to her
> discussion on Durkheim talks about the Sacred as an empty signifier. I
> wonder if this is a useful way to approach magic - as an empty
> signifier to which the scholar attaches the signified. I like to think
> of it as a Venn diagram with the scholar establishing the set. The
> difficulty, or the interesting area, is (as always) the grey ambiguous
> areas on either side of the line of difference because that ambiguity
> is strictly a function of the line the scholar draws.
Note that Levi-Strauss made this suggestion in 1950, in _Introduction to
the Work of Marcel Mauss_. This is essentially his interpretation of
"notions of the mana-type," including wakan, orenda, and so on.
> 2. I find this approach useful although the statement that magic is
> "objectively" false is clearly a minefield!
> Malinowski 's response on the efficacy of magic as posited by Stanley
> Tambiah: "objectively " false but "subjectively" true to the actors.
> But it was also true in the sense of being a "pragmatic" truth, that
> is in a sense that we may find stated in William James's Pragmatism.
> It was psychologically true in that it was "reasonable" in terms of
> addressing certain psychological needs of the individual and it was
> sociologically true because its practice raised the optimism and hopes
> of the human beings [who were involved with it]. A magician's spell
> and manipulations may not objectively, causally and directly affect
> the processes of nature but these words and acts did influence the
> human witnesses and through them produced consequences by affecting
> their intentions, and their motivations and their expectations. So
> Malinowski's answer would be that magic was pragmatically effective by
> creating a change of state in the human actors.
Useful follow-ups: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, _Taboo_ (The Frazer Lecture,
1939); George Homans, "Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski
and Radcliffe-Brown," _American Anthropologist_ (1941). Both of these
are reprinted in the excellent but very expensive _Reader in Comparative
Religions_, ed. William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, 4th ed.
Chris Lehrich
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Christopher I. Lehrich
Boston University
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