Full Description
"Do you believe in magic?" This familiar question suggests magic is easily recognized but unreal. In Magic's Translations, Margaret J. Wiener argues that such views are shaped by historical power struggles, especially in Europe's relations with the wider world. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch interactions with Indonesians, Wiener reveals how colonial agents framed unfamiliar practices, practitioners, and objects as "magic," rendering distinct phenomena fundamentally alike and advancing colonizing projects that deemed magic antithetical to reason and reality. While colonial authorities, including ethnologists, mobilized the concept of magic to differentiate Europeans from Indonesians, nature from culture, reason from superstition, and fact from fetish, their efforts produced unexpected outcomes: Some Indonesian artifacts and acts not only retained their power but invaded European experiences. As anthropologists were among the key translators of magic throughout the world, Wiener intersperses accounts of magic's translations in the Indies with reflections on anthropology's ongoing engagement with the concept. She demonstrates that magic became an object of expert knowledge, political control, and popular fascination, rather than a self-evident category or relic of naÏve belief.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Interlude 1. Witch Doctors 29
1. Tricky Subjects 33
Interlude 2. The Fetish 67
2. Troubling Objects 71
Interlude 3. Coordinating Devices 111
3. Things Collective 117
Interlude 4. Getting Caught 151
4. Dangerous Liaisons 155
Interlude 5. The Magic of Magic 187
5. Hidden Forces 191
Interlude 6. The Magic of Science Studies 229
Epilogue 233
Afterword / Isabelle Stengers 245
Notes 257
Bibliography 287
Index 307
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