Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Evolutionism

History

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 12:31:35 +0000

Brunel University London

Initially published 29 Nov 2021

Abstract:

Anthropology and history are inseparable, sharing concerns with societies other than the one we currently inhabit—whether in time or in space. This entry considers how the relation between anthropology and history developed since the late nineteenth century when anthropology professionalised as a discipline. Initially, anthropology was wedded to a form of history that was conjectural, based on hypothetical ideas of societal development deriving from evolution or diffusion. Thus, societies were often held to progress over time, in ways comparable to biological evolution, or they were held to develop through adoption of sociocultural traits from one or several culture centres. Criticism of this conjectural history came from within both anthropology and history. For a period of several decades, then, anthropology had a relatively detached relation from history, but by the mid-twentieth century this all changed. Anthropology was now understood as analogous to historiography—to writing history—as both seek to understand another society or culture and translate it into terms of one’s present society. Later, the influences of colonialism and global capitalism on the societies studied by anthropologists were given greater prominence, as was the issue of understanding societies in historical time, i.e. as subject to change over time. However, the supremacy of historical knowledge and historical time was subsequently questioned, as anthropologists asked whether all people should be seen to exist in a single and secular historical time that encompasses other kinds of time. In contrast to the single frame of historical time, with its radical separation of past and present, greater recognition is being given to the multifaceted temporal relationships of past, present, and future as diverse peoples have distinct ways of valuing and communicating temporal categories and their interconnections. Anthropology thus raises the question of whether everything can or should be historicised.

Introduction

Anthropology has a complex yet intimate relation with history; at times close, at other times more distant. In understanding this relation, one can trace the theoretical and empirical interests that have shaped anthropology, and one can learn about the tensions that mark the interplay of history and the social sciences more broadly. By history, reference is made to the study of the past and how, through understanding a particular past, one is able to account for specific changes in a given society. Mainstream contemporary historical practice involves the study of archives and documents from a past time that provide insights into social life at that time and how that social life has changed. Oral history is another form, where accounts of the past are narrated by knowledgeable persons and these narratives are then used as sources for understanding past times and social change. Ethnohistory is an interdisciplinary approach to indigenous perceptions and understandings of the past drawing on anthropology, history, and archaeology. There is also an older kind of historical practice known as ‘conjectural history’ which enabled historians and anthropologists to speculate on the nature of historical events for which no documents or material evidence existed.

Anthropology’s relation with history has taken various forms and is discussed in the sections that follow. What emerges is a series of debates about the appropriate focus of anthropological study, and how dimensions of the past and its representation are to be incorporated into sociocultural analysis. Some of the complexities of this relation are especially evident when one considers the first fifty years or so of anthropology as a professional discipline. During that time, in the late nineteenth century, anthropology was wedded to a kind of conjectural history which was subsequently displaced. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an emphasis on societies in the present became established as anthropology’s focus. However, this ‘presentism’ was subsequently criticised as it risked ignoring the influence of the past. Anthropology and history came to be understood as inseparable. As the impact of a historical perspective grew in anthropology, including the recognition of colonialism as an intrinsic part of that history, there emerged a critique of the Western assumption regarding the separation of past and present and their causal relations as the foundation of historical inquiry. This was perceived as a provincial, European notion and one that had to be transcended. Parallel to this critique was one concerning the status of historical knowledge: is history a superior form of knowledge, or is it just another form of myth? Finally, a hotly-debated issue that arose was whether people around the world exist in a secular, historical time or whether this view is Eurocentric and our ideas about history need to be rethought.

Conjectural history and its critique

When anthropology began to professionalise in the late nineteenth century—discarding its amateur status—it was heavily influenced by two ideas: evolution and diffusion. The form of evolution prominent in anthropology was one according to which all societies progressed—‘evolved’—to a higher and improved state. A group of anthropologists in Britain and the United States, namely John Lubbock, Henry Maine, John M. McLennan, Lewis H. Morgan, and Edward B. Tylor created a coherent discourse about this evolutionary progress. They held that societies evolved over time and that a direct advancement could be determined from ‘primitive society’ through varied intermediary stages to ‘modern society’. Anthropologists, they claimed, were to study the ‘primitive societies’ seen to lie at the lower rung of this hierarchy.

Diffusion in anthropology, by contrast, saw societies develop through contact, where borrowings of ideas, techniques, and institutions ‘diffused’ between them. Versions of diffusionist ideas were developed by figures such as Fritz Graebner in Germany and Clark Wissler in the United States while Grafton Elliot Smith in Britain proposed an extreme version that isolated Egypt as the basis of all civilisations (see Kuper 2005). The German view was that cultural change was an outcome of the mixture of peoples. William H.R. Rivers refined this programme arguing that the only consistent evidence of intermixture of peoples was what he called ‘social structure’, e.g. marriage rules, whereas elements of material culture could be adopted informally. Therefore, studies of social structure afforded the most reliable data of migration and diffusion. Based on a range of empirical material and theorising, Rivers argued that patrilineal succession and chieftainship in Melanesian society, for example, were the outcome of immigrant influences on what was a previous evolutionary stage of society. Rivers’ interest in diffusion enabled him to account as well for evolution (1922).

These evolutionary ideas in anthropology were subject to critique from within mainstream history at the time. Notable here is the historian Frederic Maitland who was critical of the evolutionary ideas influencing anthropology, as there was no empirical evidence that such different evolutionary ‘stages’ in social development actually existed. For example, supposed ‘laws’ were established by the above-mentioned group of anthropologists advocating that the original form of society was based on matriarchal principles which then ‘evolved’ to one based on patriarchal principles. However, systematic evidence for matriarchal roots in patriarchal societies could not be found.

At the same time, Maitland argued that anthropology had to become more like history in the sense of avoiding generalisations, examining each case carefully because local circumstances are almost certainly crucial, and abandoning the belief in preconceived universal laws of progress. He famously wrote: ‘My own belief is that by and by anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing’ (Maitland 1911: 295). Maitland was a central figure in the professionalisation of history in England (Goldstein 1990). He was a ‘master of detail’ who swept aside the futile dream of writing a single, universal history (Collingwood 1961 [1946]: 127). Maitland’s remark about anthropology and history has been cited by numerous anthropologists over the decades to emphasise the close relation between the two disciplines.^[1]

The conception of history Maitland espoused is called ‘historicism’: ‘the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development’ (Chakrabarty 2008: 6; cf. Mandelbaum 1971: 42). As Charles Stewart notes, the logic of historicism is that ‘current happenings may be seen as outcomes of prior events and present events as belonging to the past as time flows on’ (2012: 1). Historicism also insists that the past must be understood in its own terms; it has become a key term in modern historiography.^[2]

During the first half of the twentieth century, a new generation of anthropologists in Britain soon viewed ideas of evolution and diffusion as ‘pseudo-history’. In particular, the ‘founding fathers’ of modern British social anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, in their different ways found the ideas of the previous generation of anthropologists misleading. Although neither ever explicitly mentioned Maitland, the direction they took anthropology inevitably turned its back on the old form of history applied by their predecessors while practicing and advocating a form of anthropology more in line with Maitland’s emphasis on detailed empirical research.

Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were opposed to the conjectural kind of history previously conducted because the evidence supporting either evolution or diffusion, as noted above, did not exist. For example, although life expectancy in many societies may increase over time with better provision of health care and improved nutrition this does not mean that societies necessarily progress through fixed stages of evolutionary or even economic progress (cf. Rostow 1960). What mattered, according to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, was not the past and what might have happened then, but the present; how societies ‘functioned’—how they made living together achievable—and, in Radcliffe-Brown’s case, the structure of that functioning.

American anthropology around this same time was debating the extent to which its practice of anthropology was itself a form of history. Franz Boas, the ‘founding father’ of American anthropology, was critical of evolutionism, yet he saw anthropology as fundamentally a historical science, one ‘which centres in the attempt to understand the individual phenomena rather than in the establishment of general laws’ (1932: 612). Boas’ historical analysis operated on a very limited scale, making cautious historical reconstructions, similar to ‘microhistory’, in that they captured the fleeting moment (see Faubion 1993: 38). This was a form of history in line with what Maitland advocated, although again, Boas never referred to him directly. Whether such microhistory can be related more easily to the past than can the ‘macrohistory’ of evolutionism and diffusionism has remained a topic of debate (see Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958]: 9).

Boas’s protégé Alfred Kroeber placed more emphasis on historical reconstruction using archaeological data to establish what cultures may have existed. As an example of this, he cites the case of ‘pottery figurines which are found from western Mexico to Venezuela and Peru and from which as principal evidence there has been reconstructed an Archaic Middle American horizon or type of culture’ (Kroeber 1931: 151). He suggests that the demonstration of these figurines at several locations given their resemblances provides ‘evidence of the spread of a common culture, in spite of local variations’. Kroeber criticised Boas for not developing temporal sequences to the historical issues he encountered in his research or trying to infer or reconstruct the past of a culture (1966: 109). For his part, Boas argued he was not adverse to historical reconstruction but the reconstruction had to be cautious, avoiding sweeping generalisations.^[3] It was also observed that although Boas acknowledged that the dynamics of a society or culture were the result of historical processes, he did not hold that these dynamics were fully determined by their history. Rather, like Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, Boas saw it was crucial to understand the functioning of a society or culture aside from its history (Hoernlé 1985 [1933]: 9).

These varied historical approaches were assessed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]). He reiterated the conjectural nature of evolutionist and diffusionist studies and even included here the work of Kroeber, among others, with their ‘more modest and rigorous studies… of the distribution of certain cultural traits in limited areas’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958]: 6). Lévi-Strauss argued that reconstructions of the past were plausible, but also deceptive. For example, the existence of an Archaic Middle American culture mentioned above remains highly contested until today. Lévi-Strauss also emphasised that reconstructions of the past tell the reader nothing about the conscious or unconscious processes of the actual people who acquired certain institutions. Were they invented, a modification of previous institutions, or borrowed from elsewhere (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958]: 6)? To support this point, Lévi-Strauss considered the example of dual organisation, a type of social structure often found in America, Asia, and Oceania. It is characterised by the division of the social group into two halves or ‘moieties’ whose corresponding members have a variety of relations ranging from the intimate to the hostile. He rules out evolutionist and diffusionist interpretations of their existence for the reasons mentioned above. According to Lévi-Strauss, it is clear that historical factors account in part for dual organisation in any social context, yet this history might not be available to the ethnographer studying the particular society, and its exact importance for the institutions in question is hard to determine. Dilemmas of this sort—how to account for the existence of a particular institution or practice—are faced by all anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958]: 10).

History and anthropology as ‘inseparable’

Nonetheless, Lévi-Strauss argues that history and ethnography are closely allied—‘inseparable’—as they share a concern with societies other than the one we currently inhabit (1963 [1958]: 23). The otherness may be in time (history), however small, or remoteness in space, regardless of how distant (ethnography). Both seek to ‘reconstruct’—through historical causation and narrative or through ethnographic description and interpretation—what has or is happening in the society being studied (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958]: 16). Lévi-Strauss quotes the famous statement by Marx: ‘[People] make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it’ (1963 [1958]: 23). This justifies, Lévi-Strauss observes, ‘first, history and, second anthropology’.

A similar point is made by Edward Evans-Pritchard. For all the supposed disregard of history by his anthropology colleagues (see below), Evans-Pritchard asks whether social anthropology is not ‘itself a kind of historiography’ (1962: 22). The parallel between disciplines exists in the forms of research and how this is then transmitted: the anthropologist ‘seeks to understand the significant overt features of a culture and to translate them into terms of [her/his] culture’ after living with the people for an extended period of time (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 23). The historian, he suggests, ‘lives’ in his archives and documents for an extended period of time and seeks to accomplish the same kind of translation. Both are equally selective in the material they choose to use. In making this argument, Evans-Pritchard invokes Maitland’s dictum cited above and he develops themes also present in the work of Lévi-Strauss. Evans-Pritchard does mention some work among British anthropologists that adopt a historical perspective, such as John Barnes (1951) and Ian Cunnison (1951). Among these should also be included his own history of the Sanusiya Order, an order of Sufis who are Sunni or Orthodox Muslims (Evans-Pritchard 1949). His book focuses on the Sanusi of Cyrenaica, the eastern coastal region of Libya. He gained a familiarity with the region, its Bedouin people, and the Order during the Second World War when he was posted there as part of his military service. Given this, it was not possible for him to carry out systematic studies of an anthropological kind, but his close contact with the Bedouin enabled him to read the literature that forms the basis of his study (Evans-Pritchard 1949: 7).

On the whole, Evans-Pritchard is critical of the lack of attention to historical matters by his contemporaries. He argues that historical awareness is vital for satisfactory understanding in a particular field or in general: ‘… those who ignore history condemn themselves to not knowing the present, because historical development alone permits us to weigh and to evaluate in their respective relations the elements of the present’ (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 56). This is an explicitly Western view of history’s significance and one not necessarily shared cross-culturally, an issue returned to later.

Evans-Pritchard’s critique of conventional anthropological practice and what he saw as its lack of interest in history was itself subjected to critique (see Smith 1962). The question was raised of ‘[w]hether anthropologists should be historians’ (Schapera 1962). This question suggests that a distinction needs to be made between the social present, which the anthropologist studies, and the social past, which is the interest of the historian. The anthropologist’s research is conducted in the social present, but in order to understand that present, the anthropologist may need to consider the social past, conventionally studied by the historian (Schapera 1962: 145). It is noted that Evans-Pritchard’s (1949) own historically-oriented book on the Sanusi is not based on anthropological research conducted while he was resident in Cyrenaica. Rather, it is a study of the origins and development of that Order. What would Evans-Pritchard have said about the Order’s social past had he written instead a study of its social present (Schapera 1962: 152)?

The more general point to be taken from this debate includes the insight that the relevance of history and the sort of history deployed depend on the kinds of problems being examined (Schapera 1962: 152). Many of the anthropologists that worked in Southern Africa, for example, who were trained by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, studied people that were heavily influenced by European colonialism (e.g. Hunter 1936). The historical changes that resulted could not be ignored and anthropologists considered in their analyses when, how, and why historic change had occurred (Schapera 1962: 145). These anthropologists, then, situated their ethnographies in a social context shaped by the history of colonialism.

Some years before Evans-Pritchard’s critique, Edmund Leach also addressed a tension in Evans-Pritchard’s writings between a focus on the present purposes and social relationships between people (viz. a ‘functionalist social equilibrium’), such as his book The Nuer (1940) and Evans-Pritchard’s advocacy for the use of history. How could the inconsistencies between these two positions be resolved? Leach’s ethnography Political systems of Highland Burma (1954) provided an answer. He argued that explaining political life with reference to a social equilibrium, as proposed by scholars focusing on the purposes of social action known as ‘functionalists’, was an ‘as if’ description. It is ‘as if’ because it relates to ideal models rather than real societies; ideal models created and held in unique ways by both the people under study and the anthropologist. In the case of the Kachin people of Leach’s study, there were three relevant political forms: an egalitarian form of political life referred to as ‘gumlao’, a chiefly or hierarchical form known as ‘gumsa’ form - a form that seeks to imitate, when the opportunity arises, the neighbouring Shan state on the horizon. These political forms were in recurrent transformation, and Leach draws on historical documentation to describe this over an extended time period. His book seeks to ‘present a convincing model of what happens over time when such functionalist or “as if” systems interact’ (Leach 1954: 285). Like Lévi-Strauss, Leach also shows how history and ethnography are thus inseparable, but via a different route to that outlined by Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958]: 18; cf. Comaroff & Comaroff 1992: 22-3).

Diverse ways of understanding and experiencing history

Although several of the anthropologists cited by Isaac Schapera (1962) considered the historical changes introduced by European influence in Southern Africa societies, colonialism as a specific historical form was not itself analysed. Talal Asad, writing in the early 1970s, notes the ‘strange reluctance’ most professional anthropologists have in sincerely considering ‘the power structure within which their discipline has taken shape’ (1973: 15). He highlights the unequal power relation between Western societies and those societies conventionally studied by anthropology, an encounter which goes back to the ‘emergence of bourgeois Europe’ and of which ‘colonialism is merely one historical moment’ (Asad 1973: 16).

One form of history that was trying to address this shortcoming is ‘ethnohistory’. Its creation is bound up with the particular nature of settler colonialism in the United States and the establishment of the Indian Claims Commission, which served as an arbiter between Native American groups and the federal government between 1946 and 1978. Ethnohistory’s origins were in the law courts to adjudicate indigenous land rights. It was necessary to decide what constituted an ‘identifiable group’ and to establish historical continuity between such groups that had signed treaties decades before that of present activists. Particular contemporary Native American peoples had to make the case that they had not ‘changed’ in order to be successful in court, so paradoxically they had to exist ‘outside of history’ in order to be identified as groups that could demonstrate their historical continuity. Ethnohistorians were thus left with the task of mediating between different notions of ‘history’—Native American and Euro-American (Harkin 2010: 116-8). In very general terms, some of the difference hinges on the idea of the past as a living ancestral presence (Native American) as found in the landscape and the moral power of ancestral place names (see Basso 1996), and one where the past (history) is dead and gone (Euro-American). Archaeologists, for example, continue to speak of ‘prehistory’ for any Native American people before European contact, denying history and historical agency to Native American peoples prior to the arrival of Europeans.

In addition, beginning in the early twentieth century, anthropologists argued that no value could be attached to Native American oral traditions as their ‘truth value’ was uncertain (see Lowie 1915). Thus, Native Americans were denied a form of historical awareness which, in turn, became the focus and principle of ethnohistorical method by mid-century (Harkin 2010: 119). The emergence of ethnohistory also called attention more forcefully to the existence of colonial power relations and their effects on native peoples, as well as a re-evaluation of the importance of oral traditions (see Cohn 1987; Vansina 1965).

American anthropologists, like their British counterparts, began to evaluate the wider ramifications of colonialism and anthropological inquiry. The ‘colonial situation’ was not viewed as ‘impact’ or ‘culture contact’ but one in which the ‘the European colonist [whether traders, missionaries or administrators] and the indigene are united in one analytic field’ (Cohn 1987: 44). The anthropologist deploys such an analytical field to show how indigenous peoples become incorporated into diverse colonial and capitalist relations of power and expropriation (cf. Kaplan 1995: 208; Stoler 2002: 105). To ignore this situation ‘is to trivialise the experiences of the natives’ (Cohn 1987: 44; see Wiener 1995: 11; cf. Geertz 1980). Certainly by the 1980s an historical perspective is foregrounded in much anthropological inquiry, no more so than in Eric Wolf’s groundbreaking book Europe and the people without history (1982). Adopting a Marxist framework, he describes how the history of European colonial expansion to all corners of the globe since the late fifteenth century, in search of wealth as well as the production and trade of commodities, simultaneously shaped the histories of diverse native peoples (cf. Sahlins 1988; Wallerstein 1974). The explicit global perspective at the core of the book highlights the intricate connections created by capitalist and indigenous modes of production and eschews a focus on self-contained societies and cultures unaffected by wider political and economic forces. For example, in one chapter of the book, Wolf shows how the commercial routes of the fur trade stretched across most of what is now Canada and the northern United States, incorporating numerous Native American peoples (e.g. Cree, Ojibwa, etc.) who supplied the furs valued by Europeans and which transformed, in turn, these societies. The book’s title is ironic: ‘[t]here are thus… no people without history, no peoples – to use Lévi-Strauss’s phrase – whose histories have remained “cold”’ (Wolf 1982: 385).

Wolf’s reference to Lévi-Strauss’s (1978 [1973]) distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies has been generally misunderstood (cf. Bloch 1998: 109). Lévi-Strauss does not suggest that some societies have history while others do not. Rather, the distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ was used as a metaphor to express different relations with historical change. ‘Cold societies’ seek to annul the effects of historical influences through their social institutions, thus sustaining a stable continuity; ‘hot societies’, by contrast, embrace historical change and perceive its effects as the basis of societal development (Lévi-Strauss 1966 [1962]: 234; 1990 [1971]: 607; Gow 2001: 310-2). The Western ideology of progress is, for example, a potent expression of this ‘hotness’ (cf. Löwith 1949).

The distinction between the synchronic and diachronic study of people’s lives has been similarly commonly misinterpreted. Radcliffe-Brown first introduced these terms into anthropology (see Schapera 1962: 144; cf. Evans-Pritchard 1962: 61). For him, a synchronic description refers to an account of a ‘form of social life’ (a particular collection of human beings) at a specific time that abstracts from that social context its empirically ‘enduring characteristics’ (e.g. rules of marriage). Diachronic, by contrast, is an account of the ‘systematic change’ that has occurred to the form of social life over a period (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 4; Barnes 1971: 542). Lévi-Strauss’s use of these terms is different. Synchronic, for Lévi-Strauss, concerns the ‘principle of regularity’, e.g. that a spoken language at any moment in time has an orderliness that allows it to be understood and communicated. By contrast, diachronic is the accidental and particular. Again, drawing on the example of language, languages continually change due to unintentional circumstances, such as new expressions being introduced, and the individual ways a language is expressed. Lévi-Strauss’s use of these terms derives from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure: synchrony is like langue (collective language), diachrony is like parole (individual speech)—analogous to stable continuity and historical contingency.

Lévi-Strauss deploys synchronic and diachronic analysis in his monumental set of volumes known as Mythologiques (1964-1971). The study of myth he undertakes appears to be the opposite of an interest in history, as there are no dates or chronology. However, myths exist because of history—in a comparable way that language (langue) exists because of speech (parole) (and vice versa) (see Gow 2001: 11). Myths ‘generate the appearance of stability, an illusion of timelessness that cannot be affected by changes in the world, but they do so by means of their ceaseless transformation’ (Gow 2001: 11). In order to sustain a coherence of meaningfulness in social life, myths transform in response to a variety of historical events and it is these subtle changes in myth that make it appear as if there has been no change. It is the analysis of these transformations, moving from one people to the next over two continents, which enabled Lévi-Strauss to examine a complex historical phenomenon, i.e. the past peopling of the Americas. This is a process that occurred in historical time where no archival documents are available but where archaeology and historical linguistics provides evidence to support Lévi-Strauss’s analysis (see Lévi-Strauss 1990 [1971]).

Marshall Sahlins (1981; 1985) sought to historicise Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism (i.e. his study of the structure of human thought and social organisation) by showing how cultural structures order history (in particular historic events) and conversely. His well-known studies of Captain Cook’s sojourn among Hawaiians are an illustration. In that example, Sahlins focuses on the dichotomy between ‘the contingency of events [Cook’s appearance among Hawaiians] and the recurrence of structures [Hawaiian culture]’ (1985: xiii). Structures are understood to coordinate events. In other words, ‘[c]ulture is historically grounded, its constructs (metaphors [historical metaphors]) embodied in events and occasions, but practice has its own dynamics, and what really takes place generates novel myths [mythical realities]’ (Strathern 1996: 124). In order to understand the killing of Cook by Hawaiians, Sahlins argues this event needs to be seen in relation to a previous set of events which precipitated Cook’s demise. The first event is the Makahiki festival and the second is Cook’s return to the island not long after departing following the festival. In the Makahiki, a cosmological drama about political appropriation unfolds. The fertility of the land is renewed and reclaimed by the lost god-chief Lono. But this is supplanted by the ruling chief and the chief’s sacrificial cult of Ku. Cook’s visit to the Islands corresponded with the festival and the return of Lono. The treatment he received from Hawaiians matched the fixed order of ritual events in the Makahiki (Sahlins 1981: 17).

Lono and Ku were rivals for Hawaiian power. When Cook departed after his second visit, it meant his work of fertility renewal was done. Unfortunately, not long after departing, one of Cook’s ships sprung a foremast and the vessels had to return to Hawaii. Cook as Lono was now perceived as a threat to chiefly power. The subsequent killing of Cook, Sahlins argues, was not premeditated by the Hawaiians; neither was it an accident. He suggests it ‘was the Makahiki in an historical form’ (Sahlins 1981: 24). In other words, according to Sahlins, the cultural structure (Makahiki festival) orders events (Cook’s killing). Sahlins’ description of an historic event attempts to reproduce for Europeans (Cook and his crew) and anthropologists what is also attributed to the Hawaiians. Yet is this how the Hawaiians perceived the ‘events’? Would they have been registered as events in such a historical scheme (Strathern 1990)? Or, rather were the ‘events’ registered as ‘performances, in the images they strive to convey, and thereby in how they present the effects of social action to themselves’ (Strathern 1990: 28, emphasis removed; cf. Lederman 1986; Neumann 1992)? What Sahlins’ analysis does is not so much historicise structure as show how a unique series of events are amenable to structuralist analysis. In doing so, the events are explained by being put into their historical context—a chronology is created, in the sense that they are embedded in Western historical time.

Out of time

An interest in bringing societies into history and historical time is connected with what has been characterised as the problem of ‘coevalness’. This is the problem that the people studied by anthropology are often placed in another time, that of the ‘ethnographic present’ (Fabian 1983: 31). Synchronic forms of analysis potentially place the object of anthropological study in a time different from the anthropologists—such approaches are atemporal, anthropologist and native are not coeval, not in the same time. The issue of coevalness is also connected to the absence of historical time in some anthropological accounts whereby a society is represented as if unaffected by substantial historical change. From this standpoint a consideration of history does not have an essential influence on the social life being studied (see Thomas 1996: 5).

A range of studies that responded to these concerns and incorporated a historical time perspective appeared from the 1980s onwards (see Cole 2001; Ohnuki-Tierney 1987; Ortner 1989; Parmentier 1987; Price 1983, 1990, among numerous others). Notable among these is Jean Comaroff’s (1985) historical study of power and resistance among the Tshidi of South Africa. Over a period of one hundred and fifty years, their local independent chiefdom became a rural periphery within the South African state. For over eighty years they were part of a poorly paid labour market but still dependent on their own agricultural production. The Tshidi have also been subject to Christian missionisation starting one century and a half earlier. Comaroff’s study traces the interchange of Protestantism and proletarianisation which crystallised the Tshidi’s consciousness of inequality and constituted the basis for challenging and resisting their subordination. The forces of state power made explicit political expression difficult, however, ‘the submission to authority celebrated by the Christian faith was transformed into a biblically validated defiance’ (Comaroff 1985: 2). Such defiance was concealed and coded, and Comaroff’s study discloses its logic and enduring historical significance.

David Sutton’s (1998) study of indigenous notions of history on the Greek island of Kalymnos also responds to the above concerns about history and coevalness. It explores the myriad ways the past forms part of how the island denizens interpret the present—how the past is thus active and alive in the present. It reveals a distinct form of historical consciousness. Sutton shows, for example, how at local level the indigenous word for ‘histories’ translates as disputes, quarrels and acts of shame, such as stealing or sexual infidelities, that disrupt the conventional pattern of social life. For a person or family to ‘have history’ indicates they have a ‘stained’ name due to past misconduct of a sexual, social, or financial nature. Sutton reveals such histories—as disruptive events—operate as well at national level, as in the collaboration with the Italian Occupation of the island.

In Mahajanga, Madagascar, the idea of ‘bearing’ history is the focus of Michael Lambek’s (2002) study. Bearing here is a kind of embodied history that takes the form of spirit possessions. The spirits that possess the Mahajanga’s mediums happen in the medium’s houses throughout the area and in the course of their possession a juxtaposition of distinct historical epochs occurs. As the spirits that possess and speak through the mediums are usually ancestral members of the royal clan, Lambek argues that spirit mediums sanctify the present through the ancestral past. Conventionally, only royals were entitled to history in this island context, but over time this history has become more widely disseminated through the mediums that bear and articulate it. The mediums live in and with history and Lambek’s study focuses on the multiple dimensions of this bearing, including the ethical activity and power relations that such bearing implies (cf. Lambek 2018).

Often, the intention of the authors is to describe the ‘making of history’ by the people so described. They draw attention to human capacity to intervene in it, as ‘history is not simply something that happens to people, but something they make’ (Ortner 1984: 159). In contrast to Wolf’s (1982) historical account, where the focus is on a global system in the making over centuries and its local effects, the emphasis of writers such as Sherry Ortner is on the historical agency or practice of local peoples. The historian Reinhart Koselleck has noted that the very idea of ‘making history’ is historical and could not have been formulated before Napoleon and certainly not before the French Revolution: ‘[O]nly since around 1780 was it conceivable that [history] could be made’ (2004 [1979]: 193-4). It is both a modern experience and expectation ‘that one is increasingly capable of planning and also executing history’. Clearly, people have always planned what they do. However, to plan explicitly to ‘make history’ is an idea that was possible to articulate at a distinct time and place. Only in the late eighteenth century was one able to talk of history in general or history in and for itself—history as an ‘objectless singular’. Previously histories had existed in the plural, and history as an expression was plural (e.g. the history of England, the history of religion, etc.). When anthropologists speak of people ‘making history’, even metaphorically, it raises the problem of attributing to people a capacity and outlook that is distinctly Western and one of fairly recent origin. An interest in viewing actors as active no doubt arises from the perceived menace of potentially homogenising world capitalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism, and writers such as Ortner and Sahlins have sought to demonstrate this has not been the case. Asad suggests this is ‘prima facie a reasonable claim, although it does not tell us whether, and if so how, local peoples make their own history’ (1993: 7).

The flipside of the problem of coevalness is the issue of ‘homochronism’: ‘a displacement of those people who are ethnographically represented out of their temporality and their assimilation into academic discourses of history’ (Birth 2008: 7). In other words, it is the problem of establishing a single, all-embracing set of time-based tropes. This makes sense if we are wedded to a linear conception of time with a clear distinction between past and present. However, it does not apply if a peoples’ understanding of the past and its relation to the present are different than Western ideas of history. Michael Taussig (1980) provides an instance of this potential problem. His work focuses on mining and plantation labour in South America, connecting folk ideas of the devil with Marxist notions of class consciousness. When Taussig discusses the sugar plantations in western Columbia, his narrative is marked by dates and periods to record the relations between Africans, Indians, and Europeans. Contrasting his account with that of Joanne Rappaport’s (1990) discussion of the construction of history and time among the Páez in Columbia (Taussig 1980: 42-45), the question arises whether Taussig might be imposing his temporal and chronological sensibilities on his ethnographic subjects (Birth 2008: 10). This issue raises the possibility that a particular conception of history and its representation of time are perceived as privileged forms of understanding that anthropologist might be too readily prostrating to.

Questioning history; the significance of historicity

In a debate with Jean Paul Sartre, Lévi-Strauss (1966 [1962]: 245-69) famously questioned the superiority attributed to historical knowledge. He claimed that historical knowledge was partial in the sense of having a bias even if it declares not to be. He uses the example of the French Revolution. Writing a history of such an event cannot both be a revolutionary Jacobin account and an aristocratic account. It will always remain incomplete and subjective (Lévi-Strauss 1966 [1962]: 257-8). This is true to a greater or lesser degree of all history, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ history.

The assumed coherency of history that Western historical thought considers as its focus of study is in fact, Lévi-Strauss suggests, the ‘coherency of myth’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966 [1962]: 245-69; 1984 [1964]: 12-3; White 1978: 103). History, seen from this perspective, is the equivalent of ‘myth with dates’ (Barnes 1971: 547). The coherency of myth is created when ‘basic story units (or clusters of events)’ are arranged into narratives in such a manner that an essentially human structure or process may appear as a natural inevitability’ (White 1978: 103). When a historian or anthropologist gives an account of ‘why something happened’, they make a claim to fact, which actually rests on a set of conventions for the construction of a plausible narrative. All such historical stories, then, take part in the mythical realm because they ‘cosmologise’ or ‘naturalise’ that which are nothing but human constructions; they could be other than how they are structured (White 1978: 103).

Historical narratives, as much as mythic narratives, then, constitute particular modes of experiencing time. Nancy Munn draws on the notion of temporalisation to describe the manifold way relations in time transpire. Actors are not only ‘in’ a particular time. They are simultaneously constructing that time and their own experience of that time in the kind of relations formed between themselves and a given set of temporal orientation points. Munn suggests this is a symbolic process that assumes multiple forms ‘all the time’, with time-reckoning being only one form of temporalisation. It entails both implicit knowing as well as explicit attention to the time element in the course of the projects performed by actors (1992: 104; cf. Fabian 1983: 74). More generally, the past-present-future relation is inherent in all forms of temporalisation. This is because ‘people operate in a present that is always infused and which they are further infusing with pasts and futures’ (Munn 1992: 115; Gell 1992: 238-9). Although we all live in one single time, how those past-present-future relations are represented in any social context can never be known, except through careful study.

For example, among the Cumbal Indians of Columbia, reference to a past action is made by saying adelante (‘forward’ in time or in space). Cumbales explain this usage by arguing that ‘although events occurred in the past, we live their consequences today and must act upon them now. For this reason, what already occurred is in front of the observer, because that is where it can be corrected’ (Rappaport 1988: 721). In a similar way, the New Zealand Maoris refer to the past as nga ra o mua, ‘the days in front’ and the future as kei muri, ‘behind’. The use of these terms is explained as follows: ‘They move into the future with their eyes on the past. In deciding how to act in the present, they examine the panorama of [the past] spread before their eyes, and select the model that is most appropriate …from the many presented there’. It would be mistaken to see the Maori living in the past. Rather, the past is drawn on for guidance—the past is brought into both present and future (Metge 1976: 70).

In referring to these representations of time as ‘history’, their distinctiveness is obscured, potentially reducing them to the Western concept of history, where the writing of history known as historicism defines how the past should be studied. Historicism insists that the past must be understood on its own terms (see Palmié 2013). For many Western people, it makes perfect sense to say ‘the past is dead, you cannot change the past’. It is because it is dead that the past can be an object of historical study (Dening 1991). In a similar fashion, the idea of the past as a ‘foreign country’ (Lowenthal 1985) also has resonance for many Westerners. In a literal way, the subject of history ‘invades’ that country, subjects its denizens to this discipline, and appropriates their countries to the present (see Fasolt 2004: xviii). But these ideas do not necessarily apply across societies.

Such a complaint was levelled against ethnohistory (see Krech 1991). As traditionally practiced, ethnohistory has meant the reconstruction of the history of a people that had in the past no written history. Others disagreed with this convention: ‘[E]thnohistory … must fundamentally consider the people’s own sense of how events are constituted, and their ways of culturally constructing the past’ (Gewertz & Schieffelin 1985: 3). Similar criticisms were levelled against the formal principles used for assessing the truth value of oral traditions (Vansina 1965) as if they were written archival documents (Rosaldo 1980a; cf. Rosaldo 1980b).

These critiques suggest radically questioning the nature of history and by implication that of historical time. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has advocated a shift away from two ontological assumptions that inform ‘secular conceptions of the political and the social’ (2008 [2000]: 15-6). One is that people exist in a ‘single and secular historical time’ that encompasses other sorts of time (cf. Bear 2014: 5-6). The second is that people are ontologically singular. Entities such as gods or spirits can be represented as ‘beliefs’ but cannot be ascribed any real agency in historical events (cf. Sahlins 2017). The problem is one of moving beyond Eurocentric histories and the naturalism of historical time associated with the idea that ‘everything can be historicised’ (Chakrabarty 2008 [2000]: 73, emphasis removed; cf. Hastrup 1992: 11).

Consider the Indian Santal rebellion of 1855. The leaders of the rebellion said they carried out their actions as ordered by their god Thakur. Such ideas can be acknowledged, but to attribute any actual agency to the god in the events that transpired would go against standard historical procedures for resolving debates about the past and the kinds of evidence that can be used (Chakrabarty 2008 [2000]: 104). A comparable example is found among the Kaluli people, Papua New Guinea who contend that, years ago but within living memory, forest animals emerged in large numbers to attack a Kaluli longhouse (Schieffelin 1985). It was a form of revenge. The cause of such an attack was disrespect shown to animals, an event known as sana mono (‘strike’ ‘eat’). Accounts from Kaluli people whose longhouses have been attacked in this way are described in detail and it is shown how the attacks have a reality based on Kaluli perceptions of such events (Schieffelin 1985: 44-5). However, Western historians would not accept the sana mono as a real event ‘because they do not accept the Kaluli epistemological framework which gives the events in question their “meaning”’ (Schieffelin 1985: 54). Echoing Chakrabarty’s analysis, sana mono highlights the limits of credibility in Western historical consciousness and ways of knowing (Schieffelin 1985: 54).

There is thus no third voice or perspective that can integrate the views of the Santal or Kaluli with that of Eurocentric history. Each has distinct ideas of causality and of the relations between past, present and future. How can this problem of analysis be resolved? Anthropologists and historians have been moving in the same direction in this regard (see Ballard 2014). The historian François Hartog (2015 [2003]) has proposed the notion of ‘regimes of historicity’ to solve this problem. These regimes are analytic constructs that refer to how individuals and groups situate themselves in time, and how they consider themselves to alter over time (cf. Trouillot 1995: 3-4).

As individuals always have degrees of separation and relations from their selves as well as others, it is through the categories of past, present, and future that order and meaning is provided to these forms of division and connection, enabling them to be understood and articulated (Hartog 2015 [2003]: xvi). For example, a Dinka man (in what is now South Sudan) had been imprisoned in Khartoum. In response to this past event, he called one of his children Khartoum in memory of that place and to exorcise the powerful agency that troubling place from the past could have over him in the present and future. This Dinka man’s historicity was bound up with Khartoum in a way not captured by viewing his past through the lens of history (Lienhardt 1961: 149). It is thus possible to recognise historicity separately from the advent of the modern concept of history and historicism.

The significance of historicity in this regard is that it does not assume that events or time exist as a line of occurrences that add together as ‘history’. Whereas orthodox ideas of history (associated with historicism) isolate the past, historicity emphases the multifaceted relationships of past, present, and future (see Hirsch & Stewart 2005; Fazioli 2017: 16). Thus, different peoples will have distinct ways of valuing and communicating these categories and their interconnections (see Argenti 2019). It is this that the analyst might designate as a ‘regime’ or, alternatively, historicity may be understood as part of a cosmology or worldview (Tonkin 1992: 68-70). In both cases, the issue is of one of how people make sense and represent their experiences of time.

For instance, what is especially novel in the New Testament is ‘the tension between the decisive “already fulfilled” and the “not yet completed” between present and future’ (Hartog 2015 [2003]: 61). It is upon this tension that a Christian order of time and cosmology was created as well as a Christian influenced history, being a history of salvation (Cullman 1967: 172). To nineteenth century evangelical missionaries in Africa, the Bible was of overriding central importance: ‘[i]t was their supreme paradigmatic history, through which they recognised new situations and even their own actions’ (Peel 1995: 595-6). The missionaries did not just see themselves, but that of the African ‘other’, in this cosmology and narratives of the Bible (cf. Trautmann 1995: 176). Subsequently, a worldview based on ideas of progress supplanted the ‘striving for salvation’ and appropriated ‘the latter’s forward focused tension combined with a “hopeful expectation” orientated toward the future’ (Löwith 1949: 47). The native who did not pursue such a ‘progressive’ temporal trajectory could appear as living in another time, as lacking ‘modernity’, and a proper grasp of history could be viewed as ‘history’s forgotten doubles’ (Nandy 1995). At the same time, it is evident that the contemporary is plural, radically plural, and diverse peoples live their lives according to distinct historicities that highlight the conceptual limits of conventional historical practice, historical time, and thus of historicism.

Conclusion

The professionalisation of anthropology occurred at the same time that historicism became established as the leading paradigm of historical practice. An inescapable fact of the world we inhabit is that everything, potentially, can be placed in a historical context (Nandy 1995: 45). This is the basis of the modern historical consciousness, whereby the past is no longer present and is thus an object of study. But this is only one way of understanding the past and its relation to the present and future. There are other ways of conceiving ‘history’ and historical consciousness (see Stewart 2012; Hodges 2015).

The dictum ‘that anthropology must choose between being history and being nothing’ is today widely accepted—at least insofar as certain contexts of study clearly require historical analysis to be understood. The reverse may also be true, namely that ‘history must choose between being … anthropology or being nothing’. Although the latter has to some extent occurred (e.g. see Hunt 1989), both anthropology and history can perhaps transcend the supremacy of historicism. This would be by revealing other ways of knowing the inextricable relations between past, present, and future, thereby eschewing the idea that everything can be historicised, and the explicit and implicit power structures that historicism sustains (see Chakrabarty 2008 [2000]; Fasolt 2004).

Note

Unlike other entries in this encyclopedia, this text is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.

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Note on contributor

Eric Hirsch is Professor of Anthropology at Brunel University London. He has a long-standing interest in the ethnography and history of Melanesia. He is the author most recently of Ancestral presence: cosmology and historical experience in the Papuan highlands (2021, Routledge) and co-editor of The Melanesian world (2019, Routledge).

Prof. Eric Hirsch, Anthropology, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK. Eric.hirsch@brunel.ac.uk

[1] Among numerous citations, the following are a selection from the past and more recent, some of which are referred to in the text below: Barnes 1971; Cohn 1987; Comaroff & Comaroff 1992; Evans-Pritchard 1962; Hastrup 1992; Radin 1933; Rivers 1922; Stocking 2001; Varisco 2015; White 1957; cf. Axel 2002: 33.

[2] Georg Iggers (1995) discusses the origins and complex of meanings attributed to the term over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[3] Matti Bunzl (1996) traces Boas’s cautious cultural historicism to the German anthropological tradition of Bastian and Ritter, through Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and ultimately to the Herdian ideal of the Volksgeist.

Magic

Felix Stein — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 11:03:55 +0000

Matteo Benussi

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Initially published 25 Oct 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19magic

Abstract:

Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational’ science, even though both religion and science are objects just as elusive. Despite its ambiguous status and the prejudices attached to it, or maybe precisely for these reasons, magic has long enthralled scholars in the human sciences, and anthropology in particular. After first exploring the genealogy of magic as a concept, this entry will examine the manifold ways in which occult knowledges and practices play a role in the life of many societies. It will touch on the role of vernacular magic in experiences of crisis, and dwell on how anthropology has found a way to appreciate the ‘truth’ of magic. It then explores magic as a ‘craft’ – a set of techniques through which practitioners creatively shape their relationships with the world and their own selves. Emphasis will be given to magic’s documented potential to activate the imagination. The case of ceremonial magic and its revival will allow the reader to appreciate the modernity of magic. The entry concludes with a reflection on the recurrent attributes of magic – often identified as a particularly experimental, do-it-yourself, and manipulation-based form of spiritual action – and its compatibility with a post-secular age that has not renounced enchantment.

Defining magic

Magic is one of the most puzzling phenomena studied by social scientists, which has inspired and challenged generations of observers. Is magic irrational, maybe even delusional, the product of minds that cannot think straight? Despite widespread prejudice, most specialists nowadays think this is not the case. Historical and ethnographic research has revealed that many reasonable, lucid, and intellectually sophisticated people, including great philosophers and artists of the past, dabbled in magic (Yates 1964; Saunders 2010; Jütte 2015). One may wonder: perhaps such people, despite their discernment, were ignorant of modern science – is magic ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarous’, then? This too is unlikely. Categories like ‘primitivism’ and ‘barbarity’ would not get us very far in exploring magic, not only because anthropologists consider such evolutionist concepts inherently misleading and derogatory, but also because all types of societies, including ones characterised by highly complex technology, organizations, and scientific knowledge, appear to have room for magic. Understanding magic, then, requires that we be prepared to shed or at least bracket ingrained prejudices. But how do we define magic, to begin with?

The word ‘magic’ evokes a vast array of associations: from the solemn, white-bearded sage, endowed with mystical power in fairy tales and fantasy films, to sinister witches and sorcerers surrounded by grimoires, occult sigils, potions, and astrological charts; from ‘cunning folk’ healers, combining incantations and herbal remedies, to stage magicians asking us, with a wink, to let our senses be deceived. Yet explaining clearly what the many tropes associated with the concept of magic have in common is easier said than done. The concept has been used in association with divergent practices such as folk medicine, divination, palmistry, necromancy (communication with the dead), astrology, alchemy, spiritualism, occultism (the study of hidden or paranormal things), illusionism, neo-paganism (the worship of natural forces, often modelled after ancient religions), and New Age spirituality. To complicate things, the field of magic as the term is commonly understood – including amongst many of its practitioners – has come to incorporate elements that elsewhere would fall under the category of ‘religion’, such as Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical tradition) or Yoga (a set of spiritual doctrines emerged from within Indic Dharmic faiths). A plausible working definition of magic, loose enough to accommodate at least most of the nuances associated with it, may describe it as a set of activities and technologies intended to manipulate invisible or immaterial agencies and energies, not recognised by science, to an advantageous end. However, there are risks inherent in defining such elusive a subject as magic.

The word ‘magic’ has long evoked negative connotations, associated with the exotic religious customs of a threatening Other. The vocabulary and concept of magic have a distinctly Western genealogy: the word comes from the Greek mageia, which, in ancient Greece, was used to describe the priests (magav) of the arch-inimical Persian Empire (Graf 1995; Bremmer 1999). In this ancient sense, the word was associated with practices that were outlandish because they were foreign. Over time, however, and partly due to the influence of Christianity, the idea of magic became attached to spiritual or remedial practices that, while originating from within Western societies, were classified as eccentric, illegitimate, or dubious because of their external/marginal status vis-à-vis religious and scientific orthodoxy. In early modern Europe, arcane knowledge and practices were also associated with marginal groups like the Jews or peasants (Ginzburg 1991; Jütte 2015). Despite this shift in orientation, the concept of magic retained its association with notions of weirdness, mysteriousness, and unorthodoxy (Stratton 2013). When we use the category, therefore, we must be alert to both its potentially negative connotations and its shifting boundaries.

Another, related danger inherent in the vocabulary of magic is connected to its usability in non-Western contexts. For instance, let us take the Islamic notion of siḥr, usually translated as magic or sorcery. Siḥr partly resembles Christian understandings of magic as unorthodox dealings with the occult, and therefore illegitimate and sinful. However, alongside familiar items like goetia (commerce with demons) and astrology, siḥr also includes slander, malicious gossip, the ‘charismatic seduction of crowds’ (Knight 2016: 16), and other arts of deception which would not be considered ‘magic’ in most Western understandings. When it comes to magic, nuance risks easily getting lost in translation.

Furthermore, distinguishing between ‘unorthodox’ magical practices and ‘legitimate’ religious ones is particularly problematic in the case of religious traditions that are not based on highly codified doctrines and liturgies, and therefore do not encourage distinctions between prayer, incantation, or spell to the same extent as Christianity, in particular, as we shall see, in its Reformed versions. For instance, in certain Tibetan Buddhist contexts, religious specialists take part in propitiatory rituals to conjure or restore ‘fortune’ (Humphrey 2012) that in Western settings might easily be classified as magical spells and rituals.

Magic, science, religion… and anthropology

It is impossible to omit the role of anthropology itself in construing the idea of magic that was to become dominant in the modern era. In other words, we must consider that anthropology as an academic discipline has greatly contributed to establishing what counts as magic and what does not in today’s mainstream consciousness, including amongst many practitioners of magic.

The early-nineteenth-century rise of scientific interest in magic was both fuelled and conditioned by Europe’s encounter with hitherto unfamiliar spiritual traditions in the colonies. Nebulous concepts like ‘shamanism’ and ‘fetishism’ both enthralled and repelled European intellectuals, divided between an optimistic embrace of empirical science and technologic progress and a hard-to-kill Romantic fascination with all things mysterious and arcane (Pels 2003). Both the asymmetries of the colonial encounter, with Europe seeking to justify its exploitation of faraway peoples as a ‘civilising mission,’ and the intellectual establishment’s anxieties over the popularity of phenomena like occultism, thus conspired to turn magic into a veritable culture-war item. If colonialism ‘required’ the foil of native magic as a pretext for domination (Wiener 2003: 140), magic never stopped haunting the metropole itself through the mediation – or mediumship? – of homegrown Spiritualists and Theosophists, generating in turn the reaction of scientific-minded debunkers. The latter group encompassed novel professional figures as diverse as besuited stage illusionists, proponents of a disenchanted version of magic as pure entertainment and skill, and erudite scholars of ‘native trickery’: early anthropologists (Jones 2017).

Building on the reports of missionaries and explorers, Victorian-era anthropologists (of the mid- to late-nineteenth century) busied themselves with creating hierarchically organised taxonomies of social facts they had second-hand knowledge of, and that corresponded, in their view, to more or less well-defined ‘steps’ in an evolutionary ladder of human cultures. Influenced by the styles of reasoning of their time, these scholars classified magic, religion, and science in different categories, corresponding to progressive ‘stages’ of cultural complexity, with magic attached to ideas of archaism and childlike irrationality. From a magical stage, human groups would progress to a religious stage, followed by science supplanting religion at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy.

Where did the assumption underpinning nineteenth century academic conceptualizations of magic come from? Later scholars of magic (Tambiah 1990) have identified a mindset imbued with Protestant sensitivities, and the prestige of classical heritage and erudition, as crucial factors in shaping magic as an object of social-scientific study. Some of the most influential pioneers in the study of religious life had a Protestant background, in particular E.B. Tylor, who famously defined religion as ‘belief in Spiritual Beings’ (2008: 25). Scholars like Tylor, however, were reluctant to put religion – a respectable sphere of contemplation and worship – on the same footing as ‘base’ magic. It has been persuasively argued (Tambiah 1990: 12-5) that evolutionistic ideas of magic as distinct from and inferior to religion were likely fuelled by Protestantism’s deep dislike of occult practices and Biblical characterizations of magic as diabolical. This Protestant legacy contributed to the consolidation of a narrow idea of religion as a system of abstract beliefs (cf. Tylor’s definition), culminating in theology and metaphysics, as opposed to magic with its hands-on, result-oriented manipulation practices. A distinction between prayer (religious) and spell (magical) epitomised this opposition.

As far as the second source of influence – the Hellenic tradition – is concerned, Classical Greece grouped what we today call magic (understood as the occult manipulation of invisible forces) together with philosophy, the manipulation of concepts, and medicine, the manipulation of bodily substances. These activities were quite distinct from the sphere of religion understood as the worship of the Gods. While the first realm was characterised by an inquisitive, experimental attitude, the realm of divinity was not seen as an arena of human disputation. Stanley Tambiah (1990: 8-11) has argued that, given the prestige of Hellenic traditions in Western academia, a separation between magic and religion ended up influencing Victorian anthropologists such as James Frazer. In his pioneering research into magic, Frazer came to consider magic a failed attempt at science, as both systems were thought to share the idea that the universe is regulated by impersonal forces that can be intervened upon, harnessed, and manipulated. However, magic was understood to be based on incorrect ideas about these forces, as well as distorted and incomplete factual knowledge of the world (Jarvie & Agassi 1970).

Scholars in the turn-of-the-century French sociological tradition came up with yet different reasons to push magic to the margins of spiritual life. Émile Durkheim, one of the key figures of the early social science of religion, defined religion as a set of beliefs and practices concerning sacred things and shared by a moral community: a ‘Church’. He expressed the view that magic, while consisting of belief and rites like religion, though ‘less developed’, should be considered distinct from the latter because, being chiefly an individual endeavour, magic fails to generate proper ‘Churches’ (1995: 39-42). This notion too contributed to framing magic as something eccentric, peripheral, and somewhat lacking vis-à-vis religion, despite being tightly connected to it.

Later scholarship, based on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive time spent in the company of magic practitioners observing how magic is carried out in practice, became more interested in understanding magic rather than debunking it. Resulting approaches tended to call into question the notion that clear-cut divisions, let alone hierarchies, between magical, religious, and scientific worldviews can be objectively established. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged amongst anthropologists and religious studies specialists that deciding where religion (e.g. belief in spiritual beings), folk knowledge (e.g. non-biomedical healing systems), or ‘natural philosophy’ (e.g. astronomy) end and magic begins, has more to do with cultural boundary-making and social normativities than with any ‘objective’ reality. In innumerable historical and socio-cultural settings, drawing clear lines would be impossible. In Renaissance Europe, magic was performed by clergymen, scientists, and philosophers, while twentieth-century occultists, guided by a keen interest in scientific discoveries, moved in a grey area between science and magic producing ambiguous yet highly successful concepts such as ‘animal magnetism’, ‘mesmerism’, or ‘psychic energy’. In colonial Africa, sorcery was part and parcel of communities’ everyday religious and ritual life (Evans-Pritchard 1937). In 1980s Euro-America, witchcraft was rediscovered by tight communities of college-educated urbanites. These cases invite us to abandon the deeply ingrained stereotypes about magic as spiritually aberrant, irrational, and irredeemably ‘other’ that influenced early anthropology.

In spite of the fallacies of evolutionism outlined so far, the works of Victorian anthropologists remain relevant today. Some of their ideas are still compelling and they are frequently referenced by contemporary occultists themselves. One example of such lasting contributions is Frazer’s typological distinction between imitative magic, based on similarity, and contagious magic, based on contact. In the case of imitative magic, actions, objects, or enactments that resemble a given thing, person, or event, are understood to have an effect on the latter (e.g., enacting a hunt to secure abundant game); contagious magic, on the other hand involves using items once connected to the intended target of magical action (e.g., using someone’s clothes or nail pairings to cast a spell on them). This distinction has become a staple in magical studies and even within magical milieus. More broadly, early social scientists’ characterization of magic as a quintessentially pragmatic, experimental endeavour, an attempt to harness and manipulate occult forces – getting one’s hands dirty with the occult, so to speak – retains most of its validity today, even if we might not want to see this as absolutely incompatible with, or subordinate to, canonical religion or academic scientific thinking.

Dealing with the negative: maleficium and modernity

If drawing clear boundaries and establishing hierarchies with respect to magic may be difficult, how does contemporary, fieldwork-based anthropology go about understanding it? Especially after anthropology’s methodological revolution in the 1920s that established ethnographic fieldwork as the paramount avenue to investigate social and cultural life, anthropologists have become particularly interested in understanding magic in and through practice – in other words, in figuring out what people do exactly, when they do magic.

Focusing on the uses and meanings of magic in concrete social settings has had the effect of showing us that magic, far from being something archaic, lies at the heart of global modernity. As people from Latin America, to central Africa, to Mongolia, to the US and Europe become engulfed in urbanization, capitalist markets, and dreams of social mobility, ideas about the occult gain currency. They reveal deep connections between personal experiences of distress and anxiety, historical transformations marked by dynamics that exceed the ordinary and the visible, and lasting yet flexible cultural models of the cosmos which include both visible and invisible forces (Geschiere 1997, Harding & Stewart 2003, Buyandelger 2007, Barkun 2013). Magic, thus, serves as a powerful resource through which people across the globe cope with their lives in a complex, unpredictable, and often intractable world.

Indeed, scholarship based on immersion in concrete socio-cultural settings has, from its inception, recognised magic as an existential resource people draw upon ‘to compensate for the uncertainties of chance and to forearm against bad luck’ and ‘create confidence, enhance hopes and anticipations’, as fieldwork pioneer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote describing vernacular propitiatory agricultural spells amongst Trobriand islanders (1935: 217, 246). Malinowski thereby suggested that magic becomes psychologically salient when humans are confronted with the problem of the unknown: a spell is a linguistic buffer against anxiety in the face of an ever-present threat of misfortune. Malinowski’s explanation of the psychological function of magic – as part of an explanatory approach called ‘functionalism’ – has spearheaded studies that focus on cognition, some of which will be discussed in the next section (Luhrmann 1989).

In a watershed study conducted in the 1930s, Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard investigated witchcraft and anti-witch vengeance magic among members of the Azande ethnic group of current day South Sudan. The concept of witchcraft, i.e. the capability to cause harm to others through mystical means either deliberately or unwittingly, was described by him as providing members of the Azande with ‘a natural philosophy by which the relationship between men and unfortunate events is explained’. In addition to offering practical means of dealing with misfortune, Azande witchcraft theory also pointed to a system of values regulating human conduct (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 18). Hostile or envious attitudes carried the risk of attracting ruinous witchcraft accusations. Furthermore, misdeeds could result in retaliatory magical attacks. Azande witchcraft theory thus inhibited socially disruptive behaviours, thereby strengthening the stability of what Evans-Pritchard saw as a social system. Interestingly, witchcraft accusations did not undermine social cohesion in this analysis. Instead, witchcraft could be seen to contribute to social stability.

The Azande, however, were perfectly aware of non-magical causal links. Witchcraft was not meant to explain all aspects of how a certain misfortune occurred. For example, when a building collapsed and killed somebody, any Azande could easily figure that its supporting structure had been weakened by termites. However, magic offered a framework to explain why something happened to a particular person and not someone else. Evans-Pritchard famously described this as the theory of the ‘second spear’. If a man is killed by an elephant, the elephant – the direct cause – is the first spear. Maleficium (causing evil through occult means) is the second spear. The elephant rammed into him, and not someone else, because he, not someone else, was bewitched.

This study revolutionised understandings of magic by framing it as a socially appropriate and culturally meaningful answer to the problem of a negative unknown, rather than a cognitively inadequate one. It emphasised that the Azande were not credulous, but people who prized inquisitiveness and rational thinking, and whose mental processes where not dissimilar from those of Evans-Pritchard’s fellow Europeans. Indeed, a major implication in Evans-Pritchard’s work is that it draws attention to the fact that all humans are likely to ask the question ‘why me?’ when visited by misfortune, with recourse to supernatural strategies. Azande witchcraft was not, after all, so exotic. This realization led to the emergence of sustained debates on the ‘rationality’ of magic that have been engaging anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers of various backgrounds and orientations (Winch 1970, Jarvie & Agassi 1970, Sperber 1982, Lewis 1994, Boyer 2002) ever since. These on-going debates have helped establish that multiple forms of rationality, apt to address complex moral, relational, and emotional problems alongside technical ones, are at play in all human societies. ‘Apparently irrational beliefs’ may appear much less outlandish once considered as parts – and expressions – of broader social and cultural logics.

In addition to recognising the social meaning of magic, anthropologists have also drawn attention to its therapeutic efficaciousness vis-à-vis experiences of the negative, especially illness and trauma (Lévi-Strauss 1974; Lindquist 2005; Favret-Saada 2015). Writing on folk magic in the deep rural south of Italy after World War II, Ernesto De Martino (2015) shed light on the experiences of anguish that characterised communities caught between impoverishment and rapid modernization – and especially the most vulnerable groups, labourers and women. He wrote, ‘[t]he root of … any form of magic, is the immense power of the negative throughout an individual’s lifetime, with its trail of traumas, checks, frustrations, and the corresponding restrictedness and fragility of the positive’ (2015: 87). In circumstances such as illness, exploitation, or uprooting, vulnerable individuals and communities faced a radical existential uncertainty that manifested itself in altered states of consciousness ranging from frenzy to catatonia, a condition called tarantism (literally a ‘tarantula’s bite’). De Martino investigated the vernacular magic-based emergency procedures, most prominently spells and ecstatic dances (Tarantella), activated in these cases. Folk magical techniques are, in De Martino’s view, procedures that facilitate recovery from crises, helping to overcome illness and existential dread. Magic enables people to makes sense of suffering, and offers a ‘first aid kit’ of materials, spells, exorcisms, and ritual specialists capable of reabsorbing the negative and thereby restoring a sufferer’s sense of self. De Martino mixes a phenomenological approach characterised by a focus on first-person experience, useful to grasp the intimate, personal dimension of magic, with a Marxian concern with the ‘structural’ dimension of the problem of suffering.

Related post-Marxist approaches have further illuminated magic’s relation with political-economic dynamics, such as the rapid development of capitalist markets disrupting pre-existing social arrangements and spreading anxieties across social bodies. Michael Taussig (1977), for example, has explored how in the 1960s, impoverished labourers in Latin American mines and sugar plantations employed the occult idiom of ‘the devil’ and the trope of the Faustian pact – the risk of losing one’s soul – to make sense of their work. These ideas were used to express intellectual and moral statements about the ‘hidden’ mechanisms of aggressive capitalism, such as uncompensated labour, the extraction of surplus value with the amassment of wealth into a few private hands, and commodity fetishism.

Indeed, devil talk turns out to be a surprisingly sophisticated tool through which unschooled peasants and miners could formulate theories and critical judgements about their political and economic reality of exploitation. Inspired by such studies, as well as Max Gluckmann’s notion of ‘magic of despair’, anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have further contributed to our understanding of the political economy of magic and witchcraft though their notion of ‘occult economy’ (1999), i.e. imaginative and material practices connected to the use of magical means to achieve utilitarian ends. Phenomena such as witchcraft ‘epidemics’, urban lore on zombie labour, or occult-related conspiracy theories are, the Comaroffs submit, ‘symptoms’ of occult economies ‘waxing behind the civil surfaces’ of development. Cultural tropes such as the undead slave and the blood-sucking warlock become urgently salient when entire populations are drafted into regimented, mindless, and exhausting forms of labour or confronted with exploitative, seemingly invincible corporations. The term ‘occult economies’ thus indicates people’s ‘recourse to the occult in situations of rapid social transformation, under historical conditions that yield an ambiguous mix of possibility and powerlessness, of desire and despair, of mass joblessness and hunger amidst the accumulation, by some, of great amounts of new wealth’ (1999: 283): it is easy to see why although the Comaroff’s main focus is Africa, their approach has been applied to multiple contexts across the global South.

Working on the invisible: the magus craft

Despite the importance of studies that explore magic as a phenomenon straddling the personal, the cosmological, and the socio-historical, some scholars have argued that insisting on its negative aspects does not tell us the entire story. The occult is more than a symptom of suffering, turmoil, and distress. Indeed, a well-established scholarly tradition focuses on magic as an occult technology – a ‘craft’ – used to bring about desired change in both self and world. These approaches should not be seen as antithetical to the ones discussed above, and indeed the two aspects often coexist within the same instance, as the change being pursued with magical means may aim to restore balance and wholeness in the face of affliction or illness. Bearing in mind that distinguishing between ‘negative’- and ‘craft’-oriented approaches to the study of magic is to some extent an analytical artifice, this section will foreground examples of the creative and positive dimension of magic.

The case of ceremonial magic and especially Western esotericism is particularly helpful to appreciate magic’s ‘craft’. While all types of occult practices and knowledges are learned with varying degrees of mastery, Western ceremonial magic, being based on written bodies of tradition and often socialised through relatively organised communities, offers an ideal case study of magic as a set of techniques for the transformation of both the self and the world.

Many consider the Renaissance the golden era of European ceremonial magic. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries CE, polymaths and thinkers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Isabella Cortese, or John Dee devoted considerable energy to the investigation of both the visible and the invisible dimensions of the universe. These figures, at once proto-scientists, theologians, and explorers of the occult, played an important role in defining the field of ‘erudite’ Western magic, drawing on repertoires as different as astrology, Christian theology and ethics, Greek mystery religion and philosophy, and Jewish mysticism (Yates 1964, 2001; Culianu 1984; Jütte 2015). The Renaissance model of the cosmos featured an ethereal dimension, called pneuma, existing between the physical and the spiritual realms. All persons and things, although materially separate from each other, were understood to be invisibly interconnected at the ‘pneumatic’ level, clinging to each other in secret correspondences that escaped the base senses. Anthropologists working on magic have identified comparable models of reality in a vast number of societies. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl has classically defined this model ‘participatory’ (1999); more recently, Philippe Descola has proposed the notion of ‘analogism’ to describe models of the world in which all things are thought to be invisibly interlinked (2013).

Importantly, accessing the etheric dimension required sophisticated training of one’s imaginative and affective faculties. This involved rigorous spiritual discipline, encyclopaedic knowledge, articulated ceremonials, and the craft of handling matter according to its occult, etheric properties. In what is known as ‘desire magic’, for instance, Renaissance magicians would use their ability to discern and activate ethereal interconnections between objects, including persons, to influence the latter’s psychic life.

Intriguingly, this has originated the hypothesis that Renaissance magic is best understood not as a prefiguration of natural science, but rather of advertising, propaganda, and ‘mass psychology’ – the use of affective means to induce inter-psychic dynamics (Culianu 1984: 88). Indeed, the fact that there seems to be a strong family resemblance between ‘magic’, understood as the ability to generate and control interpersonal affective states, and mass publicity phenomena – from charismatic leadership to the attractiveness of brands – has long been recognised by anthropologists (Mazzarella 2017).

The advent of Protestantism likely drove ceremonial magic and its etheric intermediate dimension underground, ushering in an order of the universe premised upon a stark separation between the terrestrial and divine realms (Orsi 2002). However, the extent to which this transformation was successful is disputable: as we have seen in the previous section, modernity remains far from magic-free. Anthropological research (Luhrmann 1989, Lewis 1996) has revealed that ceremonial magic did not altogether disappear; rather, it withdrew to the counter-culture, where today it is actively pursued by new generations of practitioners. In contemporary Euro-America, occult circles of various types, such as Wiccan and neopagan covens, consciously attempt to revive Renaissance magic. Yet unlike their predecessors, latter-day Western occultists inhabit a post-Enlightenment, Cartesian mainstream anxious to exorcise the unruly spectre of magic (Pels 2003) or at least push it out of sight – either into the disreputable category of the ‘primitive’ or into the sanitised realm of ‘art’ (Mazzarella 2017).

Under these unfavourable conditions, anthropologists are interested in exploring how people who are socialised in a secular, non-magical, scientific cosmos, actively learn to ‘believe’ in magic. In other words, through which activities ordinary, scientifically literate Westerners reorganise their cognitive processes in order to ‘see’ the invisible workings of magic, in the mundane flux of everyday life. Anthropologists have described the transformative processes whereby magicians accustom themselves to finding magic persuasive as a work of cognitive cultivation. They have proposed concepts such as ‘interpretive drift’ (Luhrmann 1989) and ‘magical consciousness’ (Greenwood 2013; 2014) to characterise changes in magicians’ thinking styles.

Although magical forces are unpredictable, practitioners attempt to become alert to, and manipulate, them through disciplines requiring assiduous training, such as meditation, visualization, and dream interpretation. Ritual is equally important to ‘forge magical selves’ (Pike 1996). Consider the following example reported by Tanja Luhrmann: in the 1980s a London-based sorcerer performs a ceremony to propitiate fortune in finding accommodation (even then a notoriously tall order in the city’s housing market). A few days after the ritual, ‘no house is forthcoming, but a packet of advertising leaflets on house maintenance arrives in the post. This is reported with pride and self-mockery – the rite worked, but not quite with the intended results’ (Luhrmann 1989: 130). Recognising and attributing importance to hidden connections does not imply naiveté on the sorcerer’s part. Rather, doing magic entails a degree of irony, and a valorization of the imagination. Fantasy is not dismissed as mere ‘pretend’, but valorised as a ‘serious play’, a realm in which things and events are meaningful and wondrous. As Greenwood put it, while participating in magical consciousness, the question of belief in the ‘real’ existence of spiritual forces and beings frequently becomes ‘irrelevant’ (2014: 203).

What often counts for practitioners is that magic offers an avenue to positively engage with the world, while at the same time cultivating cognitive skills and imaginative or emotional resources that otherwise would remain inert. Owing to its ability to generate desirable affective states, William Mazzarella (2017) surmises, magic makes reality more enjoyable and pleasureful – even the mundane encounter with a packet of leaflets is experienced with delight – and this has positive repercussions on a sorcerer’s self. Ethnographic studies suggest that not only the goals, but also the methods of magic are considered invigorating by practitioners. When it comes to ritual, for instance, ceremonial magic allows ample scope for creativity compared to mainstream religious organizations: ceremonies change over time and magical milieus borrow from multiple traditions such as mythology, folklore, academic literature, and pop culture. Far from being seen as problematic, eclecticism in ritual is often proudly declared, an emphasis on creativity and bricolage understood as empowering (Magliocco 1996: 99; 2006).

While in this section we have focused on Western magic, it should be stressed that this form of ‘erudite’ occult craft is by no means the only one that underwent a revival in recent years. Consider, for example, the Book of Changes or I Ching – a classic Chinese divination text dealing with techniques of prognostication based on casting lots. Straddling philosophy, metaphysics, and soothsaying, I Ching has been described by some modern scholars as evidence that imperial-era Chinese literati were immersed in a ‘magical worldview’ (Chun 2014: 30). While, historically, divination has not been pushed underground or stigmatised to the same extent as Renaissance magic, I Ching was nonetheless harshly critiqued as superstitious during socialist-led modernization. Recently, however, I Ching divination made a comeback amongst middle-class urbanites, with some seeing it as having ethical value in view of its association with ‘traditional’ Chinese virtues. Others appreciate it for complementing scientific knowledge without being incompatible with a rational picture of the world (Matthews 2016, 2017). This example shows that in non-Western settings, too, occult disciplines may come to be cherished as helpful tools for ‘positive’ self-development and satisfying engagements with the world.

Despite the mainstream’s uneasiness with occult crafts such as ceremonial magic and divination, their stubborn refusal to simply vanish into thin air points not only to the inherent contradictions of modernity, but also to the value that practitioners attach to such crafts. Regardless of what individual scholars may think of the truth of magic, anthropology seeks to understand what makes it valuable in the eyes of its practitioners.

Re-enchantment and the future of magic

Mainstream ideas of magic and sorcery are linked to the stereotype of the broomstick-riding witch that crystallised during the Euro-American witch-hunts (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). While witch trials are often described as ‘mediaeval’, it is now well established (Ginzburg 1991) that during the actual Middle Age, ecclesiastical authorities were dismissive of magical threats, as they were certain that only God had sovereignty over the unseen. It was only as Europe entered early modernity that wizards and sorceresses became a real problem and the witch-hunts started. Recent interpretations (Stephens 2002; Silverblatt 2004) suggest that the reasons for this lie in an attitude of scepticism and inquisitiveness as well as a novel bureaucratic rationality, which began to pervade early-modern European society. Institutions such as the Inquisition sought ways to methodically explore the supernatural and systematically inquire into an occult realm. The latter had already started receding from the consciousness of Western elites, and was increasingly associated with marginal populations such as women or racial minorities. Paradoxically, even though in retrospect the witch-hunt bloodsheds may strike us as irrational, they may have been driven by a dispassionate experimental and bureaucratic mindset, rather than impulsivity and credulity. The useful lesson that this historical case can offer us is that enchantment and disenchantment are often intertwined in unpredictable ways.

This is not any less true today. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influential European intellectuals like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber appeared convinced that a worldwide increase in literacy, better living conditions, and growing acquaintance with modern science, would make people gradually forget their consolatory but false beliefs in spirits, gods, witches, and magical forces (Casanova 1994). On the other hand, it has been noted that occult-related themes often associated with these thinkers’ works – such as fetishism, the uncanny, or charisma – haunt and complicate simple visions of progress (Pels 2003; Morris 2017). And indeed, empirical observation of recent social phenomena – such as the aforementioned global boom of occult economies or the worldwide success of Wicca and neopaganism – show that the world may not be bound to become a disenchanted and secular place after all. Contemporary scholars even propose to understand the modern as being ‘re-enchanted’ (Partridge 2005). In such a re-enchanted world, many practitioners take ‘occulture’ – an eclectic milieu mixing esotericism, pop culture, and urban mysticism – to be perfectly compatible with logical thinking and a sensible outlook on life. They also treat magic as a valuable resource to address existential predicaments, foster resilience in the face of the negative, expand their cognitive resources, work on their spiritual selves, explore fantasy and creativity, and generally improve their relationship with the world.

Though scholars agree that late modernity has witnessed a resurgence of organised religions as well, magic, with its experimental, do-it-yourself character, appears particularly well-aligned with the post-secular spirituality of the twenty-first century. ‘Church’ religions remain powerful actors, but modernity has limited their hegemonic claims over the spiritual, enabling new opportunities for mystical, alternative, individualised spiritualities to blossom. From this point of view, Durkheim’s judgment of magic as a quintessentially personal spiritual endeavour was not so mistaken, and indeed late-modern spirituality has been defined by an influential commentator as ‘post-Durkheimian’ (Taylor 2002). Social research has shown, however, that magic is perfectly capable of fostering communities, even if it is as yet impossible to predict how, and whether new, ebullient magical milieus – like neopaganism or Wicca – will consolidate. In any case, scholars have argued that magical spirituality should not be considered any less genuine just because religionists do not ‘sit in pews’ nor ‘believe in systematic theologies’ (Partridge 2005: 2). What seems beyond doubt is that magic is not set to vanish into thin air anytime soon.

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Note on contributor

Matteo Benussi (PhD, Cantab.) is a social anthropologist specialising in the study of religion, ethics, and post-secularism. He has conducted research on vernacular spirituality and ritual in Ukraine as well as on Islamic piety movements in Central Eurasia/Russia, and has lectured on the anthropology of religion at the University of Cambridge. For his current research project on memory and morality amongst Russia’s Muslims, he divides his time between the Universities of Berkeley and Venice (Ca’ Foscari), and his fieldwork site in the Volga-Ural region of Russia.

Dr Matteo Benussi, Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3484/D, Venice, Italy. matteo.benussi@unive.it

Anthropology museums and museum anthropology

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 09:19:16 +0000

Anita Herle

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16museums

Abstract:

This entry provides an overview of the history, politics and changing roles of anthropology museums. It explores the developing field of museum anthropology, which encompasses the work that anthropologists do within museums and the anthropological study of museums. Museum anthropology is situated within recent theoretical frameworks that underpin the study of objects and the relation between people and things. A central concern is the changing relationship between the museum, the people from whom museum collections originated, and diverse audiences. Recent work in museum anthropology has highlighted the far-reaching potential of the museum for interdisciplinary research, experimentation, and community engagement.

Introduction

Anthropology museums are often defined by their collections, which typically originate from non-Western and often small-scale communities from around the world. Their approach tends to prioritise objects’ cultural and historical contexts. Museum anthropology refers to the work that anthropologists do within museums as well as the anthropological study of museums as important institutions within modern society. It encompasses a broad range of academic and professional concerns. In both theory and practice, museum anthropology straddles overlapping interests in field research and public outreach, metropolitan centres and (post) colonial peripheries, diverse international communities and local audiences, material culture studies and artistic sensibilities.

From the late nineteenth century, museums with ethnographic collections, particularly those based in universities, were core institutions in the development of anthropology as a specialist discipline. While anthropological interests in museums and material culture studies waned from the 1920s, over the last few decades there has been a remarkable revitalization. On-going changes have been prompted by new approaches to museum theory and practice: the development of an anthropology of museums; a renewed academic concern with objects, materiality, and the relations between persons and things; the interests of ‘source’ communities; and a growing recognition of the potential of museums as central institutions in universities and civil society.

History of anthropology museums

Principles of collection, classification, and exhibition have long influenced the ways that knowledge of human beings is formed. From the sixteenth century, European explorers collected natural and ‘artificial’ curiosities as a means of trying to understand the diversity of the world and its peoples. Objects were also collected as trophies of far-flung adventures and conquests. Originally displayed in palaces and then arranged in gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosities, this juxtaposition of diverse materials was intended to provide insights into the godlike ordering of the natural and human world. Collecting was propelled by curiosity and a growing scientific interest in classification. The idea that Europeans had the right to collect and classify the world was also part of a nascent imperialism, which was often justified by ethnocentric claims of superiority. From the beginnings of public museums in the eighteenth century to the great age of museum collecting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnographic objects and their associated information were accumulated in museums where they were used to consolidate forms of knowledge that underpinned scientific, institutional and colonial authority. (Bennett 1995). The material culture of non-Western peoples was often classified and displayed in ways that positioned non-Western peoples as less-developed in a fictitious hierarchy which privileged Euro-Americans. Objects assembled and used for colonial agendas were transferred to museums, at times providing the foundation for the creation of new museums. The Museé National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie began as the 1931 Paris colonial exposition, which featured material from Africa and Oceania gathered to celebrate the achievements of French colonial regimes. These objects later comprised one of the founding collections for the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, when it opened in 2007 (Price 2007: 98-101).

Anthropology museums as distinct institutions or separate departments within larger civic and national museums were developed during the rapid expansion of public museums in the late nineteenth century. The boundaries and affiliations with what counted as ‘anthropology’, or more frequently ‘ethnography’, varied over time and in different places, resulting in the designation of certain types of people (historically defined as ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’) as ethnographic subjects. While the terms ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnography’ are often used interchangeably, the former implies a more analytical and often comparative approach, whereas the latter tends to be primarily descriptive. The positioning of ethnography within museums reveals changing and at times prejudicial attitudes. Ethnographic collections were often displayed alongside European archaeology, implying a similarity between people from the distant past and the contemporary lives of non-western peoples. At the British Museum, ethnography moved between the divisions of Pre-history, Medieval, and later Oriental Antiquities until a separate Ethnology department was established in 1946 (Wilson 2002: 279). Elsewhere, as is common in the United States, anthropology was included within natural history museums where systems of classification developed for the study of plants and animals were then applied to artefacts and sometimes people. In institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Native Americans and other indigenous groups were often presented in dioramas that firmly placed them within a fabricated ‘natural’ environment.

There are numerous overlapping and often contradictory historical contexts and trajectories through which objects entered museum collections and were put on public display. Artefacts were acquired from many different sources – explorers, traders, colonial officials, missionaries, artists, and anthropologists – and resulted from different kinds of engagements. While much material was collected in circumstances of great inequality, at times stolen or seized as part of colonial loot, many objects were readily exchanged, sold, or gifted. An attention to the particularities of objects – their materiality, originating contexts, and histories of collection, circulation, and interpretation – provides unique insights into larger issues of sociality, history, politics, art, and environment.

In addition to providing a wealth of information about the people from whom the collections originated, research on ethnographic collections provides a richer understanding of the development of the anthropological field and the history of the discipline. Much of the material in anthropology museums, particularly in university or national institutions, was systematically assembled during the course of intensive fieldwork and is greatly enhanced by corresponding photographs and detailed associated documentation. Intensive fieldwork typically involves a close engagement between anthropologists and local hosts and assistants, who are often actively involved in processes of documentation and collecting. Many of the objects in anthropology collections were selectively exchanged or given to researchers by their producers and owners. Some of the materials collected during fieldwork, such as models, commissioned pieces, tourist art, and photographs, were themselves produced by the interactions between fieldworkers and local assistants. Considering the processes of collecting often highlights indigenous agency in the co-production of anthropological knowledge. A salient example is the extensive collection of objects, photographs, drawings, audio recordings, film, and documents made by Alfred Haddon and the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait and now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge (Herle 2012). At the time of Haddon’s fieldwork, many Torres Strait Islander elders were concerned about the rapid changes in the region and the potential loss of customary knowledge as a result of the influence of traders, missionaries, and colonial officials. Islanders actively assisted Haddon and the Expedition members in the project to document aspects of their culture while still withholding information and objects that were deemed secret or private. Much of the knowledge that was recorded and the materials that were collected were attributed to named Islanders and their families. Today, these collections are seen as a crucial resource for Islander knowledge about the past and a source of inspiration for younger generations. The importance of the Haddon collection has been reinforced by recent political events, in which the materials collected by the Expedition have been used as crucial evidence in the success of recent land and sea claims. Over the last twenty years, museum staff have been involved in numerous collaborative projects with Islanders, both in Cambridge and in the Torres Strait (Herle 2003).

The interest in assembling large collections during field research was influenced by practices developed in the natural sciences. Comprehensive collections were initially understood as providing the basis for compiling comparative ethnographic information and developing anthropological theories of evolution and diffusion. Evolution aimed to explain how different kinds of living organisms (including people) developed and diversified, while diffusion focused on the dissemination of physical and cultural traits between different groups, typically through a comparative examination of material culture, language, and human physical characteristics. With the development of social anthropology in the 1920s, these paradigms were no longer considered valid or adequate. Academic interests in objects and museums declined, yet many leading social anthropologists, from Reginald Radcliffe Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski to Marilyn Strathern, made significant collections during their fieldwork which were used to illustrate the special characteristics of particular cultural groups. At MAA and elsewhere, the tradition of staff and graduate students assembling well-documented field-based collections has continued to the present day, supplemented by donations and commissions from artists and local producers. The historic collections retain wide-ranging value for researchers and cultural descendants, and alongside newer acquisitions are mediators in developing and maintaining productive relations between museums, producers, source communities, and diverse audiences.

As with contemporary social anthropology, today anthropology museums – frequently re-branded as institutions of ‘world cultures’ – research and present a wide variety of topics, incorporating Euro-American traditions, science, and contemporary art. While museums retain responsibility for the legacies of the collections under their care, today this material is not only understood as representative of the beliefs and practices of the people from whom it originated. Collections from around the world also provide insights into the complexity and nuances of local and global histories of encounter, exchange, empire, migration, and disciplinary formation.

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Artwork by Maori artist Lisa Reihana, he tautoko (2006)[1]

Theoretical and methodological frameworks

Innovative work by curators and museum anthropologists has been informed by and has in turn influenced underlying shifts in the discipline of anthropology as well as in museum theory and practice. The post-modern turn foregrounded the literary and political aspects of ethnographic writing and challenged the authority of anthropologists who, largely for their own intellectual purposes, were charged with documenting and analyzing the beliefs and practices of typically remote groups of people (Clifford & Marcus 1986). Anthropology museums were criticised for the colonial contexts of many of their collections as well as for ethno-centric presentations that implicitly asserted the authority of the museum over the peoples it represented (Clifford 1988; Price 1989; Karp & Levine 1991). While many of these critiques failed to recognise the collaborative nature of much fieldwork, they drew attention to the politics and poetics of museum display, and encouraged a more self-aware approach to the production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. The concurrent development of an anthropology of museums took the museum itself as an artefact of society and as a subject for sustained analysis, highlighting the challenges and renewed potential of museums for both anthropology and community engagement (Ames 1986). A new ‘museology’ emerged that was reflexive and primarily concerned with epistemology, the recognition that every aspect of museum work – collecting, documentation, research, and display – was both informed by and perpetuated particular ways of knowing (Vergo 1989). Different kinds of museums, from prominent Euro-American institutions of history, science, and art to indigenous cultural centres, have become field sites. Influential examples include Sharon MacDonald’s analysis of the complex political and institutional negotiations in the production of public culture ‘behind the scenes’ at the Science Museum in London (2002), James Clifford’s reflections on ethnographic museums as highly charged ‘contact zones’ for interactions between museum staff and members of the numerous ‘source’ communities from which museum collections originated (Clifford 1997) and Jennifer Shannon’s ethnography of the ‘Our Lives’ inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington (2014). While central museum activities continue to focus on the collection, preservation, interpretation, and display of valued objects, professional practice has been influenced by an increased self-awareness of the knowledge, assumptions, and political relations that inform routine museum work as well as by the recognition of numerous stake-holders in museum collections.

The contemporary field of museum anthropology draws on a number of theoretical premises that underpin the study of objects and assemblages. Tracking the social life of things – the distinct biographies of particular objects from their creation to their use and circulation – illuminates their personal and social contexts by revealing complex and changing meanings that are attached to objects as they move between people and places over time (Appadurai 1986). The development of relational models within anthropology shifted the focus away from objectified and fixed entities exclusively owned by individuals and institutions to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic links between people and things. A central premise is that entities (both people and objects) are given substance, meaning, and value through the relations in which they are enmeshed. Rather than simply being seen as static items of material culture, objects can be understood and analyzed as materializations of social relations, a dynamic process that involves the interweaving of human actions, beliefs, skills, and materials to create physical objects (Bell & Geismar 2009). A close analysis of processes such as basket weaving reveals the maker’s sensuous and skilled engagement with the inherent properties of the fibrous material used in its construction, challenging the common distinction between form and substance (Ingold 2000). Concerns with agency have moved attention away from what objects mean to the effects they have on people as part of a system of social relations involving various kinds of human intentions and activities (Gell 1998). Perspectives from actor-network-theory position artefacts, alongside technologies and people, as ‘actants’ or active entities in complex and intersecting networks (Latour 2005). Objects that are devised to guide human actions, such as a Berlin key that is designed to replace a human caretaker by making its user lock the door at night in order to retrieve their key from the lock, demonstrate the interpenetration of the sociological and technological in their creation and use (Latour 2000). Relational models have been productively applied to the museum itself, which can be analysed as a multi-layered and dynamic transcultural artefact composed of historic and on-going relations between objects, producers, source communities, collectors, anthropologists, donors, and museum staff (Gosden & Larson 2007). This type of analysis highlights the complexity and nuances of museum histories, and provides insights into the different types of agencies that resulted in the formation and interpretation of museum collections. Ultimately the aim is to activate the potential of the collections for research and community engagement.

Museum theory informs practice in the development of methodologies to identify, care for, and interpret collections. A close examination of the physical characteristics of objects and the materials and skills they embody has been enhanced by combining anthropological and historical expertise with new technologies for scientific investigation, such as radiocarbon dating, intra-red spectroscopy, and 3-D scanning. The methodological potency of the apparently routine activities involved in curation has been aptly described as ‘the museum as method’ (Thomas 2010), an approach which draws on open-ended discovery and multiple levels of contextualization and connection. Exhibition projects have developed a range of creative approaches, moving from the didactic to the inquisitive and dialogical, incorporating multiple perspectives and enabling others – outside specialists, artists, and community groups – to tell their own stories (Raymond & Salmon 2006).

Curating exhibitions is not simply an opportunity to display knowledge generated elsewhere through fieldwork, texts, and liaisons with various specialists. The very creation of exhibitions, involving processes of assembly and juxtaposition, can itself be part of a research process that generates new ideas and understandings (Herle 2013). For example, Malangan funerary effigies from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, are one of the most prevalent types of ethnographic objects found in museum collections. Originally intended to be destroyed after ritual use, they continue to be produced by specialist carvers to commemorate the recently deceased and represent salient aspects of their life, including their clan relations (Strathern 2001). A Malangan sculpture can be imagined as a second skin, a porous membrane that first contains and then releases the life force of the deceased after a period of mourning. Like any object, a Malangan sculpture can be presented in innumerable ways, each presentation providing the opportunity for different kinds of associations. Positioning a Malangan sculpture alongside a double helix model of DNA, for example, draws attention to the different ways that the particular characteristics of individuals are understood, represented, and passed on to descendants. In this sense the Malangan sculpture and the double helix can both be understood as formidable technologies for the transmission of knowledge, bodily substance, sociality, and property between generations.

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Malangan effigy alongside a model of the DNA double helix[2]

Museums and source communities

While museums are often criticised as sites of appropriation, their trajectory over the last few centuries can also be understood as part of a democratising process, with access to highly valued collections gradually opening up for broader publics. A shift of focus to actively nourishing productive relations between museums and various kinds of communities is part of a wider trend for museums to be more responsive to the varied concerns held by multiple stakeholders in their collections. Over the last few decades, the special and enduring interests of lineal or cultural descendants of the people from whom specific collections originated have been widely acknowledged. The term ‘source communities’ (Peers & Brown 2003) has gained parlance in the context of museums with ethnographic collections originating from self-identifying indigenous or ethnic groups, including people living on ancestral lands, diasporic populations, and immigrants. Its use highlights the overlapping histories embodied in collections and the responsibilities that museums have to the people they represent.

The developing relations between museums and source communities over the last three decades have ranged from indifference and confrontation to remarkable exchanges of knowledge, innovative collaborations, and multi-vocal exhibitions, which highlight different perspectives on the material on display. Many people retain strong emotional and political attachments to objects associated with their ancestors and linked to land and custom. These attachments are often amplified by specific collection, settler, and colonial histories. Objects such as Maori Tāonga (ancestral treasures) and Blackfoot shirts are seen by cultural descendants as living entities that embody the spirits of their ancestors (Peers & Brown 2016). Reconnecting with objects from the past can be a crucial aspect of knowledge sharing, cultural healing, revitalization, artistic inspiration, and political redress (Krmpotich & Peers 2013). Objects may also be mobilised as ambassadors, providing opportunities for source communities to assert their presence in museums around the world. Groups such as the Maori are routinely involved in the presentation of materials originating from their homelands, actively contributing to the interpretation of the material on display and conducting ceremonies to mark the opening of exhibitions.

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UK based Fijian dancers with nineteenth century club[3]

While acknowledging the heartfelt connections that many source community members have to objects in museum collections, there is not necessarily a direct or an inevitable relationship between contemporary peoples and material that originated from their homelands. Attention to object biographies reveals that in many instances objects cannot be linked to a singular point of production or use. Even when there is a clear historical connection, people may express disinterest or ambivalence towards the material culture of previous generations. Some may actively chose to distance themselves from things associated with a remote or pre-Christian past. Evangelical converts are likely to disdain or even fear objects originally associated with ancestor cults, divination, or sorcery. For example, many Christian Fijians believe that historic objects in the National Museum’s collections contain spirits that could adversely affect their well-being and they avoid being near certain objects and are reluctant to visit the Museum. Between 2003 and 2005, some Protestant churches encouraged their members to burn heirlooms, including clubs and tabua (presentation whale’s teeth), in order to protect themselves from danger and strengthen their faith. In response, the Fiji Museum advertised in local newspapers to encourage people to deposit their heirlooms in the storerooms of the Museum rather than destroy them. Museum staff have encountered the spiritual aspects of these objects on various levels. As devout Christians themselves, responsible for protecting the nation’s cultural heritage, many have sought help from church members to pray for their protection and the well-being of the Museum and its collections (Buadromo & Igglesden 2015).

The diverse relations between museums and source communities reflect the nuances of entangled histories, from encounter and colonialization to fieldwork and friendship. Museum visitors and researchers increasingly include members of source communities, with many travelling great distances to engage with objects associated with their past. Many museums now proactively share information about the material in their collections, provide direct and indirect access to objects and associated documentation, and collaborate with cultural experts in the development of research projects and exhibitions. It is now common practice for curators, academic researchers, and graduate students to visit communities around the world with details and photographs of related museum collections as a means of sharing and eliciting information as well as opening up relationships for future collaboration. New digital technologies also provide opportunities for sharing information about museum collections and developing online research environments. Numerous collaborative websites have been developed worldwide, some providing privileged access to members of source communities. Outstanding examples include the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) based at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which was co-developed in partnership with four Northwest Coast First Nations groups and includes catalogue information of Northwest Coast collections from museums in Canada, the United States and the UK (Rowley 2013), and the website ‘Returning Photos: Australian Aboriginal Photographs from European Collections’.

Providing access to collections may include using artefacts, both within and outside the museum, in culturally appropriate ways, at times challenging conventional conservation standards. In order to connect with the ancestral past and the spiritual presence of sacred objects, it may be important to touch fragile materials and use museum artefacts in rituals and performances. Acknowledging the authority of source community representatives may occasionally restrict access to others. Culturally sensitive material, including some secret-sacred objects or those containing human remains, may be deemed inappropriate for public display in galleries or on the Internet. Some objects may require special storage conditions or ritual protocols, or be the subject of claims for return. Despite the popular focus on repatriation, often fuelled by ill-informed media accounts, claims for return are relatively few and successful cases demonstrate that repatriation often strengthens relationships within communities and between communities and the museum, prompting new exchanges and collaborative projects. While mainstream museums still maintain positions of relative authority, the impact of source communities on traditional museum goals and practices has been far-reaching. In settler societies such as Australia and Canada, museums are key sites for the re-articulation of political relationships between indigenous communities and civil society, resulting in a growing indigenization of museums (Phillips 2011). Many Aboriginal and First Nations groups have also developed their own museums and cultural centres. For mainstream museums, developing productive relations with source communities and indigenous cultural centres opens up new areas for research and also affords privileged opportunities for curators and researchers to work within host communities, often providing access to people, places, and knowledge from which they would otherwise be excluded.

Museum anthropology, research and civil society

Changes in museology and museum anthropology have greatly strengthened the position and potential of museums for sustained research, experimentation and engagement with a wide variety of communities, variously defined. Museums are not simply about objects; rather, they prompt scholarship on complex relations among people and things. Innovative museum-based projects, exhibitions, and activities have become more inclusive and receptive, attracting increasing numbers of visitors and targeting diverse audiences. In addition to the long-standing role of museums in public education, new perceptions among policy makers and funding bodies increasingly expect museums to act as political agents by actively contributing to agendas for social inclusion, community regeneration, and responsive citizenship. While the museum’s potential for research, teaching, and engagement goes far beyond these direct and immediate political goals, museums have become much more audience-centred and have worked to develop new collaborative paradigms which acknowledge the special needs and interests of marginalised groups (Golding & Modest 2013).

Within academia, university museums are re-gaining central positions as institutions which bring together interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and the sciences. In addition to contributing to specialist research, museums provide a public face for the broader work of the university and contribute to government-sponsored impact agendas. Drawing on the wealth of their collections and the general ethos of the academy, university museums tend to provide more opportunities for experimentation, risk-taking and debate. Anthropology museums are centrally involved in these challenging and rewarding revitalization processes. Perspectives from museum anthropology, both within and outside the museum, offer a well-positioned critique of the wide-ranging implications of these transformations.

References

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Note on contributor

Anita Herle is Senior Curator for Anthropology and Reader in Museum Anthropology at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). She has regional interests in Torres Strait, Fiji, Vanuatu, and Canada. Her research topics include museum anthropology, the early history of British anthropology, art and aesthetic, and visual histories. She has developed and participated in numerous collaborative projects with descendants and communities represented by MAA's collections.

Dr Anita Herle, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ach13@cam.ac.uk

[1] The installation repositions a carved wooden ancestral figure, tetoteko (MAA 1939.70), originally attached to a house gable in the Bay of Islands, the homeland of the artist’s father. The carving was collected in the 1830’s by Karl von Hügel and donated by his son Anatole von Hügel, MAA’s founding Curator. The figure is wearing headphone plugged into a listening post and positioned in front of a video screen, which references landscape, Maori tāonga (ancestral treasures), and the artist’s movement between Aerotea New Zealand and Cambridge. The visuals, songs and stories animate the figure, highlighting its continued ancestral presence and ongoing connections to past and contemporary events.

[2] This picture shows a funerary effigy from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea (MAA 1890.177) alongside a replica of Crick and Watson’s model of the Double Helix from the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology Images from the introductory section of the exhibition ‘Assembling Bodies: Art Science and Imagination’ (MAA 2009 – 2010; MAA 1890.177). The juxtaposition stimulated discussions about the ways that the distinctive characteristics of individuals are represented, contained, and distributed.

[3] Picture taken on 6 June 2013 during the opening of the MAA exhibition ‘Chiefs & Governors: Art and Power in Fiji’. The dancer at the back holds a nineteenth century Fijian club from MAA’s collections borrowed for the event. There are over 10,000 Fijians living in the UK, many of whom are attached to the British army. Photograph courtesy of Gordon Brown.