Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (review)

Magic and its relation to Western modernity has been a flourishing subject of late. Among those interested in this topic have been anthropologists studying indigenous cultures in Africa, South Asia, and the Americas, and also, in the case of the Americas, forcibly imported non-European (i.e., slave) cultures. Scholarly focus has fallen on the interaction of such cultures with Western modernity in a colonial and postcolonial context. Also exploring this topic have been historians of modern Europe, who have begun to articulate how the explosion of interest in spiritualism and occultism among middle- class Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of complex reactions to modernity. This volume serves as a fine introduction to work in the former area; it might have benefited (if one may put one’s quibbles about a book at the beginning of a review rather than in their more traditional place at the end) from more inclusion of the latter area as well.

Peter Pels clearly articulates the purpose of the volume in his introduction—to demonstrate that magic not only endures in the modern era, but that modernity actually produces its own kinds of magic. While many scholars have recognized the existence of magic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century societies, such observations have rarely been “accompanied by theoretical statements that reflected on the ways in which magic belongs to modernity” (p. 3; the emphasis is Pels’s). Pels is an anthropologist, and he is writing primarily about anthropological scholarship here. He notes that early European anthropology cemented the view that magic was inherently primitive and premodern. Such thinking about native practices, and about native cultures in general, was an important aspect of European colonialism, but Pels also comments on the fact that the thinkers who developed such theories came from a European culture that was, in certain quarters, fascinated with the romantic “reenchantment” of the world (p. 9). Magic was a constant companion of modernity, a necessary other against which modern society could define itself, but also a ghost perpetually haunting modern thought.

While Pels’s observations might just as well have introduced a volume of essays that focused on Europe itself, eight of the eleven essays collected here deal exclusively with non-Western societies. These all engage effectively with the central issue of the volume, demonstrating how in all spheres of European colonialism, magical beliefs and practices did not simply survive into the modern era, but developed and grew in direct reaction to the colonial imposition of modernity. The relationship between magic and the forces of modernity can be relatively straightforward or profoundly complex. Alcinda Honwana, for example, describes how traditional beliefs in protective magic and spirit possession have been deployed in the context of postcolonial independence and then the ensuing rebel wars in Mozambique. Rosalind Shaw describes how Western journalists, covering the rebel war in Sierra Leone, often presented the use of magical techniques in modern warfare as evidence of Africa’s continued (and implied inherent) primitivism. She argues, however, that not only did the use of such techniques develop in the course of the war, but their supposedly primordial roots were largely a myth. The use of protective magic had in fact mainly developed in the context of West Africa’s first encounter with Europeans and the subsequent destabilizations brought about by the slave trade and then European-driven trade in natural resources. Such practices were, therefore, never purely indigenous but always implicated in the interaction between Africa and the West.

The use of magic as an indicator of non-European primitivism can become enormously convoluted, as Laurent Dubois emphasizes in his essay on the Haitian slave revolution on 1791. This event could be regarded as entirely modern and fully equivalent to France’s own revolution. Yet European historians (who, of course, wrote the major accounts of the Haitian revolution) emphasized the supposed origin of the initial uprising in slave attendance at the religio-magical...