Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy by Graham M. Jones (review)

Following up on his 2011 ethnography Trade of the Tricks, for Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy Graham Jones returns to one of the trickier questions about modern magic that arose during fieldwork. His interlocutors were contemporary Parisian illusionists, or magicos, the self-avowed heirs to that city's iconic lineage of technically ingenious illusionistes—revered as skilled showmen, not shamans. Then, why did they repeatedly reference classic anthropological theories of magic when reflecting on the historical roots of their trade, even furnishing Jones with a bibliography of recommended works by the likes of Frazer, Mauss, Durkheim, and Lévi-Strauss? Jones confides that he'd stayed away from the traditional anthropology of magic and its problematic of belief in Trade of the Tricks, and for good reason—we don't believe magic tricks; we enjoy them. As the title Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy indicates, Jones's second book has come to pay the piper, historicizing and theorizing the comparative reasoning implied by the magico's analogy, and finally answering for what they were telling him, presently, "about the cultural constitution of their expressive practice and its vexed association with European modernity" (141).

Magic's Reason returns to the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century "golden age of modern magic," when the "modern"—of both modern magic and the modern discipline of anthropology—defined itself by reflexively provoking comparisons with what Jones follows Simon During in calling "dangerous doubles" (11).¹ By self-fashioning their normatively "disenchanted" modern professions in opposition to dangerously "enchanted," occult counterparts, stage magicians and anthropologists of magic appear surprisingly similar, as if doubles themselves. Organized around the twinned legacies of the French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), the veritable "Father of Modern Magic," and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), the controversial "father of cultural anthropology," Jones's comparative "ethnohistorical" study of the discipline of anthropology and the show business of modern entertainment magic analyzes how early figures in both professions legitimized their expertise in opposition to the enchanted superstitions and "primitive" beliefs that they claimed to demystify for domestic, bourgeois audiences.

The first four chapters of Magic's Reason outline the figuration of primitive ritual magic as a cultural foil to modern entertainment magic by tracing the trope of trickery as a leitmotif for bourgeois rationality in French colonial literature, in which the normative, commonsense identification of magic tricks as, essentially, tricks, crucially aligned stage magic with enactments of Western modernity. A salient convention for cultural comparisons, the analogue of modern magic undergirded intellectualist anthropological theories of primitive magic as false causal belief. Jones pursues this problematic formulation from cultural anthropology's disciplinary foundations through subsequent twentieth-century debates about comparative belief systems in Chapters 5 and 6. Applying a method Jones calls "ethnohistorical reflexivity," the final chapter comes full circle by using the preceding historiography of "magic's" bifurcation between modern showbusiness and nonmodern belief to reconsider and reinterpret contemporary French illusionists' own use of approbative and derisive comparisons with primitive magic.

The elegant, and ambitious, analytical arc of Magic's Reason comprises Jones's contribution to a self-reflective tradition of Europeanist works that incorporate European anthropology itself as data (citing Strathern's After Nature (1992) and Herzfeld's Anthropology though the Looking-Glass (1989) as influential exemplars [142]). Chapters 1 and 2 focus on French colonial dispatches from Algeria that propose analogies between European secular and African religious magic in order to assert a more fundamental disanalogy between disenchanted modern French incredulity and enchanted "primitive" Algerian credulity—opposing normative to potentially deviant interpretations of magic performance. Beginning with Robert-Houdin's factually unreliable but massively influential memoir A Conjuror's Confessions (1859), Jones revisits an episode recounting his 1856 engagement by the French Army in Algeria to discredit the 'Isawa's...