Maa

between private and public spheres in Latin America,

Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Southeast
Asia, and various African countries. All these cases
are unique, but one cannot help noticing their family
resemblances.

the aim of this article is to trace the main shifts in the

way in which anthropologists have interpreted magic
over the years and to suggest reasons for these shifts. It
will do so by focusing on the work of key anthropological gures.

See also: Violence in Anthropology

1. The E
olutionists: Magic as a Pseudo-science

Bibliography
Blok A 1974 The Maa of a Sicilian Village, 18601960. A Study
of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
UK
Blok A 2001 The blood symbolism of maa. In: Blok A Honour
and Violence. Polity, Malden, MA
Brogan P 1998 The drug wars (Colombia). In: Brogan P World
Conicts. Bloomsbury, Lanham, MD
Catanzaro R 1988 Il Delitto Come Impresa. Storia Sociale Della
Maa. Liviana, Padova [1992 Men of Respect. A Social
History of the Sicilian Maa. Free Press, New York]
Duggan C 1989 Fascism and the Maa. Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT
Fentress J 2000 Rebels and Maosi. Death in a Sicilian Landscape.
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Hess H 1970 Maa. Zentrale Herrschaft und lokale Gegenmacht.
Mohr, Tu$ bingen [English translation1973 Maa and
Maosi. The Structure of Power. Lexington Books, Lexington,
MA]
Jamieson A 2000 The Antimaa. Italys Fight against Organized
Crime. St Martins Press, New York
PallottaG 1977 Dizionario Storico della Maa.Newton Compton,
Roma, Italy
Shawcross T, Young M 1987 Men of Honour. The Confessions of
Tommaso Buscetta. Collins, London
Sterling C 1990 Octopus. The Long Reach of the International
Sicilian Maa. Norton, New York
Stille A 1995 Excellent Cada
ers. The Maa and the Death of the
First Italian Republic. Pantheon, New York
Tilly C 1997 War making and state making as organized crime.
In: Tilly C. Roads from Past to Future. Rowman & Littleeld,
Lanham, MD
Tilly C 2000 Preface. In: Blok A La Maa di un Villaggio
Siciliano, 18601960. Comunita' , Torino
Varese F 1994 Maa in Russia. Archi
es europeT ennes de
sociologie 25: 22458

A. Blok

Magic, Anthropology of
Magic is a generic term that refers to dierent kinds of
beliefs and practices related to supernatural forces.
Among others, it encompasses such areas as witchcraft, sorcery, and shamanism (see Witchcraft and
Shamanism). In anthropology, the meaning of magic
and its dierent manifestations has been the object of
contention and debate for many decades. Accordingly,
9128

The nineteenth century was the time when anthropology became a recognized academic discipline. It
was also the time when the numerous achievements of
natural science had captured peoples imagination,
something partly responsible for the claim that Western societies represented the pinnacle of human endeavor. Faith in both natural science and Western
cultural superiority were to bear heavily on the way in
which magic was understood by nineteenth-century
anthropologists.
For Tylor (1874) the paradigmatic gure of Victorian anthropology, magic was one of the most
pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind; it was
also a fundamental characteristic of the lowest known
stages of civilization. These claims encapsulate two
basic assumptions with which Tylor and his contemporaries were working. First is that natives used
magic to achieve certain practical resultscontrol of
the natural elements, for example, or restoration of a
persons health; second, that all societies follow an
evolutionary path with xed stages of development
that represent higher degrees of social and cultural
complexity.
On the basis of these assumptions, magic emerged in
nineteenth-century anthropology as the negative side
of science. Indeed, for Tylor and his contemporaries, it
was nothing more than a pseudo-science, a system of
thought and practice that attempted to eect changes
in the empirical world but was unable to do so. Not
that magic as a system of thought was the product of
minds radically dierent from those that invented
science. Tylor was clearly against such racist charges.
The human mind, he argued, operates everywhere and
at all times with the same principles of thoughtby
associating ideas on the basis of analogy and cause
and eect. Yet, despite this fundamental sameness
this psychic unity of mankind, as Tylor would have
itthere was still ample room for errors. Primitive
people, being at the lowest stage of intellectual
development, a stage characterized by simplicity and
innocence, were particularly prone to making errors,
magic being a paradigmatic example.
To use Tylors well-known expression, primitive
people mistake ideal for a real connections, that is,
they treat events that are only accidentally related as if
they cause one another. For example, there is nothing
in reality that connects the crowing rooster with the
rising sun, but because the two events occur regularly
and sequentially, primitive people assume that the
former causes the latter. Magic is the practical ap-

Magic, Anthropology of
plication of such misconceptions: the rooster is made
to crow so that the sun will rise.
The work of Tylor on magic was further elaborated
by Sir James Frazer. To begin with, Frazer
(1922\1950) made a distinction between sympathetic
and contagious magic. The former was the result of
associating ideas on the basis of similarity, the latter
on the basis of proximity in space or time. Frazer also
took Tylors evolutionism to its logical extreme. As
Tambiah (1990) points out, he arranged magic,
religion and science in an evolutionary lineal scheme,
with the unsupportable suggestion that magic preceded religion in time, and with the inescapable
inference that science must inevitably dissolve religion in our time.

2. Twentieth-century Paradigms
2.1 Magic as a Source of Hope and Optimism
By his own admission, Branislaw Malinowski was
drawn to anthropology after having read Frazers
work. Yet even though inspired by Frazer, Malinowski
was already beginning to question the wisdom of
Victorian evolutionism. Moreover, having spent the
years of World War I on the Trobriand Islands of the
south west Pacic, he developed a dierence sense of
the place of magic in native life. Indeed, one of
Malinowskis aims was to show that belief in magic
was not equivalent to irrationalism and mysticism.
This marks a fundamental shift in Western perceptions
of magic and native life in general and constitutes the
basis for all subsequent anthropological studies of
magico-religious systems. In more general terms, it
marks a shift, at this point still quite subtle, toward a
less ethnocentric view of the non-Western world.
In his extended essay Magic, Science and Religion,
Malinowski (1928\1954) sets out to show that much of
what has been written about magic was speculative
and had little basis in reality. To this eect, he engages
both Tylor and the French philosopher-turnedanthropologist Le! vy-Bruhl. The former, Malinowski
argues, depicts natives as highly contemplative and
rational, much like intellectuals; the latter as being
hopelessly and completely immersed in a mystical
frame of mind (1928\1954). Malinowski found the
natives of the Trobriand Islands to be practical
people concerned with such matters as shing,
gardening, building canoes, and tribal festivities. This
is not to say that they did not also practice magic; but
they did so only when their stock of practical knowledge and experience ran out.
In a celebrated example, Malinowski shows that
when shing in the lagoon, natives do not resort to
magical rites; they rely instead on their knowledge and
skill. In open-sea shing, however, which is full of
danger and uncertainty, there is an extensive magical
ritual to secure safety and good results (1928\1954).

This and other similar examples, Malinowski argues,

show that natives turn to magic only in situations of
emotional stress. As such, magic fullls an important
psychological function; it ritualizes optimism and
enhances human condence and hope.
2.2 E
ans-Pritchard: The Transition to Symbolism
Even though highly suspicious of evolutionism,
Malinowski was never able to transcend the other
tenet of Victorian anthropology, namely, that the
primary aim of magic was the attainment of practical
results. Nor by extension was he able to go beyond the
notion that, ultimately, magic was a pseudo-science.
The shift from this utilitarian perception to one that
views magic as a meaningful and meaning-generating
phenomenon came with Evans-Pritchard (1937\1976)
in his classic study of Zande witchcraft. EvansPritchard was working within the broad sociological
problematic developed by Emile Durkheim, which
emphasized social stability and treated religion as
social institution that contributed to it. In his study of
Zande witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard extended the argument to include magical beliefs and practices. At the
same time, Evans-Pritchard continued the debate with
Le! vy-Bruhl that Malinowski began. It is in this
confrontation with the French philosopher that he
lays the ground for the paradigm that was to dominate
subsequent anthropological studies of magicoreligious systems and is variously known as the
symbolic, interpretive, or cultural approach.
Evans-Pritchard, then, analyzes Zande witchcraft
along two axes. The rst explores how witchcraft
contributes to the cohesion of Zande societyits
social function. The other examines when and why the
Zande have recourse to itits cultural function.
Witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard points out, embraces a
system of values that regulate Zande behavior. No one
knows for certain who might be a witch, but spiteful,
moody, ill-tempered, bad-mannered, or greedy individuals are prime suspects. Belief in witchcraft acts
in a way that encourages more positive dispositions
and hence curbs anti-social behavior. To begin with, if
the Zande suspect that their neighbors are witches,
they are careful not to oend them from fear of being
bewitched. Those Zande who are spiteful or jealous,
on the other hand, will try to curb their spitefulness.
Those of whom they are spiteful may themselves be
witches and seek to injure them in return for their
spitefulness. In this way, Evans-Pritchard argues,
friction and conict and kept in check and the cohesion
of Zande society maintained.
Yet social stability is hardly what the Zande have in
mind when they turn to witchcraft. Their purpose,
according to Evans-Pritchard, is to explain misfortune, to make events such as the accidental injury of a
relative, sickness, even death itself socially meaningful
and relevant. Explanations of misfortune through
witchcraft set in motion checks and balances that
9129

Magic, Anthropology of
reproduce social cohesion, but this is only the byproduct of a system whose rationale lies elsewhere.
Witchcraft is rst and foremost an idiom (or a symbol,
as we would say today), the language that the Zande
use to speak about misfortune so that misfortune is
brought into the social domain and can be socially
dealt with. Evans-Pritchard does not attempt to
explain why the Zande feel the need to turn misfortune
into a social issue. He is concerned primarily with
explaining that witchcraft, which eects this transformation, has nothing to do with mysticism or, at any
rate, does not at all mean that primitive people are
unable to perceive how the empirical world operates.
Such was the accusation leveled by Le! vy-Bruhl whom
Evans-Pritchard takes to task.
Witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard points out, does not
try to explain how things happen, but rather why they
happen. For example, it does not try to explain how
old granaries collapse, but rather why they collapse at
a certain time and injure certain people. The Zande are
well aware that termites eat away the foundations of
granaries and that wood decays; they know that it is
because of these natural causes that old granaries
collapse. What they try to explain through witchcraft
accusations is the timing of the event. Why should a
particular granary collapse at the particular moment
when these particular people were sitting beneath it?
Through the years it might have collapsed, so why
should it fall when certain people sought its kindly
shelter? (1937\1976). When the Zande say that it is
witchcraft that caused the granary to collapse, then, it
is not because they see a witch push it over; they see
termites and rotten wood.
Witchcraft oers an explanation over and above
natural causation, one that links the collapse of the
granary with the fact that certain people were at that
point in time sitting underneath it. We, EvansPritchard points out, do not have an explanation for
the intersection of the two events; we say that they
have independent causes and that their intersection is
an accident. The Zande provide the missing link; they
say that it is witchcraft.

2.3 Magic as a Symbolic Phenomenon

After Evans-Pritchards ground-breaking book, the
notion that magic is a symbolic phenomenon, something that reects underlying social and cultural
realities rather than an irrational, mystical practice
becomes the central argument in most anthropological
studies. In what follows, I discuss several well-known
works, beginning with Douglass (1966) famous analysis of pollution and taboo (see Taboo).
In this book, Douglas deals with the accusation that
primitive people do not make a distinction between
the holy and the uncleanan accusation whose
implication is that primitive societies have a magical
9130

orientation toward the physical world; that people in

these societies believe that nature is inhabited by
unpredictable and often malevolent supernatural
forces; and that contact with unclean things, such as
menstrual blood or corpses, brings one perilously
close to these forces.
Douglass response to this accusation is that notions
of pollution and taboo are symbolic expressions of
conceptual and social disorder, the idiom through
which people come to terms with unclassiable things
and intractable social contradictions. Dirt, Douglas
points out, is matter out of place, the inevitable
outcome of every attempt to classify things and
establish a conceptual grip on the world. It is the result
of a universal human predicament, the need to
transform chaos into a cosmos, that is, a meaningful
world. Those things that do not t our conceptual
schemes and hence contradict and undermine them are
everywhere designated as dirt; they become dangerous
and are either suppressed or avoided. The threat is real
enough, since unclassiable things undermine our
ability to construct and lead meaningful lives. At the
level of culture, this danger is expressed through beliefs
in pollution and delement and concomitant rules of
avoidance.
Contradictions in conceptual schemes are often
reproduced in contradictions at the social level. Take,
for example, the notion of sexual pollution and the
related idea that it is dangerous for men to come into
contact with menstrual blood. This notion, Douglas
points out, is widespread among New Guinea tribes,
but it is particularly pronounced among the Mae
Enga. In this tribe men believe that sexual intercourse
weakens male strength so that even within marriage it
is reduced to the minimum necessary for procreation.
This belief may appear as little more than an irrational
fear, but as Douglas explains, the taboo reects
conicts embedded in Enga society. The latter consists
of exogamous clans that compete ercely for prestige
and power and are hostile to another. The exogamous
clan system, however, forces men to marry outside
their own clan, that is, women who come from the
enemys camp. In their pollution beliefs and practices
of sexual avoidance, then, the Enga are trying to
overcome symbolically a fundamental social contradictionbuilding marriage and family on enmity.
Less than a decade after Douglass book, Geertz
(1973) wrote a seminal essay that was to consolidate
the symbolic approach in the study of magico-religious
systems. Geertzs essay is entitled Religion and as a
Cultural System but the reference to religion should
be understood to mean any metaphysical system,
including magic. Indeed, Geertzs essay is inspired by,
and draws on Evans-Pritchards discussion of Zande
witchcraft. It also draws on Max Webers religious
sociology, but unlike the latter who was working
within an evolutionary paradigm and treated magic as
historically prior to religion, Geertz does not make a
distinction between the two.

Magnetoencephalography
Geertzs argument is that religion is a cultural
system that helps people maintain faith in the ultimate meaningfulness of life and the world. It does so
by accounting for all those anomalies in human
experienceparadoxes, puzzles, ambiguitiesthat
threaten to undermine the general order of existence.
There are three points, according to Geertz, where
chaos, a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability threatens to enter into
the world: at the limits of peoples ability to explain, to
endure suering, and to make sound moral judgements. Coming up against these limits time and again,
Geertz (1973) points out, sets ordinary human experience in a permanent context of metaphysical
concern and raises the dim, back-of-the-mind suspicions that one may be adrift in an absurd world. It
is at such dicult moments that religion intervenes
and arms the ultimate meaningfulness of the world.
It does so not by denying that there is ignorance,
suering, and injustice in the world, but rather by
denying that such things are intrinsic to realityan
inescapable fact of the world.
The last work to be examined is Taussigs (1980)
book The De
il and Commodity Fetishism in South
America. This is an interesting and inuential book.
Although situated within the Marxist problematic,
which has been historically unreceptive to the signicance of magico-religious systems, the book decisively
adopts a symbolic approach. It interprets native beliefs
in the devil as a means of making sense of, and
resisting symbolically an alien way of life imposed on
them from the outside. The book has inspired several
anthropologists working in other parts of the world
who developed arguments along similar lines.
In rural Colombia, Taussig points out, native people
working on sugarcane plantation often enter into a
secret contract with the devil. In return for their soul,
the devil helps them work faster, increase their
production, and hence their wages. Such contracts,
however, are said to have several negative consequences. To begin with, it is said that there is no
point in investing the extra money in capital goods,
such as livestock or land. The money earned with the
help of the devil is believed to be inherently barren: the
animals will die and the land will become sterile.
Moreover, those who enter into such contracts are
said to die young and in pain. In short, even though
people better their conditions in the short run, the
long-term eects of dealing with the devil are destructive. How are these beliefs and practices to be
interpreted?
The devil, Taussig argues, signies the way in which
local people are trying to come to terms with the
capitalist relations of production imposed on them. It
also expresses their evaluation of, and resistance to the
new way of life. Having been uprooted from their
ancestral homes, the local peasants are now forced
into wage labor. Their traditional way of life based on
reciprocity and cooperation has been displaced by the

capitalist mode of production, exploitation by the

landowners, and competition among themselves. It
may be the case that they are now nancially better o
than before, but as the devil stories suggest the quality
of their lives has drastically decreased. The devil is an
apt symbol for expressing the new order of things.
See also: Collective Beliefs: Sociological Explanation;
Collective Memory, Anthropology of; Folklore;
Mysticism; Myth in Religion; Myths and Symbols:
Organizational; Tradition, Anthropology of

Bibliography
Douglas M 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts
of Pollution and Taboo. Praeger, New York
Evans-Pritchard E E 1937\1976 Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic
Among the Azande. Clarendon, Oxford, UK
Frazer J 1922\1950 The Golden Bough. Macmillan, New York
Geertz C 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, New
York
Malinowski B 1928\1954 Magic, Science and Religion and Other
Essays. Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, NY
Tambiah S J 1990 Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of
Rationality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Taussig M 1980 The De
il and Commodity Fetishism in South
America. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel
Hill, NC
Tylor E B 1874 Primiti
e Culture. Holt, New York, Vol. I

V. Argyrou
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.

Magnetoencephalography
Magnetoencephalography or MEG refers to the recording of the rapidly changing magnetic eld produced by cerebral activity. From these recordings, one
can determine where and when the brain activity in
question takes place. MEG has provided important
information about sensory as well as higher-level
information processing in the brain. MEG is also
nding its way to the hospital, to aid in diagnosis and
to inform the brain surgeon about the precise location
of the functional cortical areas, so that causing damage
to important cortical areas can be avoided.
With its total noninvasiveness, simple and quick
procedures, good accuracy in locating sources, and
millisecond-scale time resolution, MEG is a powerful
tool for revealing information-processing sequences
and their pathologies of the human brain.

1. Background
The rst MEG experiment was performed by David
Cohen (1968), who recorded the human alpha rhythm
using an induction coil with a million turns of copper
9131

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7