Why Modern People Still Practice Magic

Claire Brooks

If you are short on rent this month and sell your bicycle for cash, that is basic empirical cause and effect. But if you place a money plant facing south in your living room using Feng Shui, what are you actually doing?

Oliver Hart

You are attempting to bend the universe to pay your landlord.

Claire Brooks

Exactly. In the anthropology of magic, witchcraft, and religion, that distinction is central. Every single human culture engages with these concepts, showing our shared human nature, yet every culture expresses them uniquely.

Oliver Hart

Before diving into those supernatural concepts, we have to establish what anthropology actually is. Anthropology is the holistic study of humanity across four major subfields: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, anthropological archaeology, and cultural anthropology.

Claire Brooks

While our main focus is cultural anthropology, anthropologists use a holistic perspective because no part of a culture exists in isolation. Everything connects, including religion, economics, family structures, gender, health, and law.

Oliver Hart

Consider how medical anthropologists tackled the West African Ebola epidemic. Looking at genetics alone was not enough. Anthropologists examined religious burial rituals, where family members physically hold deceased loved ones, and used that holistic insight to design effective health interventions.

Claire Brooks

Or look at fraternal polyandry in rural Tibet, where a woman marries all the brothers in a family. Holistically, this links directly to land preservation, ensuring family farms stay intact rather than being divided into unsustainable pieces.

Oliver Hart

This interconnected approach brings us to Kimberle Crenshaw's framework of intersectionality. Identity components like race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to create unique lived experiences and distinct forms of marginalization, such as the specific issues Black women face in society.

Claire Brooks

All these elements shape our worldview, our fundamental understanding of good, bad, justice, and social roles. We learn our worldview through enculturation, guided by family, media, peers, and institutions that teach us what to value as beautiful or successful.

Oliver Hart

In cultural anthropology, culture is essentially how humans create meaning in their lives, known as semiotics. That brings us to how we study scientifically unverifiable concepts like the supernatural.

Claire Brooks

Religion is defined as a system of beliefs, symbols, and practices involving the supernatural that shapes a community's reality. It is faith based and cannot be proven by science, but its impact on people's lives makes it profoundly real.

Oliver Hart

Magic, by contrast, is an individual effort to alter circumstances through supernatural means. As scholars like Barbara Frankle and David Graeber note, magic is transactional with a definite beginning and end, whether praying for a specific exam score or placing a plant for financial luck.

Claire Brooks

And witchcraft carries two definitions in anthropology: first, self identified spiritual communities who hold reverence for natural forces, and second, an accusation historically used by societies to punish nonconformity.

Oliver Hart

To understand these concepts, anthropology had to evolve away from its early history. During European expansion from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, early anthropology was entangled with colonialism, the external control of people and land.

Claire Brooks

Those early scholars were armchair anthropologists who relied on third party accounts from traders and missionaries rather than direct experience. They practiced ethnocentrism, judging other cultures by European standards and constructing false cultural hierarchies.

Oliver Hart

Franz Boas challenged this by developing cultural relativism, the rule that all cultural beliefs and practices must be understood on their own internal logic rather than judged from the outside.

Claire Brooks

Feminist anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod demonstrated this in her work Do Muslim Women Need Saving. While Western liberation narratives often focus on revealing the body, covering through a veil or burqa can represent liberation from the male gaze within another cultural logic. Both seek empowerment within their specific context.

Oliver Hart

Fieldwork was transformed in 1914 by Bronislaw Malinowski. Stranded in the Trobriand Islands during World War One, he pioneered participant observation. He established four steps: stay for an extended period, learn the local language, explore mundane imponderabilia, and get off the veranda to actively participate.

Claire Brooks

This methodology produces ethnographies, written descriptions of a culture. Anthropologists like Jason De Leon use material objects in the Sonoran Desert, such as migrant belongings, to analyze how political power, national borders, and migration impact human lives.

Oliver Hart

When conducting ethnography, scholars balance two analytical lenses introduced by Kenneth Pike: emic and etic perspectives.

Claire Brooks

The emic perspective is the insider view, understanding how cultural members see their own world. The etic perspective is the outsider view, observing objective functions without insider preconceptions. Take breakfast: emic is the cultural tradition of the most important meal of the day, while etic measures caloric intake and social coordination.

Oliver Hart

Ultimately, studying anthropology requires critical thinking. Since education is part of enculturation, academic theories are well researched arguments rather than absolute objective facts. We must evaluate the speaker, scrutinize evidence, and examine our own experiences to make up our own minds.