In Dangerous Doubles Graham Jones tells the entwined histories of anthropology and magic. As he shows, entertainment magic was a crucial part of defining modernity as a worldview in which the appropriate experience of anything remotely ?magical" lies within a circumscribed arena of suspended disbelief. A close association of entertainment magic with Enlightenment values thus made it a powerful resource for signifying modernity's thresholds. In what Jones describes as a representational feedback loop, early colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western stage magic and ritual ?magic," calling native ritual performers ?tricksters" who were hoodwinking a gullible public into thinking their miracles were performed by a divine hand. This analogy had a powerful impact on how supernatural events were conceptualized in the Victorian age and were then formalized in subsequent disciplinary literature. As Jones shows, despite welcome and largely salutary efforts at destabilizing anthropology's conception of ?magic" during the second half of the twentieth century, some obscuring residue from the initial analogy remains. By tracing the reasoning that led to the comparison in the first place, he hopes to show how dangerous cross-cultural analogies can be. But, far from calling for anthropologists to abandon ?magic" as a category or to eschew analogy altogether, Jones wishes to simply clear the path toward sharper thinking about magic?the anthropological subject par excellence. This is a clear-eyed history of the discipline, a cautionary tale about cross-cultural comparison, and a lively story about how the ideas that we posit about the world shape the very thing they seek to describe.
Industry Reviews
"Magic's Reason introduces a fresh element into the well-developed comparativist discourse of the anthropology of magic...and...challenges...the existing boundaries of one of anthropology's most enduring conceptual central places... Jones has contributed to the anthropology of magic proper; but he has also created an opening relating magic to performance, public education, inchoate delight, and a host of other productive connections."-- "Rena Lederman, Princeton University"
"Magic's Reason is based on a brilliant apercu--why shouldn't anthropology come to terms with today's secular magic?. . . anthropology can make claims to pursue globalized truths not just because its practices can be learned through training, but because universities and their disciplines are now, as a matter of fact, global, the world being divided into nation-states, almost all of which contain universities, and many of these train and hire ethnographers. Magic and reason have nothing to do with it. But, of course, as Jones's excellent study also shows, such an understanding of anthropology. . . would not mean that the discipline could fully take account of itself and its conditions of emergence. That would still require multifaceted and conceptually subtle ethnohistories of reason's complex relation to magic, of the kind presented so well here."-- "Simon During, Public Books"
"Magic's Reason is thoughtful, beautifully written, intellectually sweeping, and theoretically ambitious. The quite persuasive story Jones tells is that primitive magic becomes compelling because those who study it assert a view of the world central to a western vision of reality: that the material world is what is real, and the world of the supernatural, of the immaterial, and even of thought itself, is not real in the same way. This is a peculiar and culturally specific view in the context of world history, and the perennial fascination of magic is that it both challenges this worldview and is embedded in it."-- "Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University"
"Acute in his wide and deep reading of earlier as well as contemporary anthropological theories of magic, Jones moves from showman to shaman and back again. We get to see the Algerian Isawi hadra, trance-induced shamanic feats of superhuman powers, through the eyes of Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, the mid-nineteenth century father of French magic. This sets the ethnographic tableau against which Magic's Reason relates the emergence of anthropology to such colonial knowledge and to anxieties of the would-be disenchanted West about whether and how to distinguish by degrees 'primitive' versus 'modern' mentalities in the face of the persisting sociocultural ubiquity of occult beliefs and practices and of illusionist entertainment as well as ritual performativity."-- "Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago"
"With Magic's Reason, Jones seeks to show how comparison within the realm of magic assisted in the construction of modernity. His line of inquiry may well be worth pursuing in the late 20th and early 21st century--guided by the curiosity for how magical assemblages remain entangled in human grappling with drawing distinctions or dividing lines between own and other, belief and superstition, the effectiveness of the paranormal and commodified hoax. Jones has offered a highly stimulating if complex read that opens further possibilities for the critical engagement with anthropological theorizing in its continuous intersection with other social actors and movements."-- "Anthropological Quarterly"
