The exploration of events and situations has long been at the focus of anthropological ethnographic description. In common with many other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, this has been so in two main and frequently combined senses: (1) as exemplifications or illustrations, usually in the form of case studies, of more general ethnographic descriptive or theoretical assertions, or (2) as happenings or occasions, slices of life, that establish a conundrum or problematic that the presentation of an ethnography and its analysis will solve or otherwise explain. Most anthropological ethnographies offer examples or variations of the first. The second is relatively common, especially among historians, but perhaps the work of Clifford Geertz is the most celebrated example in anthropology. An outstanding instance is Geertz's (1980) study Negara, which opens with the mass suicide of the Balinese court before the Dutch invaders. This event sets the stage for his exploration of the Balinese theatre state.The concern with events and situations in this issue seeks to extend beyond these more or less conventional usages and to argue for a deepening of the methodological significance of events and situations in anthropological ethnographic practice. The overall direction of the approach that I essay is one that takes the event as central to anthropological analysis rather than the concept of society, in relation to which the event or the event-as-case is commonly engaged, either to substantialize the abstract (society) or to provide a means to grasp the foundational or general organizational principles of society. The argument that I develop and toward which the articles in this issue are variously directed expresses both a continuity with conventional event-as-case approaches and, most importantly, a break with such perspectives. Ultimately, the aim is toward the exploration of the event as a singularity in which critical dimensions can be conceived as opening to new potentialities in the formation of social realities 2 | Bruce Kapferer or what post-structuralists, especially of a Deleuzian persuasion (see Deleuze 2004;Deleuze and Guattari 1987), would describe as the continual becoming of the social as a complex emerging and diversifying multiplicity that is enduringly open and not constrained within some kind of organized, interrelated totality of parts, either as real (existent), imagined, modeled, or projected. Hitherto, such a view has largely been presented as a philosophical abstraction despite claims to the contrary, as in assertions of transcendental empiricism (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) in opposition, for example, to a Kantian transcendental idealism that underpins much Durkheimian anthropology and sociology.I start this discussion with the early development of an event approach in anthropology, initiated by Max Gluckman's Manchester School, which was partly motivated in the direction of more recent post-structuralist orientations. The efforts of the Manchester group continue to be instructive...
Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are at the epistemological centre of anthropology. They embed matters at the heart of the definition of modern anthropology, and the critical issues that they raise are of enduring significance for the discipline. But the questions these phenomena highlight expand beyond mere disciplinary or scholastic interest. They point to matters of deep existential concern in a general quest for an understanding of the human forces engaged in the human construction of lived realities. Anthropology in the embracing Kantian sense is involved. The phenomena that are deemed to be magic and sorcery (including all that which such scholars as Durkheim (1915) and Mauss (1972) would include under the label 'profane') project towards the far shores of human possibility and potentiality. The human profundities to which they might lead are already there in the imagery and metaphors of thinkers, both abstract and concretely pragmatic, worldwide. Within European traditions the world of the magician and the sorcerer is routinely evoked to explore the continuing crisis that is faced by humankind, more recently, for example, in the works of Dante, Goethe and Nietzsche right through to the most contemporary philosophers and social commentators. The essays in these pages contend with some of the overarching existential issues towards which a concern with the magical must extend. This introduction begins with a consideration of the somewhat narrower confines that have developed in the discipline of anthropology. But this should not obscure the fact that at the outset, the anthropology of magic and sorcery dealt with weighty issues-the foundations of religion, the underlying features of the human psyche and, indeed, the very nature of science. While these interests have persisted, over time they became narrowed or deflected onto smaller, more empirically manageable concerns. However, of late, via a renewed interest in magic and sorcery, anthropology is once more opening up to the larger
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