The Notion of Magic

Enchanting Technology

“…Magic thus exists in and among subjective relationalities and interactions from which meaning is derived. It is 'within a process of cross-cultural interaction apart from the "rational" West' (Wax & Wax 1963: 503) that magic designates an impassioned form of conceptualizing the world, bringing far-off realities and relations close by.…”

Melanesians in North Queensland: The retention of indigenous religious and magical practices

“…A. Goldenweiser, R. R. Marett and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown of the futility of trying to separate magic and religion. 31 Yet, as Peter Lawrence stresses, such a distinction is ethnocentric in that the cultural isolates of religion and magic are only Western concepts, meaningless in non-Western 'primitive' societies. 32 In this article, magic and religion will be treated rather as overlapping phenomena than as two distinct utilities.…”

The Occult Revival as Popular Culture: Some Random Observations on the Old and the Nouveau Witch

“…16 This conception that magic is directed toward social, beneficial ends is at odds with the common, anti-social definition of magic found among many sociological theorists ( e.g., Durkheim, 1961:5&63). Wax and Wax (1963) outline well the difficulty facing most current sociological and anthropological theory in dealing with empirical cases of magical practices.…”