Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment

“This volume offers an innovative and intriguing collection of essays. Each chapter is grounded in detailed anthropological and historical research and offers stimulating theoretical considerations. The breadth of scholarship—addressing both the general implications of ‘magic’ and its place in the making of ‘modernity,’ as demonstrated in a range of ethnographic contexts—suggest a broad readership.” —Brad Weiss,The College of William & Mary
“These essays demonstrate that even our most objective categories of social and cultural understanding are entangled in the constitutive undergrowth of our present circumstances. In their diverse and intriguing ways, they are all concerned with the modernist configuration of magic, as magic, so taken, configures modernism. Despite our liberal claims to transparency, reason, and secularism, they lay bare a world shaded by opacity, unreason, and blinkered faith.” —Vincent Crapanzano,City University of New York

This is the first book to explore comparatively how magic—usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern—is also at home in modernity.

Birgit Meyer is a senior lecturer at the Research Centre for the Study of Religion and Society, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Peter Pels teaches at the Research Centre for the Study of Religion and Society and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He is also the editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.