Just Finished Reading: Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality by Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah

This was one of my set texts in my pervious MA. I’d skimmed certain sections before basically data-mining for essay material but never actually read it from cover to cover. I decided on a whim to do so recently. This is basically a study of the various ways Magic, Religion and Science have been defined and related to each other by Western anthropologists from the 19th century onwards.

Things started off with the idea that there was a steady evolutionary progress from Magic to Religion. Not surprisingly few of these, often armchair, scholars failed to follow their own logic and propose that Religion will in turn be superseded by Science. The evolutionary idea clearly failed to answer questions of cultures that practice both scientific and magical activities and much else besides. So it was replaced by the theory that societies (and individuals) hold multiple orderings of reality which explains quite easily how some people can be both scientists and still believe in God or understand the workings of the internal combustion engine and practice magic at weekends. We hold different beliefs that are compartmentalised in such a way that we can bring them out at the appropriate time and place.

A major problem with studying any other culture is, of course, the issue with translating what they do in such a way that we can understand them without losing too much detail in the process. Some believe that such translation is simply impossible – that we might think we understand other cultures but that this is simply an illusion. Of course there must be some points of commonality – the trick is finding exactly what they are. Moving onto science, Tambiah made two interesting points – firstly that it is a product western European culture but seems to be freer of potential cultural bias than either magic or religion and that it is in effect a product of the Protestant mind-set. So maybe without the major schism between Catholicism and Protestantism we may not have had science as we know and love it. Interesting, I thought – and another pointer to the fact that everything we hold dear is in fact dependent on a long series of contingent accidents.

Although a reasonably interesting book this was both fairly difficult to read and not exactly Earth shattering. This is a moderately good, although rather academic, introduction to a very wide subject indeed. I’ll be reading more of this sort of thing later.