Jones takes his readers on an ethnohistorical journey that traverses instrumental magic (which is mostly occult and “primitive”), stage magic (which aspires to be modern by calling out the trickery and confusion of instrumental magic), and anthropological methodology (which works by analogical comparisons, including the comparisons of various forms of magic as well as between magical and scientistic thinkings) from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In doing so he explicates a set of partial and complex associations within which both stage magic and anthropology unfold through each other in a manner perhaps analogous to how Hobbes and Boyle collaborated in carving up the domains of society and science in the production of modernity. Through this process both stage science and anthropology emerged as mostly secular and mostly modernist Euro-American cultural projects. Jones unveils to us a world saturated with analogical imaginaries, aspirations, and interventions. He parses them out into a succession of analogy, disanalogy, misanalogy, counteranalogy, native analogy, analogical ladder, and meta-analogy—each of which destabilizes or refigures the analytical practice preceding it. Jones argues that analogical imaginaries, when used by the moderns, have not only secularized and disenchanted Other people’s cosmologies, but also created an enterprise of knowledge production and world making suspended in the dialectical dance of enchantment and disenchantment.
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Dangerous doubles and magical ethics
by
Chris Goto-Jones
As the superstar-magician walks through an urban shanty in the middle of his television special Magic Man (1998), David Blaine’s voiceover explains that he has spent years walking around America doing magic, but that he was “curious how they would respond in Haiti, a culture which is deeply rooted in magic.” He performs some simple sleight-of-hand (multiplying sponge balls) for a child in the street, who responds with suitable delight. Then the scene shifts—lightning flashes and thunder claps—local Haitians are dancing in a dark chamber festooned with ritual iconography, wielding blades, spitting alcohol; Blaine’s voiceover informs us that “in Haiti, magic and voodoo are considered the same thing.” A brief montage transports us out of the city to a rural road in the sunshine, with Blaine walking after a local man, asking him to wait so that he can show him some magic. The man is uncomfortable, reluctant, attempting to flee. “It’s not—no, no, look. It’s not black magic . . . it’s not bad . . . it’s okay . . . It’s good. It is good,” reassures Blaine, pursuing the man. For the audience, the implication is that the man considers magic and voodoo to be the same, and that voodoo is something to fear; he does not want to participate. Finally the man relents, stops, and turns to Blaine, who repeats his reassurance: “It is good.” But the man counters, “No [it is good] for you, not for me.”
Networks of reception, conditions of audibility: A reply to Johnson and Walker
by
Pamela Klassen
The line between critique and credulity, or between cynicism and naiveté, is at the heart of all of the books in this forum on “modernity’s resonances.” My tack on this question follows one man on his journey from east to west, beginning on Abenaki land, which was claimed in the seventeenth century by the French Crown and then in the eighteenth century by the British Crown. As a young man, Frederick Du Vernet found his networks among Anglican clergy and the Anglo-Canadian elite in Toronto, on land bound by treaties between the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the British Crown. In mid-life, he ventured to the unceded territories of the Haida, Nisga’a, and Ts’msyen on the Pacific Northwest coast, where his networks expanded in two different ways. First, as a white missionary bishop living among a predominantly Indigenous population, he learned about the diversity of their languages and forms of property, their stories of creation, and their resistance to land dispossession and to state pressure to send their children to church-run residential schools.
The discipline of Radio Mind
by
David Walker
Pamela Klassen skillfully leads readers to consider important underlying and interconnected concerns throughout The Story of Radio Mind, including occasions of church-state cooperation in Canada, Ojibwe medicinal and burial practices, Ts’msyen and Nisga’a storytelling conventions, land theft and sovereignty claims, intra-Anglican institutional competition, railway building, Indigenous residential schools, trends in psychical research, and the colonial origins of canonical works in academic anthropology. Moreover, readers learn here—in core chapters on photography, map-making, printing presses, and radio—about the ways in which different technologies mediated the spiritual aspirations and effects of Dominion itself, or, as Klassen puts it, how they “were at the heart of the negotiations and contests that made possible the invention of the new Canadian nation.” Operating in multiple registers—and with recurring attention to Klassen’s personal investments in matters of research design and narrative method—The Story of Radio Mind encourages deep reflection on the interdependent relationship between margins and metropoles in North American history and historiography, and it calls scholars to account both for previous failings and future possibilities of self-reflexive storytelling at the intersection of religious studies, Indigenous studies, and media studies.
In the spirit of reconciliation
by
Miranda Johnson
Pamela Klassen offers her subtle and judicious book to us “in the spirit” of the call issued in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report in Canada. Established in 2008 to examine the effects of the Indian Residential Schools, the commission elicited over six thousand testimonies from across the country and mainly from residential school survivors. These survivors, as Klassen poignantly observes, were removed from parents, grandparents, and the elders who might otherwise have told them the stories that held them together as peoples. The commission judged the school system to be a systematic attempt at “cultural genocide.” This is a strong condemnation, especially from a state-sponsored body. The implications of the charge, and the call for action the report issued, have been taken seriously by state and civil institutions in Canada. However, attention has primarily focused on the victims and survivors of the schools, with less attention paid to agents of colonialism, presumably because many of the leading figures are already well represented in Canadian national history. Nonetheless, the relative absence of those voices marks the Canadian TRC as distinct from the South African version, which did consider the stories of perpetrators. In the Canadian context, The Story of Radio Mind flips the script, offering us a dialogic history of settler colonialism.