by
Graham Jones
Read side by side, these two stunning commentaries on Magic’s Reason—for which I am immensely grateful—both seem to revolve around an implicit antinomy between what I might call symbolic care and symbolic violence. To think is to compare, Mei Zhan tells us; to compare is to produce similarity and difference, commonality and alterity. To interact—as a close-up magician might with a spectator, in Chris Goto-Jones’s telling—is to enact comparisons between self and other. Comparison carries both logical implications and moral weight. When do our comparisons ennoble and empower, spark creativity and create possibility? When do they mangle and maim, stifle thought and limit freedom? Like anything that imposes order, comparisons may effect care and violence simultaneously. Can we disentangle these valences? How should we social scientists approach comparison—and particularly comparison in the form of analogy—as both thinking subjects and moral agents?
by
Mei Zhan
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.
