ABSTRACT
Magic is a word to conjure with. It confuses, and evades constraint, so that it is confi gured in contradictory ways. To some theorists, it is anti-social, even anarchistic. To others, it is socially conservative and authoritarian. As such, it offers the potential for disruption, resisting, critiquing, overturning constructed social norms, or it can constrain a society, keeping it attached to the past and stultifying change and innovation. It has become a privileged category, one that is imposed by white, Western, Protestant, male, imperial academics onto the ‘other’. Likewise, the concept of religion taught in the academy rests on the same privileged platform. As noted in Chapter 4, ritual became a dirty word as attention shifted to religion as an internal state of mind, concerned with ideas and beliefs, becoming orthodoxic rather than orthopraxic. This change began during the various Protestant and Catholic reformations of the sixteenth century, and became embedded in the theories of religion and magic that emerged with the new disciplines of anthropology and sociology at the end of the nineteenth century.
