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These speculative and ethnocentric theories were soon eclipsed by more grounded ones, based upon detailed ethnographic fieldwork on magical ideas and practices in various non-Western settings. Bronislaw Malinowski (1935; 1948)

refused to believe that preliterate people were ‘incurably superstitious’. His studies on the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia led him to argue that there were no societies without magic, religion, nor some scientific knowledge. The science of ‘primitive societies’ consists of a body of traditional knowledge that provides a working understanding of the natural world, and that can be put to practical uses. A scientific attitude is also apparent in beliefs in the regularity of nature and in critical reasoning. But he insisted that magic, religion and science had different places in human affairs. The significance of magical beliefs and practices can be explained by their social and psychological utility. Public rituals unify social groups. Magic also offers an emotional response to frustrating situations, where there is an impasse because technical knowledge provides inadequate control. When people are forsaken by scientific knowledge, we deploy magic to gain confidence, poise, hope and optimism. Therefore magic flourishes in dangerous enterprises such as hunting, fishing, warfare, disease, love, rain and the weather. Malinowski observed that in the Trobriand

Islands magical acts comprised three essential elements: the spell or actual words used (these were private property, inherited within families);

a standard sequence of symbolic acts; and the moral or ritual condition of the performer (frequently involving sexual and dietary taboos). Magic coordinated actions for which controls were lacking. For example, the performance of magical rituals during canoe building ensured the mobilization of the necessary labour force. He found that magical rites were used to ensure safety and good results in open sea fishing, which was full of danger and uncertainty. But no magic was required in lagoon fishing, where the islanders could rely completely upon their own knowledge and skill. His studies of horticulture showed the complicated relationship between magic and science. The Trobriand Islanders cleared plots by practical procedure and skilfully planted crops. But they fumigated the cleared ground by magical ceremony to prevent blight, pests and insects, and to make crops strong. During the 1930s †Edward Evans-Pritchard

also broke new ground by showing how, amongst Azande people of Sudan, magical ideas and practices formed a logical and coherent belief system. Beliefs in magic, along with those in witchcraft and oracular divination, provided Azande with explanations for the occurrence of unfortunate events, such as sickness and death. Though Evans-Pritchard insisted that these beliefs were reasonable, he did not accept these occult forces as empirical reality. Subseqeuntly, studies of these phenomena

became scarce, and the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ often replaced ‘magic’. Peter Pels (Meyer and Pels 2003) suggests that the pejorative ‘magic’ became an embarrassment to anthropologists, wishing to protect non-Western people from accusations of irrationality. Those who did not avoid the topic emphasized the meaningful symbolic elements in these practices.