“Magic Reconsidered: Towards a Scientifically Valid Concept of Magic”

Jesper Sørensen is a Danish scholar of religion. His book A Cognitive Theory of Magic (2007a) tries to explain “magic” by drawing on the framework of cognitive sciences (in particular, cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology). He analyses “magic” as a specific mode of ritual action and the parameters set by cognitive sciences are used to trace the mechanisms and processes at the origin of the permanent creation of magical agency. In his contribution to this volume, Sørensen defends the use of “magic” as a scholarly category once its “underlying traits” are identified and it is “fractioned into a number of empirically tractable problems”. Sørensen argues that “magic” draws on ordinary conceptual mechanisms that appear to work in a special way given that they are embedded in ritualized behaviour that triggers specific cognitive processes. He holds that “magic” takes meaning out of actions and words in ritual (“de-symbolization”) and outlines three tensions between “magic” and “religion” in terms of different attitudes to ritual interpretation, the status of ritual experts, and local context versus institutional codification.

MAGIC RECONSIDERED: TOWARDS A SCIENTIFICALLY VALID CONCEPT OF MAGIC

Magic is among the many essentially contested concepts in the fields of anthropology and study of religion. Due to its dubious past as a polemical concept, considered inherently related to primitivism, or simply believed to be indistinguishable from religion, numerous scholars have called for its abandonment (e.g., Pocock 1972; Smith 1995).