“Form and Meaning of Magical Acts: A Point of View”

Stanley J. Tambiah (b. 1929) is a social anthropologist from Sri Lanka who taught at the Universities of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Cambridge, Chicago and Harvard. He conducted fieldwork mainly in Sri Lanka and Thailand and published various books on the religious and ethnic conflicts of modern Thailand. Tambiah is particularly known for his book Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality (1990), where he discusses and refutes several of the major theorists of the debate and stresses the ethnocentricity and ineffectiveness of the scholarly habit to oppose “magic”, “science” and “religion”. His most original contributions to the endeavour of “defining magic” stem, however, from the “rationality debate” of the 1960s and 1970s, where he was one of the main protagonists. Tambiah's article “Form and meaning of magical acts: A point of view”, of which we present the last two chapters, appeared in one of the mouthpieces of this debate, Robin Horton's and Ruth Finnegan's Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies (1973).

In an earlier article on “The magical power of words” (1968), Tambiah advocates a linguistic turn in the study of rituals. While focusing on the role of verbal actions (and their relation to other types of actions) in ritual, he argues that the often metaphoric and metonymic use of language in “magical” rites is intended to imitate or simulate practical actions.