Magic, (colonial) science and science studies

Abstract

This article draws on Latour's ethnography of science, analysis of the Great Divide and call for a symmetrical anthropology, to follow magic's emergence as a modern category. The focus is ethnology in colonial Indonesia. Tracing a practice initially known as , it analyses five successive Dutch texts. Early texts show that could affect Europeans but purify 's effects as either natural or cultural/psychological. In later texts, that translate as magic, references to Europeans, efficacy and substances vanish; is simply a culturally specific belief. Terming practices magic has ontological and political consequences; irreduction offers an alternative to analytic habits that yield magic.

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