The exoticizing of magic from Durkheim to 'postmodern' anthropology

Abstract

The projection of ethnocentric prejudices on non-western cultures is common practice not only in positivist or classical 'realist' anthropology. the recent fashion of the use of the ethnographic 'I'among so-called 'postmodern' anthropologists and others - the often over-dramatized story of the anthro pologist's own experiences in a faraway society - easily leads to 'ethno egocentnsm'. Magic and religion seem to be favoured domains in this respect. The fascination among certain anthropologists with the occult, the sacred, the esoteric and the 'supernatural' tends to hide the normality and the pragmatism of many magico- religious representations and practices in African societies- the fact that these representations are part of daily life and of people's 'natural attitude'. The inevitability of the fact that the anthropologist translates from one system of meanings to another requires a break with the exoticizing stereotypes which western common sense projects on non-western cultures.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.