Using “Magic” to Think from the Material: Tracing Distributed Agency, Revelation, and Concealment at Çatalhöyük

Abstract

Introduction As the provocative discussions about religious life at Çatalhöyük (Hodder 2006, 2010) have demonstrated, speaking of transcendent forms of sociality in human prehistory is a tricky business. In an earlier volume, Carolyn Nakamura began to address “when” and“where” one can speak of “magic” and whether “magic” could be viewed as something distinct from “religion” in the Neolithic material culture of Çatalhöyük, while Peter Pels elaborated on Webb Keane’s suggestion that we try to speak of “religion” at Çatalhöyük in terms of degrees of material articulation (Keane 2010; Nakamura 2010; Pels 2010). The present chapter takes this task further through the explicit confrontation of certain key anthropological ideas and debates about magic to improve archaeological approaches to material interpretation. The obstacles to such an effort are twofold. First, there is the threat of ethnocentric classification: Çatalhöyük suggests a largely “entangled” material world where certain convenient Western distinctions between functional and symbolic, sacred and secular, nature and culture cannot be maintained. Discerning the more subtle distinction between magic and religion, then, threatens to be even more fraught. While often viewed by many nonarchaeologists as an interpretive morass, the exclusive testimony of the material record, however, pushes us to consider and articulate a more material approach to magic. Archaeologists and anthropologists alike have recentered and theorized materiality as constituting the social (Graves-Brown 2000; Keane 2008; Miller 1987, 2005; Mills and Walker 2008; Meskell 2004, 2005; Meskell and Preucel 2004; Weiner 1992). Many theoretical frameworks now situate embodied practice and materiality as the very stuff of, rather than a secondary factor in social life, thus placing certain concerns of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies more in line with the core concerns of archaeological inquiry (Berggren and Nilsson Stutz 2010: 173). We think the confrontation between this attention to materiality and spiritual realms often theorized as intellectual and “immaterial” activities will take these discussions further, even if they may not provide us with straightforward “evidence” of either “religion” or “magic.”

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