In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine.

Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison. 

Graham M. Jones is associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft. 
 

— Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University

— Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago

— Rena Lederman, Princeton University

— Martin Zillinger, University of Cologne

— Margaret J. Wiener, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

— Mark S. Mosko, Australian National University

— Simon During, Public Books

— Alex Golub, University of Hawaii at Manoa

— Anthropological Quarterly

— Religious Studies Review

— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute