In introducing Dr Brain’ s excellent translation I am acutely conscious that Professor Lévi-Strauss has not only written about Thé orie de la magie at some length but also made it the occasion for a major, if early, statement of position.1 Because this important document has not yet been translated I believe that I shall do the reader of the present work more service by drawing his attention to it rather than attempting something in the nature of an original essay. I shall write of Mauss’ s Theory of Magic in the perspective of Lévi-Strauss’ s own achievement which, in my opinion, gives it retrospectively its significance for the modern reader.
It may seem paradoxical to say that the importance of the present work is that it contributes to the dissolution of ‘magic’ as a category, nevertheless this is the claim made for it. The need for such an act of dissolution is to be found in the earlier history of ethnology.
Criticisms of social Darwinism in the nineteenth century are easily made and, in the process, many of the still relevant achievements of the period are neglected. One of the most important of these, at a time when notions of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘progress’ threatened to divide humanity along what today we would call ‘racialist’ lines according to innate capacity, was that the application to primitive societies of the theory of evolution re-established the fundamental human unity. If it now seems to us absurd that certain societies should have been thought of as representing stages in the evolution of the human species, we should remember that this was the price paid for the renewed belief in the unity of that species and the potential for change in the societies concerned.
Few theories are pure in their application and it should not surprise us if writers of that time occasionally sinned against the conception of unity by imputing, particularly in the area which they thought of as the supernatural, modes of thought which, if true, would as effectively have cut the primitive off from communication with the modern as a genetic difference would preclude interbreeding.
The vice is not dead: some modern accounts of non-European societies, again especially in the area of ‘religion’ , ‘magic’ and the like, seem to rest on assumptions about human nature which would not stand the test of application to ourselves. Indeed sometimes it seems that the primitive is to be defined as that about which any nonsense can be believed. Modern writers have less excuse than their forebears: they, for the most part, shared beliefs in, or derived from, a revealed religion which, but for the labours of their missionary brethren, was indeed closed to the majority of mankind.
‘Magic’ was perhaps even more prone to this treatment than ‘religion’. The ethnologists of the nineteenth century knew what they, at least, meant by the latter; magic on the other hand was a peculiar and alien phenomenon and its persistence in sections of European society only heightened the scholar’ s sense of estrangement. Much of the theoretical discussion which preceded Mauss’ s work had for its effect not so much that of overcoming the apparent division between those who believed and those who did not (i.e. the ethnologists themselves) as of reinforcing it. Thus it comes about, for example, that we learn more about Sir James Frazer’ s beliefs about ‘magic’ than we understand about the examples which he cites.
This intrusion of the subjective is not bad in that it is inevitable; it is common to all the social sciences. However, consciousness of it imposes upon them all the perpetual task of re-examining in relation to the facts the most tried and accepted categories of their apparatus. If categorical distinctions of the Western mind are found upon examination to impose distinctions upon (and so falsify) the intellectual universes of other cultures then they must be discarded, or, as I have put it, dissolved. I believe ‘magic’ to be one such category and need only cite here by way of evidence the fact that it is perpetually opposed to ‘religion’ and ‘science’ in our literature.
Marcel Mauss certainly had no such work of demolition in mind, although I seem to see in his two concluding paragraphs some hint of an awareness that his researches had led him further than his original intent. Certainly the modern reader can derive from Mauss’ s wide-ranging survey of the facts and his many profound insights the materials for a further advance.
In his Introduction Professor Lévi-Strauss reminds us that if we are to do justice to Mauss we must remember the date at which the Theory of Magic was published.2
It was at a time when comparative ethnology had not yet been abandoned, largely at the instigation of Mauss himself, and as he was to write in the Essay on the Gift : ‘That constant comparison in which everything is mixed and where institutions lose all local colour and documents their savour.’ Only later did he devote himself to drawing attention to societies ‘which truly represent the maxima , the excesses, which better allow the facts to be seen than those in which, although no less essential, they remain small and undeveloped.’
This is to compare Mauss with himself and certainly no one would seek to displace the Essay on the Gift as his masterpiece. Nevertheless I, having given the Theory of Magic a role in retrospect, wonder whether its contribution to the work of dissolution does not lie in the fact that it does cover so wide a range of material. Professor Lévi-Strauss himself appears to be partly of this mind when he defends Mauss, and Durkheim also, from the common criticism alleging that they ‘were wrong . . . to bring together notions borrowed from widely separated regions of the world and to constitute them as a category.’ The same author continues: ‘Despite all the local differences it seems certain that mana, wakan, orenda represent explanations of the same type; it is therefore legitimate to constitute the type, to attempt to classify and to analyse it.’
It is upon this assimilation of geographically distinct notions that Professor Lévi-Strauss is able to advance the proposition:3
conceptions of the mana type are so frequent and so widespread that we should ask ourselves if we are not confronted with a permanent and universal form of thought which . . .being a function of a certain situation of the mind in the face of things, must appear each time that this situation is given.
Lévi-Strauss then cites both the example of the Nambikwara who, on being introduced to cattle, designated them by a term very close in its connotation to manitou and the example of French words used for essentially mysterious objects. From these he passes to the observation that in our own society such terms are fluid and spontaneous whereas elsewhere they constitute the base for considered and official systems of explanation, a role which we reserve for science.4
Lévi-Strauss’ s argument leads him finally to see the mana type notion as pure symbol or as having zero symbolic value : a formulation analogous to the linguistic zero phoneme. This analysis, which carries us beyond the category ‘magic’ , is explicitly related to the contribution of Mauss who ‘was one of the very first to denounce the insufficiency of psychology and traditional logic and to disrupt their rigid frames by revealing other forms of thought, apparently “ alien to our adult European understanding.” ’5 Lévi-Strauss’ s first and simplest formulation runs as follows:6
Always and everywhere notions of this (mana ) type intervene, somewhat as algebraic symbols, to represent a value of indeterminate meaning (signification ), which being itself empty of meaning (sens ) is therefore susceptible to the reception of any meaning (sens ) whatsoever. Its unique function is to make good a discrepancy between signifier and signified, or, more exactly, to draw attention to the fact that in certain circumstances, on a certain occasion or in certain of their manifestations, a relation of inadequacy exists between signified and signifier to the detriment of the anterior relation of complementarity.
This is an important step: it does not dissolve the concept ‘magic’ so much as, so to speak, cut the ground from beneath it. A field of explanation is opened in which what we call ‘magic’ — pre-eminently an activity— is only one of, and of the same order as, many symbolic actions which overcome the discrepancies of thought. Rituals do what words cannot say : in act black and white can be mixed; the young man is made an adult; spirit and man can be combined or separated at will. Indeed actions speak louder than words.
Let me give an example of a very simple magical act which I have observed in Gujarat, in western India. A Hindu by accident brushes against, touches an Untouchable. To free himself from the consequent pollution he then touches a Muslim. The structure of the situation is as follows. The Muslim is not a Hindu, he is outside the caste system and the world of purity and impurity as are all non-Hindus. Nevertheless, he is given a place in the Hindu caste hierarchy in the village. The Untouchable, on the other hand, is of his nature an essential element in the system; he personifies the negative pole of impurity, an impurity, let us note, which at the level of thought, embraces Muslims, Christians, etc. The Untouchable’ s function in the system is to be excluded from its activities; to be treated as an outsider. There is then, so to speak, an absurdity in the system: the outsider is thought of as an insider, and the insider is treated as an outsider. It is against this absurdity that we now observe the Hindu who has by accident touched the Untouchable. It is like a game of tag— he has equated himself with the Untouchable. He frees himself from this association by deliberately touching the Muslim whose contradictory nature— insider/outsider, pure/ impure— provides the conduit for a restoration of normality: the Hindu and Untouchable are again separate. It is important that I stress that it is only on this occasion and for this purpose that the contradiction of the Muslim’ s position is used. In certain circumstance she may be recognized as a Muslim, in the majority of circumstances he is assimilated in the Hindu caste system, one or the other. Only in the circumstances that I have described is his double and contradictory value recognized.
One major criticism of Mauss’ s work is to be found in Lévi- Strauss’ s discussion. It is worth reporting at length not only because of its relevance to the present text, but also because it touches upon a continuing tendency in modern anthropology.
The anthropologist inevitably works with the categories of his own culture and consciously refines them through the experience of others. He may, and sometimes does, imagine that his categories are perfectly matched in the cultures which he observes; thus they are believed to practise ‘magic’ as he supposes it to be. From this it is an easy and dangerous step to imagine that the entire phenomenon is now accessible to his empathic understanding. Ironically an unreflective empiricism is thus transformed into simple-minded subjectivism. Because of this tendency I take the opportunity of translating Lévi-Strauss’ s critique at length.7
We refuse to accompany Mauss when he looks for the origin of the notion of mana in an order of realities other than the relations which it helps to construct: the order of sentiments, volitions and beliefs which are, from the point of view of a sociological explanation either epiphenomena or mysteries, in any case extrinsic to the field of investigation. This pursuit is, to our mind, the reason why an enquiry in itself so rich and penetrating, so full of illuminations, falls short and ends deceptively. In the final account mana is but ‘the expression of social sentiments which have been formed, sometimes fatefully and universally, sometimes fortuitously in relation to certain things, chosen for the greater part in an arbitrary manner. . . .’ But notions of sentiment, fatality, fortuity and arbitrary are not scientific notions. They do not throw light upon the phenomena which they claim to explain, they participate in them. We can see that in one case at least, the notion of mana does present those characteristics of mysterious power and secret force which Durkheim and Mauss attribute to it: it plays just such a role in their own system. There truly, mana is mana. At the same time one wants to know whether their theory of mana is anything other than an imputation to native thought of properties which were implied by the very particular role that the idea of mana was called upon to play in their own.
It would be peculiarly inauspicious to close on a negative note a foreword to a work of this nature. That the leading ethnologist of our time should lean with such weight upon a fifty-year-old argument is as good a testimony as one could wish to its vitality. One can on occasion become irritated with Mauss as with a contemporary and it is Lévi-Strauss himself who has insisted in the same Introduction upon the astonishing modernity of the mind of Marcel Mauss.
1 ‘Introduction à l’ oeuvre Marcel Mauss’ in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie , Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1950.
2 Op. cit., p. xli.
3 Op. cit., pp. xlii– xliii.
4 Op. cit., pp. xliii– xliv.
5 Op. cit., pp. xliii– 5 Op. cit., p. li.
6 Op. cit., p. xliv.
7 Op. cit., p. xlv.