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2020
At first sight, these two volumes represent different views of the task of interpreting material culture: the first seems to announce a post-processual paradigm, emphasising the agency of objects and the ambivalence of meanings in the area of magical practice, whereas the second makes no overt claims about materiality while based firmly on museum objects. In fact, however, the differences between them are rather smaller than first impressions suggest.
2015
The Materiality of Magic is an exciting new book about an aspect of magic that is usually neglected. In the last two decades we have had many books and proceedings of conferences on the concept of magic itself as well as its history, formulas and incantations in antiquity, both in East and West. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the material that was used by the magicians for their conjuring activities. This is the first book of its kind that focuses on the material aspects of magic, such as amulets, drawings, figurines, gems, grimoires, rings, and voodoo dolls. The practice of magic required a specialist expertise that knew how to handle material such as lead, gold, stones, papyrus and terra cotta—material that sometimes was used for specific genres of magic. That is why we present in this well illustrated collection of studies new insights on the materiality of magic in antiquity by studying both the materials used for magic as well as the books in which the expertise was preserved. The main focus of the book is on antiquity, but we complement and contrast our material with examples ranging from the Ancient Near East, via early modern Europe, to the present time.
Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2023
This paper discusses objects connected with folk magic and medicine found in museum collections in Estonia and Finland. Our perspective is comparative as we compare these collections to other sources and to each other. The focus is on what kind of objects are found in the museum collections and how these differ between the two countries. We also explore how these materials have been acquired and collated. While we see general similarities between the magic objects in the two countries, there are also notable differences: remains of bears stand out in the Finnish collections while fossils are common in the Estonian ones. Although these observations may reflect a true difference in magic traditions, there are still potential sources of bias in the collections. Even though the museum collections in both countries were formed with romantic national overtones, the interests of individual collectors and curators influenced them in various ways.
Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications of backwardness and primitivism, the concept of magic has been reclaimed from its prior function as a negative trope in the constructions of the exotic other and recast to elucidate a wide variety of social processes and practices. Like other once maligned but now rehabilitated conceptual tools of the anthropologist's kit – fetishism and syncretism are two that come to mind – magic has gained a new lease on life to judge from these three recent publications focused on the occult and its ever visible place in contemporary societies the world over. If the volumes under review can be said to share anything, it is precisely an interest in the newly discovered use of magic as an analytical category as well as the intent to contribute to the framing of this renewed anthropological interest. [...]
2015
The Materiality of Magic is an exciting new book about an aspect of magic that is usually neglected. In the last two decades we have had many books and proceedings of conferences on the concept of magic itself as well as its history, formulas and incantations in antiquity, both in East and West. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the material that was used by the magicians for their conjuring activities. This is the first book of its kind that focuses on the material aspects of magic, such as amulets, drawings, figurines, gems, grimoires, rings, and voodoo dolls. The practice of magic required a specialist expertise that knew how to handle material such as lead, gold, stones, papyrus and terra cotta—material that sometimes was used for specific genres of magic. That is why we present in this well illustrated collection of studies new insights on the materiality of magic in antiquity by studying both the materials used for magic as well as the books in which the expertise was preserved. The main focus of the book is on antiquity, but we complement and contrast our material with examples ranging from the Ancient Near East, via early modern Europe, to the present time.
Journal of Historical Geography, 2007
The continuing challenge for archaeologists of ritual and magic revolves around recognition of such beliefs and practices in the archaeological record. This is especially true in contexts where material culture functions as both mundane utilitarian objects and magical devices simultaneously or alternatively. In such cases, mere typologies are insufficient to differentiate magical application from quotidian use. Nor are the most frequently used criteria for distinguishing between magical and non-magical artifact function—irregularity of depositional location--reliable predictors, if the underlying logic of those locations defies articulation. A critical first step in recognizing magical material culture involves understanding the embeddedness of worldviews, particularly aspects of cosmology, in the use and pattern of magical material culture. This article examines the implicated roles of religious frameworks and doctrine with cosmological constructs on “cultural logic” by using an example 17th-century Anglo-European numerology to illustrate the connection between worldviews and material expression.
The wreckage of a rare sports car breaks free from a transport truck, crushing the legs of an unfortunate mechanic. A humble chair instigated a quarrel that led to a murder and an execution. A series of unusual, mass-produced paintings are implicated in a wave of fires which leave nothing save the paintings unscathed. These stories sound as if they were excavated from the pages of a pulp novel or a horror movie, yet these objects are quite real and the aforementioned stories are an ingrained in Western folklore. These objects, and others like them, represent a class of objects that are designated as cursed in Western folklore. These objects, thought to be imbued with the ability to cause misfortune, contradict the ideas of the passive object, which typify discussions of subject-object agency. This analysis uses the life history of four “cursed” objects, James Dean’s Death Car, the Hope Diamond, the Dead Man’s Chair, and the Crying Boy paintings, as a means to explore the nature of cursed objects as an object class, object agency in Western culture, and what it means when Westerners say that an object is cursed. This analysis demonstrates a pattern of avoidance consistent with the sympathetic magic principle of contagion, and suggests a potential biological basis for ‘superstitious’ relationships between humans and material culture.
2018
Excellence International Publication Pvt. Ltd. , 2022
European Geriatric Medicine, 2015
Theoretical Computer Science, 2018
Yüksek lisans tezi/Master's thesis, 2024
Jurnal informasi dan Komputer , 2021
Bulletin of University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca. Veterinary Medicine, 2020
Jurnal Manusia dan Lingkungan, 2016
arXiv (Cornell University), 2010