Comments on Manvir Singh’s Essay (2021) "Magic, Explanations and Evil"

By Razie Mah

Manvir Singh publishes an article in Current Anthropology (volume 62 (1), 2021) entitled "Magic, Explanations and Evil: The Origins and Design of Witches and Sorcerers". He proceeds in steps.
First, Singh consults ethnographic surveys and performs a prinicple component analysis, obtaining (A) the principal and (B) secondary dimensions of greatest variation. These are (A) witchiness and (B) the evil eye. In witchiness, a malevolent agent, in addition to practicing sorcery, embodies situational features of magic, such as becoming invisible and turning into animals. With the evil eye, a sorcerer uses sympathetic magic but does not embody the magic itself.
Second, Singh constructs an explanation couched in terms of cultural selection. Selection favors and preserves (C) beliefs in intuitive magic, (D) plausible explanations and (E) demonizing narratives.
Third, Singh examines the ethnographic information again in light of the explanation.
These comments associate Singh's formulations to a resonance between two interscopes, which appear in a model on presence in e-book, How To Define the Word "Religion". These interscopes are the organization and the individual in community tiers. Organizations emerge from (and situate) individuals in community.
A search for sorcerers and witches begins with the situation level of the organization tier, corresponding to production in somewhat differentiated societies. Open and public magic associated with coming together in cooperative action should call forth fortune, or some degree of good results. When misfortune happens, the result may be familiar (and due to some failure to appease divine forces) or out of the ordinary (and due to some malevolent person performing mystical harm).
Singh's prinicpal component analysis and explanation, then, may be couched in terms of interactions between the organization and individual in community tiers, which are partially differentiated (rather than fully differentiated as in industrial civilizations), and may apply to a particular civilizational phase in our current Lebenswelt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955931007

Razie Mah

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