INTRODUCTION

Magic is a much contested idea in the study of religion. In the last few decades, scholars simply wanted to do away with the term “magic,” claiming it contributed nothing to understanding religion except perpetuating entrenched positions of ethnocentric bias and colonialism (Graf et al. 2005: 283–6; Kapferer 1997; Kuklick 1991; Lévi-Strauss 1966: 220–28; J. Z. Smith 1995). In spite of its political incorrectness, however, the word magic did not go away, and in the last fifteen years voices could be heard repeatedly arguing for new, meaningful ways of using the term as an analytical category (Braarvig 1999; Bremmer 2008: 347–52; Czachesz 2007f, 2011a; Pyysiăinen 2004b: 96; Thomassen 1999; Uro 2011a). Without rehearsing the arguments for and against “magic,” let us note that most of the discussion can be understood as the redressing of a basic conceptual debate that has determined the academic study of religion from the beginning. In fact, the problem of studying religion from an emic or etic perspective, which I am referring to, is one of the most fundamental theoretical issues in many areas of the social sciences as well as of the humanities. (To put it simply, an emic perspective means that the scholar tries to use the concepts and categories of a given culture when analyzing it; an etic approach, in contrast, means that the scholar uses the categories and concepts of his or her own culture—the two words originally derived from the linguistic concepts of phonemic and phonetic, respectively.)