Magics Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia [Hardcover]

“Do you believe in magic?” This familiar question suggests magic is easily recognized but unreal. InMagic’s Translations, Margaret J. Wiener argues that such views are shaped by historical power struggles, especially in Europe’s relations with the wider world. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch interactions with Indonesians, Wiener reveals how colonial agents framed unfamiliar practices, practitioners, and objects as “magic,” rendering distinct phenomena fundamentally alike and advancing colonizing projects that deemed magic antithetical to reason and reality. While colonial authorities, including ethnologists, mobilized the concept of magic to differentiate Europeans from Indonesians, nature from culture, reason from superstition, and fact from fetish, their efforts produced unexpected outcomes: Some Indonesian artifacts and acts not only retained their power but invaded European experiences. As anthropologists were among the key translators of magic throughout the world, Wiener intersperses accounts of magic’s translations in the Indies with reflections on anthropology’s ongoing engagement with the concept. She demonstrates that magic became an object of expert knowledge, political control, and popular fascination, rather than a self-evident category or relic of naïve belief.USFocusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch relations with Indonesians, Margaret J. Wiener examines how the concept of magic emerged out of historical struggles between Europe and the rest of the world.Margaret J. Wiener is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author ofVisible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali.

Isabelle Stengers is Emerita Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles.“Margaret J. Wiener gives the concept of magic, long central to but recently dolãw