Magic's Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia

by Margaret J Wiener, Isabelle Stengers (Afterword)

Overview

“Do you believe in magic?” This familiar question suggests magic is easily recognized but unreal. In Magic’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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478028505
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/09/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Margaret J. Wiener is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali.

Isabelle Stengers is Emerita Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Universityé libre de Bruxelles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
Interlude 1. Witch Doctors  29
1. Tricky Subjects  33
Interlude 2. The Fetish  67
2. Troubling Objects  71
Interlude 3. Coordinating Devices  111
3. Things Collective  117
Interlude 4. Getting Caught  151
4. Dangerous Liaisons  155
Interlude 5. The Magic of Magic  187
5. Hidden Forces  191
Interlude 6. The Magic of Science Studies  229
Epilogue  233
Afterword / Isabelle Stengers  245
Notes  257
Bibliography  287
Index  307

Editorial Reviews

Margaret J. Wiener’s Magic’s Translations offers a reading that changes for history what magic is and what it has never been. At the crossroads of actor network theory and postcolonial studies, she boldly reconceptualizes magic; in the process, she adds historical and political nuance to the former and challenges the latter beyond the comfort zones of historical interpretation and epistemology. Magic’s Translations will have enormous staying power in feminist studies and decolonial studies and will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, history, philosophy, and literature. It will also appeal to readers and the public beyond any disciplinary walls.

Marisol de la Cadena

Margaret J. Wiener gives the concept of magic, long central to but recently dormant in anthropology, new relevance. She shows how magic is relational and highlights its importance in colonizing projects, where worlds are remade through denunciations of fetishes and fanaticisms in the name of European realism and modernism. I cannot think of any other work that constructs this particular argument so thoroughly. Magic’s Translations is an inspiring book.

Stephen Muecke