317Magic, Miracle, and Marvels in Anthropology
ethnos, vol. 69:3, sept. 2004 (pp. 317–340)
Magic, Miracle, and Marvels
in Anthropology
Robert Shanafelt
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, USA
abstract As ethnographic reports variously relating to magic, witchcraft, sorcery,
and shamanism have expanded in recent years, so too has our thinking about them.
However, deep epistemological, ontological, and methodological issues remain that
cut to the heart of anthropology (Kapferer 2003a:1–2). This paper discusses the concepts
of magic and miracle, with a focus on how they have been and are being researched
and taught. It argues that events of extraordinary wonder claimed to be
the result of supernatural force might better be conceived under a broad category of
‘marvels.’ It also suggests that social scientists should investigate ultra-natural marvels
with respect for unique social and psychological realities without abandoning
questions and concerns about generalization and empirical validity.
keywords Religion, ethnography, methods, epistemology
W
hat’s the difference between magic and miracles? I had not given
much thought to this contrast until a curious student asked me
the question. I was prepared to give pat definitions of magic, but
what was a miracle? Was there anything in my ethnographic experience that
related the two?
Defining Magic and Miracles
In working with the Amish, I had just assumed that miracles were supernatural
wonders stemming from God and Jesus. I understood that ‘charming’
in their folk medicine involved magical technique, but didn’t their curing also
involve something miraculous? Similarly, when informants in the American
South told me more recently that they had seen ghosts, would anthropological
wisdom suggest that magic or miracle was involved? Or, when informants
and relatives from Lesotho talked about witchcraft and other mysterious things,
was there also conceptual space for the miraculous?
© Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnography
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/0014184042000260017
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When I examined the older ethnographic literature, I found that anthropologists
had reported on situations that seemed miraculous, but they did so
without paying much attention to what most interested me, their distinguishing
characteristics. Even in the more recent phenomenological approaches,
it seemed that marvels had been overwhelmed by discourse directed to theories
about magic and witchcraft. This paper is therefore an attempt to answer my
student’s question by: (a) discussing the relationship between magic, miracles,
and marvels, (b) reviewing relevant literature, and (c) considering epistemological
and ontological issues from a framework that owes much to Pascal Boyer
(1994; 2001), while, I hope, still being sensitive to the claim that some issues
are fundamentally undecidable.
Introductory textbooks offer a good place to start the discussion, if only
for what they reveal about the restricted sense of magic that has pervaded
teaching. Consider four examples:
(1) Conrad Kottak (2004) defines magic in his glossary as the ‘use of supernatural
techniques to accomplish specific aims.’
(2) For Keesing and Strathern (1998:305) ‘magic ... represents human attempts to
manipulate chains of cause and effect between events that to us are unrelated,
in ways that to us are irrational...’
(3) According to Schutz and Lavenda(2001:169), magic refers to‘aset of beliefs and
practices designed to control the visible or invisible world for specific purposes.’
(4) For Haviland (2003: 671), the classical anthropological notion of magic is the
‘belief that supernatural powers can be compelled to act in certain ways for
good or evil purposes by recourse to certain specified formulas.’
Is this all that magic is? What Mary Douglas (1985 [1966]:59) described some
time ago as the Anglo-American ‘debt’ to Frazer, an ‘isolating and hardening
of the idea of magic as the efficacious symbol,’ is obviously still in service
here. Even now, a paraphrase of Frazer’s sympathetic magic is often the only
definition of magic given in introductory treatments (see, for example, Peoples
& Bailey 2003:276–280), with such other phenomena featured in the folklore
of magic as physical transformation, spiritual enchantment, and occult
communication being ignored. Indeed, one wonders why magic is so much
a part of textbooks at all, given that, as David Graeber (2001:241) has pointed
out, the concept has offered so little inspiration to ethnography that it has
been largely replaced with ‘rubrics like witchcraft and sorcery, shamanism,
curing, cosmology, and so on, each of which implies different questions and
different problematics.’ And the work engaging these ‘other problematics’ —
such as that which has embraced sorcery, shamanism and other occult practices
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and beliefs as real (Turner 1996; Stoller & Oakes 1989; Lett 1991; Young &
Goulet 1994), or interpreted them as valid forms of expression concerning
morality, modernity, knowledge, and power (Jackson 1989; Comaroff & Comaroff
1993; Kapferer 1997, 2003b; Moore & Sanders 2001) — have also not
yet much influenced the textbooks.
What is most to the point here, though, is that not all of the definitions are
completely clear as to the role of agency in the Frazerian magical process.
While I think one can fairly assume that they all at least imply that human
beings are the manipulators behind magical acts, the definitions of Kottak
and Schutz and Lavenda could be applied to any causal agent, including spirit
beings or God. This distinction is important because Frazer himself did not
see the concept of magic as exclusively referring to human activity. In fact,
he argued explicitly that for primitive man gods ‘are often merely invisible
magicians who behind the veil of nature work the same sort of charms and
incantations which the human magician works in a visible and bodily form
among his fellows’ (Frazer 1935:375).
In his classic text Primitive Religion, Paul Radin (1957:59–60) presents some
additional perspectives on magic and animism that reveal more about how
previous generations of anthropologists helped maintain a gap between magic
and miracle. First, Radin agreed with Frazer that magic is a primordial attempt
to control or gain access to desirable objects and that the human proclivity
to act in terms of an all-pervasive sense of magic declines with civilization.
However, what made magic possible and, at one point in social evolution at
least, necessary, was that humans began to inhabit a mysterious world of language
and abstract thought. Hence, we sought to connect symbolically with
the object of our intentions — to be one with it in an animistic fashion: ‘it is
the fundamental concern of every magical act and rite to establish a relation
of such a kind to the object that it can literally be at one with the ego’ (Radin
1957:60). This overcoming of boundaries to connect with the objects of nature
was the main focus of religious attention before the development of monotheism.
‘Thus,’ says Radin, echoing the Gospel of John, ‘in the beginning there
was magic and magic was with God and God was magic’ (1957:60). Since
magicians make unmediated connections to the mystical relationships in the
world, their actions are profoundly different from those who pray or use other
forms of ritual to beseech God. For Radin and for Frazer, then, miracles must
be on a different plain from magic because they are thought to be the
manifestations of a transcendent God, not the manipulations of those who
connect to a spiritual realm immanent in nature. As Frazer wrote, ‘a miracle
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to him [primitive man] is merely an unusually striking manifestation of a common
power’ (Frazer 1935:377).
In their more recent study of sacred pilgrimage, Victor and Edith Turner
also found it necessary to distinguish between miracles and magic. While
they reported that they had often seen something that looked like contagious
magic — Christians seeking close physical contact with the sacred objects of
a pilgrimage site in order to receive grace — they thought there was more to
this than magic. This pilgrimage contact was different because ‘it is mediated
through a carefully learned theology of incarnation which recognizes that
selected components of the material order were sanctified through the bodily
sacrifice of Jesus’ (Turner & Turner 1978:71). In other words, Turner and Turner
reinforce through their ethnographic observations Frazer’s judgment: although
the pilgrimage process can operate on the same logical terms as magic, there
is an overarching theology that interprets the resulting supernatural power
as the ultimate product of the transcendent God.
As with Frazer and Radin, Raymond Firth considered there to be a significant
difference between magic and miracle that had to do with the posited
source of supernatural power. However, he approached both from an openly
materialist perspective. In fact, Firth has been one of the few anthropologists
to critique miracles and their relationship to belief in God in a textbook,
giving considerable attention to them in his Religion: A Humanist Interpretation.
Here he defined a miracle as ‘an unexpected performance resulting from
supernatural power, exercised by direct divine agency or through the agency
of a divinely inspired person, such as a saint’ (Firth 1996:206). For Firth, however,
the promulgation of belief in miracle events stands in paradoxical contrast
to the more productive achievements of religious institutions in such endeavors
as music, art, and architecture. In his (undocumented) opinion, most
anthropologists would agree with him that miracle claims are not to be taken
literally but are best seen as ‘propaganda devices, reinforcing the pretensions
of a religion to credibility’ (Firth 1996:206). Still, despite this forthright skepticism,
Firth’s definition of miracle is in good accord with formal usage.
The oed defines a miracle as ‘a marvellous event not ascribable to human
power or the operation of any natural force and therefore attributed to
supernatural, esp. divine, agency; esp. an act (e.g. of healing) demonstrating
control over nature and serving as evidence that the agent is either divine or
divinely favoured.’ However, current usage also suggests some lingering influence
of the word’s derivation from the Latin miraculum, an ‘object of wonder.’
In fact, the etymology suggests, the sense of divine involvement in the pro-
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duction of a wonder is not indicated by the descriptive words given in the
New Testament Greek — words sometimes translated as miracle in English
literally suggest sign (s ¯emeion, ÛËÌ›ÔÓ), wonder (teras, Ù¤Ú·˜), or mighty work
(dynamis, ‰‡Ó·ÌȘ). The sense that miracles must imply the action of almighty
God does not seem to have developed until at least the fourth century.
Today, of course, the reality of miracles is fundamental to such institutions
as the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, as Turner and Turner (1978:205–6)
have noted, the Church considers itself a ‘living body’ historically connected
to the generative miracles and revelations of the biblical era. As such, it remains
both ‘electrically charged’ with the potential for miracles and responsible for
guarding against inauthentic claims. Once authenticated, however, miracles
are considered facts, not just beliefs. Their reality is established from material
evidence or corroborated testimony that suggest some normal operation of
nature was suspended in fulfillment of God’s higher purpose. While miracles
transcend nature, they do so in a way more unpredictable than the supernatural
aspects of regularly recurring rituals, sometimes by way of intermediaries
such as angels, saints, or sacred relics. As works of God, they are to be
distinguished from demonic acts or ‘prodigies’ of supernatural power (‘Miracle’
1913). In all these things, except for the reference to saints and relics,
Protestant views are in substantial agreement (Purtill 1997:72).
While opinion polls conducted in the United States between 1994 and
2003 indicate that some 79 to 84 percent of adults believe in miracles (Shermer
2000:21; Taylor 2003), what North Americans mean by miracles must be
considered. A 1996 survey of Ontarians, for example, found that their miracles
amounted to such things as finding the right mate, receiving a much needed
but unasked for gift, avoiding a fatal car crash, and witnessing a critically ill
relative recover after life-support was removed (Shermer 2000:26). Popular
culture as presented in television programs, movies, and books also indicates
that the characterization of unusual life events as miracles is widespread. One
example from recent television is the popular PaxTV network series It’s a
Miracle, where one hears all manner of happenstances described as miracles.
A jacket cover from one of the program’s spin-off books advertises ‘divine
intervention ... miraculous rescues ... inspiring reunions ... heartwarming animal
stories ... and remarkable medical recoveries’ (Thomas 2003). Similarly, on
the long-running The Oprah Winfrey Show, reverential tones of awe and words
of praise to God are used to describe the ‘miracles’ that have been brought
about by new technologies and medical advances in vision enhancement,
prosthetics, and speech pathology (Oprah Winfrey Show, July 23, 2003.) In
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North American folk thought, then, a miracle may be defined as any uncommon
event brought about by some divine agency for the benefit of an individual
or group. However, despite high rates of belief in God, the typical folk view
of miracle has been secularized to such an extent that an emphasis on ‘supernatural’
transformation may be entirely absent.1
The distinctions Judeo-Christian scholars make between nature/supernature
raise other issues about cultural specificity. As a miracle is assumed to
be a rare case of a personalistic God-agent temporarily overturning the ordinary
conditions of existence, it would seem that any other supernatural
manifestation would have to be deemed an inferior prodigy, magic, or witchcraft.
However, this is not so if ‘other divinities’ are allowed to enter into the
conceptual space of the miracle. This is a move that David Hume (2000:92)
made in his famous discussion of miracles when he reported on a case from
antiquity in which a blind man and a lame man were said to have been cured
by contagious contact with emperor Vespasian, in response to a vision of the
God Serapis. And, there is some room for disagreement even among those who
believe in the literal reality of biblical miracles. For example, when Aquinas
spoke of miracles as caused by ‘divine agency’ (Levine 2002) and C.S. Lewis
(1947:10) defined a miracle as ‘an interference with Nature by supernatural
power,’ they opened conceptual space for different characterizations of that
agency and power. More recently, the Christian philosopher David Johnson
(1999) has expanded that space by arguing that it is not necessary to include
reference to God in defining a miracle. Instead, he identifies miracles with
paranormal phenomena in general (1999:73).
The definitions of Lewis and Johnson are in keeping with the sense of
miraculum described in the oed. In my opinion, the Latin concept has more
cross-cultural utility than does the term miracle in that it encompasses divine
interventions, supernatural wonders, and other paranormal phenomena without
the implied hierarchy of monotheism or traditional anthropology. However,
because the term ‘miraculum’ is rather too arcane to be useful, I suggest the
term ‘marvel’ as an alternative. Indeed, in addition to meaning something
extraordinary, in obsolete usage marvel was synonymous with miraculum.
Thus, we may say that a marvel is as an event of extraordinary wonder, thought
to have physical consequences, claimed to be the result of ultra-natural force.
A miracle would then be a special type of marvel that yields positive results,
traditionally ascribed to the power of the divine.
A likely point of contention concerns the cross-cultural validity of using
terms like supernatural or paranormal in the definition of a marvel. While
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some anthropologists consider the term ‘supernatural’ fundamental to comparative
analysis, others find it ethnocentric (Lohmann 2003b). And a prominent
sociologist of the paranormal has argued that it ‘becomes an intellectual
issue only in a society where the scientific method is hegemonic ’ (Goode 2000:22,
italics in the original). However, it seems to me that claims of such wide divisions
are debatable. For one thing, it is debatable if a materialist orientation
to causality is really hegemonic in any society — as opposed to being hegemonic
in more narrowly authorized institutional practice (Humphrey 1996:4;
Jindra 2003). Further, in non-Western contexts, contrasts between normal
and ultra-normal are also readily found. For example, cognitive anthropologist
Pascal Boyer has observed that the Fang ‘find stories of flying organs and
mysterious witchcraft killings fascinating as well as terrifying, precisely because
they violate their expectations of biological and physical phenomena’
(Boyer 1994:21; also quoted in Humphrey 1996:56). I have also found such
distinctions among the Sotho. To take but one instructive case, a recent issue
of a popular Sotho-language weekly featured a front-page article titled ‘Woman
Gives Birth to Eggs’ (2003). On the 31st July, the story relates, an astonishing
wonder (khoba) and marvel (mohlolo) occurred when a 24-year-old woman
gave birth to two eggs, of the appearance of chicken eggs. This story shows
clearly that the Sotho make a distinction between at least three types of
phenomena: witchcraft/sorcery, a very astonishing wonder (khoba), and a
wonder (mohlolo): It also indicates that there is much skepticism.
These examples reinforce what philosopher Michael Levine has noted with
reference to the ancient world, ‘what is required for a notion of the miraculous
is ... a strong sense of what constitutes the normal, natural course of events’
(Levine 2002:10). However, such a distinction between usual and unusual
does not commit us to the view that everything that is ultra-natural is necessarily
a marvel. Indeed, some spiritual manifestations may not be marvels either
from folk or analytic points of view. Aragon (2003:134–5) gives an example
from Central Sulawesi in which it is said that rats that eat up the harvest are
manifestations of the ancestors. As she notes, this is not so much a supernatural
marvel as an added layer of imagery told about an empirical reality.
Similarly, many anthropologists have been occupied of late demonstrating
how such systems of meaning about the ultra-natural are not essentially ‘other’
but may reflect, critique, and constitute empirically evident social realities
(Comaroff & Comaroff 1993; Moore & Sanders 2001; Kapferer 2003b). In
any case, conceptualizing miracles and the more wondrous aspects of magic
and witchcraft in the same domain helps avoid too simplistic a contrast be-
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tween ‘Western’ and ‘closed’ systems of thought that had been suggested in
some of the older debates about rationality (Wilson 1970).
Studying Marvels
In support of the argument that the concept of marvels I have put forth
above is ethnographically useful and interesting, I will describe several cases
in which observations about them have been made from different points of
view, but with little comparative link. While one of the best general surveys
of Christian marvels is Joe Nickell’s (1993) account of weeping icons, healing
pictures, Marian apparitions, stigmata, and so on, his debunking approach
is practically unheard of among anthropologists. More typical is the relativist
perspective that Geertz (1968:25–35) takes in describing the marvelous powers
attributed to famous saintly figures by his informants in Morocco and Indonesia.
Although some might label his approach phenomenological, I would
not do so because more recent approaches given this label often find Geertz
too much a functionalist and social constructivist. In turn, social constructivism
and the more recent phenomenology need to be differentiated from
‘reflexive-seeking’ and ‘naturalistic-cognitivism.’ Reflexive seekers most forthrightly
describe personal marvel experiences and use them to question their
own premises. Naturalistic-cognitivists and social constructivists are not so
much interested in understanding marvel experiences in-and-of-themselves
but for what they reveal about mind or society. Phenomenologists and reflexive
seekers share the goal of coming to an empathetic understanding of marvel
experiences. Despite their differences, all these views raise some rather interesting
philosophical issues about causality, relativism, and ontological possibilities
that I will try to address below.
One of the most reflexive and reflective of the recent accounts of the
extraordinary is an ethnographic account of an apparent rising of the dead
(Grindal 1983). This is especially interesting in connection with miracles because
it touches directly on issues of validity and testimony discussed by Hume.
In ‘Of Miracles,’ Hume (2000[1748]:87) wrote: ‘When any one tells me, that
he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether
it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or
that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one
miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover,
I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle.’ However,
as Bruce Grindal’s account makes clear, in light of a dramatic personal experience
of the wondrous, making such a cold calculation is not always so simple.
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Grindal’s marvel occurred on the 23rd October, 1967, in the town of Tuma,
Ghana, while he was attending a funeral ritual for a man who was prominent
locally as a drummer. ‘Near midnight came a moment totally unnatural to my
previous experience,’ Grindal reported, ‘I “witnessed” the raising of the dead’
(Grindal 1983:60). This was apparently evoked by the actions of the Sisala praise
singers (goka) who were dancing in the house, near where the corpse sat propped
up against a wall. As they sang, they moved forward and back from the corpse,
beating a steady rhythm of iron hoes as they did so. With the movements, the
rhythmic beats, and the song, Grindal began to see the goka and the corpse
as linked, as if tied together. He then saw the corpse jolt, and flashes of light
emerge from it and from the bodies of the praise singers. ‘The corpse, shaken
by spasms, then rose to its feet, spinning and dancing in a frenzy.’Finally,‘a most
wonderful thing happened. The talking drums on the roof of the dead man’s
house began to glow with a light so strong that it drew the dancers to the rooftop.
The corpse picked up the drum-sticks and began to play’ (Grindal 1983:68).
Grindal’s interpretation of this astounding experience involves a complex
mixture of psychology, mysticism, and sociology. From the scientific vein,
he characterizes his marvel as an altered state of consciousness, a ‘synesthetic
integration’ of the senses (p. 75). He also describes in intimate detail the personal
circumstances of the previous few days that could have evoked such a
state. These included experiences of intense heat, uncomfortable change in
personal routine, the putrid smell of death, ubiquitous stinging insects, severe
sleep deprivation, hunger, physical fatigue, stress from lengthy funeral proceedings,
and fear from being physically threatened with an axe. Yet, he describes
what he saw as more than just a temporary mental aberration. With allusions
to mysticism, he says, ‘the experience was real and was seen as such by those
who sat to my right in the divination place, as well as by the goka who conjured
the miraculous transformation’ (1983:71). Further, there were other contexts
to consider. At the sociological level, Grindal discovered that his personal
testimony fit together with other Sisala narratives of extraordinary death. In
the days following the funeral, he heard several tales of this genre — of men
whose corpses had been briefly re-animated like that of the drummer and of
a corpse that had resisted burial by stretching its legs out over the grave pit.
Indeed, it was said that if a ‘man has strong daluri or “medicines,” the spirit of
the daluri can make the corpse hear and can cause the corpse to move’ (Grindal
1983:71). Clearly, these are no ordinary events (the story of the corpse
that resisted burial was told about an event from 30 years beforehand), and
their power was heightened in the re-telling.
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Katherine Ewing (1994) provides another good example of a reflexiveseeker
perspective from a different ethnographic setting. While doing fieldwork
in Pakistan on Sufism, she had an unsettling dream that seemed to verify
Sufi beliefs about the extraordinary. On the very same night that a Sufi saint
had told her that he would come to her in a dream, he seemingly did so. This
shook her assumptions about reality as she continued to do her fieldwork,
and she flirted with shifting ground away from anthropological inquiry toward
the inquiry of a seeker after spiritual truth.
In contrast to such questioning, a social constructivism that tends toward
relativism is much more common. I say ‘tends toward relativism’ because in
this approach no claim is made that an account of a marvel might somehow
be beyond nature; it is primarily taken to be a socially significant event. While
this has the appearance of relativism because it also does not directly call
into question the marvel, it also does not take the marvel as ‘really real’ either.
Consequently, what is most important to the seeker, the reality of marvels,
may be virtually ignored. In fact, one of the most important contributions of
the reflexive seekers is to point out the ‘pseudo’ quality of the more typical
analyst’s relativism. Only if marvels are not really real, is there need for the
additional complexities of social analysis (Lett 1991).
Such a contrast in perspectives is nicely illustrated in Spencer’s (1997) analysis
of ‘Fatima and the Enchanted Toffees.’ Here Spencer describes the case
of a sixteen-year-old Sri Lankan girl called Fatima who, according to her own
description and that of some of the Buddhist and Sufi specialists she consulted,
was possessed by demons. As Fatima told it, the demons entered her
body after she ate enchanted toffees proffered to her indirectly by a frustrated
young suitor. A demonic presence then became evident some days afterwards
when she started to have fits of possession. During these times, she writhed,
twisted, and spoke aggressively. In addition to possessing her, the spirits were
said to have made cups and plates fly through the air and smash to the ground;
there was also a spontaneous appearance of blood on Fatima’s cheeks and on
surfaces near her. However, from his dispassionate description, it is clear that
Spencer is not really interested in exploring the physical reality of these apparent
‘poltergeists.’ Instead, his paper is about other things of anthropological
concern — about concepts of the person and the stability of selves, about
Sinhala and Freudian projections of desire, about the control of female sexuality,
and about Fatima’s possession and treatment as ‘a means of redefining
her own identity as Sinhala Buddhist rather than Muslim’ (Spencer 1997:701).
For the social analyst, the empirical reality of marvel testimony is secondary
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to the teasing out of connections between occult belief and the social problems
and concerns of the times. If some people in the streets of Port Harcourt say
they saw a vulture turn into a man or if a few Pentacostalist women in Lagos
confess that they are agents of Satan whose vaginas have magically destroyed
the financial wealth of men (Bastian 2001:73, 83), what is really going on is
an embellished articulation of unjust differences in wealth and power in the
physical world. Indeed, despite the unfashionable quality of such references,
the vast majority of recent anthropological work on malevolent marvels treats
them in much the fashion of Durkheim — as social facts to be explained by
social facts — and (in the fashion of empiricism) as dependent variables —
with the apparently increasing rates of witchcraft accusations the consequence
of such independent variables as social insecurity, relative impoverishment,
gender discrimination, and transnational forces, to mention a few explanations
given in recent African work (Moore & Sanders 2001; Kohnert 2003).
While this work has been criticized precisely because it has these positivist
implications (Kapferer 2003a:18–20), a different concern here is with the logical
inconsistency of making implicit evaluation behind a mask of relativism.
Such analysis is relativist in name, but analytically other in practice.
If Firth’s perspective on the anthropological opinion of miracles were accurate,
there would be little need to belabor this point. Yet, it seems even if they
are as skeptical as Firth believed, anthropologists are reluctant to label socially
patterned imagination false in the way that he did. For example, consider a
report of the testimony of three South African women who separately claimed
to a large church gathering that they: (a) had married a zombie (b) had imprisoned
elderly relatives alive beneath the sea; or (c) had 5,000 demons under each
knee. For the ethnographer, these confessions were ‘not necessarily false’ because
they seemed to be psychologically enabling actions that helped the women
overcome the trauma of their lives (Badsteubner 2003:21). While a functionalist
explanation like this is plausible enough, is there therefore no need for distinction
here between empirical reality and imagination? Graeber (2001:243) notes that
his Malagasy informants did not hesitate to call a liar a man who claimed to
have killed someone with lightning. Would not Firth’s anthropologist also see
these testimonies as false, propagandistic, social constructions whose articulation
before the crowd put naïve women at future risk so as to bring in large crowds,
thereby functioning as advertising for a fledgling church whose male leader
stood most to benefit? Holding in check one’s skepticism in the process of
interacting with others during fieldwork is one thing, but refusing to admit a
difference between social-psychological reality and material reality is another.
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The ever-present possibility of ordinary alternatives is what Hume’s dismissal
of miracle testimony was all about. And however viable his case for
the dismissal of miracles on logical grounds may be, the philosopher makes
a number of other observations that are directly relevant to any ethnographic
account of them. (See Earman 2000 and Fogelin 2003 for the continuing debate
on Hume’s logic.) Extrapolating from these observations, it can be suggested
that ethnographers always need to wonder about: (1) possible deception and
the distorting affects of the will to believe; (2) why one should accept testimony
of violation of well-known physical processes when no causal explanation is
offered; (3) how rumors of the uncanny will spread rapidly in groups because
such news is so out-of-the-ordinary, and (4) whether or not there are conflicting
accounts available. The significance of these and other related concerns about
distortion potentials in human perception and communication have been well
documented and elaborated upon by recent critics of credulity (Gilovitch
1991; Shermer 2000) as well as by some classic ethnography of shamanic
deception (Boas 1930). Yet, as Ewing (1994:571) and Shweder (1991:49) have
wondered, is not a refusal to take the beliefs of others seriously, a kind of
hegemony or arrogance?
In response, one can point to evidence that anthropologists have in fact
tended to downplay indigenous skepticism (Graeber 2001:243). As Goody
(1996) has argued — and as recent accounts of marvels confirm (Boyer 2001:76;
Mitchell 1997:87–88; Spencer 1997:705–706) — doubt is an intrinsic feature
of religious experience. ‘Questioning is in fact built into the human situation
in which language using animals create representations of entities to help
deal with their intellectual, social, and psychological needs’ (Goody 1996:679).
Even in classic accounts like that of Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, doubt is
acknowledged only to be dismissed as unimportant (Graeber 2001:243). This
lack of interest can be of considerable consequence in that it promotes too
uniform a view of others and obscures analysis of strategic manipulation by
skeptics. For example, David Lan’s (1985) well-known work on the positive
role of spirit mediums in Zimbabwe’s war against minority rule has been criticized
for assuming that guerilla leaders were mere followers of tradition. Others
have suggested greater complexity by pointing out that guerillas used coercive
force to get rural villagers to comply with their strategies and may have consciously
manipulated the belief in spirit mediums for their own benefit (Kriger
1991). As Graeber (2001) argues, similar combinations of compulsion, doubt,
and conviction are often involved in people’s general relationship to power.
This is so clearly a universal issue that apologetic claims from Western scholars
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that they will not consider other people’s marvels in terms of all relevant and
available evidence about nature, history, society, and belief seem themselves
peculiarly engaged in a quite restrictive form of tolerance, a tolerance for the
marvelous but not the mundane.
One problem with open skepticism is, of course, that it may be taken as a
sign of disrespect. Many religious settings may not be available if we express
any disbelief. Open expression of doubt may simply prompt informants to
refuse to talk. ‘If you just listen nicely and believe what I tell you, not asking
questions of doubt, I will tell you about these things [witchcraft]’, a Zulu informant
once told Berglund (1976:269). This is clearly a problem not to be
denied. But a requirement for methodological relativism should not be confused
with a reasoned consideration of alternative possibilities in ethnological
discourse.
In their studies of sorcery and witchcraft, Kapferer (2003b) and his colleagues
attempt a phenomenological way that they suggest is beyond such
questions without being mystical. While not accepting that marvels are ‘really
real,’ they also argue that the division between rational/irrational, supernatural/
natural is an outmoded product of a hegemonic metropolitan discourse. Most
at issue here is the claim that to examine information comparatively in terms
of evidence about empirical reality is to accept uncritically master narratives
of rationality and unilinear progress. (See also Moore & Sanders 2001:12, 13
on this point.) If I understand Kapferer correctly, no attempt to explain marvels
using Western forms of reason will fully get at the complexity and multiplicity
of the experiences they represent. Instead, witchcraft and sorcery are best
seen as occupying their own space (seemingly a hyperspace) outside of set
frameworks of social or psychological analysis. In this view, it is wrong to
think of a marvel as a dependent variable because it is not just an effect; it is
constitutive of experience and therefore creates its own effects.
However, there are still unavoidable problems here. Should one neglect
altogether questions about such an ‘empirical’ and ‘rationalist’ link as that
between distorted perception and tendencies toward scapegoating in times
of social crisis? Why else but because they were treated as scapegoats have
hundreds of women and elderly people been killed as witches in South Africa
in recent years? One might also consider that because anthropology is not
just information but practice, it too must modify itself over time. Because of
their focus on the particular, many of the recent ethnographers of marvels
show no interest in the universal processes that may under gird what they
have observed. Yet, these processes will form a crucial dimension even of
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hyperspace if they actually delimit what it is conceivable for variable gods,
spirits, demons, witches, and sorcerers to do (and not do).
The naturalist-cognitive perspective attempts to do precisely this, to delimit
what is a possible ultra-natural concept. Against those who argue that ‘positivism’
is unable to make sense of the ‘world constitutive force’ of particular
marvels (Brendbekken 2003:50), experimental approaches from cognitive
psychology and evolutionary anthropology do suggest that there is a predictability
to the ultra-natural that is an understandable feature of human inference
systems. Following Boyer (1994, 2001), who has done much to explicate
the evidence, it can be shown that marvels have a restricted set of ontological
features as well as congruence with default templates of expectations. For
example, if spirits manifest themselves, they will operate as agents that meet
our expectations of what minds and persons are like. If a person turns into a
baboon, it will not be a complete baboon, but a baboon with a person’s thoughts
and intentions. If diviners from Sudan say that the burnt twigs of an ebony
tree can reveal the testimony that the spirit of that tree ‘heard,’ they will carry
with them the default assumption that the tree’s hearing will be like that which
is typical for people. Spiritual expectations will always be based on people’s
implicit assumptions about what it means to exist in the physical world. If a
tree can ‘overhear,’ the overheard testimony will be from near the tree’s physical
location, not from across the ocean; and the twigs will reveal conversations
relevant to us, not conversations that trees hold amongst themselves about
being trees (Boyer 2001:68). Similarly, if a Dominican peasant talks about
misterios (mysteries) espiritus (spirits), angeles (angels), vientos (winds), and sanes
(spirit beings) (Brendbekken 2003:35), it is predictable that these phenomena
will have intentions and goals; be concerned and engaged with what happens
to living human beings; and, when extraordinary nonmaterial powers are
expressed, people will be concerned with their effects, not bothering themselves
too much to unravel the details of how such things could possibly occur
(Boyer 2001:200).
Physicists, chemists, and biologists are particularly good at providing detailed
answers concerning material mechanisms, but there is little equivalent
inquiry concerning the mechanism of marvels. People who describe marvels
are rarely interested in questioning the magical process whereby the immaterial
is transformed into the material, particularly at the point where the
ultranational interfaces with the material. A Judeo-Christian miracle, in which
God can say, ‘Let there be light,’ and light just happens, does not evoke much
questioning about how exactly spoken words turn into light because it is based
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on the taken-for-granted assumption that our thoughts mysteriously allow
us to do things too. We do not need to question how it happens; when we
want to move our arm, for most of us, it just moves. Similarly, when gods
think or act, their intentions can just be realized. ‘Marvelous’ claims may continue
to be successfully promulgated because they fit in with such extrapolations
from human intentionality and inference about what it is for us to exist
in the world.
While such naturalism may sound too purely Western to some, as a compromise
position and as a methodological strategy, I have advocated elsewhere
that it is useful to regard ethnographic description as pertaining to several
different but overlapping domains of truth (Shanafelt 2002). Experiences may
be real, functionally important, and true at distinct levels of psychosocial analysis.
‘Truth’ at the levels of psychological state, speech act, or social practice
may have criteria of evaluation that are distinct from any ‘etic’ truth that must
be based on consideration of the total preponderance of all available evidence.
In seeking the relevant evidence, we should also not disdain older literature
simply because it is old. The folk literature of magic and marvels, for example
— especially the literature that shows the marvelous to be eminently promotable
entertainment (Boyer 2001:20; Schechter 2001:6), has yet to be fully explored.
In folkloristics it is old-hat to point out that marvels have themes that transcend
cultural particularity. Review again some of the phenomena that I have
mentioned previously or that are described in the recent literature on magic
and sorcery. Besides sounding like headlines from the most sensational of
tabloids or themes from gory b-grade horror films, they are also quite easy to
find in Stith Thompson’s (1955–58) classic index of folk literature — (1) woman
lays egg is motif t565; (2) the living corpse is e422; (3) magical transformation
of man to animal is in the d100–d199 range, with d152.3, man transforms to
vulture, included; (4) resuscitation by magician is e121.7; (5) witch in animal
form [g211] flies with magic aids [d1531.5]; (6) remarkable sex organs [f547]
cause loss of fortune for breaking a taboo [c930]; (7) vampires [e251], etcetera.
As Boyer (2001:90) argues, it is a mistake to assume essential differences
between folkloric representations and so-called sacred ones because these
are domains in which ‘concepts often migrate from one to the other.’
Approaching Marvels in the State of Georgia
From my present social setting in Savannah, Georgia, I have relatively easy
access to accounts of poltergeists, Marian visions (Davis & Boles 2003), ghosts
of the Civil War dead (Debolt 1984), and phantom lights (Prizer n.d.). In this
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last section, I would like to review some of the marvels around me. In doing
so, I will reinforce some of the points I have made above, but will also emphasize
a few new things. These additional points are that there are material
consequences of marvels that can be objectively measured; that skepticism
and faith are not simply bipolar oppositions but exist in a dialectical relationship;
that social constructs are nevertheless real mental constructs that may
have ethical consequences that cannot be ignored; and that the writing of
ethnographic experience is not the only fair way to study marvels.
Marvel Economics
When Savannah gained notoriety in 2002 for being named ‘America’s Most
Haunted City’ by the American Institute of Parapsychology, the opportunities
for promotion were obvious. In 1991, the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce
reported that none of the city’s 18 tour companies conducted ‘ghost tours.’
By 2003, however, 27 of 53 tour companies conducted them (Murdock 2003).
(For a virtual sample, one may visit http://www.theghostsofsavannah.com.)
In the wake of this acclaim, at least one bed and breakfast was able to find
couples willing to pay $450 for dinner, a walking tour, and an overnight stay
(Murdock 2003). This move towards commercialization of ghostlore is not
locally specific, but seems to represent a trend that involves many historic
cities in North America and Europe (Seeman 2002).
Savannah resident Al Cobb is one promoter of marvels who apparently
does so out of firm conviction that something wondrous happened at his family
home in 1998–99. While he does profit by selling books about his experiences
(his self-published Danny’s Bed [Cobb 1999] sells for $14.95), to me he appears
no mere profiteer but to genuinely believe that things paranormal happened
in his house. Cobb says that his house was occupied by a poltergeist that the
family came to think of as a little boy from the 1890s named Danny. He believes
Danny was metaphysically attached to an old bed purchased for one
of his fourteen-year-old twin sons. Now, not even considering Cobb’s book
sales and his ultimate motivation, we are able to calculate some of the local
market value of his ghost story by tracing its relationship to this bed. In October
1998, Mr. Cobb bought the bed for $125.00. A few weeks later he resold
it for only $66.00. Initially this seems to suggest ghosts are bad for business.
However, the price drop occurred before Cobb’s ghost story became more
widely known. After an account of it appeared in the Savannah Morning News
(Fishman 1998), the bed’s auction value skyrocketed to five hundred dollars.
A few weeks later it was sold again for $550.00 (Cobb 1999:38).
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Cobb’s story and the related example of burgeoning ghost-tour businesses
exemplify the more general trend of the commodification of folk tradition.
Fascinating tales of hauntings that were once spread with dramatic flourish
on porches and in parlors are now experienced through tourism or in book,
tv, movie, or video format. What Hume referred to as the ‘love of wonder’ has
a profit margin that is as highly valued by small-scale entrepreneurs as it is by
media moguls who turn out endless variations of marvel themes for public consumption.
(And the profitability of wonder is not just confined to spiritualism
or the entertainment industry. Purported apparitions of the Virgin Mary in rural
Georgia in the 1990s netted a supporting organization 3 to 4 million dollars
in donations as well as enough money to buy the apparition site [Davis &
Boles 2003:379]). Carl Jung recognized some years ago that ‘our age wishes to
have actual experiences in psychic life’ (quoted in Humphreys 1996:160). The
difference today is that we have many more ways to hope and pay for them.
Marvel Faith
Cobb’s explanation of his marvels involves a combination of everyday assumptions
and concepts about personhood and the Christian soul with more
uncommon assumptions and jargon from spiritualism and occult science. He
refers to different planes and dimensions of existence entered through portals,
to energy fields, to telepathy, to spirit balls, to channeling, and so forth. Such
elaboration suggests not only a rich cultural tradition, but also a need for
justification, as ideological conceptions develop complexity in response to
strain and challenge (Geertz 1973:218). Certainly, none of the spiritualist
elaborations work as explanations of supernatural mechanism. They are more
like the layer of complexity added to Sulawesi observations of rampaging
rats from the ancestors. Similarly, in the public performances that are ghost
tours, I have heard guides in New Orleans, Savannah, Orlando, and London
make use of scientific-sounding descriptions (such as ‘the ghost was only partially
visible because it still occupies the dimensions of the building of the time’)
that authorize their accounts without really explaining. Given what I have
referred to above as the institutional hegemony of science, this is perfectly
understandable. But, even in the realm of the paranormal believer, the very
need for scientific legitimation suggests a dialectical relationship with doubt.
Below, the mission statement of the ‘Georgia Haunt Hunt Team’ (ghht)
provides a further example:
The goal of the ghht is to obtain evidence supporting our theories on ghosts. For
this purpose we use Electromagnetic Field Detectors (emf meters), thermal scanners,
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infrared detectors, voice-activated tape recorders, compasses, many types of cameras,
many types of film and good old-fashioned common sense. We do not condone
the use of ouija boards, the invoking of spirits, or the conducting of seances. We are
a serious, scientifically-oriented, research organization. (http://www.geocities. com/
Athens/Aegean/8697/pgmission.html)
The assumptions here are clear: ultra-natural phenomena can be studied because
they leave material traces on machines, and there are wrong ways to
go about it. Yet, these measures claim only things that lack solidity and remain
mysterious to ordinary human perception: electricity, magnetism, heat,
sound, light, all things, like moving your arm, that are experienced by just
seeming to happen to us. And ghost activists want not only to focus exclusive
attention on confirmatory evidence that ghosts are real, they must even affirm
their reality as people: ‘We are real investigators and real people, not a big
store or corporation trying to make a profit from you,’ reports another group
(http://www.ghosthunterstore.com).
Ghost hunting and other marvel-seeking certainly have psychological and
sociological benefits that have been well covered in the standard accounts of
religion. However, one should hardly forget that the truth-claims of seekers
can have consequences beyond harmless mental fascinations. I am not content
to let go unchallenged the claims of people who think there are vampires
and then act in the world as if they are vampires, especially if this leads to
cases like that of the Kentucky teenagers who sacrificed animals, drank each
other’s blood, murdered two parents in Florida, then headed to New Orleans
in an apparent attempt to meet Anne Rice, author of Interview with a Vampire
(www.cnn.com/us/9802/27/vampire.slayings; Zagnar 1996).
Marvel Making
Two Georgia ethnographers have recently published work describing rural
Conyers, where, from 1991 to 1993, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was
said to appear monthly to a woman named Nancy Fowler (later, from 1994 to
1998, the appearances were yearly events that attracted thousands of people).
This work shows clearly how shared expectations and discourse can turn
ordinary events into marvels. The ethnographers, Davis and Boles (2003),
describe how crowds of seekers created meaning out of their shared experience
of being together with the common goal of witnessing the sacred on
temporarily hallowed ground. This was a process that involved a combination
of emotional enthusiasm, significant physical activity (a trek to a holy well,
visits to stations of the cross), negotiated typifications, and shared validation
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of signs (most notably reports of an ethereal smell of roses, a pulsating crucifix,
and the exchange of overexposed photographs socially interpreted as ‘doors
to heaven’). While the occasional individual expressed skepticism, this was a
message not widely shared. Rather, the crowd disparaged skepticism itself,
especially that implied by the Church’s refusal to validate their claims.
After listening politely to the anticommunist and antiabortion messages
that were reported from the seer, people seemed more interested in direct
signs. For example, after one service, many people pointed ‘their cameras
skyward above the farmhouse, hoping to capture the moment’ [when the
Virgin Mary ascended back to heaven]. There were also ‘flurries of picture
taking during the service, accompanied by waves of “oohs” and “ahhs” when
the sun came from behind the clouds’ (Davis & Boles 2003:380–381). Nothing
seems more striking as evidence of a profound longing for wonder, and of
the power of groups to make wondrous phenomena that would be taken for
granted individually, than a large crowd of enthusiasts constructing miracles
out of overexposed film and the sun going behind a cloud. Whether it presses
the limits of human experience as some anthropologists might have it, or
swings wide the doors of false consciousness as might others, the Conyers
case in either case exemplifies Lohmann’s (2003a:178) point that imaginations
have their own reality as empirical products of the cogitating brain.
And, outside the brain, technology functions to certify and make tangible
the fleeting and essentially contestable nature of marvels and their memories.
(See also Wojcik [1996].)
Marvel Variables
By desiring miracles so much — and by interacting through frames of reference
indexically connected to previous Marian phenomena — the crowds
at Conyers were able to interpret the sun going behind a cloud as a small
marvel. Through shared expectations and desires, the crowd constituted an
especially meaningful experience from a mundane event, thereby creating its
own effects. While this ‘social reality of psychologically real imaginings’ may
be difficult to interpret from the point of view of a dualistic philosophy,
methodologically, there is no necessary difficulty in treating belief as a dependent
variable for certain circumstances and independent for others. Certainly,
Catholic identity may be treated as an independent variable related to
the likelihood of an individual experience of the dependent variable, ‘something
sacred about Mary’ in Conyers. Whether or not an individual saw the
sun going behind a cloud at a particular moment in Conyers and interpreted
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it as a miraculous sign could in turn be seen as an independent variable, causally
related to something else. And, referring again to the vampire case mentioned
above, is it acceptable to not investigate causal variables for manifestly dangerously
real fictions?
Surely, while belief both constitutes and is constituted by experience, it is
the differing patterns of experience that shape these beliefs. There are always
variables that can be explored in depth by ethnographers, but only if they are
not shy of entertaining ideas about cause and effect. Whatever their shortcomings,
questionnaires, for example, can suggest interesting causal relationships
that are not evident from informal discussion.2
Of course, this may sound
like a fall back to the old materialist-idealist divide, but much recent work in
the ethnography of marvels suggests that the field is not as far beyond that
division as many might imagine.
Conclusion
In both magic and miracle, there is an overpowering of the ordinary course
of nature by non-material, spiritual means. In this paper I have suggested that
the label ‘marvel’ be set aside to specify any event or effect of extraordinary
wonder, thought to be tangibly real, that is claimed to be the result of ultranatural
force. This term has the advantage of being less tied to monotheistic
premises than is miracle, and it should be useful in conceptualizing a wide
variety of specific cases that have found no place in traditional conceptions
of magic. To answer my student’s question, then, I would say that magic is a
type of manipulation of ultra-natural forces to bring about desired results,
some of which may be marvels. A miracle, on the other hand, is a marvel
brought about by no manipulative process, as if by pure intention. In monotheism,
it is traditionally said to be the product of a divine intention that is
spontaneously realized.
The brief look at marvels I gave here from a naturalist perspective suggest
that the mechanisms by which they operate always involve such a mysterious
act of interface between a special non-natural force and ordinary matter that
leads to some material transformation. While this mysterious process is an
aspect of the terrain of all narratives of the wondrous, the miraculous transformation,
what I would call the ‘poof factor,’ is what is generally most vaguely
depicted. Our willingness to pass over this ‘poof’ to consider the results may
simply be an example of an overriding focus and obsession with the products
of our own concerns. Yet, its neglect is part of what makes marvels interesting
from the point of view of comparative social science.
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While some anthropologists are interested in what ultra-natural phenomena
reveal about the mind, many others focus on how claims of wondrous
magic and witchcraft provide a window on the social concerns and issues of
our times. Some marvel beliefs may even, as Kapferer (2003a:24) suggests,
press ‘the limits of human experience and beyond.’ What I hope I have shown
here is that there is something to be gained from stirring up magic, miracle,
and marvel more formally into the same conceptual brew. As should be clear,
my reading of the evidence suggests more methodological materialism is needed,
not less. However that may be, continued dialogue on the subject of marvels
and how to describe them may help anthropology as a discipline arrive at a
greater appreciation of its own epistemological requirements.
Notes
1. I would like to comment on two things here. First, it seems that for contemporary
Mexicans a miracle (milagro) has similar associations. For evidence, consider the
retablo tradition. Retablos are folk paintings made for the express purpose of thanking
a Catholic saint, or, sometimes, a folk intercessor such as Jesús Malverde
(patron-saint of smugglers), for a particular milagro. Thematic analysis (Durand
& Massey 1995) shows that contemporary retablos depict such stressful events
as hospital recovery, escape from criminals, survival of automobile accidents,
crossing the border safely into the United States, overcoming legal problems,
and returning to one’s home safely as consequences of supernatural intervention.
Second, the term ‘supernatural,’ with its built-in dualism, seems less problematic
when used in reference to Christian belief than when used as a general term in
anthropology. However, Lohmann (2003a:175) has suggested a valuable ‘etic’
definition of term as ‘a ubiquitous mental model that depicts one or more sentient,
volitional agencies that are independent of a biological substrate and understood
to be the ultimate cause of elements of physical reality.’ Still, given the political
implications of binary oppositions, it may be even better to use a substitute term
(Sered [2003:218] uses ‘ultra-natural,’ and this term has interesting possibilities.)
2. The author found this to be the case after conducting a survey of 200 Georgia
Southern University students about ‘Out-of-the-Ordinary Phenomena.’ Responses
pertaining to five items that related to marvels were highly correlated, and there
were interesting differences in opinion associated with religious background,
gender, and ethnicity. (Results are available from the author upon request.)
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