Magical Contracts, Numinous Capitalism
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Description
One suspects that anthropology’s long preoccupation with magic has much to do with the widespread sense, famously articulated by Weber, that becoming modern involves disenchantment, literally losing the sense that life is magical. This chapter takes issue with that suspicion and suggests that magic itself is a shifting thing, strangely hard to lose, perhaps more durable than often feared. Very mundane and seemingly secular things, legal doctrines and jurisprudence concerning contracts, require rather breathtaking faith in the efficacy of words to shape reality. (“Contracts” here means nothing more exotic than the economic transactions that inhabitants of contemporary society engage in daily.) Functioning at all in our very commercial society requires something akin to enchantment, or perhaps enchantment without the wonder.
An earlier version of these ideas appeared under the same title in Anthropology Today, v. 32 n. 6, special issue “Capitalism and Magic Part I,” December 2016, pp 13–17.
Publication Date
7-26-2018
Publisher
Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN
978-3-319-74396-7
First Page
45
Last Page
63
Disciplines
Anthropology | Law
Recommended Citation
Westbrook, David A., "Magical Contracts, Numinous Capitalism" (2018). Contributions to Books. 457.
https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/457
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