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From the November 2004 Anthropology News How
Far Have We Traveled? Hugh Gusterson How far have we come in the century since professional anthropologists began to think systematically about magic, science and religion? When anthropology was established as a discipline in the early 20th century the relationship between magic, science and religion was one of its central preoccupations. In particular, British anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Edward Evans-Pritchard, writing for metropolitan audiences in an empire that was beginning to lose its self-confidence, started to question simplistic Victorian and Edwardian dichotomies, essential to high imperialism, between scientific, rational Westerners and their superstitious, irrational others. Malinowski, in Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays, pointed out that Trobriand islanders—far from living in a perpetual fog of magical thought—hunted and gardened with empirically-honed skill; they only turned to magic when they reached the limits of their practical knowledge. Evans-Pritchard, in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, argued that a belief in witchcraft did not preclude the Azande from understanding empirical relationships in the world around them and that their witchcraft beliefs had an underlying logic and plausibility that impeded falsification. While there were reflexive implications to this work, Westerners too turned to magic and religion when they felt powerless. For example, Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard were rationalists more interested in looking for the science in the primitive than the primitive in Western science. If anthropologists have backstaged these issues in recent decades, today they are more than ripe for revisiting and reworking. The context for revisiting these issues now is different, but not as different as one might think, from that of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard. Contemporary anthropology departments, turned intellectually upside down in recent years by various kinds of critical theory, are no longer milieus where the declaratory rhetoric of science is accorded uncritical reverence, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s. However, American anthropologists find themselves writing from within an empire that, like its European predecessors, construes its domination of the underdeveloped world through the tropes of modernity and science. Its pundits—the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman comes to mind—insist on misreading resistance to corporate capitalism and American military bases abroad as a rejection of modernity. This conjuncture of an empire confident of its superiority and an academy inclined to question what it has become trendy to call “the Enlightenment Project” is a combustible but productive one.
If Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard were alive today, they would surely be intrigued to find that, while Americans often construe their global dominance in terms of their superior science and technology, they also have a president who lists Jesus as his favorite thinker and regards evangelicals as his most important voting bloc, a government that has prohibited embryonic stem cell research on the grounds that a blastocyte is a person in the eyes of God, and numerous civic leaders seeking to ban the teaching of evolution and reestablish prayer in the schools. In other words, religion, revived, is sometimes getting in the way of science over here in the headquarters of modernity. But what of magic, the third term in our troika? As an anthropologist of science I am increasingly struck by the way that magic and science, far from being opposites, are increasingly fused at the hip. Take these examples: Through the last four presidential administrations, the US has persisted in its pursuit of a missile defense system to protect the country against nuclear attack. Recent revelations that the rudimentary successes of prototype interceptors were enabled by rigging of the tests and years of proclamations by university physicists that missile defense can easily be overwhelmed by new offensive strategies have in no way dimmed the enthusiasm of American policymakers to spend billions of dollars on interceptor technologies sporting mythical names such as “Excalibur.” The General Accounting Office estimates that the US will spend $160 billion by 2009 in pursuit of the fantasy that there must be a magic bullet that will protect us from nuclear attack. Failures and setbacks, far from undermining the program, lead to budget increases. Polygraph tests are at least as dubious, and as popular with the US government, as missile defense. The Office of Technology Assessment and the National Academy of Sciences have both issued reports in recent years determining that there is no scientific basis to polygraphy. We also know that proven spies such as Aldrich Ames passed their polygraph tests. Yet the magical aura of the machine that reads minds—a suped-up version of the Azande’s poisoned chickens with wires and dials—is more powerful than expert panels or empirical evidence. Polygraphs are currently used for employment screening and investigations of security breaches by the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. The FBI, for example, rejects 20% of its job applicants on the basis of their polygraph scores. Police in 62% of departments also use polygraphs. The US government polygraphs 300,000-600,000 people a year, and the number is increasing. Then there are “scientific” personality tests such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the Myers-Briggs tests. The Myers-Briggs test is taken by two and a half million people a year and is used by 89 of the top 100 companies in the Fortune index. This is despite the fact that more than half the people who retake the Myers-Briggs test come out the second time with a different personality type! Walter Benjamin once argued, famously, that technology demystifies the world by robbing objects of their aura. In the contemporary US the reverse seems to be true. Technology itself has an aura of infallibility that makes it an instrument of magic. Particularly in matters of national defense, where the underlying reality in an age of nuclear weapons and terrorists is one of profound anxiety and vulnerability, we turn to the magic of smart bombs and mechanical mind-readers to thwart our enemies and seek out the otherwise invisible traitors in our midst. The stakes are bigger and the interventions more expensive, but have we really traveled so far from the complex mixture of paranoia, logic and magic that characterized Evans-Pritchard’s Azande? Hugh Gusterson is an associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is author of People of the Bomb (2004) and co-editor of Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong (in press). |
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