Magic

Magic is defined by function and by method, deliberate use of skill and methodology to accomplish one of four things, which means the category is settled by what an act does rather than by whether anyone believes in it. That is why Marsh's modern examples sit inside the definition rather than beside it as analogies. An employment contract and a student enrolment are sublation of one will to another through the creation of a shared bond, which is the second category performed with paperwork. Diplomatic immunity is a spell complete with talismans, warding off curses in the form of criminal accusations, which is the third. Categories one and three cover most of what institutions do, since creating endogroups and negative images and moving guilt and debt between people is the ordinary business of law, media and economy. What is now called religion was originally divided into these same categories, with guilt allocation, deflection and punishment now largely under law and economy, divination and influence of outcomes transferred first to prayer and now to economics and bondage and sublation now the business of government. Her point is not that modern institutions resemble magic but that the practices were never abandoned, only relocated and renamed. Today words and images are no longer recognized as magical and nobody admits they are used for shunning, and the effect is the same as it always was.

Anthropology of magic runs from Frazer's sympathetic magic through Malinowski's functional account to Evans-Pritchard on Azande witchcraft, and Keith Thomas traced the decline of magic in England alongside the rise of other means of managing misfortune. Mauss and Hubert emphasized that magic is a collective social fact rather than individual belief. Marsh's definition is closest to the functionalist strand and pushes it to a conclusion the discipline stops short of, since anthropologists describe continuity between magical and modern practices while she classifies contemporary legal and economic instruments as magic outright, which is a claim about what those instruments are rather than about what they resemble.