REVIEW Making Magic,Writing Culture: The Magic of the Magic of Modernity

Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World (Sagan, 1997) opens with a vignette about a discussion Sagan and his cab driver had about Atlantis, Area 51, alien abduction and other tabloid topics. The story ends with Sagan bemoan-ing the mystification of the common folk and reiterating the responsibilities of scientists to combat the mystical pseudo-science that passes for knowledge in mass media and popular culture. Here, Sagan repeats a theme common to many discourses of modernity: the demarcation of science from magic, or of empiricism from superstition and baseless conjecture. This theme is as rele-vant now in an age of ‘intelligent design ’ as it was in 18th-century debates on polygenism. But might Sagan’s invocations of objectivity, truth and method themselves constitute a kind of magic? Is there some Stygian power in mobi-lizing discourses of science themselves? What demons haunt his world? Two recent books, Randall Styers ’ Making Magic and Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels ’ edited collection Magic and Modernity plumb the depths of our demon-haunted world, but not in a way in which Sagan would approve. Instead, practicing what Michael Taussig calls ‘the legerdemain of revelation of concealment ’ (Magic and Modernity, p. 284), these writers uncover magic both at the inception of modernity and in its contemporary articulations (including, of course, the writing of the magic of modernity itself). These texts join a growing list of monographs and essays – many produced by anthropol