Consider Bronislaw Malinowski’s groundbreaking analysis of spells among the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia. Rather than decide whether spells were intrinsically rational or irrational modes of speaking, thinking, and acting, Malinowski emphasized their practical repercussions—what they did rather than what they expressed.⁶ This was consistent with his view that “If the earliest and most fundamental function of speech is pragmatic—to direct, to control and to correlate human activities—then obviously no study of speech except within the ‘context of situation’ is legitimate.”⁷

In volume 1 of Coral Gardens and Their Magic (first published in 1935), he provides numerous examples of what he had in mind, describing spells that accompanied every phase of gardening, as well as the building and decoration of canoes, and actions to enhance health, well-being, and beauty. Consider, for example, the “most important formula in the whole system of Omarakana garden magic”—the vatuvi spell—uttered over the axes after ground has been cleared and soil prepared for planting. Before any spelling takes place, the axes are dressed with magical substances—including aromatic herbs, leaves, clumps of soil taken from the nest of a bush-hen, chunks of hornets’ nests, and bits scraped off coral boulders—and participants anoint their bodies and put on armulets. The spell typically consists of a string of references to critical aspects of the work to be done—in this case striking the soil—followed by repeated verbs, which impart to the spell an incantatory and imperative power:

Show the way, show the way
Show the way, show the way,
Show the way groundwards, into the deep ground,
Show the way, show the way,
Show the way, show the way,
Show the way firmly, show the way to the firm moorings.

The names of the gardener’s ancestors, and his grandfather and father, are now invoked before he continues:

The belly of my garden leavens,
The belly of my garden rises,
The belly of my garden reclines,
The belly of my garden grows to the size of a bush-hen’s nest,
The belly of my garden grows like an ant-hill;
The belly of my garden rises and is bowed down,
The belly of my garden rises like the iron-wood palm,
The belly of my garden swells,
The belly of my garden swells as with a child.
I sweep away.

There follows a lengthy recitation of all the things that are to be swept away—including various pests and blights:

I sweep, I sweep, I sweep away. The grubs I sweep, I sweep away; the blight I sweep, I sweep away; insects I sweep, I sweep away; the beetle with the sharp tooth, I sweep, I sweep away . . .⁸

Malinowski was fascinated by the ontological metaphors that link human and extrahuman worlds. Social relationships are likened to paths, nets, and bonds; understanding is thought of as a coming into the light, and ignorance is equated with darkness; freedom is compared to the flight of a bird; dilemmas are compared with knots, persons with places, and the human body with the body of the land. These images provide a counterpoint to ritual action, for by manipulating material objects that are symbolically equated with human subjects, one can vicariously work on one’s subjectivity at the same time as one is carrying out the physical task at hand.

As Malinowski notes, the “magic words are, so to speak, rubbed in by constant repetition to the substance.” That the object must be within hearing suggests that it is spoken to as though it were another person, capable of responding to, or reciprocating, the words that are addressed to it. This focus on external inductive effects gives the impression that Trobrianders do not understand the arbitrary relationship between words and the world and act as if language not only mirrored reality but could be used to influence it. Indeed, just as Richard Dawkins assumes that anyone who takes the metaphor of a selfish gene literally is a fool, many Westerners dismiss “primitive” people as foolish, for who in their right mind would try to influence the growth of crops by talking to the soil in which they are being planted? But if we see the spell and the action of tilling the soil as complementary, the apparent gap between Trobrianders and ourselves (or the way we like to think of ourselves) is narrowed, for all human beings seek to augment and increase by all means possible their capacity for interacting effectively with their social and physical environments. As Malinowski himself observed, the spell is addressed both to the soil and to the speaker himself. Although the spells for a yam house are seemingly directed at anchoring and filling the yam house, the Trobrianders themselves are under no misapprehension that it is the belly of people that is the real object of the spell, for, logically, if bellies remain empty the yam house will be full.⁹

In the majority of cases . . . magic refers to human activities or to the response of nature to human activities, rather than to natural forces alone. Thus in gardening and in fishing, it is the behaviour of plants and animals tended or pursued by man; in the canoe magic, it is the carver’s magic, the object is a human-made thing; in the Kula, in love magic, in many forms of food magic, it is human nature on to which the force is directed.¹⁰

In arguing that spells complement practical activity, reinforcing our efforts by focusing attention, bolstering confidence, and inspiring hope, Malinowski insisted that social integration was the most important function of magic.¹¹ But if all action involves social and subjective functions, our interest shifts from identifying which of these functions is primary to exploring the conditions under which one or the other comes to the fore.

For Jean-Paul Sartre, magical thinking typically emerges in situations of heightened uncertainty and anxiety¹²—when our health fails, our incomes do not meet our needs, our families fall apart, our computers or cars break down, or we lose faith in our government. Under such circumstances, we often turn inward, making our emotions the means whereby we “magically” recover our sense of agency or presence. Nursing ill will toward an enemy, cursing an errant computer, kicking a flat tire, blaming a false friend, concocting a conspiracy story, or feeling sorry for ourselves will not necessarily effect any objective change in our situation, but it can transform the way we experience it. It is not that we become utterly enthralled by magical thinking; rather, it gives us temporary relief from our inability to cope or “think straight.”

In The Religion of the Dinka, Godfrey Lienhardt makes a similar point. Magical action is a supplement to practical action rather than a substitute for it—a vital means of making life more thinkable, and hence more manageable, under trying conditions. Thus, when a Dinka knots a tuft of grass in order to constrict, delay, or “tie up” an enemy, or binds a stone with grass to hobble a prowling lion, he does not desist from practical action, for these devices are but “models” of his “desires and hopes, upon which to base renewed practical endeavour.”

“Symbolic actions,” Lienhardt writes, “recreate, and even dramatize, situations which they aim to control, and the experience of which they effectively modulate. If they do not change actual historical or physical events—as the Dinka in some cases believe them to do—they do change and regulate the Dinka’s experience of those events.”¹³

The following anecdote from the first months of my fieldwork among the Kuranko of northern Sierra Leone in early 1970 further illustrates the ways in which we tend to switch opportunistically between alternative ways of thinking and acting depending on the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves.

After several weeks in a remote Kuranko village, and with no means of communicating with my wife in a town two days’ walk away, I became increasingly concerned that, in the event of a medical emergency, her life and the life of the child she was carrying might be in danger. My anxieties came to a head one evening when I went out to the latrine that stood in the grassland behind the house where I was lodged. The silence was suddenly broken by several Senegalese fire finches flitting around me. That these small, crimson birds were said to embody the souls of children who have died in infancy undoubtedly gave some assurance to bereaved mothers that their dead children could be reborn. But it worked on my subconscious in a very different way. I became convinced that my wife had suffered a miscarriage and that her life was in jeopardy.

That night I slept fitfully, and in the morning confided my fears to my field assistant, Noah Marah. Noah said that he was missing his children and wondering about his wives; perhaps it was time for us to return to Kabala.

That afternoon, Noah announced that he was going to see a diviner and invited me to accompany him.

A diviner is “one who lays out pebbles”—beresigile—or reads palms (bolomafelne, lit. “hand-on-looker”), though other divinatory techniques include mirror-reading and consulting the Qur’an. Bokari Wularé used river stones.

We were taken indoors, and sat on either side of a raffia mat, spread on the clay floor. After observing Bockari divine for Noah, I asked if he could read the stones for me. I half expected Bockari to laugh at my request, but he responded without a word, and began following the same procedure he had followed with Noah.

“Why have you come?” he asked.

Noah spoke for me. “He wants to find out about his wife. She is expecting a child. He is worried about her. He wants to know if all is well, and if all will be well.”

Bockari emptied some stones from his small monkey-skin bag and with the palm of his hand spread them across the mat. Most were river pebbles: semilucent, the color of rust, jasper, and yellow ocher. Among them were some cowrie shells, old coins, and pieces of metal. When I handed Bockari his 50 cents consultation fee, he mingled it with these objects.

“What is your wife’s name?”“Pauline,” I answered, pleased to have understood the question.

Bockari found difficulty with the name but did not ask for it to be repeated. In a soft voice he addressed the stones, informing them of the reason I had come. Then he gathered up a handful and began to chant. At the same time, with half-closed eyes, he rhythmically knocked the back of his cupped hand against the mat.

Very deliberately, he then laid out the stones, some in pairs, some singly, others in threes and fours.

“All is well,” Bockari said quietly, his attention fixed on the stones. “Your wife is well. She will give birth to a baby girl.”

Without pausing, he proceeded to lay out a second pattern.

“There is nothing untoward. The paths are clear. The birth will be easy.”

To see what sacrifice I should make, Bockari laid out the stones a third time.

“Your wife must sacrifice some clothes and give them to a woman she respects. You must sacrifice two yards of white satin and give it to a man you respect. When your child is born, you must sacrifice a sheep.”

Bockari looked warily at me, as if wondering whether I would do as the stones instructed.

“To whom must I address the sacrifice of the sheep?” I asked in English. Noah translated.

”To your ancestors,” Bockari said.

A week later in Kabala I shared my experience with Pauline, who was as reassured by Bockari’s confident predictions as I had been, and I wasted no time in making the sacrifices I had been directed to make to ensure that the birth of our daughter went smoothly. I was curious, however, to find myself acting as if I had embraced the assumptions on which Kuranko divinatory praxis was based. Could this be compared to an agnostic turning to God at a critical crossroads in life, or an alcoholic admitting his or her powerlessness as a first step on the road to recovery? Was there a necessary relationship between belief and action, or were beliefs and ideas expedient means of making sense of bewildering events, and we take them up or discard without necessarily being committed to their intrinsic validity?¹⁴

Five years would pass before I published my praxeological account of Kuranko divination. Although I would refer to my consultation with Bockari Wularé, my findings reflected numerous conversations with diviners and their clients, and my conclusions would go against the grain of the prevailing epistemological approach to divination. Influenced by the rationality-irrationality debate, many anthropologists asked how diviners were able to maintain credibility and protect the plausibility of a diagnostic system that was, at best, hit or miss. By contrast, my focus was on the experiences of clients who did not know what to think or do when faced by a perilous journey, a difficult childbirth, a troubling dream, a grave illness, a sudden death, an impending initiation, or even building a new house and making a new farm. I argued that committing oneself to a belief in God or the djinn was far less important than acting as if God and the djinn could mediate a change in one’s experience, and thereby help one change one’s situation. Just as J. L. Austin argued for an illocutionary form of speaking that designated an action rather than expressed a meaning,¹⁵ I argued that a diviner’s stones and incantations enabled clients to get some distance from situations they could not think clearly about or directly act upon. What appeared to be submission to higher powers was a prelude to regaining one’s own power to govern one’s fate. Though this power might be illusory, it had real effects. And because it could reduce anxiety and restore a sense of agency, it would not necessarily inspire reflection on the essential veracity or fallibility of the diviner’s methods.

In the same way that bilingual people code switch in response to changing social situations, Kuranko opportunistically switch from one diviner to another, have recourse to traditional and Western medicines, and experiment with alternative crops or religions in their attempts to maximize well-being in a world of limited resources and external dangers. As Michael Lambek discovered in his fieldwork in Mayotte, people “juggled three traditions of knowledge” that he referred to as Islam, cosmology, and spirit possession. “The traditions did not contradict one another and were not mutually exclusive, but nor did they did fit precisely together in the sort of totalizing structure elucidated by influential anthropologists” at the time of his fieldwork.¹⁶

If there is any existential problem that is common to religion, philosophy, science, and everyday life, it is the problem of uncertainty. Tanya Luhrmann observes that Christians have always struggled with a sense that their faith might be misguided and their religion a sham:

Augustine agonized. Anselm despaired. The long tradition of spiritual literature is full of intense uncertainty about the true nature of a being that can be neither seen nor heard in the ordinary way. And whether or not people ever voice the fear that God himself is an empty fantasy, whether or not they tussle with theology, Christians of all ages have wrestled with the difficulty of believing that God is real for them in particular, for their own lives and every day, as if the promise of joy were true for other people—but not for themselves.¹⁷

Doubt was also as fundamental to Socratic dialectics as it was to the methodological skepticism of René Descartes. Nor did the advent of Enlightenment science put an end to doubt; rather, it remained crucial to experimental method, and even the most sophisticated scientists readily confess confusion and muddle as they try to get equipment to work, to measure a phenomenon more exactly, or to interpret their findings. “This mixture of doubting with the certainty of scientific laws is not a new phenomenon,” writes the neurophysiologist J. Z. Young, and he cites the case of Newton for whom “the search for answers was a continual struggle and anxiety that drove him to the edge of madness.”¹⁸

If scientists, philosophers, and people of faith often find themselves uncertain as to the true nature of reality, then surely it is wiser to suspend our search for ultimate truth and acknowledge that there are always alternative explanatory models, coping strategies, and practical skills available to us and that what has failed us in the past may be improved upon for the future. Trial and error is not only basic to empirical method; it is the way we negotiate our paths through life.

Rather than vociferously advocating for one all-encompassing answer to the quandaries of existence and dismiss the rest as wrong-headed or downright delusional, it behooves us to fully acknowledge the variety of possible ways of making life meaningful and bearable. Just as we acknowledge the diverse ways in which people identify themselves ethnically or sexually, or express their different tastes in food, music, and clothing, so experienting with alternative worldviews should be seen as a coping strategy rather than irresponsible or self-defeating,

A year after the introduction of genetic mutation technology to New Zealand in 2003, I interviewed the Māori researcher and writer Manuka Hēnare, and asked him how many Māori, in his view, embraced the “traditional” belief about not intermingling genetic material from different species. I took care to explain that I was not calling traditional beliefs into question, but that I was curious to know if people held these beliefs to be true and could not comprehend the world in any other way, or espoused these beliefs for the sense of solidarity they provided in the face of a dominant Eurocentric and “scientific” worldview which excluded them from it.¹⁹

Manuka made two points.

First, he observed that relatively few Māori are opposed to genetic engineering on a priori cultural or cosmological grounds. However, most will speak against it, saying no at first, because they are wary of being railroaded into giving their assent to something that may prove later to be to their detriment. People are conservative and cautious, Manuka said, because Pākehā have ridden roughshod over their intellectual and cultural property rights in the past; their inclination is, therefore, to go slow, to wait and see how things work out, how the land lies, before rushing into anything.

Manuka’s second point was that Māori attitudes to genetic engineering are context dependent, and he described a Māori gathering at which he asked people to raise their hands if they were diabetic and using insulin. As Manuka expected, a large number of people raised their hands. He then asked how many were against genetic engineering. All were against it. Manuka then told his audience that insulin was produced through genetic engineering. How many people, he now asked, would continue using insulin? All said they would. If it’s a life-and-death issue, Manuka told me, one will set aside one’s ideological objections to genetic engineering.

This pragmatic spirit struck a chord in me, for I had long been critical of the view that the way human beings live their everyday lives is wholly determined by the beliefs to which they pay lip service. In my view, it is facile to claim that our worldviews so deeply penetrate and permeate our consciousness that our actions can be explained by direct reference to them. The immense variability in commitment to doctrine is strong evidence that doctrine does not determine experience in any straightforward way. Moreover, beliefs are more commonly post facto rationalizations than a priori determinants of action. And human beings are motivated by many imperatives apart from belief, even though they cannot always say what these imperatives are.

In arguing that science and religion are complementary means of coping with the exigencies of life rather than competing theories about the nature of reality, I have not addressed the ethical issue of when invoking scientific knowledge or religious faith does more harm than good. It is all very well claiming that the value of a scientific fact or an article of faith lies in what it does for us, but what if the coping strategy we adopt creates suffering for others or a short-term solution entails long-term damage? It is never enough to assert that one has God or Science on one’s side without reckoning with the general consequences of one’s actions. How can we reconcile the scientific breakthrough of splitting the atom with the use of atomic bombs to kill 200,000 people in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? When does spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines and treatments or spreading racist views on social media endanger people’s lives? And how can we measure the good that Christian missionaries or Muslim proselytizers have done in Africa against the harm they have caused?

These questions may be difficult to answer unequivocally, but they serve to caution us against the self-righteous assumption that what is in our best interest or what we hold to be true is ipso facto in the best interest of others and true for them.

If the anthropological study of allegedly “primitive” people has any value it is to shatter the Eurocentric delusion of being in possession of superior knowledge, whether derived from occult or scientific sources. Yet many anthropologists have found it difficult to overcome the bias of their own cultural conditioning even when adducing evidence against it. Malinowski saw that spells had real effects, and compared sympathetic magic to Western advertising, but he could not, as a person, place himself on a par with so-called savages. Consider, too, Robin Horton’s influential essay on African traditional thought and Western science in which he perpetuates the European myth that premodern societies are closed, both intellectually and socially, by contrast with modern societies, which are open.

Horton makes this point by comparing modern medical diagnosis with African divination. Whereas diagnosis assumes that a determinate cause can be found for every effect (and treated with a drug developed for that ailment and no other), divination assumes that any effect may have multiple causes and may involve switching between several strategies of redressive or therapeutic action.²⁰ Ironically, however, it would seem that divination is more open to unseen possible causes than Western diagnosis, which tends to reduce any effect to a single determinate cause. Contrary to Western stereotypes of tribal societies as outside history and arrested in the past, West Africans have traded and formed political alliances as far afield as the Middle East since the thirteenth century, and the same pragmatic openness is equally true of traditional societies in Asia and Polynesia.

For a long time, Pākehā New Zealanders assumed and were taught that the Polynesian people who first settled the islands of Aotearoa made landfall accidentally, unlike Captain James Cook who used scientific navigational techniques to “discover” the same islands some 8oo years later. It wasn’t until the late 1960s when a seasoned long-distance yachtsman, David Lewis, invited Polynesian navigators to take charge of his boat and sail it from one island to another across the South Pacific, that the Polynesian science of ocean navigation (involving extensive knowledge of subtropical weather systems, star constellations, and ocean currents) was recognized.²¹ It was also only relatively recently that scientists appreciated the sophisticated technology of temperature control that Māori developed for storing kumara during the winter months. Undoubtedly karakia (spells) supported these seagoing and agricultural activities in the same way that spells supported the same activities in the Trobriand Islands.

If this complementarity of magical and practical actions is to be fully understood, and we are going to break historically engrained ways of either-or thinking in which “they” are always depicted as the opposite, if not the opponents, of “us,” we need to reflect deeply on how we actually navigate our everyday lives. The ethnographic method of participant-observation, developed by Malinowski over one hundred years ago, is one way of getting beyond ourselves, but so too is open-ended conversation with those we believe to be “other” in our own neighborhoods and nation.

Michael D. Jackson retired from active teaching duties at Harvard Divinity School in 2022 and is now a senior research fellow in world religions. He is the author of numerous books of anthropology, including the prize-winning Paths Toward a Clearing and At Home in the World, and has also published seven works of fiction, a memoir, and nine volumes of poetry.