Primitive Magic

I think this book could have been condensed into a couple chapters. I suspect he was trying to illuminate different aspects of the topic, but it all just ran together for me. It was hard to follow and hard to read and seemed very repetative. I also find it irritating in a book that drew mainly from African and Iniuet and from male shamans, that the cover are two naked, one at least caucasian, females. That may not be the author's fault, but still irritating.

In short: Magic is to address the cultural problem of "not being there" (be it an individual or a world or a tribal-type group), which is something first-world cultures no longer even consider as a potential problem. So the problems addressed by magic are unheard of, uncomprehensible by anyone coming from a Western point of view who has not trained themselves to see the issue. Magic deal with "the beyond" which may be trying to unwork the world or the soul may be likely to escape from the body--neither of these are issues Western culture is concerned about. In the west, our being here and the world being as it is are both givens. In magical cultures, both of these are still being decided.

He did a nice job comparing it to schizophrenia, and the loss of self associated with it (and the reactions to try and maintain the self) in a culture where the core problem isn't even recognized. He also did an excellent job making sure to differenciate schizophrenia from a magical culture, which is not made of schizophrenias. However, it seems a schiizophreiniac might be better off in a magical culture, because their core problem would at least be related to a problem the entire culture addresses--the risk of Not Being There.

And that theory--and the inability of Western researchers or observers to properly understand what magic was addressing (and a bit about their unwillingness to even consider that magic might be based on actual real things, which our culture has made impossible for us to reach--if the beyond is gone, we can hardly touch the beyond) is most of the book to me.

Interesting, but covered decently in the first section (still wordy and convoluted) and could have been covered much more clearly in a much shorter book, with more organized examples.

So, marked down for the writing (or translation, it's hard to tell--it could just be a not very skilled translator with a difficult subject), but extra stars for a fascinating theory of magic that made me think and go "hmmm". I prefer the brain effort being more in the topic and less in the reading, though.