Magic, Science and Society

Magic, Science and Society investigates the way the ‘rationality debate’ has developed over the last century, from E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s study of Azande magic, through Peter Winch’s argument that there can be no such thing as a social science, across the arguments about the proper status of science in the 1970s and 1980s, to the ‘epistemological’ and ‘ontological’ turns of the early twenty-first century.

Different people have different understandings of what is rational: some practise magic, some orientate to legal convention and tradition and others defer to science and logic. Starting with anthropological studies of witchcraft, and working through to contemporary debates about epistemology and ontology in social science, this book systematically examines the ways key questions about these issues have been framed and answered. These include:

• Can ‘magic’ be real, either for members of the cultures that practise it or more generally?
• How can we arbitrate between different types of rationality?
• Is science a benchmark for studying other forms of rationality or just a cultural practice like any other?
• What are the implications of these issues for the social sciences themselves?

This book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers of the social sciences and science studies practitioners.

Alex Dennis is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he also leads the BA Sociology programme. His research explores theories of rationality, ethnomethodology and conversational analysis, ethnographic methodologies, workplace and organisational studies, sociologies of knowledge, social interaction and social order perspectives. He is the author of Making Decisions about People: The Organisational Contingencies of Illness (Routledge, 2001), co-author of Perspectives in Sociology (Sixth Edition, Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Human Agents and Social Structures (2010).