For various reasons, the concept of magic has been disputed for several decades. Argued to be a pejorative assessment of other peoples' religious rites, magic is broadly understood as a vacuous concept without any explanatory value. While critique of former approaches is necessary, it is doubtful that terminological cleansing is helpful, or that dismantling distinctions such as that between magic and religion will make us any wiser. Building on previous work, I will present a bio-cultural approach to magical ritual focusing on its cognitive foundation as well as its functional role in negotiating tension arising between distinct levels of social organization, notably that between a ‘nurture sphere’, the extended family based on intimate-phatic communication, and a ‘community sphere’ consisting of coalitions between such families arbitrated by increasingly abstract, symbolic communication. Taking departure in a short discussion of previous explanatory approaches, I address the cognitive underpinning of magical action in a predictive processing framework. I then argue that magic addresses certain kinds of contingency events (e.g. illness or failure to procure sufficient food) that generate cognitive representations of a special ‘force’, and that magic applies this force to problems inherent to the nurture sphere. As contingency events affecting the survival of extended families potentially unbalance the relation between nurture spheres comprising a community, magic is argued to be part of cultural immune systems aimed to alleviate pressure arising from loyalties divided between family and group in the face of environmental pressures.
Jesper Sørensen (Thu,) studied this question.