ATS2371 Magic, science and religion
The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · S2 2026ATS2371 Overview
- Faculty of Arts
- Semester 2, 2026
- Clayton campus, flexible mode
- Six credit points
- Level 2 anthropology unit
ATS2371 Magic, science and religion is a Level 2 anthropology unit in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. Its question is deliberately awkward for a modern reader: if magic, ritual and spiritual belief are supposed to belong to a world we have left behind, why are they everywhere in the one we live in?
- Assessed by Three pieces of written work and no examination: an 800 word observation exercise, an 800 word annotated bibliography and a 1500 word essay.
- Hardest piece The essay at 40 per cent, answering one of fourteen set questions and needing theory tied to a named ethnographic case.
- Watch the penalties The unit's own rubrics apply a late penalty of 10 per cent per day and a word count penalty once you are more than ten per cent over or under.
- How to prepare Learn one analytic move per week and keep a running case bank, because every task is marked on evidence of independent critical thinking.
How ATS2371 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Observation exercise | 30% | 800 words plus or minus 10 per cent. Describe one ritual, secular or religious, that you observed in an ethnographic film, at an event you attended within the past six months, or through a religious object, then interpret its purpose and meaning and add a personal reflection. Generative AI may not be used for any part of it. Opened Monday 3 August 2026 and closes at 11.55 pm on Friday 14 August 2026. The Handbook names this row Analytical exercise while the unit's own assessment page names it Observation exercise. |
| Annotated Bibliography | 30% | 800 words plus or minus 10 per cent, using the template supplied on the unit page. Four sources you intend to use in the essay, none of them from the weekly readings, each covered for reference details, method, argument, strengths and limits, and relevance to your essay problem. Generative AI may be used only to improve, refine or edit your own writing, and must be acknowledged. Opened Friday 28 August 2026 and closes at 11.55 pm on Friday 18 September 2026. |
| Essay | 40% | 1500 words plus or minus 10 per cent, answering one of fourteen set questions released on the unit page. Theory has to be tied to a specific ethnographic case rather than asserted on its own. Generative AI may be used only to improve, refine or edit your own writing, and must be acknowledged. Opens Friday 2 October 2026 and closes at 11.55 pm on Friday 23 October 2026. |
Weights come from the Monash University Handbook 2026 entry for this unit, whose assessment table carries exactly three rows at 30, 30 and 40 per cent; the unit's own assessment page shows the same three weights, with the due dates above. Neither document marks any task as a hurdle, so no hurdle badge appears here; check pass conditions on Moodle before relying on them, and note the Handbook's own warning that assessment details may change. One point to raise with your tutor: the marking rubric for the observation exercise labels its six criteria 20, 20, 10, 10, 10 and 15 per cent, which adds to 85, while the mark bands printed under those same criteria are out of 20, 20, 15, 15, 15 and 15, which adds to 100. The rubrics for the annotated bibliography and the essay carry no such mismatch.
What ATS2371 covers
The whole unit as one map, from ritual and sympathetic magic through to iconoclasm and megachurches. Follow any topic straight into its own free chapter guide.
Ritual, Rites of Passage and the Meaning of Death
Week 1. What counts as a ritual; Tambiah's four formal properties; the six ritual types; rites of passage and death, mourning and the social work grief does.Week 1 sets the vocabulary the rest of the unit runs on.
- Two definitions of ritual side by side: the prescribed-behaviour definition, and Tambiah's system of symbolic communication with its four formal properties
- What a ritual asks of a participant: multiple actions, special knowledge, and a cost for omitting it
- The six ritual types: rites of passage, calendrical and commemorative, exchange and communion, affliction, feasting and fasting, and political ritual
- Rites of passage as status change: birth, puberty, marriage, death, and why the transition has to be witnessed
- Death rituals in Bowen: burial and the body, the passage of the soul, mourning, and grief as a socially shaped response
- From watching to describing: participants, arrangement, duration, speech roles, languages, and formulaic openings and closings
Foundations of the Anthropology of Magic
Week 2. Frazer's sympathetic magic split into homeopathic and contagious; the evolutionist ladder and armchair method; Evans-Pritchard on Azande witchcraft, oracles and the granary.Week 2 opens the historical argument the whole unit is a reply to.
- Frazer's two principles: homeopathic magic by imitation, contagious magic through prior contact, both grouped as sympathetic magic
- The evolutionary ladder from an age of magic to an age of religion to an age of science, and the assumptions it smuggles in
- Armchair method versus fieldwork, and the language warning the unit attaches to reading these authors
- Azande categories kept apart: witchcraft as psychic malevolence, magic as remedy and technique, sorcery as the conscious evil use of magic
- The granary case: what the Azande already know about termites, and what witchcraft is actually being asked to explain
- Oracles as an institution: how a private suspicion becomes an authoritative and accepted verdict
Rethinking the Purposes of Magic and Ritual
Week 3. Radcliffe-Brown on the social function of rites; systems of sentiments; efficacy widened beyond technical cause and effect; why the Frazer test misreads the evidence.Week 3 dismantles the Frazer test from the inside. His charge was that the sorcerer is deluded because he believes his technique bends natural law.
- Frazer's charge restated precisely: magic as false science and abortive art, judged on technical mechanism alone
- The counter-evidence: societies that practise rites also hold detailed working knowledge of the natural world
- The near-to-home version: practitioners of science who keep rites whose efficacy claims their own methods would reject
- Radcliffe-Brown's move: read a rite by its social function rather than its stated mechanism
- Systems of sentiments, and how ritual maintains the dispositions a group depends on
- Efficacy widened: technical, social and dispositional outcomes, and how to say which one a claim is about
Doing Magic in the Contemporary West
Week 4. Malinowski's inner lagoon and open sea contrast; the control test; Gmelch on baseball magic; taboo and fetish; confidence as an efficacy outcome.Week 4 turns the argument onto the reader.
- Malinowski's method: five years of residence, and what long fieldwork lets a writer see that comparison at a distance cannot
- The inner lagoon and the open sea: the contrast that carries the argument, and why it functions as a controlled comparison
- The control test as a decision rule: are we in command of the situation and its result, yes or no
- Gmelch's reworking: rituals, taboos and fetishes in baseball, and the association between an act and a past success
- Confidence as an efficacy outcome, and how that answers the objection that the acts do nothing
- Where the argument is applied in the 2026 lecture: elite sport, interviews, performance, and clinical research on ritual and wellbeing
Syncretism and Afro-Diasporic Religion in Latin America
Week 5. Syncretism as fusion plus retention; colonisation, the Middle Passage and the encomienda; Santeria, its orishas, ashe, the ile and the consulta.Week 5 introduces syncretism as fusion that keeps what it absorbs. Elements from two traditions combine into something new while the older element survives inside the new form, usually alongside acculturation and transculturation.
- Syncretism defined as fusion plus retention, and its relation to acculturation and transculturation
- Warm-up cases outside the Americas: Guanyin, and the Christian calendar absorbing Samhain into All Hallows
- The historical conditions: colonisation of the Caribbean, the encomienda, the Middle Passage and Yoruba arrivals
- Santeria's structure: orishas and their Catholic manifestations, ashe as amoral neutral energy, Olodumare, and the independent ile
- Ritual practice: the consulta with a santero or santera, training by older practitioners, divination and prescribed offering
- The framing question: coping strategy, resistance, or an ordinary religion in its own right
Witches Among Us: the New Age and Re-enchantment
Week 6. Weber on rationalisation and disenchantment; the New Age self-ethic, holism and bricolage; Ezzy on popular spell books; contiguity and homeopathy in Hardie's spells.Week 6 asks whether the modern West is really disenchanted.
- Weber on rationalisation: ends and means, rules, classification, linear time, division of labour, bureaucracy
- Disenchantment defined, and the twist that religious modernity was its vehicle rather than its casualty
- The New Age as tendencies rather than a movement, and the transfer of authority from church structure to the individual
- The self-ethic, holism and the psychologisation of religion, with self-interest as the standard of judgement
- Spell books read as technologies of the self, and the consumerist infrastructure that supplies the bricolage
- Two critiques to hold at once: the limited sense of broader social obligation, and the methodological limits of studying practice through published books
Fieldwork with Sorcerers: Insider and Outsider
Week 7. The insider and outsider problem; Evans-Pritchard's use of a Zande assistant; Stoller's Songhay apprenticeship; sohanci, sorko and the ethics of belief in the field.Week 7 turns from what magic is to how anyone could study it. Sorcery is lodged inside webs of kinship and inside locally specific ideas about how a person ought to behave, and neither is something a visitor can simply walk into.
- Why sorcery resists outside study: it is embedded in kin relations and in the untidy parts of social life
- The insider and outsider distinction, and what each position can and cannot see
- Evans-Pritchard's arrangement with a Zande assistant, and the ethical objection the unit raises to it
- Stoller among the Songhay of Niger, apprenticeship as method, and the vocabulary that comes with it
- Does a researcher need to believe? The reported position of accepting the ideas inside the culture and rejecting them outside it
- What anthropological convention permits, and how far a fieldworker may go before the discipline objects
Social Frames for Explaining Illness and Misfortune
Week 8. Fadiman on a Hmong family and American medicine; explanatory models in collision; syncretic care; Hunter in a Sasak village, where sorcery and science meet.Week 8 moves the argument into a hospital. Fadiman's book follows a refugee Hmong family and the American doctors treating their daughter, and it is studied in medical anthropology because it holds both perspectives rather than adjudicating between them.
- Explanatory frames as the unit's working idea: models people use to make an event intelligible and actionable
- Fadiman's case: a Hmong family, American clinicians and a neurological condition explained twice over
- Why a non-anthropological book is set: long-term engagement, and both parties given their own account
- Syncretic care in practice, and where a health system fails the people it is trying to help
- Hunter in a Sasak village: sorcery and science complementing as well as conflicting
- Writing the encounter: describing collision and coexistence without ranking the frames in advance
Materiality: the Stuff of Religion and Magic
Week 9. Materiality against the Cartesian split; Miller on private space and the ordering of objects; Engelke on the Masowe Apostolics worshipping without the bible; speech as material medium.Week 9 asks why the physical properties of things should matter in a unit about belief. Modern thought has tended to downplay material life, and Descartes supplies the emblem: thinking is held to lift a person above their material conditions.
- Materiality defined as the physical attributes of objects, and why an inquiry into belief needs them
- The Cartesian inheritance, and the proposed inversion from thinking to having a body
- Why anthropology arrived early: magic, religion and spirituality are organised around the qualities of things
- Miller in private space: individual aesthetics and cosmologies read from how objects are arranged
- Objects as a way of ordering memory and relationship, with the body as one of the objects being decided about
- Engelke's Masowe Apostolics: worship without the bible, the preacher as a vessel, and marked speech as material medium
Purification and Iconoclasm
Week 10. Tauhid pushed to extremes; Isakhan and Zarandona on symbolic sectarianism and pre-monotheistic iconoclasm; why Sufi and Shi'ite sites were targeted; heritage as a category.Week 10 takes the materiality argument to its negative limit. Iconoclasm is the destruction of images and sites, and the week's case is the Islamic State's programme against heritage in Iraq and Syria. The lecture is careful about two things at once.
- Iconoclasm as radical opposition to materiality, and how it inverts the arguments of the previous week
- Tauhid and the theological line invoked, and why the lecture insists the reasoning is not new
- Documented destruction in Iraq and Syria, including sites kept standing for centuries by the region's own Muslim communities
- Reading the target list: Shi'ite sacred sites and Sufi practices of intercession, grave visits among them
- Symbolic sectarianism as the analytic term, and the pre-monotheistic strand alongside it
- Heritage as a category, and why destruction shocked Muslim and non-Muslim publics alike
Globalisation, Pentecostalism and Religion on the Move
Week 11. Time-space compression and religious mobility; why the secularisation thesis did not hold; Connell reading Hillsong; Eves on masculinity among Pentecostals in New Britain.Week 11 follows religious ideas as they travel.
- Globalisation as mobility plus time-space compression, and what that does to religious transmission
- The secularisation thesis and its failure as a prediction, which is the week's organising puzzle
- Pentecostal growth and the megachurch as an institutional form in Australia and the Pacific
- Connell on Hillsong: appeal read against socio-economic change, uncertainty and promises of self and economic fulfilment
- Eves in New Britain: conversion producing socially acceptable masculine identities and practices
- The implications for gender-based violence, and why the week refuses a purely celebratory reading
Research and Writing for the Three Assessed Tasks
Weeks 1 to 12. The observation exercise, the annotated bibliography and the essay: what each rubric rewards, the two referencing instructions the unit gives, word count and late penalties, and how theory meets case study.This chapter is the assessment craft the unit teaches alongside the anthropology.
- The three tasks as one sequence: describe, then research, then argue
- What the observation exercise rubric scores: field description, argument and analysis, expression, structure, reflection and references
- What the annotated bibliography rubric scores, including relevance of scholarly sources as its own criterion
- What the essay rubric scores, and the additional highest band it carries above the other two
- Penalties recorded in the rubrics: lateness per day, referencing style, and the two word count thresholds
- The referencing conflict inside the unit's own documents, and how to resolve it before you submit
The unit answers by teaching you to read practice rather than to rank it.
You begin with the early comparative writers who put magic on an evolutionary ladder, then watch that ladder get dismantled by fieldworkers who asked instead what assumptions made a practice credible to the people doing it.
Twelve weekly topics move from ritual and rites of passage, through Frazer's sympathetic magic and Azande witchcraft, to magic under uncertainty in sport and work, syncretic religion in Latin America, New Age witchcraft in the West, sorcery fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger, the collision of Hmong belief with American medicine, materiality, iconoclasm, and the spread of Pentecostal megachurches.
The unit is delivered at Clayton in flexible mode, with twelve hours of lectures and twenty four hours of workshops across the semester.
Assessment is entirely written. An observation exercise of 800 words is due in Week 3, an annotated bibliography of 800 words in Week 8, and a 1500 word essay in Week 12, weighted 30, 30 and 40 per cent.
The Handbook's assessment table for this unit carries those three rows and nothing else. Every rubric in the unit rewards the same thing above all: evidence of independent critical thinking, shown by connecting a named case study to a named concept.
Worked example · free
Classify a magical act, then re-read it through the control test
- 1Miming the delivery is homeopathic magic: the act imitates the desired outcome, so like is held to produce like.
- 1The handkerchief is contagious magic: an object that has been in contact with past success is held to keep acting on the bowler.
- 1Apply the control test. Malinowski found no magic in the safe inner lagoon and extensive magic in the dangerous open sea, so the presence of magic tracks uncontrollability, not ignorance.
- 1State what that adds: Frazer's categories describe the form of the act, the control test explains when and why anyone reaches for it, and it identifies confidence rather than physical causation as the outcome that follows.
Key terms
- Ritual
- A patterned, ordered sequence of words and acts, often across several media, marked by formality, rigidity, condensation and repetition; the unit works from Tambiah's definition of it as a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication.
- Rite of passage
- A ritual tied to a turning point in a person's social standing, at birth or adulthood or marriage or death, which carries them out of one position into another and makes the new one public.
- Homeopathic magic
- Frazer's category for acts that work by imitation, on the principle that like produces like, so performing a likeness of the wanted outcome is held to bring the outcome about.
- Contagious magic
- Frazer's category for acts that work through prior physical contact, on the principle that things once joined keep acting on each other after they are separated.
- Efficacy
- What a practice is held to accomplish. The unit widens the term deliberately: beyond technical cause and effect it covers social effects such as restored relations, marked status and the confidence a performer carries into a difficult act.
- Evolutionism
- The nineteenth century framework that ranked societies along a single ladder from magic through religion to science, treating the observer's own society as the ladder's top rung.
- Armchair anthropology
- Comparative writing built from other people's travel reports and missionary accounts rather than from the writer's own extended fieldwork, the method Frazer used and later ethnographers abandoned.
- Oracle
- Among the Azande, a socially authorised procedure for putting a question about witchcraft and receiving a verdict that participants treat as binding, which is how a suspicion becomes a public answer.
- Syncretism
- The fusion of elements from two traditions into something new while the older element is retained inside the new form, often alongside acculturation, as in the Afro-Caribbean religions that formed under colonisation.
- Disenchantment
- Weber's term for the historical process by which explanations of the universe stopped resting on supernatural forces and salvation doctrines and came to rest on rational science and empirical observation instead.
ATS2371 FAQ
Is there an exam in Magic, science and religion at Monash?
No examination row appears anywhere in this unit's published assessment.
The Monash University Handbook 2026 entry lists exactly three rows, an exercise at 30 per cent and two written tasks at 30 and 40 per cent, which already add to 100. All three are written pieces submitted through the unit's Moodle page, and the last of them falls in Week 12. Confirm on Moodle before the teaching period starts, since the Handbook warns assessment details may change.
How is this unit assessed?
By three pieces of written work. An observation exercise of 800 words carries 30 per cent and is due on Friday 14 August 2026. An annotated bibliography of 800 words carries 30 per cent and is due on Friday 18 September 2026. An essay of 1500 words carries 40 per cent and is due on Friday 23 October 2026. The three weights add to 100.
How long is each task and what happens if I run over?
The observation exercise and the annotated bibliography are 800 words each and the essay is 1500 words, all with a tolerance of plus or minus ten per cent. The marking rubrics state a five per cent penalty once you are more than ten per cent over or under, and a ten per cent penalty once you are more than fifteen per cent out. Your reference list is excluded from the count but in-text citations are included in it.
Which referencing style does this unit use?
The unit's own materials give two different instructions and you should confirm which applies to your task on Moodle. The observation exercise brief and the essay tips document both direct you to Harvard style, author, date and page number in the body with a full reference list. The essay page instead asks for APA 7th or Chicago 18th.
Both rubrics score references as a criterion worth 15 marks, and both add a penalty of up to five per cent for not following the style guidelines.
Can I use generative AI in the assessments for this unit?
It depends on the task and the unit states this explicitly for each. Generative AI may not be used at all in the observation exercise, which the unit describes as requiring students to demonstrate knowledge and skill without AI assistance.
For the annotated bibliography and the essay, generative AI may be used only to improve, refine or edit your own writing, never to generate content or ideas, and any use must be acknowledged.
Does this unit have a hurdle requirement?
Neither the Handbook assessment table nor the unit's assessment page marks any of the three tasks as a hurdle, so nothing here is shown with a hurdle badge. That is a statement about what these two documents show, not a guarantee about pass conditions, so check the current requirements on the unit's Moodle page. The Handbook also notes that assessment details may change before teaching starts.
What is the late penalty on these tasks?
The marking rubrics supplied with the observation exercise and the annotated bibliography both record a late penalty of 10 per cent per day. The same rubrics record a further deduction of up to five per cent for not following the referencing style guidelines.
Check the current figure on Moodle before you assume it, and apply for a short extension or special consideration through the University's own process rather than submitting late.
Which offering does this guide describe?
Semester 2, 2026 at Clayton, in the flexible attendance mode where some activities offer a choice between on-campus and online. The Handbook lists exactly one 2026 offering of this unit, and the unit's own Moodle materials carry the same Semester 2 2026 marker. Teaching is twelve hours of lectures and twenty four hours of workshops, against an expected total workload of 144 hours for the semester.
Questions students ask in each ATS2371 chapter
- Which reading does Week 1 rest on?
- Two required readings. Henninger's chapter on religion in the open cultural anthropology text sets the field, and Bowen's chapter on rituals of transition supplies the initiation, death and pilgrimage material the lecture works through. Both are reached through the unit's reading list. Chapter 01 · Ritual, Rites of Passage and the Meaning of Death
- What is the difference between homeopathic and contagious magic?
- Homeopathic magic works by imitation, on the principle that like produces like, so a model or a mimed action is held to bring about what it resembles. Contagious magic works through prior physical contact, on the principle that things once joined continue to act on one another after separation. Frazer groups both under sympathetic magic. Chapter 02 · Foundations of the Anthropology of Magic
- What is the reading for Week 3?
- Radcliffe-Brown's essay Religion and Society, published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1945, reached through the unit's reading list. The lecture also refers to work on repetition and ritual logic in video games as a contemporary application. Chapter 03 · Rethinking the Purposes of Magic and Ritual
- What is the required reading for Week 4?
- Gmelch's essay on baseball magic, reached through the unit's reading list. The lecture builds it on Malinowski's 1925 essay on the rational mastery of the environment, and the third clip adds recent research on religious ritual and mental health among displaced communities in India. Chapter 04 · Doing Magic in the Contemporary West
- What is the reading for Week 5?
- Mena's 1998 article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, which compares Cuban Santeria, Haitian Vodou and Puerto Rican spiritualism as a multiculturalist inquiry into syncretism. The week also sets a required video, listed on the unit's own week page. Chapter 05 · Syncretism and Afro-Diasporic Religion in Latin America
- What is the required reading for Week 6?
- Ezzy's 2003 article in Culture and Religion, which reads mass-market spell books as a re-enchantment of ordinary life. The week also asks you to read and look at Titania Hardie's Hocus Pocus book of spells, which is available on the unit's Week 6 page. Chapter 06 · Witches Among Us: the New Age and Re-enchantment
- What are the readings for Week 7?
- An excerpt from Evans-Pritchard on his fieldwork arrangements, and the opening sections of Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow, published in 1987, which records an apprenticeship served with Songhay practitioners in Niger. The unit also posts a glossary of Songhay terms used in the memoir, which is worth having open while you read. Chapter 07 · Fieldwork with Sorcerers: Insider and Outsider
- What is the required reading for Week 8?
- Chapter one and chapter three of Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, reached through the unit's reading list. The additional reading is Hunter's paper on sorcery and science in one Sasak village. Chapter 08 · Social Frames for Explaining Illness and Misfortune
- What are the readings for Week 9?
- Two encounters from Miller's The Comfort of Things, together with Engelke's 2004 article on the Masowe Apostolics, both reached through the unit's reading list. Read Miller first, since the argument is easier to see where objects are plentiful, and keep the second reading for the harder case where the central object has been refused. Chapter 09 · Materiality: the Stuff of Religion and Magic
- What is the reading for Week 10?
- Isakhan and Zarandona's 2018 article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies setting out the layered religious and political iconoclasm the Islamic State practised. The week also lists a recommended reading by Beranek and Tupek. Chapter 10 · Purification and Iconoclasm
- What are the readings for Week 11?
- Connell's 2005 article in Australian Geographer on Hillsong as a megachurch in the Sydney suburbs, and Richard Eves on Pentecostalism in New Britain in Papua New Guinea, both listed on the unit's own week page. Chapter 11 · Globalisation, Pentecostalism and Religion on the Move
- What do all three rubrics have in common?
- Their two largest criteria. Understanding of key concepts and the quality and coherence of argument and analysis carry the most marks in every one of them, and both are scored on evidence of independent critical thinking rather than on coverage. Referencing is scored as a separate criterion in all three. Chapter 12 · Research and Writing for the Three Assessed Tasks
How to prepare for the assessments
Build a case bank from Week 1 and keep it in one place. Every rubric in this unit scores independent critical thinking and the relevance of scholarly sources, and both are won by having a specific ethnographic case ready to attach to a concept rather than by restating the concept more fully.
One row per week: the concept the week introduced, the writer who introduced it, the case they built it on, and one sentence on where the concept stops working. That table is what turns the annotated bibliography into a real search rather than a scramble, and it is what lets you answer any of the fourteen essay questions without starting from nothing.
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