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.02Foundations 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.03Rethinking 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.04Doing 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.05Syncretism 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.06Witches 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.07Fieldwork 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.08Social 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.09Materiality: 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.10Purification 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.11Globalisation, 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.12Research 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.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.
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.
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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