ATS2371 Chap.4 Doing Magic in the Contemporary West
Doing Magic in the Contemporary West
Week 4 turns the argument onto the reader. Malinowski spent five years among Trobriand communities from 1914, at a time when the most celebrated comparative writer in the discipline had travelled no further than Italy and Greece, and the difference in method produced a different finding.
Fishing inside the sheltered lagoon, where skill is sufficient and the outcome is known, carries no magic; fishing in the open sea, where danger and uncertainty are inherent, carries extensive magical ritual. Magic tracks uncontrollability rather than ignorance.
Gmelch anchors baseball magic in that finding, which lets the week identify the same behaviour in job interviews, performances and elite sport, and to name confidence as the outcome that actually follows.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Malinowski's method: five years of residence, and what long fieldwork lets a writer see that comparison at a distance cannot
- 02
The inner lagoon and the open sea: the contrast that carries the argument, and why it functions as a controlled comparison
- 03
The control test as a decision rule: are we in command of the situation and its result, yes or no
- 04
Gmelch's reworking: rituals, taboos and fetishes in baseball, and the association between an act and a past success
- 05
Confidence as an efficacy outcome, and how that answers the objection that the acts do nothing
- 06
Where the argument is applied in the 2026 lecture: elite sport, interviews, performance, and clinical research on ritual and wellbeing
Apply the control test to two tasks in one occupation
- 1Checklist: a codified technique with a known mechanism, retained because it demonstrably catches faults. It is the lagoon case.
- 1Doorframe: no mechanism connects the touch to the flight, and it persists by association with past uneventful flights. It is the open-sea case.
- 1Name the difference: not the pilot's knowledge, which is identical in both moments, but the residual uncontrollability of the second.
- 1State the outcome: what the touch delivers is confidence entering an act that cannot be fully controlled, which is exactly the efficacy Gmelch identifies.
Key terms
- Taboo
- A prohibition attached to an activity, where breaking it is held to threaten the outcome, and observing it forms part of the preparation for a difficult act.
- Fetish
- An object credited with power over an outcome, typically because it was present during past success and has been retained ever since.
- Participant observation
- The method of living with a community for an extended period and joining its activities, which Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork established as the discipline's standard.
- Uncertainty
- The condition, rather than any deficit of knowledge, that Malinowski's comparison identifies as predicting where magical practice appears.
- Magical thinking
- Reasoning that links an act to an outcome without a mechanism connecting them, treated here as a normal companion to technical competence rather than its opposite.
- Confidence
- The efficacy outcome Gmelch foregrounds: the state a performer carries into a difficult act, which the ritual reliably produces even when nothing physical follows from it.
Doing Magic in the Contemporary West FAQ
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.
Does Malinowski say magical people cannot think rationally?
The opposite. He argued for the omnipresence of rational and technical thought, and used the Trobriand case to show that the same people who fish the lagoon by skill alone use magic once the open sea removes control. The two capacities sit together in one person.
How do I use this week in an essay?
As the mechanism behind any claim that the modern West has left magic behind. The control test gives you a testable rule and Gmelch gives you cases from a society that describes itself as rational, which is exactly what the first essay question asks you to evaluate.
Where do taboo and fetish appear in the assessment?
They are named in the week's own learning goals as terms to use comfortably, and they are the natural vocabulary for the observation exercise if you describe a sporting or performance ritual rather than a religious one.
Assessment move
Collect three magical acts from your own week and run each through the control test before the tutorial, writing down what remained uncontrollable in each case. The exercise is short, and it produces material you can reuse in both the observation exercise and the first essay question.
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