Sorcery or Science? by Ariela Marcus-Sells

Author:Ariela Marcus-Sells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 2022-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Etic Engagements

The previous two sections began with the Kunta scholars as interlocutors and examined the emic, second-order categories that emerged from within their own texts. This section illustrates how uneasily the terms “religion,” “science,” and “magic” that developed in early modern western Europe map onto the Kunta’s categories of “breakings of the norm,” “sciences of the unseen,” and “sorcery.” First, European scholars used “magic” to designate a degraded or vestigial form of religion, and then to refer to a kind of flawed science. Meanwhile, in popular parlance, “magic” has come to designate an appeal to supernatural forces other than God. However, as we have seen, the Kunta scholars understood both the sciences of the unseen and sorcery to depend on the appropriate functioning of the “normal” operations of the world. It is the miracles of the prophets and the charismata of the friends of God, by contrast, that break free of the constraints of normalcy and the natural. The terminology developed in western Europe fails to work for this Muslim context in part because of an epistemic divide that separated western European elites from the knowledge/practices of their Renaissance counterparts. Max Weber’s theory of “disenchantment” described a historical process in which Europeans came to understand God and religion as belonging to a spiritual place distinct and separate from the physical, knowable world. Science came to occupy the role of informing people about the physical world of the senses, while religion was confined to the spiritual realm and—because the spiritual was reconceived as fundamentally unknowable—was presented as a matter of faith and doubt.43 In that the Kunta scholars understand the visible and invisible realms to be intimately and inextricably connected, their categories of knowledge/practice stand on the other side of the epistemological divide from the so-called Enlightenment elites. However, the idea of a disenchanted modernity has been the subject of much recent debate, and scholars such as Egil Asprem, Wouter Hanegraaff, and Jason Josephson-Storm have pushed back, arguing that “enchanted” understandings of the world continued throughout the early modern and modern periods.44 Responding to their criticisms of the theory of disenchantment, Edward Bever and Randall Styers, as noted above, have posited that European modernity is defined by “a double gesture” that reinscribes and revitalizes the sets of knowledge/practice that it seeks to banish.45 Although the specific meanings that European elites ascribed to the terms “magic” and “science” do not apply to the context of the Kunta, the Kunta were very much involved in the discursive “double gesture” of disavowal and reinscription that these scholars have attributed to Western modernity.

The remainder of this chapter situates the Kunta’s classificatory system within two larger, etic contexts and seeks to destabilize the assumption that this “double gesture” is restricted to modern Europe. I begin by mapping Sīdi al-Mukhtār’s and Sīdi Muḥammad’s engagement with the sciences of the unseen onto the current state of knowledge concerning the history of these sciences in West Africa through the nineteenth century. Although research on this topic is still nascent,

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