Ep 4 Podcast Clip
Academics over the past few decades have been debating: can we use 'magic' as an etic term at all? Should we only use the indigenous terms that people used back in the Greco-Roman world?
“Academics over the past few decades have been debating: can we use 'magic' as an etic term at all? Should we only use the indigenous terms that people used back in the Greco-Roman world? So we have terms like 'mageia' which we translate these days as magic, there's terms like 'pharmaceia', there's all these different indigenous terms that describe different types of ritual practices, and they don't map perfectly onto the 21st century English word 'magic'. And there's always this slippage, where we're trying to tie these things together. So I have been very careful along with many of the scholars–it's not just me–to not map the English word 'magic' onto those indigenous terms because they are used in many different ways, they refer to things that we don't think we would refer to today as magic." Dr. Andrew Henry