Introduction

This chapter introduces a collection of essays: The territory charted by the essays in this book is the curious field occupied by both machines and magic. It is the techno-mystical domain of science and the spirit, technologies and ghosts. Refracted through highly technologised, post-Enlightenment societies, magic manifests itself in surprising ways and through an enormously diverse range of practices, as the essays in this volume suggest. Yet they all investigate, in various ways, the co-existence of very old forms of thought - belief in magic, ghosts, spirits - and contemporary practices. Although employing different approaches to the topic of magic - from magic as metaphor to magic as ritual to magic as performative mode - the writers represented in "Technologies of Magic" resist strict dichotomy between the age of scientific reason and the 'primitive' belief in the powers of magic.