The Magic in the Magic Pudding

This paper offers a narrative interpretation of Norman Lindsay's remarkable children's story, The Magic Pudding. Entering into the spirit of the tale, it seeks to evoke its magic as well as understand it, advocating an approach to the analysis of narrative that is as celebratory as it is critical. Making reference to James Clifford's discussion of ethnographic allegory, it draws on Michael Taussig's analysis of commodity and other forms of fetishism to argue that the pudding can be construed as a fetish object expressive of concerns and tensions haunting the Australian imaginary. The paper addresses such things as the interplay of class, race and sex in Lindsay's story, equality and exclusion, wealth without work, beards and hats and whatnot. In doing so, it responds to the humour and metaphorical play that is the source of the tale's popular appeal by offering the reader a little of its own—not a whole pudding's worth perhaps but at least enough to whet the appetite.     

Darkroom Magic

Abstract

S. D. Schindler (story by Phyllis Krasilovsky), THE FIRST TULIPS IN HOLLAND, Doubleday: New York, 1982, unpaged, $12.95 (boards)

Tomie de Paola, Francis: The Poor Man of Assisi, Holiday House: New York, 1982, unpaged, $14.95

Piero Ventura (story by Gian P. Ceserani), Marco Polo, Putnam: New York, 1982, unpaged, $9.95 (boards)

Demi, The Adventures of Marco Polo, Holt, Rinehart &; Winston: New York, 1982, unpaged, $6.95 (boards)

Bernice Loewenstein (text by Dan Beekman), Forest, Village, Town, City, Thomas Crowell: New York, 1982, 40 pages, $9.50

Huck Scarry, Life on a Barge, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1982, 70 pages, $9.95, (boards)

Douglas Florian, The City, Thomas Crowell: New York, 1982, unpaged, $8.95

Byron Barton, Airport, Thomas Crowell: New York, 1982, unpaged, $9.95

Gail Gibbons, Trucks, Thomas Crowell: New York, 1981, unpaged, n.p. i

Robert Quackenbush, City Trucks, Albert Whitman: Chicago, 1981, unpaged, n.p.i. (boards)

John Lim, Merchants of the Mysterious East, Tundra: Plattsburgh, N.Y., 1981, 32 pages, $12.95

Sandra J. Russell, A Farmer's Dozen, Harper: New York, 1982, unpaged, $8.95

Mary Azarian, A Farmer's Alphabet, David Godine: Boston, Mass., 1981, 62 pages, $6.95

Victoria Chess, Alfred's Alphabet Walk, Greenwillow: New York, 1979, unpaged, $7.95

Jack Kent (“story” by M. Elting and M. Folson), Q IS FOR DUCK, Clarion Books: New York, 1980, unpaged, $8.95 ($3.95 paper)

Borje Svensson (paper engineering by James Diaz), BLOCK BOOKS (LETTERS, NUMBERS, COLORS, ANIMALS), Viking: New York, 1981, unpaged, $2.50 each     

这里有一方神奇之水

一道奇特的风景线 冬日的五大连池被茫茫冰雪包裹得严严实实心目中14座火山锥和五池碧水的壮观景象已被眼前的白色取代．天地一色树木、公路．就连老百姓的房顶也被单调的白色笼罩着,别样的心情别样的感受．我努力搜寻着别样的色彩…     

Magic: A Problem in Semantics

Anthropologists, from Tylor to the present, have so defined magic that, although it might shade into or overlap with religion, it is a separate phenomenon distinct from religion. Theorists have made different features the chief means of differentiation, but no matter how defined the distinction cannot be easily or consistently maintained. This paper suggests that the concept of magic as a distinct entity is the factitious result of ethnocentric classification, and that magic should be included within religion as one type of the practices of which religious ritual is composed.     

The Limits of Magic

This is the case of a Malay shaman who narrowed the scope of her diagnoses to magic, evoking scorn from her colleagues and alarm from rural patients accustomed to a variety of illness etiologies. But she found success as part of a team catering to urban Malays. Her performance satisfied expectations of clients unused to traditional shamanism and set the stage for acceptance of her partner's diagnoses couched in "common sense," educated, urbane language which nevertheless restored elements of Malay illness etiology she had discarded.     

Linguistic Magic Bullets in the Making of a Modernist Anthropology

This article engages current debates about concepts of culture in U.S. anthropology by examining how assumptions about language shape them. Characterizing linguistic patterns as particularly inaccessible to conscious introspection, Franz Boas suggested that culture is similarly automatic and unconscious—except for anthropologists. He used this notion in attempting to position the discipline as the obligatory passage point for academic and public debate about difference. Unfortunately, this mode of inserting linguistics in the discipline, which has long outlived Boas, reifies language ideologies by promoting simplistic models that belie the cultural complexity of human communication. By pointing to the way that recent work in linguistic anthropology has questioned key assumptions that shaped Boas's concept of culture, the article urges other anthropologists to stop asking their linguistic colleagues for magic bullets and to appreciate the critical role that examining linguistic ideologies and practices can play in discussions of the politics of culture. [Keywords: Franz Boas, culture concept, linguistic anthropology, language ideologies, scientific authority]     

Magic lite design and development

Chemiluminescence immunoassays have now achieved a recognized place in the diagnostic laboratory. The advantages of this non-isotopic technology derive from the use of acridinium esters which can be used to label antigens and antibodies to high specific activities, as well as from optimized immunochemistry. The availability of simple, reliable instrumentation for chemiluminescence measurement together with a range of assay kits offers a logical alternative to traditional radioimmunoassay.     

Leaving the Magic Out: Knowledge and Effect in Different Places

In 2010, Porer Nombo and I launched a book about indigenous Papua New Guinean plant knowledge to a large audience at a university near to his village on the north coast of that country. Members of the audience commented that the book made a record of important practices. But they asked if those practices were dependent on secret magic to be effective? What gave us the right to include such secrets? Or, if there was in fact something fundamental missing from the book (magical formulae to activate the processes described), then what was the use of publishing the book? Thinking through their questions suggested the need to analyse what ‘knowledge’ is in different places, and why plants might be effective in some, but not others. In this paper I attempt an explanation that does not rely on a ‘social’ explanation of magic but instead suggest that what we call ‘magic’ are mechanisms whereby a gardener (or healer, or hunter) positions an action, or a thing in relation to other things. I liken the way myth works in these systems to the way intellectual property law provides a comparable ‘mythic’ structure that locates effect in the places that have developed ‘knowledge economies’ and I conclude by asking; if places embody their history and politics, and generate different understandings of effect, then what are the implications of calling Porer's practices with regard to plants, ‘knowledge’?