"This volume offers an innovative and intriguing collection of essays. Each chapter is grounded in detailed anthropological and historical research and offers stimulating theoretical considerations. The breadth of scholarship--addressing both the general implications of 'magic' and its place in the making of 'modernity, ' as demonstrated in a range of ethnographic contexts--suggest a broad readership." --Brad Weiss, The College of William & Mary"These essays demonstrate that even our most objective categories of social and cultural understanding are entangled in the constitutive undergrowth of our present circumstances. In their diverse and intriguing ways, they are all concerned with the modernist configuration of magic, as magic, so taken, configures modernism. Despite our liberal claims to transparency, reason, and secularism, they lay bare a world shaded by opacity, unreason, and blinkered faith." --Vincent Crapanzano, City University of New York