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In memoriam John Richards
The magical practices of the Southern Appalachian region have attracted attention of various kinds over the decades. There are now, for example, several popular books and websites of varying styles of approach and degrees of reliability devoted to the subject (cf. Richards 27-29). But most of the specifically scholarly attention to the subject has come from folklorists and anthropologists. Leading examples of these studies are Ruth Ann Mustek's Green HiIh of Magic: West Virginia Folktales from Europe; Patrick W Gainer's Witches, Ghosts, and Signs: Folklore of the Southern Appalachians; Anthony Cavender's Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia; and most recently Gerald Milnes' Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German AppaUchian Folklore. These scholars' works are illuminating in many ways, but they write out of a set or sets of disciplinary assumptions that I think hinder a complete understanding of the subject. This essay will proceed via a critique of these assumptions to an exploration of the real ideational matrix of Appalachian magic and then to an examination of the directions I believe future research on Appalachian magic should take, and why.
The works I have mentioned are different in approach but share certain common attitudes. Mustek and Gainer are mainly concerned with recording stories and customs with little theoretical interpretation outside a casual distinction between the rational and the "superstitious." Of the more theoretically oriented approaches, Cavender divides his subjects' folk-medical ideas into the "naturalistic" and the "magico-religious" with a sharpness that does not accord with his actual description of healers' practices, while Milnes essentially relegates his entire subject to the category of the irrational. What these writers have in common (whether explicitly stated or only implicitly informing their presentation of materials) is, first of all, the tendency of folklorists to constitute their object of study by the negative category of "the irrational," whose boundaries in turn constitute "the rational" as the privileged category; and secondly, a Malinowskian functionalism, assimilated to common sense, that sees magic as rooted in an attempt to "explain the unknown." This functionalist assumption, of course, entirely begs the question of why people should resort to this kind of "explanation" - in short, how magic actually functions in a society - or indeed why "explanation" and causal efficacy are assumed...