Social Science Research Council

"Trades of the Trick: Apprenticeship and Innovation in the Artworld of French Magic"

This dissertation research explores the social world of Parisian entertainment magicians as a means of addressing four interrelated questions: Why has magic achieved growing popularity in contemporary France despite the seemingly antithetical expansion of mass-mediated entertainment throughout the 20th century? What are the cultural factors that presently attract people to these theatrical enactments of deception, both as deceivers and as deceived, and what are the social and economic conditions underpinning this genre of performance? What are the particular linguistic, physical, and artistic skills magicians employ in performance, and how are they developed, diffused, and conserved? What is the learning trajectory of participants in this ostensibly secretive cultural practice? This project will address these questions through an ethnographic study of the way that magic is produced as an art form and reproduced as a social activity in clubs, classes, performance contexts, and heritage sites. At the same time, it will employ micro-analytic methods to illuminate the verbal and non-verbal gestural skills used in magic performance, the discursive constitution of magic as a cultural practice, and the interactive processes through which magic is learned. Two larger questions underlie these ethnographic preoccupations. First, what is the relationship between "art" as an analytic category and popular, often avocational, cultural practices such as magic in a national context like France, well-known for its deeply ingrained hierarchies of artistic value perpetuated through the institutional disaggregation of funding for high and low culture? Second, given that magic (in its "primitive" form) has been a locus classicus for anthropological debates about the scope and nature of rationality, and that anthropologists have little commented on conjuring, a genre of performance that theatrically enacts magical feats to entertain modern, secular audiences, how might conjuring provide a historical mirror on representations of rationality associated with European modernity?