Making Magic

This academic work examines how the concept of magic has been systematically constructed within religious studies and social sciences as a tool for defining modernity's boundaries. Styers traces how magic became positioned as the primitive counterpart to modern religion and science, creating a powerful but ambiguous category that reveals more about Western intellectual anxieties than about the practices it purports to describe. The book meticulously documents how academic disciplines have used magic as a foil to reinforce their own legitimacy and modernity.

What makes this study particularly compelling is its critical approach to exposing the ideological work performed by the category of magic itself. Styers demonstrates how this seemingly neutral academic concept has carried heavy baggage about race, colonialism, and cultural superiority. Readers interested in the history of ideas, critical theory, or postcolonial studies will find rich material here about how scholarly categories shape our understanding of human experience. The book ultimately challenges us to reconsider what gets excluded when we draw firm lines between magic, religion, and science.