Margaret J. Wiener on Magic's Translation: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia

Dr. Margaret J. Wiener is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (University of Chicago Press) won the 1995 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her publications have been grounded in many years of field research on the island of Bali, Indonesia’s most famous province, as well as foraging in colonial archives and libraries in The Netherlands. She considers herself an empirical philosopher, who brings an ethnographic sensibility to the clashes involved in colonial encounters while asking broad questions about practices of knowing and making worlds. Inspirations from thinkers in the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (STS) inform her recent book Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2025), the topic of today’s conversation. Dr. Wiener examines how the category of magic traveled from Europe through the imposition of colonial rule and the birth of anthropology.  Her current research extends her longstanding interest in the worlds different practices produce to multispecies entanglements and conflicting visions of the future.

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