From Charm to Ritual: Transformations of "Magic" in the Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

The article examines the changing definitions of magic in the humanities and shows how many of these definitions are falsified. It proposes to view magic as an umbrella term, the use of which depends on cultural context, and thus the best approach the study of magic would be to define its boundaries for each particular culture separately, and to carefully examine whether a particular phenomenon belongs to «occulture» in each specific context. The article then turns to the interpretations of magic in the post-Soviet space, finding, in particular, how ««magician» evolved from being a person of knowledge to becoming a person of power, and how once negatively charged terms, borrowed from the Western occulture, were redefined with positive meanings.