Paper short abstract:

By exploring a series of encounters and disputes between magician Harry Houdini and spiritualist medium Mina Crandon, this paper develops an anthropological historiography of theorising the relationship between magical performance, fakery and exposure.

Paper long abstract:

A pertinent ethnographic question is the persistence of the anthropological category of magic in an increasingly secularised world, as well as the persistence of magical beliefs even after certain magicians and magical performances have been exposed as fake. A series of encounters and disputes between the famous magician Harry Houdini and spiritualist medium Mina Crandon provide apt material for developing an anthropological historiography of theorising the relationship between magical performance, fakery and exposure. By using the Houdini-Crandon case as a point of departure, we draw attention to incidents of exposure as capable of providing trajectories through which relations between magic, truth and fakery are fostered and proliferate. Through an exploration of the ethnographic archive, we showcase how exposure is used by magicians as means of deploying their performative capacity to establish power and authority over their audience. Nevertheless, unlike ethnographic accounts which attribute the persistence of magic, even after it has been exposed as fake, to elements of "theatricality" (Asad, 2003: 46), we proceed to instead analyse the unknowability and opacity which permeates incidents of exposure and, more broadly, sociality. We conclude by offering some comment on how ethnographic theorisation of magic within modernity can act as a gateway into better understanding the social space fakery occupies in contemporary societies.