The belief of all, faith, is the effect of the need of all, of their unanimous desires. Magical judgment is the object of a social consent, the translation of a social need.... It is because the effect desired by all is witnessed by all that the means are acknowledged as apt to produce the effect. It is because they desired the healing of the feverish patients that sprinklings of cold water and sympathetic contact with a frog seemed to the Hindus who called on the Brahmins of the Atharva-veda sufficient antagonists to third- or fourth-degree fever. In short, it is always society that pays itself in the counterfeit money of its dreams.

—from Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Mana and Magic (1904, trans. Loic Wacquant)

Acknowledgments

It feels a little silly writing acknowledgments for a book like this, an intellectual project at least fifteen years in the making. The logical thing would perhaps be to thank everyone I’ve ever known, because you never

know where your ideas really came from. There are two names though that I really ought to mention: my oldest friend, Stuart Rockefeller, an intellectual companion since high school, and Nhu Thi Le, whose mind for the last six has touched everything mine has. Any idea you read in here might very well actually have been invented by one of them; in many cases, perhaps most, they are really joint projects that all three of us, and probably others, are equally responsible for. (Except for the parts that are just dumb: I had nothing to do with those!)

Aside from that I must acknowledge the professors and staff and students of the anthropology department of the University of Chicago when I was there, who produced an environment that actually encouraged people to think for themselves and experiment with ideas, something surprisingly rare in academia; my fellow workers at Crerar; my colleagues and students at Haverford, NYU, and Yale; and my comrades in the direct action movement here and abroad who give me hope for humanity, and with whom I have spent so many pleasant hours tearing down walls. Oh, and my parents, who made me who I am.

And my brother Eric. And Kristi Long, the best editor who ever lived, and everyone at Palgrave (except whoever it was who made me switch around the title).