Bureaucratic Sorceries in The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives on Magic and Officialdom

Abstract

The history ofanthropological discourse retraces a long and subtle thread of analogiesbetween the seemingly disparate worlds of bureaucracy and magic, from BronisławMalinowski (as early as 1922) to Graham Jones (2017), passing through the worksof Claude Lévi-Strauss, Stanley Tambiah,Michael Herzfeld, and David Graeber. A complex dialectic of enchantment anddisenchantment involving experiments with the dynamics of reason and unreasonis also a recurrent motif in the Western literary tradition of bureaucratic andanti-bureaucratic narratives. What enables and justifies a comparison betweenthe irrational nature of magical thinking and a social form of systematization,regulation, and control, famously described by Max Weber as being primarilyguided by an effort of rationalization? The article provides an overview ofseveral possible answers to this question, illustrated with examples from FlannO’Brien’s TheThird Policeman.