George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (Eds.). 2001. Witchcraft dialogues. Anthropological and philosophical exchanges. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 344 pp. $26.00. ISBN 0 89680 220 5.

Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Eds.). 2003. Magic and modernity. Interfaces of revelation and concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 390 pp. $22.95. ISBN 0 8047 4464 5.

Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (Eds.). 2001. Magical interpretations, material realities. Modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge, 253 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0415 258677.

Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications of backwardness and primitivism, the concept of magic has been reclaimed from its prior function as a negative trope in the constructions of the exotic other and recast to elucidate a wide variety of social processes and practices. Like other once maligned but now rehabilitated conceptual tools of the anthropologist's kit – fetishism and syncretism are two that come to mind – magic has gained a new lease on life to judge from these three recent publications focused on the occult and its ever visible place in contemporary societies the world over. If the volumes under review can be said to share anything, it is precisely an interest in the newly discovered use of magic as an analytical category as well as the intent to contribute to the framing of this renewed anthropological interest. Despite their divergent analytical foci and their distinct uses of interchangeable terms such as the occult, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment to describe local realities, all three propose approaches to the problem of magic that are both enlightening and rewarding for their attention to people's lived experience. All three also present collections of generally well-written and interpretively provocative essays that cover a wide range of issues from a wide range of cultural or historical spaces.