Conclusion: Enchantment

Abstract

In the religion of Gamrie, belief and experience; ideas and objects; words and language, are all bound together in sets of relationships that cannot easily be separated. Nor should they be separated. Beliefs (about the end of the world, for example) are indistinguishable from the implications they have within the material (economic, demographic, and political) world. Words become objects and objects become words. Not only do people believe things about objects, but they also experience those objects ideationally. Equally, beliefs about boxes of fish are not only implicated within a local theology of eschatology, but those beliefs change the material nature of the objects in question. All this is possible because theological beliefs, material objects, words, language, and the cosmos that contains them are enchanted. Enchantment animates Gamrie religion—it ‘makes it alive with a kind of magic.’