One for my Reading List:
“This article examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI), often framed as the pinnacle of modern rationality, is interpreted in Southeast Asian Islamic contexts where the unseen, the spiritual, and the magical continue to be central to everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic cases from Indonesia and Malaysia, it argues that AI’s efficacy, like that of magic, rests less on objective proof than on the cultural and social force of belief. In these settings, AI is not only a technical system but an enchanted technology, integrated into cosmologies of al-ghayb (the unseen) and sustained by ritualized practices, ethical orientations, and expectations of efficacy. The black-box nature of AI resonates with Islamic engagements with sacred opacity, such as the Kaʿba, where concealment enhances rather than diminishes authority. By bringing magic, religion, and technology into the same analytic frame, the article proposes an “enchanted anthropology of AI” attentive to how technological power is both imagined and enacted.”
