It was written by the American anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann of the University of California, San Diego, and first published in 1989.

[citation needed] Writing in her paper within James R. Lewis' edited Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft anthology, Siân Reid described Luhrmann's work as "a solid ethnography".

Nevertheless, she felt that the study "occasionally rings hollow" because Luhrmann failed to take into account the "subjective motivations for magical practice".

[1] In her anthropological study of the U.S. Pagan community, Witching Culture (2004), the American academic Sabina Magliocco noted that her work both built upon and departed from Luhrmann's.

[3] Although the interpretive drift was intended to describe a feature of human cognition, it has parallels in Artificial Intelligence, especially regarding how machine learning (ML) models adapt slowly with experience, and specifically "Concept Drift" which shares with interpretive drift the core idea of gradual change over time, and the processes by which a starting point or understanding evolves due to new influences.