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Author : Birgit Meyer
Release : 2003
Genre : Body, Mind & Spirit
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 645/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Magic and Modernity by : Birgit Meyer
Download or read book Magic and Modernity written by Birgit Meyer. This book was released on 2003. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to explore comparatively how magic—usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern—is also at home in modernity.
Author : Birgit Meyer
Release : 2022
Genre : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 056/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Magic and Modernity by : Birgit Meyer
Download or read book Magic and Modernity written by Birgit Meyer. This book was released on 2022. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic and Modernity is the first book to explore comparatively how magic--usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern--is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social sciences have studied how modern culture and institutions incorporated and even produced magic. This book is the first to adopt a comparative approach to the study of magic as something that has a place in modernity, and that helped to constitute modern society at local and global levels. The essays in this collection contribute to recent discussions in anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and sociology that increasingly question the extent to which modern self-conceptions are accurate reflections of a state of affairs in the world rather than cultural interventions.
Author : David Picard
Release : 2011-09-01
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 029/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Tourism, Magic and Modernity by : David Picard
Download or read book Tourism, Magic and Modernity written by David Picard. This book was released on 2011-09-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.
Author : Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Release : 2017-05-16
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 36X/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Myth of Disenchantment by : Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm. This book was released on 2017-05-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
Author : Ms Amy Wygant
Release : 2013-04-28
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 809/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France by : Ms Amy Wygant
Download or read book Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France written by Ms Amy Wygant. This book was released on 2013-04-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together the previously disparate fields of historical witchcraft, reception history, poetics, and psychoanalysis, this innovative study shows how the glamour of the historical witch, a spell that she cast, was set on a course, over a span of three hundred years from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, to become a generally broadcast glamour of appearance. Something that a woman does, that is, became something that she has. The antique heroine Medea, witch and barbarian, infamous poisoner, infanticide, regicide, scourge of philanderers, and indefatigable traveller, serves as the vehicle of this development. Revived on the stage of modernity by La Péruse in the sixteenth century, Corneille in the seventeenth, and the operatic composer Cherubini in the eighteenth, her stagecraft and her witchcraft combine, author Amy Wygant argues, to stun her audience into identifying with her magic and making it their own. In contrast to previous studies which have relied upon contemporary printed sources in order to gauge audience participation in and reaction to early modern theater, Wygant argues that psychoanalytic thought about the behavior of groups can be brought to bear on the question of "what happened" when the early modern witch was staged. This cross-disciplinary study reveals the surprising early modern trajectory of our contemporary obsession with magic. Medea figures the movement of culture in history, and in the mirror of the witch on the stage, a mirror both appealing and appalling, our own cultural performances are reflected. It concludes with an analysis of Diderot's claim that the historical process itself is magical, and with the moment in Revolutionary France when the slight and fragile body of the golden-throated singer, Julie-Angélique Scio, became a Medea for modernity: not a witch or a child-murderess, but, as all the press reviews insist, a woman.
