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Loading... Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion) (2003)by Randall Styers
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is perhaps the best (but also probably the only) thorough review of how magic has been treated and perceived throughout the last few centuries. I shuddered to think of the clerical notetaking that this project required, for which he appears to have read practically everything, and retained a nuanced recall of it all. Whew! More than a catalog, he digests it all to tell coherent narratives of varying schools of thought. Anyone at all interested in this topic absolutely must add this to their collections. I'm just surprised it took so long for me to hear about it. ( ) Detailed overview of scholarly theories of the definition and place of magic in relation to religion, science and desire (will). Magic as a foil to definitions of those areas and as a repository of rejected characteristics. Particularly interesting is the idea that both religion and science have balanced their respective authorities by using magic and magical thinking as a reference. No practitioners were consulted, however, since this is a study of academic theories about magic rather than magic examples or insider theory. Styers writes about how the various modern social theories antagonistic to magic have served to police the boundaries of piety, reason, and desire, in the service of a bifurcation between spiritualized religion and scientific secular power. But he also notes that not all modern theorists have opposed magic, and that even its alleged repulsiveness involves a measure of self-recognition. The book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the ways in which academic disciplines approach the concept of magic. no reviews | add a review
Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitivelynon-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous.In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctivenorms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriatereligious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as animportant foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)133.430903Philosophy and Psychology Parapsychology And Occultism Specific Topics Witchcraft - Sorcery Witchcraft and Magickal Practice Biography; History By PlaceLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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