Between Magic and Rationality

Between Magic and Rationality PDF Author: Vibeke Steffen
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 8763542137
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
In Between Magic and Reality, Vibeke Steffen, Steffen Jöhncke, and Kirsten Marie Raahauge bring together a diverse range of ethnographies that examine and explore the forms of reflection, action, and interaction that govern the ways different contemporary societies create and challenge the limits of reason. The essays here visit an impressive array of settings, including international scientific laboratories, British spiritualist meetings, Chinese villages, Danish rehabilitation centers, and Uzbeki homes, where they encounter a diverse assortment of people whose beliefs and concerns exhibit an unusual but central contemporary dichotomy: scientific reason versus spiritual/paranormal belief. Exploring the paradoxical way these modes of thought push against reason's boundaries, they offer a deep look at the complex ways they coexist, contest one another, and are ultimately intertwined. Vibeke Steffen is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, where Steffen Jöncke is senior advisor. Kirsten Marie Raahauge is associate professor in the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Between Magic and Rationality

Between Magic and Rationality PDF Author: Vibeke Steffen
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 8763542137
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Between Magic and Reality, Vibeke Steffen, Steffen Jöhncke, and Kirsten Marie Raahauge bring together a diverse range of ethnographies that examine and explore the forms of reflection, action, and interaction that govern the ways different contemporary societies create and challenge the limits of reason. The essays here visit an impressive array of settings, including international scientific laboratories, British spiritualist meetings, Chinese villages, Danish rehabilitation centers, and Uzbeki homes, where they encounter a diverse assortment of people whose beliefs and concerns exhibit an unusual but central contemporary dichotomy: scientific reason versus spiritual/paranormal belief. Exploring the paradoxical way these modes of thought push against reason's boundaries, they offer a deep look at the complex ways they coexist, contest one another, and are ultimately intertwined. Vibeke Steffen is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, where Steffen Jöncke is senior advisor. Kirsten Marie Raahauge is associate professor in the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality

Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality PDF Author: Stanley J. Tambiah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521376310
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.

Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine

Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine PDF Author: Manfred Horstmanshoff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047414314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
For the first time, medical systems of the Ancient Near East and the Greek and Roman world are studied side by side and compared. Early medicine in Babylonia, Egypt, the Minoan and Mycenean world; later medicine in Hippocrates, Galen, Aelius Aristides, Vindicianus, the Talmud. The focus is the degree of "rationality" or "irrationality" in the various ways of medical thought and treatment. Fifteen specialists contributed thoughtful and well-documented chapters on important issues.

Magic

Magic PDF Author: Ernesto De Martino
Publisher: Hau
ISBN: 9780990505099
Category : Basilicata (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology--a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of Sud e Magia, his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy, shows how De Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place. Setting his exploration within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as in the context of his politically sensitive analysis of the global south's historical encounters with Western science, he presents the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, Magic is still relevant as anthropologists continue to wrestle with modernity's relationship with magical thinking.

Religion as Magical Ideology

Religion as Magical Ideology PDF Author: Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317544730
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
'Religion as Magical Ideology' examines the relationship between rationality and supernatural beliefs arguing that such beliefs are products of evolution, cognition and culture. The book does not offer a false rapprochement between reason and religion; instead, it explores their interrelationship as a series of complex adaptations between cognitive and cultural processes. Exploring the nature of the tension between religious traditions and reason, 'Religion as Magical Ideology' develops a dual inheritance theory of religion - which combines the cognitive byproduct and prosocial adaptation accounts - and analyses the connection between the function of a belief and the degree of protection it gets from potential counter-evidence. With discussion ranging from individual cognitive mechanisms, general functional considerations, to the limits of evolutionary and cognitive processes, the book offers readers a systematic account of how cognition shapes religious beliefs and practices.

Magic's Reason

Magic's Reason PDF Author: Graham M. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651871X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine. Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison.

Karl Popper: Science

Karl Popper: Science PDF Author: Ian Charles Jarvie
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754657125
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) is one of the most controversial and widely read philosophers of the 20th century. Volume III examines Popper's contribution to our understanding of logic, mathematics, physics, biology and the social sciences, from economics to education

The Re-enchantment of the World

The Re-enchantment of the World PDF Author: Joshua Landy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

Sporadically Radical

Sporadically Radical PDF Author: Steffen Jensen
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 8763546027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
What makes young men willing to risk their lives by enrolling in violent organizations? How do these organizations persuade young men to do so? In the age of radicalization, these questions are central to most debates about politics and globalization. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in various conflict settings, this volume explores both the violent organizations that entice young people to engage in conflict and how these same young people answer the call. It takes the reader into the worlds of Maoists in Nepal; ex-combatants, mercenaries, religious ‘zealots’ and drug dealers in West Africa; violent student politics in Bangladesh; ethno-nationalist vigilante groups in Kenya; both sides of the war between LRA and the Ugandan state as well as gang-like fraternities in the Philippines. When researched in situ and in-depth, these mobilizations show themselves to be multiple, performative and temporary, just as people may show themselves to be more sporadically radical than ideologically locked down.

Magic in the Air

Magic in the Air PDF Author: James E. Katz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351507907
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In this timely volume, James E. Katz, a leading authority on social consequences of communication technology, analyzes the way new mobile telecommunications affect daily life both in the United States and around the world. Magic in the Air is the most wide-ranging analysis of mobile communication to date. Katz investigates the spectrum of social aspects of the cell phone's impact on society and the way social forces affect the use, display, and re-configuration of the cell phone. Surveying the mobile phone's current and emerging role in daily life, Katz finds that it provides many benefits for the user, and that some of these benefits are subtle and even counter-intuitive. He also identifies ways the mobile phone has not been entirely positive. After reviewing these he outlines some steps to ameliorate the mobile phone's negative effects. Katz also discusses use and abuse of mobile phones in educational settings, where he finds that their use is eroding students' participation in class even as it is helping them to cheat on exams and cut class. Parents no longer object to their children having mobile phones in class in a post-Columbine and 9/11 era; instead they are pressing schools to change their rules to allow students to have their phones available during class. And mobile phone misbehavior is by no means limited to students: Katz finds that teachers are increasingly taking calls in the middle of class, even interrupting their own lectures to answer what they claim are important calls. In keeping with the book's title, Katz explores the often overlooked psychic and religious uses of the mobile phone, an area that has only recently begun to command scholarly interest. Magic in the Air will be essential reading for communications specialists, sociologists, and social psychologists.