Magic and Modernity

Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment

By: Birgit Meyer (Editor), Peter Pels (Editor)

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Paperback | 19 June 2003

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402 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24 x 2.26

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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.

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"[Magic and Modernity] is an important introduction and contribution to the anthropological side of this field," - Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft "These essays demonstrate that even our most objective categories of social and cultural understanding are entangled in the constitutive undergrowth of our present circumstances. In their diverse and intriguing ways, they are all concerned with the modernist configuration of magic, as magic, so taken, configures modernism. Despite our liberal claims to transparency, reason, and secularism, they lay bare a world shaded by opacity, unreason, and blinkered faith." - Vincent Crapanzano,City University of New York

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Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Magic and Modernity	p. 1
Between Science and Superstition: Religion and the Modern Subject of the Nation in Colonial India	p. 39
Undying Past: Spirit Possession and the Memory of War in Southern Mozambique	p. 60
Robert Kaplan and "Juju Journalism" in Sierra Leone's Rebel War: The Primitivizing of an African Conflict	p. 81
The Citizen's Trance: The Haitian Revolution and the Motor of History	p. 103
Hidden Forces: Colonialism and the Politics of Magic in the Netherlands Indies	p. 129
On Witch Doctors and Spin Doctors: The Role of "Experts" in African and American Politics	p. 159
The Magical Power of the (Printed) Word	p. 183
Ghanaian Popular Cinema and the Magic in and of Film	p. 200
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Modern Medicine Between Magic and Science	p. 223
Spirits of Modernity: Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Fact	p. 241
Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic	p. 272
Notes	p. 307
References	p. 343
Contributors	p. 375
Index	p. 379
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Magic and Modernity

Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

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How to return your order

Defective items

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