Making Magic: Religion, Magic, & Science in the Modern World: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World - Brossura

Styers, Randall

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0195169417 ISBN 13: 9780195169416

Casa editrice: Oxford University Press USA, 2004

Riassunto

Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the idea 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 definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to the distinctly modern models of religion and science. As a category, however, 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 it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative: rational-scientific, judicial-ethical, industrious, productive, and heterosexual. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief.

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Recensione

Magic has always been a marginal, umbrageous subject. Despite numerous attempts, no philosopher, scientific observer, or cultural theoretician has managed to describe its essential nature or to circumscribe its proper boundaries-and no wonder. The virtue of Randall Styers compelling study is not that it finally succeeds in defining magic with clarity-an impossible and patently misguided objective. Instead, through a meticulous and incisive examination of the major and minor writers on the subject, Styers shows that the highly pliable, always shifty, devious, and problematic category of magic has been an extremely effective device with which to define and to empower that which it is not: religion proper, (real) science, rationality, modernity. The result, then, is far from marginal. (Tomoko Masuzawa, University of Michigan)

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Oxford University Press USA
• Data di pubblicazione: 2004
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0195169417
• ISBN 13: 9780195169416
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 304
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile