The Anthropology Of Magic

Author : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Berg
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2009-11-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781847886415

Get Book

The Anthropology of Magic by Susan Greenwood Pdf

Magic is arguably the least understood subject in anthropology today. Exotic and fascinating, it offers us a glimpse into another world but it also threatens to undermine the foundations of anthropology due to its supposed irrational and non-scientific nature. Magic has thus often been 'explained away' by social or psychological reduction. The Anthropology of Magic redresses the balance and brings magic, as an aspect of consciousness, into focus through the use of classic texts and cutting-edge research. Suitable for student and scholar alike, The Anthropology of Magic updates a classical anthropological debate concerning the nature of human experience. A key theme is that human beings everywhere have the potential for magical consciousness. Taking a new approach to some perennial topics in anthropology - such as shamanism, mythology, witchcraft and healing - the book raises crucial theoretical and methodological issues to provide the reader with an engaging and critical understanding of the dynamics of magic.

Author : Rebecca L Stein,Philip Stein
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2015-08-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317350217

Get Book

The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft -- Pearson eText by Rebecca L Stein,Philip Stein Pdf

This book emphasizes the major concepts of both anthropology and the anthropology of religion and examines religious expression from a cross-cultural perspective while incorporating key theoretical concepts. It is aimed at students encountering anthropology for the first time.

Author : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2020-08-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000181227

Get Book

Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld by Susan Greenwood Pdf

Anthropology's long and complex relationship to magic has been strongly influenced by western science and notions of rationality. This book takes a refreshing new look at modern magic as practised by contemporary Pagans in Britain. It focuses on what Pagans see as the essence of magic - a communication with an otherworldly reality. Examining issues of identity, gender and morality, the author argues that the otherworld forms a central defining characteristic of magical practice. Integrating an experiential ethnographic approach with an analysis of magic, this book asks penetrating questions about the nature of otherworldly knowledge and argues that our scientific frameworks need re-envisioning. It is unique in providing an insider's view of how magic is practised in contemporary western culture.

Author : Graham M. Jones
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2017-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226518718

Get Book

Magic's Reason by Graham M. Jones Pdf

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.

Author : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-05-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000180633

Get Book

The Anthropology of Magic by Susan Greenwood Pdf

Magic is arguably the least understood subject in anthropology today. Exotic and fascinating, it offers us a glimpse into another world but it also threatens to undermine the foundations of anthropology due to its supposed irrational and non-scientific nature. Magic has thus often been 'explained away' by social or psychological reduction. The Anthropology of Magic redresses the balance and brings magic, as an aspect of consciousness, into focus through the use of classic texts and cutting-edge research. Suitable for student and scholar alike, The Anthropology of Magic updates a classical anthropological debate concerning the nature of human experience. A key theme is that human beings everywhere have the potential for magical consciousness. Taking a new approach to some perennial topics in anthropology - such as shamanism, mythology, witchcraft and healing - the book raises crucial theoretical and methodological issues to provide the reader with an engaging and critical understanding of the dynamics of magic.Join the live discussion on Facebook!

Author : Susan Greenwood,Erik D. Goodwyn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2015-08-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317517207

Get Book

Magical Consciousness by Susan Greenwood,Erik D. Goodwyn Pdf

How does a mind think magically? The research documented in this book is one answer that allows the disciplines of anthropology and neurobiology to come together to reveal a largely hidden dynamic of magic. Magic gets to the very heart of some theoretical and methodological difficulties encountered in the social and natural sciences, especially to do with issues of rationality. This book examines magic head-on, not through its instrumental aspects but as an orientation of consciousness. Magical consciousness is affective, associative and synchronistic, shaped through individual experience within a particular environment. This work focuses on an in-depth case study using the anthropologist’s own experience gained through years of anthropological fieldwork with British practitioners of magic. As an ethnographic view, it is an intimate study of the way in which the cognitive architecture of a mind engages the emotions and imagination in a pattern of meanings related to childhood experiences, spiritual communications and the environment. Although the detail of the involvement in magical consciousness presented here is necessarily specific, the central tenets of modus operandi is common to magical thought in general, and can be applied to cross-cultural analyses to increase understanding of this ubiquitous human phenomenon.

Author : Phillips Stevens, Jr.
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2023-12-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000998764

Get Book

Rethinking the Anthropology of Magic and Witchcraft by Phillips Stevens, Jr. Pdf

This book introduces students to the anthropology of magic and witchcraft, terms widely used but without widely accepted definitions. It takes a new approach to this area within the anthropology of religion, demonstrating that the bases for these beliefs and alleged practices are inherent in human cognition and psychology, even instinctual, and likely rooted in our evolutionary biology. It shows how magic and magical thinking are regular elements in people’s daily lives, and that understanding the components of the witchcraft complex offers surprisingly important insights into patterns of thinking and social behavior. The book reviews the many meanings of “magic” and “witchcraft,” and introduces the best anthropological meanings of the terms. The components of these beliefs are timeless and universal; this fact, and recent advances in the brain sciences, suggest that the principles of magic are derived from basic processes of human thinking, and the attributes of the witch derive from neurobiologically based fears and fantasies. The propensity for such beliefs probably had adaptive significance in the evolutionary development of the human species; they are inherently human. This book is intended to focus anew on the core concepts of magic, witchcraft, and the supernatural, while also serving as an introduction to the anthropology of religion for undergraduate and graduate-level courses.

Author : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-06-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000189827

Get Book

The Nature of Magic by Susan Greenwood Pdf

This book examines how and why practitioners of nature religion - Western witches, druids, shamans - seek to relate spiritually with nature through 'magical consciousness'. 'Magic' and 'consciousness' are concepts that are often fraught with prejudice and ambiguity respectively. Greenwood develops a new theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with socio-cultural explanations. She combines her own subjective insights gained from magical practice with practitioners' in-depth accounts and sustained academic theory on the process of magic. She also tracks magical consciousness in philosophy, myth, folklore, story-telling, and the hi-tech discourse of postmodernity, and asks important questions concerning nature religion's environmental credentials, such as whether it as inherently ecological as many of its practitioners claim.

Author : Thomas Buckley,Alma Gottlieb
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2023-04-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520340565

Get Book

Blood Magic by Thomas Buckley,Alma Gottlieb Pdf

Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, this volume dramatically redefines the anthropological study of menstrual customs. It challenges the widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination which underlies it. Contributing important new material and perspectives to our understanding of comparative gender politics and symbolism, it is of particular importance to those interested in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems.

Author : Ernesto De Martino
Publisher : Hau
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Basilicata (Italy)
ISBN : 099050509X

Get Book

Magic by Ernesto De Martino Pdf

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.

Author : Koen Stroeken
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Social ecology
ISBN : 1845457358

Get Book

Moral Power by Koen Stroeken Pdf

Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient's recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce moral values that assess the state of the system and that remove the obstacles to what is taken as key: self-healing. The implied 'sensory shifts' and therapeutic effectiveness have largely eluded the literature on witchcraft. This book shows how to comprehend culture other than through the prism of identity politics. It offers a framework to comprehend the rise of witch killings and human sacrifice, just as ritual initiation disappears.

Author : George W. Stocking
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 452 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : History
ISBN : 0299134148

Get Book

The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology by George W. Stocking Pdf

George Stocking has been widely recognized as the premier historian of anthropology ever since the publication of his first volume of essays, Race, Culture, and Evolution, in 1968. As editor of several publications, including the highly acclaimed History of Anthropology series, he has led the movement to establish the history of anthropology as a recognized research specialization. In addition to the study Victorian Anthropology, his work includes numerous essays covering a wide range of anthropological topics. The eight essays collected in The Ethnographer's Magic consider the emergence of anthropology since the late nineteenth century as an academic discipline grounded in systematic fieldwork. Drawing extensively on unpublished manuscript materials, the essays focus primarily on Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, the leading figures in the American and the British academic fieldwork traditions. According to George Marcus of Rice University, the essays "represent the most informative and insightful writings on Malinowski and Boas and their legacies that are yet available." Beyond their biographical material, the essays here touch upon major themes in the history of anthropology: its powerfully mythic aspect and persistent strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries; and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively acquired data. To provide an overview against which to read the other essays, Stocking has also included a sketch of the history of anthropology from the ancient Greeks to the present. For this collection, Stocking has written prefatory commentaries for each of the essays, as well as two more extended contextualizing pieces. An introductory essay ("Retrospective Prescriptive Reflections") places the volume in autobiographical and historiographical context; the Afterword ("Postscriptive Prospective Reflections") reconsiders major themes of the essays in relation to the recent past and present situation of academic anthropology.

Author : Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard,Eva Gillies
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9780198740292

Get Book

Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard,Eva Gillies Pdf

An abridged version of the 1937 an-thropological study of the Azande of the southern Sudan, the theoretical insights of which have proven increasingly influential among both anthropologists and others

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1037107278

Get Book

Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion by Anonim Pdf

Author : Rebecca L. Stein
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Anthropology of religion
ISBN : OCLC:1012102968

Get Book

The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft by Rebecca L. Stein Pdf