Making Magic: Religion, Magic, & Science in the Modern World (AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion) - Softcover

Book 17 of 38: AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion

Styers, Randall

 
9780195169416: Making Magic: Religion, Magic, & Science in the Modern World (AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion)

Synopsis

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 distinctive norms 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.

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Review

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)

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780195151077: Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series)

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  0195151070 ISBN 13:  9780195151077
Publisher: OUP USA, 2004
Hardcover