Esoteric Practices and Alternative Rationalities: A Global Perspective

This volume is the first milestone of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded Center for Advanced Studies in Social Science and Humanities (CAS-E). It presents unprecedented comparative and interdisciplinary research by renowned and emerging scholars, as well as pioneering conceptual frameworks on contemporary and historically-informed esoteric practices from a global perspective. Offering grounded analysis and conceptual frameworks, this collection illuminates the political, economic, cultural, material, embodied, ritual, and symbolic contextual meanings of the pragmatic and experiential aspects of these practices, as well as identifies a range of sources of change, agents, and material evidence that embody them.

Raquel Romberg, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania, 1998), is a socio-cultural anthropologist and folklorist. She is the author of Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico (2003); Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Puerto Rico (2009); and several articles on the dramatic, sensuous, and poetic aspects of possession, divination, and healing ritual practices, as well as their colonial and postcolonial histories. Currently, Raquel is Research Coordinator of the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Science and Humanities (CAS-E) “Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective” at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). For a list of publications see: link text.

Andreas Nehring (*1957), Dr. theol., is Professor Emeritus for Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology at the FAU. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Salzburg, Makumira University in Tanzania, at the Lutheran Theological Seminary (LTS) in Hong Kong, as well as in Malaysia and Myanmar. At present he is Director of the CAS-E. His fields of research are: theories of religious and cultural studies, postcolonial theologies, transcultural processes of exchange and communication between Europe and India.

Dominik M. Müller is Heisenberg Professor and Chair of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the FAU. His research interests cut across legal and political anthropology as well as the anthropology of Islam. He is the Principal Investigator of the CAS-E and Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights” at FAU. He also heads the FAU branch of the International Max Planck Research School “Global Multiplicity: A Social Anthropology for the Now” (IMPRS-GM).