Making Magic

Randall Styers

ISBN 10: 0195169417 / ISBN 13: 9780195169416

Published by Oxford University Press USA, 2004

About this Item

: En 'Making Magic', Randall Styers explora la vitalidad del discurso académico que intenta definir y explicar la magia, a pesar de su fracaso en lograrlo. Argumenta que esta persistencia se explica mejor a la luz del impulso occidental por establecer y asegurar su propia identidad como normativa. El libro examina cómo la magia ha servido para designar una forma de alteridad o desviación contra la cual las nociones occidentales dominantes de piedad religiosa apropiada, racionalidad científica legítima y relaciones sociales ordenadas se ponen de relieve. Los académicos han encontrado en la magia una herramienta invaluable en sus esfuerzos por definir los límites apropiados de la religión y la ciencia. En un nivel más amplio, el pensamiento mágico ha servido como un importante contraste para la modernidad misma. EAN: 9780195169416 Tipo: Libros Categoría: Religión y Espiritualidad|Ciencia Ficción|Filosofía Título: Making Magic Autor: Randall Styers Editorial: Oxford University Press USA Idioma: en Páginas: 304 Formato: tapa blanda.

Seller Inventory # Happ-2025-12-02-0a732db9

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Making Magic
• Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195169417
• ISBN 13: 9780195169416
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept 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 distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of 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 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. 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. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.

About the Author

Randall G. Styers is at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.