Magic and the Will to Science

A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-45736-9
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 218 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 499 g

Reihe: Contemporary Liminality

This book offers a political anthropological perspective on the problematic character of science, combining insights from historical sociology, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Its central idea, departing from the works of Frances Yates and the Gnosticism thesis of Eric Voegelin, is that far from being the radical opposite of magic, modern science effectively grew out of magic, and its varieties, like alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, the occult, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. Showing that the desire to use science to solve various – real or presumed – problems of human existence has created a permanent liminal crisis, it contends that the ‘will to science’ is parasitic, existing as it does in sheer relationality, outside of and in between concrete places and communities. A study of the mutual relationship between magic and science in different historical eras, ranging from the Early Neolithic to recent disease prevention ideas, Magic and the Will to Science will appeal to scholars and students of social and anthropological theory, and the philosophy and sociology of science.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Horvath, Agnes

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Introduction

Ch1 Magical doubles as liminal technicity

Ch2 Sensuals without borders: artificial man, artificial intelligence

Ch3. The cunning of unreason: exposure to harm to transpose into a new status

Ch4. Recursive algorithm in the amplification of magic

Ch5. The unknown factor of effusion in spiritualised science

Ch6. Mind control

Ch7. One tower: when the dead seized the living

Conclusion

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

Über Autor(innen)

Agnes Horvath is a political anthropologist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, and president of the International Political Anthropology Association, she was an affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma and Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded, the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion, Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery, and Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism.