The Anthropology Of Magic

Author : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Berg
ISBN 13 : 1847886418
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Anthropology of Magic written by Susan Greenwood and published by Berg. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317350219
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft -- Pearson eText written by Rebecca L Stein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 1000181227
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld written by Susan Greenwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 022651871X
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic's Reason written by Graham M. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 1000189821
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Nature of Magic written by Susan Greenwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317517202
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magical Consciousness written by Susan Greenwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion written by and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Susan Greenwood
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000183815
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Anthropology of Magic written by Susan Greenwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Thomas Buckley
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520340566
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood Magic written by Thomas Buckley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : George W. Stocking
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN 13 : 9780299134143
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology written by George W. Stocking and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.