Magic and Modernity Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment [Hardcover]

Magic and Modernityis the first book to explore comparatively how magicusually portrayed as the antithesis of the modernis also something that is at home in modernity. Magic and modernity are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially unmodern. Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social sciences have studied how modern culture and institutions incorporated and even produced magic.This book is the first to adopt a comparative approach to the study of magic as something that has a place in modernity, and that helped to constitute modern society at local and global levels. The essays in this collection contribute to recent discussions in anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and sociology that increasingly question the extent to which modern self-conceptions are accurate reflections of a state of affairs in the world rather than cultural interventions.Birgit Meyer is a senior lecturer at the Research Centre for the Study of Religion and Society, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Peter Pels teaches at the Research Centre for the Study of Religion and Society and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He is also the editor ofSocial Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. [Magic and Modernity] is an important introduction and contribution to the anthropological side of this field, This is the first book to explore comparatively how magicusually portrayed as the antithesis of the modernis also at home in modernity.