Primitive Magic PDF Download

Author: Ernesto De Martino
Publisher: Avery Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Describes societies where magic is a way of life, where sorcerers, shamans, diviners and fire-walkers form powerful bonds with the psychic realities of nature. This is a thorough study that is both scholarly and readable.

Author: Randall Styers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190287926
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
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.

Author: Eli Edward Burriss
Publisher: Vamzzz Publishing
ISBN: 9789492355034
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In Ancient Rome Mana was the term used for a mysterious, magical medium, which could be helpful or harmful (Taboo). Just like the Chinese qi, it could empower the positive and the negative.

Author: Bernd-Christian Otto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317545044
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion, anthropology, sociology, and cultural history. Defining Magic is the first volume to assemble key texts that aim at determining the nature of magic, establish its boundaries and key features, and explain its working. The reader brings together seminal writings from antiquity to today. The texts have been selected on the strength of their success in defining magic as a category, their impact on future scholarship, and their originality. The writings are divided into chronological sections and each essay is separately introduced for student readers. Together, these texts - from Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology - reveal the breadth of critical approaches and responses to defining what is magic. CONTRIBUTORS: Aquinas, Augustine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Dennis Diderot, Emile Durkheim, Edward Evans-Pritchard, James Frazer, Susan Greenwood, Robin Horton, Edmund Leach, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Christopher Lehrich, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Plato, Pliny, Plotin, Isidore of Sevilla, Jesper Sorensen, Kimberley Stratton, Randall Styers, Edward Tylor

Author: Bronislaw Malinowski
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473393124
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This vintage book comprises three famous Malinowski essays on the subject of religion. Malinowski is one of the most important and influential anthropologists of all time. He is particularly renowned for his ability to combine the reality of human experience, with the cold calculations of science. An important collection of three of his most famous essays, "Magic, Science and Religion" provides its reader with a series of concepts concerning religion, magic, science, rite and myth. This is undertaken in an attempt to form a definite impression and understanding of the Trobrianders of New Guinea. The chapters of this book include: "Magic, Science and Religion", "Primitive Man and his Religion", "Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings", "Faith and Cult", "The Creative Acts of Religion", "Providence in Primitive Life", "Man's Selective Interest in Nature", etcetera. This book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Author: Graham M. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651871X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
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: Luis Carlos Molina Acevedo
Publisher: XinXii
ISBN: 3960285884
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Here, the magic is studied in its linguistic and semiotic aspects and is defined as well: Magic is objectified language and symbols to operate with power over the world by a magician to the particular interest of an user into a community, whose interaction constitutes a system. The study demands specific and analytical tools as well: 1. The Linguistics and Semiotics to study the expression of magic. 2. The Information Theory and its science involved (Dianetics and Bioenergetics) to show how magical effectiveness is reached. 3. The Theory of Post-modernity to analyze the scenic characteristics of magical ritual. The theatre aesthetics of magic is important for producing emotional reactions toward healing by the magical action. 4. The Theory of Speech Act and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to show how manages to operate the magic with power over the world and its creatures. 5. The Theory of Discourse to establish the structure of magical discourse. 6. The Theory of Symbols to establish the symbolic structure of magic.

Author: Lynn Thorndike
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 1181

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Book Description
History of Magic and Experimental Science is a two-volume study by Lynn Thorndike, American historian of medieval science and alchemy. The book covers a period from antique until the thirteen century. Thorndike writes about magic and science in medieval times with the goal of finding a historical truth. Table of Contents: Volume 1: Book I. The Roman Empire Book II. Early Christian Thought Book III. The Early Middle Ages Volume 2: Book IV. The Twelfth Century Book V. The Thirteenth Century

Author: Jacques Waardenburg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110473860
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 715

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Book Description
Waardenburg’s magisterial essay traces the rise and development of the academic study of religion from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, outlining the establishment of the discipline, its connections with other fields, religion as a subject of research, and perspectives on a phenomenological study of religion. Futhermore a second part comprises an anthology of texts from 41 scholars whose work was programmatic in the evolution of the academic study of religion. Each chapter presents a particular approach, theory, and method relevant to the study of religion. The pieces selected for this volume were taken from the discipline of religious studies as well as from related fields, such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology, to name a few.

Author: Andrea Bardin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401798311
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon a thorough and unprecedented survey of the French philosopher’s entire oeuvre. The publication, which breaks new ground in its thoroughness and breadth of analysis, systematically traces the interconnections between Simondon’s philosophy of science and technology on the one hand, and his political philosophy on the other. The author sets Simondon’s ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon’s sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard’s philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropology of luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon’s philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthélémy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author’s intimate knowledge of Simondon’s language allows him to resolve many of th e semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon’s many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.