A Reenchanted World PDF Download

Author: James William Gibson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805078355
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
In a surprising and enlightening investigation of modern society's rediscovery of the sacred in nature, an acclaimed sociologist reveals that the culture of enchantment is making an astonishing comeback.

Author: James William Gibson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142999486X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A surprising and enlightening investigation of how modern society is making nature sacred once again For more than two centuries, Western cultures, as they became ever more industrialized, increasingly regarded the natural world as little more than a collection of useful raw resources. The folklore of powerful forest spirits and mountain demons was displaced by the practicalities of logging and strip-mining; the traditional rituals of hunting ceremonies gave way to the indiscriminate butchering of animals for meat markets. In the famous lament of Max Weber, our surroundings became "disenchanted," with nature's magic swept away by secularization and rationalization. But now, as acclaimed sociologist James William Gibson reveals in this insightful study, the culture of enchantment is making an astonishing comeback. From Greenpeace eco-warriors to evangelical Christians preaching "creation care" and geneticists who speak of human-animal kinship, Gibson finds a remarkably broad yearning for a spiritual reconnection to nature. As we grapple with increasingly dire environmental disasters, he points to this cultural shift as the last utopian dream—the final hope for protecting the world that all of us must live in.

Author: Anne Harrington
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218080
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

Author: Joshua Landy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

Author: Marc Bekoff
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1577319540
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In wildlife conservation, rewilding refers to restoring habitats and creating corridors between preserved lands to allow declining populations to rebound. Marc Bekoff, one of the world’s leading animal experts and activists, here applies rewilding to human attitudes. Rewilding Our Hearts invites readers to do the essential work of becoming reenchanted with the world, acting from the inside out, and dissolving false boundaries to truly connect with both nature and themselves.

Author: Silvia Federici
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629635855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Silvia Federici is one of the most important contemporary theorists of capitalism and feminist movements. In this collection of her work spanning over twenty years, she provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues and debates in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the “new enclosures” at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation. Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection centers on women and reproductive work as crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the hierarchies and divisions capital has planted in the body of the world proletariat. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing capitalist organization of life and labor.

Author: George Levine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226475743
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The Victorian novel clearly joins with science in the pervasive secularizing of nature and society and in the exploration of the consequences of secularization that characterized mid-Victorian England. p. viii.

Author: Adrian Horn
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719083662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
British teenagers witnessed immense cultural change in the period following the second world war. There were fewer than 100 juke boxes in Britain in 1945 and over 15,000 by 1958. Over the same period, there was a similar unprecedented expansion of casual youth venues in the form of cafés, snack, milk, and coffee bars where young people could hear the sounds of hot American jazz and rock 'n' roll. It has been a common assumption among academics and cultural historians alike that British youth between 1945 and 1960 underwent a period of massive "Americanization."Juke Box Britain contests this view, maintaining that American popular-cultural influences were not examples of cultural domination but simply influences that combined with existing styles to create distinctly British style fusions. Juke Box Britain is suitable for students of cultural, social, and design histories, as well as cultural studies, providing fascinating reading for youth culture and juke box enthusiasts.

Author: Morris Berman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801492259
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition--destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.

Author: Erik Davis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1907222871
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.