Magic and the Will to Science

This book offers a political anthropological perspective on the problematic character of science, showing how science grew out of magic and its variations, whilst demonstrating that the desire to use science to solve various problems of human existence has created a permanent liminal crisis.

Autorentext

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 coauthor 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 coeditor 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.

Inhalt

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