Enchantment

Undergraduate

This seminar interrogates the role of enchantment in the history of religion, science, and magic. A key foil in the constitution of secular modernity, enchantment has long served as a way to critique other societies and people as mired in primitive superstitions. Yet throughout the course of modern era, enchantment has also offered a fount for constituting the past, critiquing the present, and imagining the future. Inversely, the process of disenchantment has played a vital role in the definition of what it means to be modern. Throughout the semester, we interrogate the interconnections that have both bound together and separated religion, science, and magic. One primary concern for our seminar is the categorical logic that has structured the study of religion and the history of science through such antonyms as Eastern and Western, superstitious and rational, savage and civilized, primitive and modern, religious and secular, etc. Themes include: language, epistemology, authority, comparison, classification, origins, history, mythology, ideology, colonialism, Orientalism, polemic, secularism, liberalism, sympathy, theories of race, and group formation. HU Th 9:25am-11:20am