Enchantment

Poker’s explosion in popularity over recent years has generated a potential demand for academic study into the game.  This paper will describe and explain case studies of two poker players.  Larry plays recreationally, looking to socialise and minimises exposure to risk by employing discourse of “enchantment” – instilling certain cards with “magical” powers and seeing the “poker world” populated with “gods” of “fate”.  Losses are viewed as ‘entrance fees’, winnings the result of good fortune he claims to possess.  The other player – Todd – is a “serious” player, with the explicit aim of maximising financial gain and implicitly asserting skill and gaining a sense of pride.  Exposure to financial risk elements in poker are controlled by managing “bankrolls” which absorbs the shock of prolonged losing streaks, statistical databases are employed to analyse the play of past hands and combined with study of poker theory, these methods “disenchant” Todd’s poker world and enables him to explain the game without using “enchanted” discourse.  This dissertation has links to and develops anthropological areas of “play”, specifically seeking reasons one plays poker; the anthropology of “risk”, notably methods to control financial risk in poker plus outlining broad “player types”.  The study of risk includes association to discourses of “enchantment” and “divination” which are used to explain events taking place in the poker world.  The argument will outline many people’s complicity or unconscious action in maintaining the view of an “enchanted” poker arena, concluding with an appeal for further studies whilst poker continues its rise in interest.

This interview with Charles Taylor explores a central concern throughout his work, namely, his concern to “reenchant” self and world through a careful examination of value as emanating from the world rather than from ourselves. It focuses especially on the status of his central doctrine of “strong evaluation” against the background of mainstream metaethical theories, such as neo-Kantian constructivism and robust realist non-naturalism. Additionally, the relationship between Taylor’s theism and his moral-political philosophy is discussed. A key issue that is examined is what ontological background picture can make sense of the strong evaluative experience of higher worth. Some other related issues that are explored revolve around Taylor’s papers “Disenchantment-Reenchantment” and “Recovering the Sacred,” which tentatively explore the meaning of reenchantment.

This paper begins by drawing on accounts of enchantment as
wonder by three authors (Alain-Fournier, Aldous Huxley and J.R.R.
Tolkien) to explore its basic characteristics and dynamics. It then
draws a contrast with the disenchantment attending will and the
will-to-power, noting the internal affinity of the latter with the
project of modernity and its contrast with enchantment as a nonmodern
experience. It then proceeds to a critique of three influential
philosophers’ portrayals of enchantment (Philip Fisher, Jane
Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami, as well as Charles Taylor), which it
faults for not paying closer attention to the implications of the
experience of enchantment. It closes with a plea for philosophy
aligned with the humanities rather than sciences.

This article sheds light on public performances as important yet neglected sites for social entrepreneurship's discursive expansion as a fashionable model for social transformation. It approaches the strategic considerations behind presentations aimed at 'enchanting' social entrepreneurship through sophisticated investments in spiritual, aesthetic and bodily involvement, and the impressive staging of Muhammad Yunus as a global hero. On a first analytical layer, these ethnographic insights broaden the explanatory basis for social entrepreneurship's rising popularity. In academic literature, its recent prominence is either accepted as a given fact or critically explored through the theoretical lens of language effects, while modes of conviction that invest in the 'extra-textual' are largely ignored. Addressing this gap, the article portrays how organisational actors charged presentations with aesthetic significance, emotional fervour, spiritual dynamism and sensual pleasure to produce holistic experiences that allow people to connect the concept of social entrepreneurship to a felt sense of being-in-the-world. On a second layer, the analysis problematises the enchantment debate's tendency to construct a secular–spiritual binary, that is, to perceive enchantment as arising either from powerful acts of managerial manipulation or from a deeply human desire to fill a religious void. Complicating this distinction, the article frames enchantment work in the social entrepreneurship field as an ambiguous 'dance' between the secular and the sacred—a paradoxical activity of amalgamating neo-rational considerations with the spiritualised pursuit of a global vision.

Comment l'identité musicienne se construit-elle à travers les pratiques des musiciens ? Les musiciens participent activement à la construction de leur identité de musicien en procédant à une mise à disposition d'eux-mêmes, toujours plus complexe et plus élaborée, ainsi qu'à un travail plus ou moins important d'aménagement de leur environnement. La rencontre entre la disposition du musicien et le dispositif dans lequel il s'engage dans ses pratiques musicales pourra faire émerger une expérience particulière, appelée "expérience d'enchantement", au travers de laquelle il se sentira pleinement exister dans la musique.

Nowadays, massively development of food consumption makes many changes, including the humanbiological element, the eating activity. In Earlier, taste of food is a priority in exchange value, but everythingsbe changed because the new concept about presentation and appearance of food itself. The presentationof food becomes important and creates more value for the food. Appearance is the main stimulant for thefood to deciding the taste from the food itself. In deep researched, implicity, the condition emphasis thathappened about commodifiation of exchange value in food perspective. Discussing about value in food, isa form of commodification and has correlation with society existence. To solve the problem, ethnofraphyand art perspective method is a source to analyzing data, with interviews and literature studies as a sourceof data, to interpret and respond the phenomena. The results of researched had founded, art is the newelement in value exchange of food. Food and art created an aesth...

Current debates about the Anthropocene have sparked renewed interest in the relationship between ecology, technology, and coloniality. How do humans relate to one another, to the living environment, and to their material or technological artifacts; and how are these relations structured by coloniality, defined not only as a material process of appropriation and subjugation, but also as an exclusionary hierarchy of knowing and being that still pervades contemporary life? While these questions have of course received attention in decolonial theory, they have also captured the interest of scholars who self-identify with the field of political ecology. However, it can be argued that political ecology still primarily adheres to research practices and paradigms that have been developed in the West, regardless of its diversity and dynamism as a field of research. It is therefore suggested that a rapprochement between decolonial theory and political ecology can open up new perspectives on current debates that are emerging around the concept of the Anthropocene. In particular, the article takes the recent interest in the ontological implications of the Anthropocene as a point of departure to bring the decolonial notion of 'border thinking' into a conversation with the so-called 'new materialism' in political ecology. While both approaches are not necessarily opposed to values grounded in rationality, they can be seen as attempts to rethink ontological divisions such as human/nature or subject/object based on 'enchanted' ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. Yet, although enchantment has the potential to counter inherently colonial practices of appropriation, commodification and objectification, it is argued that keeping a moderately critical distance to enchanted narratives is still recommended, not because of the alleged naïveté of such narratives, but rather because enchantments may also function as and through technologies of power.

Current debates about the Anthropocene have sparked renewed interest in the relationship between ecology, technology, and coloniality. How do humans relate to one another, to the living environment, and to their material or technological artifacts; and how are these relations structured by coloniality, defined not only as a material process of appropriation and subjugation, but also as an exclusionary hierarchy of knowing and being that still pervades contemporary life? While these questions have of course received attention in decolonial theory, they have also captured the interest of scholars who self-identify with the field of political ecology. However, it can be argued that political ecology still primarily adheres to research practices and paradigms that have been developed in the West, regardless of its diversity and dynamism as a field of research. It is therefore suggested that a rapprochement between decolonial theory and political ecology can open up new perspectives on current debates that are emerging around the concept of the Anthropocene. In particular, the article takes the recent interest in the ontological implications of the Anthropocene as a point of departure to bring the decolonial notion of 'border thinking' into a conversation with the so-called 'new materialism' in political ecology. While both approaches are not necessarily opposed to values grounded in rationality, they can be seen as attempts to rethink ontological divisions such as human/nature or subject/object based on 'enchanted' ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. Yet, although enchantment has the potential to counter inherently colonial practices of appropriation, commodification and objectification, it is argued that keeping a moderately critical distance to enchanted narratives is still recommended, not because of the alleged naïveté of such narratives, but rather because enchantments may also function as and through technologies of power.

Les débats récents sur l'anthropocène soulignent un nouveau intérêt scientifique pour les relations complexes entre la écologie, la technologie, et le colonialisme. Comment est-ce que l'humanité se rapportent les uns envers les autres, à leur milieu de vie et à leurs objets physiques et techniques, et comment ces relations sont-ils structurées par le colonialisme, non seulement définies comme un processus matériel de l'appropriation et de l'assujettissement, mais aussi comme une hiérarchie d'exclusion de la connaissance et de l'être, qui imprègne encore la vie contemporaine? Bien que ces questions étaient naturellement traitées dans la théorie de la décolonialisme, ils ont également suscité l'intérêt des scientifiques, qui se disent les écologistes politiques. Néanmoins, on peut affirmer que l'écologie politique suivie encore des pratiques et paradigmes de recherche occidentaux, mais il est un domaine diversifié de la recherche. Il est donc proposé qu'un rapprochement entre la théorie décolonial et l'écologie politique peut ouvrir une nouvelle perspective sur les débats autour de l'anthropocène. Avant tout, cet article prend l'intérêt récent pour les implications ontologiques de l'anthropocène comme point de départ pour amener la notion décolonial de la «pensée frontalière» dans une conversation avec le soi-disant «nouveau matérialisme» dans l'écologie politique. Bien que les deux approches ne sont pas nécessairement opposés à des valeurs fondées sur la rationalité, ce sont des tentatives de reconsidérer les divisions ontologiques entre l'homme et la nature ou entre sujet et objet basé sur les moyens «enchantés» de savoir et d'être-dans-le-monde. Pourtant, bien que l'enchantement a le potentiel pour contrer les pratiques coloniales d'appropriation, de la marchandisation et de l'objectivation, il est soutenu que garder une distance critique aux récits enchantées est recommandé, pas à cause de la naïveté présumée de ces récits, mais plutôt parce que enchantements peut également fonctionner comme et grâce à des technologies du pouvoir.

Recientes debates académicos sobre el Antropoceno apuntan hacia un renovado interés académico en las complejas relaciones entre la ecología, la tecnología y la colonialidad. ¿De qué manera los seres humanos se relacionan entre sí, de las condiciones de vida y de sus materiales o tecnológicos artefactos, y cómo son estas relaciones estructuradas por la colonialidad, que se define no sólo como un proceso material de la apropiación y el sometimiento, sino también como una jerarquía de exclusión del conocimiento y ser, que todavía impregna la vida contemporánea? Si bien estas cuestiones fueron tratadas por supuesto en la teoría decolonial, sino que también han atraído el interés de los científicos que se llaman ecologistas políticos. Sin embargo, se puede argumentar que la ecología política siguió siendo prácticas de investigación y paradigmas occidentales, aunque hay un amplio campo de investigación. Por lo tanto, se sugiere que un acercamiento entre la teoría decolonial y la ecología política puede abrir nuevas perspectivas sobre los debates actuales que están surgiendo en torno al concepto del Antropoceno. En particular, el artículo toma el reciente interés en las implicaciones ontológicas del Antropoceno como un punto de partida para que la noción decolonial de 'pensamiento fronterizo' en una conversación con el llamado 'nuevo materialismo' en la ecología política. Si bien ambos enfoques no son necesariamente opuestos a los valores fundados en la racionalidad, que pueden verse como intentos de replantear divisiones ontológicas entre los humanos y la naturaleza o entre sujeto y objeto en función de maneras 'encantadas' de conocer y de ser-en-el-mundo. Sin embargo, a pesar de encantamiento puede servir como un medio útil para contrarrestar las prácticas destructivas de apropiación, la cosificación y mercantilización, se argumenta que una distancia moderadamente crítico para narrativas encantada es recomendable, no es principalmente debido a la supuesta ingenuidad de estas narrativas, sino más bien porque encantamientos también podría funcionar como tecnologías de poder, y por medio de tecnologías de poder.

El presente artículo se centra en la transformación y valoración de las magas y los libros de magia o grimorios en los primeros nueve libros del ciclo de Amadís. en estos textos, la mayor parte de los libros presentes en la diégesis son mágicos y pertenecen a las magas, explicando su quehacer sobrenatural. siguiendo una perspectiva diacrónica, el análisis se remonta al modelo de las magas configurado en la literatura artúrica, que influyó en el Amadís y fue modificado en sus continuaciones. el artículo explica las importantes divergencias en la función y presentación de los grimorios, la magia y las magas al interior de este ciclo caballeresco.
This article studies the transformations and different views on an essential part of the magic landscape of the first nine books of the Amadís cycle: enchantresses and magic books (or grimoires). In these woks, most books that appear in the diegesis are magic ones and they usually belong to an enchantress. This study follows a diachronic approach, starting with the prototype of the enchantress created in Arthurian literature. The model of the Arthurian enchantress strongly influenced Amadís, whilst the sequels show significant innovation that emphasise the importance of grimoires for the characterisation of female characters. The article focuses on explaining the significant divergences in the depiction and function of enchantresses, grimoires, and magic in this chivalric cycle.a

Jung’s psychology is founded upon this problem: ‘Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons’ (Jung & Jaffé, 1977, pp. 61-62).  I intend to read the disquieting tension of this problematic as haunting everything he wrote.  My thesis is that Jung’s perspective is both enchanted and disenchanted: and, moreover, that this antinomial tension makes him and his psychology peculiarly modern. Utilising recent scholarship on the modern occult which has placed enchantment at the centre of modernity, this paper argues for a peculiarly modern disenchanted enchantment which Jung’s psychology both exemplifies and explores.

In a supposedly enlightened and disenchanted age, why has lyric poetry continued to make claims and perform gestures that are now otherwise inadmissible or even unimaginable? Animation, invocation, and unmotivated praise, apparently artificially imposed (dis)order, and spurious gnomic and vatic sayings that pretend to universal or transcendent knowledge are marks of the lyric as a genre. Sketching a theory of poetic license, this article addresses the lyrical entanglement of enchantment and embarrassment. The author argues for a concept of the lyric as a medium for regulating the balance between enchantment and disenchantment in an always imbalanced environment. Engaging other scholars and using examples from modern French and German poetry, the article also ventures a new understanding of lyric modernity. Rather than naming a historical event to be lamented, disenchantment unveils a risk inherent to the lyric whose regulatory function it makes explicit.

This quirky film by director Ramaa Mosley has been begging for analysis since I first saw it in 2014.  It follows the fate of a disenfranchised couple, living permanently on the breadline, whose lives are changed when they fatefully discover an enchanted object; a brass teapot.

This modern morality tale explores with comedic flair the young couple's journey involving the sadistic pursuit of pure greed, in an ode to the dangers of Mammonism and the corruption brought with the worshipping of money. ...

Find Out More:
http://www.whenthenewsstops.org/2016/09/the-brass-teapot-enchantment-sadism-and.html

The Otherkin are an identity-group of individuals who consider themselves to be non-human or not completely human. Over the past years, their online presence has grown, in particular through The Otherkin Community, Inc. Simultaneously, the validity of their identity claim has been increasingly challenged. Relying on concepts in the field of discourse theory, this study examines their position and prospects in the wider Western culture. It uncovers their discursive strategies in an externally hostile and internally fragmented context, systematises their modes of identity-building, and explores the extent of their possible mainstreaming as an online counterpublic. In linking the findings, it argues that ‘Otherkinism’ is heavily impacted by an environment of exclusion, yet may still thrive – to that environment’s likely benefit.

This essay considers fairy-tale symbolism by means of a rather obscure tale, "The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers" (ATU 451). The discussion highlights the lunar aspect of fairy-tale enchantments in the woods. It also notes the cross-cultural reach of lunar imagery in ritual, myth, and the fairy tale.

This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett.

The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment, strong evaluation, objective value, first-personal experience, transcendence, resonance, perceptual experience, religious meaning, moral experience, interpretation, attention, and the sacred or reverence-worthy; notions that are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as disenchantment, realism, nature, and God. In this way, this volume seeks to put the concept of reenchantment firmly on the contemporary philosophical agenda by showing the extent to which it connects with central questions about agency, value, metaphysics, and religion.

The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy (especially those working in moral philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science), theology, religious studies, and sociology.

New look on the Sirens' song in Odyssey.
A long tradition of interpretation based on subsequent poetical elaborations and allegorical readings of Homer has overshadowed the literal meaning of the passage dedicated to the Sirens in Odyssey XII. But in a narrative characterized by specularity, the poet focuses his attention only on the Sirens'  voice and song so as to illustrate their ambivalence : involved, as a derridean pharmakon, both in the figure of the epic bard and of the melic chorus, the Sirens embody the interference of two opposite poetical practices which, while coexisting in the Iliad, are blurred in the Odyssey, in connection with the figure of Ulysses, a witness hero who builds himself and asks from other singers his own song of glory so to mirror in it.
Une longue tradition d’interprétation fondée sur des réélaborations poétiques postérieures et des lectures allégorisantes d’Homère a fini par occulter la lettre du passage du chant XII de l’Odyssée consacré aux Sirènes. Or, dans un récit caractérisé par la spécularité, seuls la voix et le chant des Sirènes intéressent en réalité le poète qui s’attache à en montrer l’ambivalence : participant, telles un pharmakon derridéen, à la fois de la figure de l’aède épique et de celle du chœur mélique, les Sirènes incarnent les interférences de deux types de pratique poétique opposées qui, coexistant dans l’Iliade, se brouillent dans l’Odyssée, en relation avec la figure d’Ulysse, héros témoin qui construit lui-même et réclame aux autres chanteurs un chant de gloire auto-réflexif pour s’y mirer.

This article focuses on the figure of Silvana, a witch in Sardinian folk tradition,
placing her for the first time in relation to the mythical archetype of the Latin deity Silvanus
and the salvans, its already known Romance successors in the Alpine and Apennine areas.
The witch’s presence is certified by a series of spells recorded in various parts of the island
during the twentieth century; she was also connected to apotropaic rituals, which are compared
with similar practices in Roman folklore that have come down to us from Varro’s Antiquitates.

Dans le mouvement populaire nord-américain des « funérailles à domicile », le mort est veillé à la maison par ses amis et sa famille, au lieu d’être pris en charge par une entreprise de pompes funèbres. Cette pratique met en évidence les tensions fécondes – entre biologie et construction sociale, matière et sens, objet et sujet – dont le corps mort est le lieu. Investi d’un reste de volonté et de subjectivité, d’une étincelle de vie qui s’éteint, le défunt vient contredire l’idée médicale et scientifique selon laquelle le cadavre serait un objet inanimé. Les funérailles à domicile provoquent la réflexion en bousculant les certitudes : les vivants et les morts peuvent tisser des liens affectifs, et les morts prendre soin des vivants autant que les vivants des morts.

“Home funerals” are a small, grassroots North American movement in which the dead body is cared for at home by friends and family rather than in a funeral home by professionals. This paper argues that home funeral practice offers a generative view of the tension between the body as biological and social construction, matter and meaning, object and subject. In home funerals, the dead body is enacted as possessing a fading spark of agency and subjectivity, animating the dead against the grain of medical and scientific conceptions of the corpse as inert object. Home funerals provocatively engage questions of the forms of care and affective attachment available between the living and the dead.

This article contributes to the understanding of the role of religion in the public and political controversies about homosexuality in Africa. As a case study it investigates the heated public debate in Zambia following a February 2012 visit by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasised the need for the country to recognise the human rights of homosexuals. The focus is on a particular Christian discourse in this debate, in which the international pressure to recognise gay rights is considered a sign of the end times, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN and other international organisations are associated with the Antichrist and the Devil. Here, the debate about homosexuality becomes eschatologically enchanted through millennialist thought. Building on discussions about public religion and religion and politics in Africa, this article avoids popular explanations in terms of fundamentalist religion and African homophobia, but rather highlights the political significance of this discourse in a postcolonial African context.

The essay examines from a diachronic perspective the formulae of incantation addressed to Mother Earth, of which there are at least three examples dated between the 9th and 10th centuries, two composed in scripta latina rustica and one in the Occitan language (the most famous “blessings of Clermont-Ferrand”). The three enchantments are aimed at curing diseases of various kinds and in their respective final charm, according to a principle of magical thought, they order the evil to move from the inside to the outside of the body, finally begging Mother Earth to welcome it. The earliest antecedent of this formula is identified in Varrone’s De re rustica, where the poem was part of a healing ceremony.

Nicolas Zorzin’s degrowth archaeology—and LouAnn Wurst’s radical response to it—are discussed in light of disenchantment and sustainable archaeology. Disenchantment is not just integral to degrowth archaeology, it is its reason for being. Disenchantment is also what makes degrowth archaeology untenable. Reflecting the larger effort to remake and ‘re-enchant’ archaeology, and like sustainable archaeology, degrowth archaeology underestimates the scope and scale of disenchantment. In doing so, archaeologists risk perpetuating and exacerbating disenchantment.

Chapter Eleven from the book Re- enchanting the Academy, an anthology published by Rubedo press.  In this chapter, enchantment is explored through significant aspects of the poetic heritage of the Western Esoteric tradition; from the Celtic bards through to Blake and Whitman, and how the  modern definition of poetry, indicates a cultural disinheritance of the scope of this enriching legacy. 

Way, J. (2017). Enrichment and enchantment. In A. Voss and S. Wilson (Eds.), Re-enchanting the academy. Auckland, New Zealand: Rubedo Press.

A mode of artistic representation that creates a sense of enchantment, an aesthetic of magic and mystery that animates the surrounding world, might be particularly effective in forging attachments with that world. This chapter interrogates one such mode of aesthetic representation, the creation of enchanted geographies, by examining the novels, nonfiction works, and cultural activities of a particularly active and successful cultural producer, the Ural writer Aleksei Ivanov. Ivanov's works, I argue, deploy aesthetic experiences of enchantment to activate cultural memory, drive engagement with his native territory, and develop a strong sense of local identity.

Certain deadening forces including disneyfication, museumization, and the standardization of heritagescapes have led to the loss of embodied, lived experiences. In an effort to (re)enchant how these landscapes are developed, managed, and encountered, a new landscape model is introduced that combines the more practical components of heritage management (locale and story) with strategies that explore the emotional and affective dimensions of phenomenological landscape experience (presence). Within landscape geography, the model provides a more concise methodology for landscape analysis. Bringing together often opposing perspectives, the model helps to peel back the different material, symbolic, and affective layers of landscapes. Within heritage and tourism studies, the model provides a vital stepping stone between theory and practice, and it serves as an accessible and replicable tool to study the complexity of the visitor experience and the different dimensions of historical landscapes. Applying the model in four sites associated with the Viking Age reveals the desire for more multisensory, hands-on, and individualized encounters with heritagescapes. This illuminates the need to thwart the deadening forces and reawaken the lived experience in landscapes of the past and present.

This editor’s introduction elaborates on the central aim of The Philosophy of Reenchantment: to present the first integral account of what is involved in understanding reenchantment as a distinctive approach to philosophy against the background of the mainstream debate on Max Weber’s narrative of the “disenchantment” of the world. It discusses the background literature on the concepts of disenchantment and reenchantment and related approaches, and explains the cohesion and content of the different chapters.

This paper seeks to explore the visions of AE in order to frame contemporary creative practices that actively seek numinous experience as part of a creative continuum. Of import are the diversity of AE’s visions: they span an introvertive-extrovertive spectrum (Marshall 2005), and occur both in the natural scene (for example, his ‘awakening’ as one of the ‘heavenly household’ in the Irish countryside) and in more prosaic surroundings (often through meditation, but at times unheralded such as his vision of ‘earth breath’ while working as a city clerk: ‘an exile from living nature but she yet visited me’.)

Coupled with Voss’ hermeneutic approach to creativity and imagination (2009), such visions may be related to a series of creative approaches that strive toward the ‘participatory turn’ in which empirical modes of interpretation necessarily yield to the alternative, intuitive and visionary approaches, before being re-integrated as part of a working process within an ‘awakened’ or ‘initiated’ landscape. Grounded in the archetypal/imaginal concepts of Corbin, Voss’ approach to the methodology of imagination is a natural complement to the poetic essentialism implied by AE’s vision and the wider mystical backdrop of his work. Furthermore. the author’s own work since 2001 with music and text are analysed to elucidate the process of working within an ‘initiated’ landscape in a contemporary context. Works such as Abital (2007) and Almias (with Simon Bradley and Layla Legard, 2010) encounter participatory turns within the physical environment, while Angelystor (2013) and Hawthonn (with Layla Legard, 2014) explore reflexive interior landscapes through visionary practice.

In this paper, I approach thinking as something that takes place in playful encounters with the city: it is then always connected to doing. New reflection emerges in everyday action with everything that comes together in a given event. This understanding is based on a posthuman acknowledgement of the capacity of the material world to produce effects in human bodies: urban spaces take part in the event of hanging out, that is, they can make things happen. I focus my discussion on the possibilitites for experimentation that hanging out in the city opens up. Because hanging out is wonderfully aimless, time and space is cleared for dwelling with the city, and then re-cognizing the world. To deliver my argument, I illustrate vignettes from a study on young people’s hanging out in San Francisco. By presenting the concept of hanging-out-knowing, I draw attention to the importance of young people having the time and space to be with their peers without strict plans and schedules.

The focus of my talk is the standard thesis (or theory or master narrative) of the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt). I am going to discuss at length one of the few recent attempts to systematically deconstruct it in order to make room for an alternative view of the relationship between religion and the modern world.
This work of demolition was undertaken by a prominent German sociologist – Hans Joas – in his last bulky book: Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung, whose fourth, more than 100 pages long, chapter is devoted to a meticulous analysis of Max Weber’s narrative of disenchantment. Joas’s book was published by Suhrkamp in Germany in October 2017, and will appear in English in 2019 (with Oxford University Press).
Before embarking in a systematic reconstruction of the counterargument put forward by Joas, I am going to precede the exposition with a condensed overview of its subject-matter from a non-specialist point of view that I will use as a background for the ensuing discussion. From this perspective, the disenchantment thesis appears as a self-referential claim that maintains something about the claimant, i.e. about us. It contends that we are disenchanted in so far as we experience whatever goes under the name of “enchantment” – let’s call it the “religious” domain – as a peculiar field. Its peculiarity derives from the fact that religious people seem to admit a mysterious kind of causality in their dealings with their surroundings that does not belong in the realm of physical laws and efficient causes.
This is disenchantment from the object’s side, as it were. From the subject’s side, conversely, disenchantment is a specific stance, a way of relating to the world as a whole, that denies the world any independent power to bring about a cognitively justified state of overwhelming awe or terror in humans. Disenchantment, in this regard, appears as a condition of disengagement where a minded subject is faced by a mindless external reality and any emotionally charged property of what is out there is regarded as a projection of the (responsible) feeling being onto an unresponsive reality.
Prima facie, the transition from an enchanted to a disenchanted condition can be made better sense of if it is understood along biographical lines. In brief, we can account for this major shift by envisioning it as a Gestalt switch, on which a familiar story of growing up can be told. But it is precisely the sense of familiarity enveloping such teleological narratives of maturation that arouses the suspicion of scholars such as Hans Joas who are wary of accounts that appear too simple to be true.
“Disenchantment” is a term of modern coinage. As such, it makes sense only if embedded in some theory or historical narrative about religion’s origins from a modern point of view. This is the main reason why Joas begins his investigation with a self-reflexive move whereby he shows, in the first three chapters of The Power of the Sacred, how the “Geschichte von der Entzauberung” is the late offspring of a new field of investigation made possible by the rise of the “secular option”. This historical innovation went hand in hand with a new way of looking at “religion” as a contingent, natural, discrete human phenomenon susceptible of being investigated with standard scientific means.
This is the historical context where the master narrative of disenchantment took shape and became the most influential portrait of the place of religion in modern life. This is, however, also the context in which one can set oneself the goal of “disenchanting disenchantment” (“entzaubern die Entzauberung”).
The ambivalence and open-endedness of the novel option are of crucial importance for Joas and bring to the surface its challenging character. In Chapter 4, following a trail already blazed by David Martin with reference to the secularization thesis, the German sociologist shows in details what “disenchanting disenchantment” boils down to in the last analysis. Schematically, it amounts to: (a) Drawing attention to its extravagant influence on later understandings of the alleged decline of religion in modern societies. (b) Contrasting this hyperbolic impact with both the contingent emergence of the concept in Weber’s oeuvre and its constitutive plurivocity, if not outright ambiguity. (c) Unpacking its plural meanings and showing that this plurivocity cannot be made coherent. (d) Unmasking the non-empirically grounded status of Weber’s multilayered claim. (e) Conjecturing that “Weber at a certain point in his intellectual development [was] swamped or drowned in the varieties of his historical reconstructions and, as a consequence or a remedy to this fragmentation, [imposed] on his material certain […] ‘dangerous nouns of process’”.
In conclusion, I will say a few words about the alternative to the Geschichte von der Entzauberung envisioned by Joas and take a look at its pros and cons.

This paper  challenges a longstanding consensus on the need to foreground the homogeneity, purity, and simplicity of fairy tales. It argues that the core of fairy tales is enchantment,  a phase ruled by lunar time. The discussion examines a transmedial string of variants of “The Maiden in the Tower” (ATU 310) and “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410)—stories about girls in the dark forest, suspended between heaven and earth, who are ushered by ambivalent witches/fairies into a fateful transition. As girls spin a spindle, they cycle along with the moon; as they prick a finger, they mark with blood the thread of their lives. Cyclic time, which straddles opposites, breeds pervasive fairy-tale hybridity.
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This paper explores tensions between scientific understandings of the internet phenomenon known as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) and accounts of the experience put forth by people who experience ASMR (also known as ASMRers). While current scientific research into the therapeutic affordances and the physiological, neurological, and psychological determinants of ASMR have failed to produce satisfactory accounts of the experience, ASMRers label and describe the phenomenon in scientific terms to give the experience scientific validity. So far, this strategy has worked, infusing a series of scientific inquiries into the strange uniqueness of the experience. That said, efforts to understand the ASMR experience through modern scientific, technological, and conceptual strategies is not only limiting, but futile. ASMR is incomprehensible from the standpoint of modern scientific discourse because of the unique, posthuman constitution of the ASMR body. This has led to what I call the ASMR Paradox: growing efforts to describe ASMR, a scientifically inaccessible experience, in purely scientific terms. In consideration of this paradox, the following reflection piece explores the tension between scientific discourses regarding ASMR and the seemingly diametrical experiences of ASMRers. I conclude that, while the former is indebted to western humanist thinking, the latter expresses a posthumanist configuration that is incompatible with the scientific rhetoric currently being used to describe it.