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This article addresses the issue of the fragility of Western liberal democracies, the divisions in Western society as a whole and within particular countries, and the loss of faith in the Western model of civilization. My focus will be (1) on the initial enchantment of the Eastern European countries (with special emphasis on Romania) with the West European models of freedom, democracy, lifestyle, and living standards, which explains why these countries overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining the European Union after the fall of Communism; and (2) on their subsequent disenchantment with how far liberal democracies could go, and their general discontent with the restrictions and preconditions imposed on them for obtaining EU funding for their economic development. In dealing with the issue of globalism, nationalism and identity, I will elaborate on the role of identity, personal and national, in the creation of roots, stability, self-esteem, hard work and progress, with reference to the manifestations of populism in Europe. Finally, I will consider the positive effects Eastern countries with their traditionalism and religious values could have on their Western counterparts, in order to revive and sustain their initial enchantment and diminish their disenchantment with Europe, the European Union, and Western civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewilding is regularly connected to re-enchantment. In some rewilding projects, ecological restoration merges with narratives of wonder, enchantment and spirituality. While rewilding's association with re-enchantment appears as part of its appeal, it is also criticised as anthropocentric, escapist or naive. This article aims to formulate a thorough conceptual understanding of rewilding as re-enchantment by situating it within the critical framework of (dis)enchantment developed in the early 20th century by Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno. Connecting this framework to contemporary, phenomenologically inspired accounts of enchantment and critiques on the mechanisation of nature, this article aims towards a new perspective on rewilding as a critical discursive practice of re-enchantment. Rewilding, like re-enchantment, can be seen as a valuable attempt to formulate alternatives to the modern paradigm and programme of disenchantment. Situating rewilding within a broader cultural context and historical perspective, this approach allows for assessing rewilding as part of modern (counter-)culture at large. Moreover, through a detailed account of (re-)enchantment in rewilding on a phenomenological, theoretical and relational level, this article gradually develops a conceptual understanding of re-enchantment as a valuable concept for ecological restoration and cultural transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kipus: Revista Andina de Letras y Estudios Culturales is the property of Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Sede Ecuador and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Drawing on the neo‐Durkheimian cultural sociology of Jeffrey Alexander and Anthony Smith's ethno‐symbolic approach, Schertzer and Woods argue that contemporary 'populist' movements in France, the US and the UK are better understood as 'ethno‐nationalist' movements. In this, they join a recent spate of revisionist work that emphasises the role of ethno‐nationalism and White supremacism in the historical trajectories of these supposedly 'civic' nations. The central weakness of this approach and of their argument is that it detaches symbolic struggles from material ones and in‐group solidarity from out‐group violence. Here, Bourdieu's theory of class‐ification struggles and the dark Durkheimianism of the mid‐20th century provides a helpful supplement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have understood conspiracy theories as sense-making mechanisms. Among them, a particular strand further inspected them in parallel with religion and magic. This comparison bears the risk of framing conspiracy theories as irrational interpretations and anachronisms with respect to contemporary ways of explaining reality. This contribution takes off from the reflections of those who have highlighted this risk. It tries to confront the possibility of using the concept of enchantment without implying a normative judgment on the irrationality of conspiracy theories. This paper carries out this effort by closely inspecting Max Weber's texts. I argue that Weber's notion of enchantment and disenchantment allows for a punctual use of both, devoid of normative implications. After setting out this non-normative notion of enchantment, this paper examines the characteristics of the enchanted worldview and its usefulness in reading conspiracy theories. Finally, this paper supports this effort using the identified characteristics to systematise a reading of conspiracy-based accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze which concept describes the central theme in Max Weber's works — the rationalization processes — best: disenchantment, alienation, or anomie. I first describe how Weber's rationalization processes were understood in the past. Most scholars have interpreted these processes as disenchantment, although some have seen a stronger affinity to the Marxist concept of alienation. Since the majority have regarded disenchantment as the central theme of Weber's legacy, I discuss Weber's rare statements about the disenchantment process, most of which appear in a speech that was published later as Science as a Vocation. I then introduce definitions of key concepts (Hegelian alienation, Marxist alienation, Durkheimian anomie, and de-magification) to provide a more varied and precise vocabulary. This will aid in describing at least two different rationalization processes that can be derived from Weber's theoretical framework (Economy and Society) and his historical studies. The first, in the economic and political sphere, can be characterized as Marxist alienation, whereas the second, in the religious sphere, can be interpreted as de-magification and Hegelian alienation. It is possible to regard Weber's statement in Science as a Vocation as a third rationalization process, in the sphere of knowledge production, which would suggest the concepts of de-magification and anomie. However, such a reading would seem to contradict the greater body of Weber's methodological writings. Finally, it is concluded that the term disenchantment is not a very useful concept for portraying Weber's intended view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a social phenomenon, artificial intelligence (AI) is not just technically but also culturally constructed. This article investigates the meaning-making of AI in the case of AlphaGo by employing and refining cultural sociological narrative analysis. Building on Smith's structural model of genre, whose horizontal axis reflects varying degrees of (dis-)enchantment, I propose an extended model of narrative genre, adding a vertical axis on the theoretical basis of Durkheim's distinction between pure and impure sacred, to account for the empirical bifurcation between utopian and dystopian AI narratives. While critical approaches to AI, prevalent in sociology, tend to offer disenchanted narratives, my cultural sociological approach allows for the construction of a meta-narrative, which is able to capture not only enchantment as well as disenchantment but also purification and impurification as empirical processes that accompany the emergence and consolidation of new technologies. This approach is exemplified by a case study of AlphaGo, a Go-playing program utilizing machine learning and neural networks, which gained global prominence and cultural significance after beating a human grandmaster in 2016. Drawing on publicly available online data, this article investigates the discourses surrounding AlphaGo, focusing on its cultural construction through storytelling and genre. I not only show how characters and events were emplotted in different stories, which were in turn embedded in broader narratives about technological progress and AI, but also explain how the development of the main storyline was driven by in-game performances, audience expectations and collective representations. The article demonstrates the feasibility of a cultural sociology of AI and the usefulness of my extended model of narrative genre, which is not only applicable to AI discourses but other domains as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long documented rituals that reinforce the social and spiritual aspects of killing and eating animals. The historical processes of modernization, industrialization, and the spread of market capitalism have driven many such references to sacredness out of meat production in North America, leading dominant social relations around meat into what Max Weber famously termed "disenchantment." In this article, I argue that re-enchanting discourses are one technique being used to develop the alternative production models of ethically raised meat—animals raised for human consumption with priority on sustainability and well-being. As people redesign a food system that resists the meat industry's churn of pigs, cows, and chickens from feed lot to factory, they are not just rearranging the material structures of production. They also foster discourses and practices of sacredness, mutuality, and wonder. Ethical meat advocates use these discourses particularly to make sense of conflicts regarding the non-commodifiable nature of mortality and harmony. This article draws on ethnographic research among Southern Wisconsin butchers, farmers, and customers as well as public discourse analysis to trace meaning-making strategies that powerfully counter the commercial meat industry by re-enchanting meat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how Martin Heidegger's notion of "the thing" (Das Ding) can help rescue modern disenchantment with regard to its root in the World, a concept developed from "being-in-the-world" presented in Being and Time, and later taken as a participant in the bilateral polemos illustrated in die Gestalt (signifying Being's strife to disclose itself against the Earth: self-concealing concealment). In Section 1, I analyze the occurrence of disenchantment by critically reviewing several thinkers' discussions of it, pointing out that "faciality"—which has structured the modern Western understanding of reality—is the cornerstone of ontotheology, as well as the collapse of it: disenchantment. In Section 2, to demonstrate how Heidegger's rediscovery of usefulness in a de-subjectified discourse of signification has challenged the positivistic view attached to "faciality", I examine Heidegger's idea of "readiness-to-hand," revealing the basic temporal–spatial units composing the "handiness" of categorical beings and its relation to Dasein, progressing thereon to the analysis of a thing-centered worldview of Heidegger's phenomenology. In Section 3, I demonstrate how this thing-centered worldview has the potential to form a preparative stage for re-enchantment of the World by uncovering the concealed existentiality within things, aligning with Heidegger's polemos in his philosophy of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public discourse and political climate policymaking are based on scientific reports and propose technological solutions to solve the crisis, primarily by changing fossil fuels to renewable energy. Rather than questioning growth and the overuse of natural resources—which has been at the core of green concern for decades—green growth is the motor in an economy that aims for continuous economic spin, driven by new technological innovations that will enable us to go on as before, simply by replacing energy sources. It is no surprise that in such a discourse, the alternative voices—such as religious or spiritual responses—are left out, but to go from that and conclude that no such voices exist would be to rush to conclusions. I suggest that if we want to search for enchantment in times of climate change, we must look elsewhere. Searching for these voices means leaving the discourse framed by scientific rationalistic measurements because we can find an enchanted alter‐tale beyond this disenchanted tale. In this article, I account for voices from my field and answer the question: What motivates people to turn to spirituality in times of climate change? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This treatise explores the philosophical implications of the impact of machine translation on foreign language education. Rather than delving into technical details, it scrutinizes the theoretical ramifications of regarding machine translation as a means of thought. This article aims to articulate the theoretical potential of machine translation and to increase awareness of its significance. It posits that the advent of machine translation has the potential to challenge native linguistic intuition, which traditional corpus linguistics has been unable to achieve. This is attributed to machine translation's unique features, including (1) its conversion from bad model to good model, (2) its capability for production, and (3) its mediation by the use of the native language. These peculiarities may pose a threat to native speakers' linguistic intuition and may, in some cases, surpass it. Finally, this article speculates on the possible impact of these theoretical implications on the practice of foreign language education and suggests the potential emergence of a new instructional paradigm characterized by the extensive use of the mother tongue in a backcasting manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has pointed to the modern nature of the state that Islamists posit in contrast to medieval Islamic notions of political authority. This paper argues that a conceptual framework derived from romantic aesthetics underpinned the Islamist thought of Sayyid Qutb, who was for many years a secular literary writer. The aesthetic framework made possible the notion of human freedom and progress as the enactment of the general or collective will, which is the source of the state. Classical formulations of the general will in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel are closely related to contemporaneous aesthetic notions of freedom as creative expression of interiority. Qutb participated in this line of thinking. The vitalist metaphysics and expressivist aesthetic theory of his literary period led him to later formulate an account of the general will that is embodied in Islamic law, the sharīʿa, which he identified with the state. He presented the Islamic state on this basis as resolving the fundamental contradiction of western modernity that romantic aesthetics had identified in the context of establishing the redemptive value of art. This contradiction, the disunity of the spiritual and the material, was equated by Qutb with the separation of church and state. Islamic law as the state is thus justified on aesthetic grounds as the reconciliation of humanity and nature now divided by Western materialism. Qutb's thought in the context of its aesthetic genesis provides valuable insight into the nature of modern notions of individual and collective will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I turn to Adam Phillips' recent discussion of the vexed nature of cure in psychoanalysis to consider the structural differences between mental and physical health. I examine how psychoanalytic thinking raises questions for naturalistic ways of thinking about mental health and for broader crisis narratives that are becoming prevalent in Western modernity. In the latter half of this paper, I draw a comparison between thinking about matters of health and ways of thinking in the philosophy of education. I suggest that the lure of cure can be detected in statements of universalist aims and ends for education (which themselves have come to invoke conceptions of wellbeing and mental health in modern times). I also explore Phillps' account of psychoanalysis as 'something better than a cure' and consider its implications for future thinking in the philosophy of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can board games be part of challenging the dangerous tide of reactionary cultural politics presently washing over the United States and many other countries? The authors frame this threat to progressive social movements and democracy as entangled with a cultural politics of reenchantment. Thanks in part to the rise of ubiquitous digital media, capitalism is gamified as never before, yet most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game. Here, a gamified reactionary cultural politics easily takes hold, and the authors turn to the example of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy as a "dangerous game" of creative collective fabulation. They explore how critical scholars and activists might develop forms of "enchanted inquiry" that seek to take seriously the power of games and enchantment. And they share their experience designing Clue‐Anon, a board game for three to four players that aims to let players explore why conspiracy theories are so much fun... and so dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically understood through a universal-statist framework, modern schooling in contemporary China often contributes to the disenchantment of ethnic students. Based on year-long research in a Tibetan-serving secondary school, we provide additional insight in this discussion. We argue that to treat disenchantment as a fixed state ignores the space-temporal quality of human action. The school's social process is multiple and momentary in nature and often undermines the seemingly linear educational programming. Under the rigid school setting emerge social spaces that expand beyond academic lessons. In those spaces, students continue to interact among themselves and with teachers, where withdrawal and marginalization happen alongside negotiation, appropriation, and participation. While disenchantment anchors the classroom experience of many, it interpenetrates and enmeshes with other aspects of student lives and is interwoven over time. By considering this complex interplay of disenchantment we upend the notion of disenchantment as a singular state, and illustrate this idea through two examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada is the property of Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The subject of depression, often driven by personal experience, has lately become very prominent in the public sphere. Olga Hund's Psy ras drobnych [Dogs of Smaller Breeds] (2018) is a novel about depression, though unlike many European films and novels, it does not blame the condition on the individual -- the main character of the story. Her book is memoir of sorts, a series of dramatic scenes from a mental ward of the Kobierzyn Psychiatric Hospital in Cracow. The whole is written, we may assume, to provoke outrage: it is an accusation of the health care system, yet the blame for the mental condition rather than the wrong therapy, is put squarely on the structures and socio-economic mechanisms of the neoliberal society. The book makes two points. First, the psychiatric hospital by its very nature is a total institution that's totally indispensable; and second -- as seen from the interface of the 'normal' people and the mental patients -- the social, economic and ideological factors have a significant role in generating suffering and the mental illness itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution looks at the different architectures for the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. Based on the ideas of the sociologist Max Weber, and later the theologian Harvey Cox, of an increasingly secularized, disenchanted urban society, the author first analyzes the earlier buildings for the European Community as an expression of a rationalist, even 'disenchanted' architectural strategy. This contrasts with the efforts of the European Union in the 21st century, which attempts to strengthen identification with the European Union by various means. One of these strategies—as the author points out—is to increasingly charge architecture with auratic meaning, in other words, to re-enchant it. Nevertheless, both architectural solutions do not offer a nation-like master narrative but are intended—each in its own manner—to represent a network of many individual parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his magnum opus, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), Charles Taylor gives an exhaustive and teleologically interpretive history of the modern self. He, in fact, is in search of the core of the modern identity. By 'identity', Taylor means the ensemble of the understanding of what is to be a 'human agent', a 'person', a 'self'. Taylor in generating the ontology of the self, is greatly inspired by the understanding of Dasein in Heidegger. This paper also focuses on how Taylor uses Heidegger's hermeneutics of the self in several ways to give modernity a base that is not Cartesian. Taylor's central argument is 'how the assertion of the modern individual has spawned an erroneous understanding (identity) of the self', where one experiences a loss of horizon. He has turned our attention, more than anyone else, towards the communitarian constitution of the self, and pointed out the limitations of insights within liberal individualism. For Taylor, as for early Heidegger, the self is not neutral or atomic. The self exists only in terms of questions and constitutive concerns, and it is not amenable to arbitrary determination, but can be made sense of only in terms of its life as a whole at any moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol Dickens takes the sensations usually associated with alienation and disenchantment in the nineteenth century and reappropriates their language and energy to reenchantment. We can therefore read A Christmas Carol not only as the conversion narrative of Scrooge from bad capitalist to good capitalist, as has been done many times, but also Dickens’ reckoning with the possibilities afforded by modern life and modernity as a narrative device in his turn to the biographical form. In essence, Dickens charts a move forward which allows the strangeness and uncanny sensations of modernity to explode out into webs of possibility made possible but not limited by the conventions of the realist novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nasleđe is the property of University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms levelled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article is based on re-reading the Joas vs. Weber discussion about the macro-concept of "disenchantment". For Joas, the Weberian thesis brings together, in a single explanatory model, different social processes that must be differentiated. Joas's proposal highlights the need to build research models sensitive to the interaction and the play of different logics of action between tension and transaction. The collection of some of the most recent tendencies shows how research on religion and modernity has renewed its interest in "visible religion", granting a fundamental place to study the different modalities of religious agency in the recomposition of the public domain. Reading these results allows the reconstruction of an epistemological model centered on the logic of action, considering that religion can no longer be studied only on the terrain of its institutional reproduction. Instead, the plurality of religious agency requires observation at different scales: a multiscopic and multisite perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses four different concepts: disenchantment, secularisation, post-secularism, and re-enchantment, analysing their theoretical entanglements and problematising their applicability to recent and contemporary social realities in formerly socialist Europe. It also offers a conceptual tuning of re-enchantment in particular, basing it on both empirical evidence as well as on readings from the now rather rich scholarly literature that operationalises this concept. A typology is also presented that illustrates a variety of re-enchanted social phenomena that populate the religious and spiritual horizons of late modern centraleastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more remarkable satires of English society and thought of the 1880s came in the guise of a fairy story, That Very Mab (1885), in which the eponymous fairy queen is driven out of Samoa by imperialists and on her return to England finds it overrun by evolutionists and the proponents of modern material progress. Written by the satirist and popular Punch contributor May Kendall, That Very Mab excoriates Victorian England by satirizing its passion for explanatory frameworks, including scientific materialism, philistinism, nihilism, novel metaphysics, evolutionary progress, and imperialism, all subjects that Kendall also attacked in her comic verse (published between 1885 and 1894). Kendall has recently received critical attention for her satiric poems about evolutionary science, materialism, and modern disenchantment. While That Very Mab's satiric concerns in many ways dovetail with those of these poems, the wider scope of its fantastic narrative allows Kendall to enact a more sustained assault on the concept of empire and its justifications from evolutionary anthropology. Highly skeptical of teleologies that promote a belief in the evolutionary progress of humankind, her fairy fantasy links evolutionary anthropology to the dishonest blandishments, corruption, and violence of imperial adventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filologia Hispanica is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There is little question that organized religion as embodied in the Christian churches has not fared well in recent decades. Yet, precisely the period when the decline of organized religion hit its stride – the 1960s and 1970s – also witnessed the rise of what Ernst Troeltsch referred to as 'mystic religion', only now it goes by 'spirituality'. Indeed, recent empirical studies suggest that, in addition to secularization, we are also witnessing a veritable spiritual turn. How do we explain this? We pursue this puzzle in a somewhat peculiar fashion: by turning the sociological gaze toward the lives and oeuvres of the two sociologists who have arguably played the largest roles in the development of classical secularization theory: Max Weber and Peter Berger. Addressing their theoretical contributions in tandem with their personal stances vis-à-vis religion, we argue that the standard account of secularization rests on an extremely one-sided interpretation of their legacy: it leaves out their steadfast romanticism, their deep commitments to the value of individual freedom, and, most importantly, the particular religious paths they charted. Furthermore, we contend that each of them exemplifies a way of reconciling a rationalist commitment to disenchanting science with a romantic longing for ultimate meaning, which sheds significant light on why mystical religion (or 'spirituality') has come to flourish in late modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows Adam Zagajewski’s relationship with Charles Taylor’s thought. The author argues that the poet’s dialogue with the philosopher is not limited to quotations and direct references but is also revealed at a deeper level. Based on Zagajewski’s essays and interviews, the author concludes that the poet studied Sources of the Self and The Ethics of Authenticity, and probably also drew on later works dealing with the condition of religion in a disenchanted world (“A Catholic Modernity?” and A Secular Age). Zagajewski borrowed from Taylor’s historical argument about the genealogy of modern identity. He also alluded to the philosopher’s diagnoses of the Enlightenment-Romantic lineage of modern Europeans and his conviction that the struggle for more demanding forms of spiritual life is preserved. The most direct traces of the conversation with Taylor can be found in the essays from The Defense of Ardor. The author suggests that Zagajewski also alludes to Taylor’s diagnoses in poems (e.g., “Tierra del Fuego”, “Senza flash”, and “The Kingfisher”), in which the motifs of spiritual lobotomy and the epiphanic power of poetry appear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adam Zagajewski’s essays on poets and poetry are interpreted here in the context of scholarly debates about the specificities of mystical experience. From the four criteria the great American philosopher and psychologist William James developed in 1902, “transiency” and “passivity” can be brought together as indicators of what I call the inescapability of mystical experience, while the two other criteria, namely “ineffability” and “noetic quality”, can be treated as what I call the “paradox of articulation”. The essay demonstrates how profound the reflections of the Polish poet on these questions are, how they are related to his views about the possibilities of contemplation and art in view of the history of violence of the 20th century and what they mean for the future of religion. The highly influential narrative of a world-historical process of ongoing “disenchantment” (Max Weber) loses much of its persuasiveness if these reflections are true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of bankruptcy. On this basis it is easy to see why the British HE system is haunted by the spectres of commodification, proletarianization, devaluation, alienation, disenchantment and, what Bernard Stiegler calls, disbelief and discredit. From this point of view the future of the British university looks bleak and yet we must consider the pharmacological possibilities that might arise from this dark situation. After explaining the history of the neoliberalization of British HE through the lens of Stiegler's work in the first part of the article, and then exploring the history of the university in the second part of the paper, in the concluding section I seek to consider ways in which it might be possible to use the crisis to escape the grip of ever-increasing technological nihilism and invent a new model of HE beyond the disenchanted university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disenchantment of experience and the development of scientist objectivism limit the scope of objective knowledge to science and relegate the human realm to historicist relativity, which leads to the crisis of modernity. The late modern return to immediate experience as a condition that is antecedent to dualism comes as a response to the crisis and attempts to cure the diremption of experience. T.S. Eliot's and Theodor Adorno's accounts of immediate experience and the possibility of developing a vision of the whole out of it are compared to determine which response is more consistent and handles the crisis adequately. This may offer a possible way out of the crisis and indicate the role that art can play in restoring experience. Art may either work to recreate the lost totality of experience as Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral does or show alienated objectivity as a product of experience as another possible route to restoring experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many literary theories focus on materialistic concerns, less frequently have these theories focused on the spiritual matters arising from such concerns. A cosmological interpretive strategy focuses on such spiritual and cosmic themes rather than ignoring them. This essay's analysis will focus on using a cosmological interpretive strategy to analyze Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Arthur Miller's The Man Who Had All the Luck. This strategy will reveal that, rather than merely being focused on spatial and material concerns, these texts also demonstrate a concern with our relationships with nature and the wider cosmos. Through their narratives, both Wilder and Miller address the passage of time and the questions of agency which occur when thinking about time. This analysis will demonstrate how these stories deny economic and historical determinism in favor of an interdependency between humans and the wider cosmos. These texts help reveal reality as a set of interconnected narratives and histories that include each individual, the societies around that individual, nature around those societies, and the wider cosmos within which everything exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Con A de Animación is the property of Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Arte e Industria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper engages with the theme of individual disenchantment, that is, the process of falling out of love with something that once gave pleasure and purpose. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, it sketches the process by which individuals become 'enchanted' with the stakes of different fields, the phenomenology of enchantment and disenchantment and several ideal typical modes of genesis of disenchantment. Attention is given to intra‐field dynamics but also, going beyond Bourdieu, inter‐field dynamics too. The final section considers the epistemological consequences of constructing trans‐field objects of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary deals with the issue of alternative food and drink from the perspective of my work on such topics as disenchantment, enchantment, McDonaldization, nothing, prosumption, rationalisation and something. The conclusion is that the interests of, and pressure from, large-scale profit-making businesses will, to a large extent, undermine efforts to produce ‘true’ alternatives in food and drink. Those alternatives will survive on the margins in the developed world, but they will be more prevalent in the less developed world which is less attractive to those businesses, and therefore, the alternatives will be allowed to survive there. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This review‐essay examines two books about the history of the modern humanities: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon and Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth‐Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler. Both studies reconstruct genealogies of discourse and practice by which to understand the "crisis" of the humanities, yet they draw disparate lessons from these reconstructions. The review traces the two monographs' competing accounts of the historical continuity of humanities practices and the moral dimension of humanistic inquiry. Together, Permanent Crisis and Battle of the Classics describe an antinomy that can be neither resolved nor ignored: the methodological norms of the modern university tend to subvert the humanities' investment in meaning and value, but without that investment, humanistic study loses the motivations and purposes that define it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors set themselves the goal of describing the pattern of civil engagement comparable to that of Antigone in relations with the state on the case study of people associated with the "Anna Foundation," saving the evangelical (protestant) cemetery in Gostków (Lower Silesia) from the mid-nineteenth century. The area of operation of this foundation is the local communion of multicultural influence. The research method involved reading sources, a series of qualitative interviews with activists and other subjects with "borderline experience," a description of photographic documentation and an interpretation of the history of modernity. The article is a case study and an attempt to interpret a broader phenomenon of saving cemeteries of various denominations from destruction and oblivion in Poland after 1989. This study contributes to studies on culture and religion, and the philosophical and theological reflection of late post-modernity. In interpreting the phenomenon of civic involvement, the authors use the concepts of "disenchantment of the world," "rationalization," "bureaucratization" and "the garden state," as well as "re-enchanting of the world" and "holiness in the secular age." In the conclusions, the authors propose to correct both the definition of "world enchantment" and the definition of the inevitable secularization of the world in late (post) modernity. The authors argue that in the time of the post-pandemic crisis and the climate catastrophe, Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" may be an equivalent that is appropriate for the non-rational elements of contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Psicologia del Trabajo y de Las Organizaciones is the property of Colegio Oficial de Psicologos de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

William Bain's book does a brilliant job excavating some key conceptual underpinnings of our contemporary discussions about order, but he has perhaps underplayed the importance of nominalism in structuring our present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Memoria Ethnologica is the property of CJCPCT Maramures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Político is the property of Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Politico - Universidad Pablo de Olavide and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contexto Revista Anual de Estudios Literarios is the property of Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. While historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is nevertheless to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in everyday narratives and practices. We approach this objective by critiquing the suggestion contained, but often not articulated or theorised within anthropological literature, that humans 'know' magic. We show that magic in these two island settings persists through a collective awareness of historical, social, and cognitive incompleteness, accumulated and contained within dormant magical memory. Hence, we gesture to the unknowability contained and nourished in social and cognitive processes, through which the possibility – future and past – of magic is thought of and narrated in disenchanted worlds. As we suggest, not-knowing does not signal lack of knowledge but a mode of thinking specific to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how adherents within the self-styled scientific side of the UFO subculture implicitly challenge the assumed dichotomy between a rationalized disenchanted modern scientific worldview, and a non-rational religious other. After providing background on the origin of the UFO subculture, ufology, and more explicitly religious forms of ufology, the article turns to the largest scientific ufological organization, MUFON, and the way in which participants within that organization engage and delineate social boundaries between religion, science, secularism, and spirituality. I argue that an enchanted ufology lurks just under the surface of this secular, scientific, rational disenchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the macrocosm of the universe to the microcosm of the human body, our discoveries about ourselves and the natural world continue to spark our experience of awe and wonder. But how exactly does science define and explain the experience of awe and wonder? Social psychologist Michelle Shiota, writer Caspar Henderson, and astrophysicist Alex Filippenko unpack the emerging science behind the emotions of awe and wonder, including their role in our ongoing quest for understanding and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the drivers behind why Swedes move to Portugal and who these migrants are. The conceptual framework is based on lifestyle migration and considers migration as a process. Using a semi-structured interview guide, designed according to a life-course approach, 36 in-depth interviews with Swedes permanently residing in Portugal were conducted. The findings display that only a small minority of the respondents claimed that the climate, the sense of privilege/ affluence and the prospects of being a permanent tourist made them move to Portugal. A majority of the respondents expressed a disenchantment with Sweden, political correctness and a perceived collapse of the Swedish welfare system. Simultaneously, the respondents describe an escape from everyday problems. Notably, it is not the Swedish middle class that seems to be moving, and emigrants come from mainly the top or bottom of the social hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Chilena de Literatura is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)