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While the predominant forms of Buddhism in Southeast Asia are enchanted, some novel interpretations of Buddhism are disenchanted rejecting anything supernatural and metaphysical. One such case is the teaching of the controversial, blue-robed monk Ashin Nyāna in Burma/Myanmar. The aim of this article is, first, to examine Ashin Nyāna's own objectives of his doctrinal and moral reform of Buddhism, and how his followers make sense of his teaching. Second, it argues that Ashin Nyāna's reformist Buddhism, which is characterized by a this-worldly orientation and an absence of supernatural, metaphysical, and transcendent dimensions, can be understood as disenchantment in the Weberian sense and referred to as disenchanted Buddhism or a disenchanted Buddhist discourse that has emerged through a critique of enchanted forms of Buddhism, and in interplay with modern urban life. Third, the article suggests that the concept of a disenchanted Buddhist discourse might have some advantages as a comparative concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Copyright of Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines is the property of Editions Belin 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 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.)

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]

AbstractAttending to the broader wellbeing debates, this study examines the interplay between forest-based tourism practices and sustainability. It does so by building on Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment of the world to explore how planetary wellbeing can be cultivated through the commercial practice of forest bathing. In positioning the study within the Serbian context, we build on feminist new materialist ideas to explore the ways in which broken ties between postmodern humans and forests as our primordial home can be reclaimed through this tourism practice. Using the empirical data collected during two forest tours, we take the relational approach in our analysis of the meanings the forest tour attendees ascribed to their experiences. In extending scholarly understandings of the notion of sustainability, we discuss the ways of achieving planetary wellbeing through forest bathing and the potential of more-than-human entanglements to re-enchant the world. To conclude, we discreetly illuminate one way of reconceiving the idea of enchantment and encourage rethinking our everyday and tourist practices in disenchanted Anthropocene. [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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

This article presents the results of a survey conducted between 2014 and 2016 among young adults from the Tunisian-Algerian border region of Kef. We collected several social trajectories of “unemployed graduates” a few years after the overthrow of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime on January 14, 2011 in order to understand how the bubbling of democratic expression carried by powerful collective mobilization movements linked to the end of the dictatorship can influence the daily life of an age group that is particularly mediatized but invisibilized or instrumentalized by the public authorities. These trajectories show us first of all the disenchantment of an age group with blurred contours that is linked to the situations of socio-economic injustice that they experience on a daily basis. These young people express a feeling of exclusion in the face of the many inequalities suffered in the family circle, confronted with numerous inter-generational conflicts as well as the weak presence of the public authorities. These demands, which are hardly heard by the authorities and the elites, express a demand for more social equality in everyday life, more freedom of movement and, more generally, recognition by the State. The injustices that young 'unemployed graduates' experienced daily are also forms of social demand. In other words, we can see a real process of identity building among citizens in training and the emergence of a “social critique” aimed at combating social immobilism and “post-revolutionary” disenchantment. In this difficult context, social and geographical mobility are therefore necessary resources for young adults in order to take the initiatives they feel are necessary to compensate for the shortcomings they experience because of their social and geographical origin. Young “unemployed graduates” suffer from many forms of precariousness, which they accumulate, as well as from social and territorial inequalities. However, they develop many professional projects. These generally aim to access micro-entrepreneurship and/or a migratory project, whether these mobilities are realised or planned, and whether they are short or long distance. They thus show a strong determination to fight the social immobility to which they feel assigned and, to do so, they multiply the crossing of social and territorial universes. Their initiatives are sometimes not very visible to those around them. They start by building what they lack most, i.e. relational skills in order to create circles of solidarity, friendship, mutual aid and professional advice, in Tunisia and sometimes also abroad. They then combine these skills with different forms of mobility in order to build their own trajectory and try to escape the identity assignment of citizens on the margins of society. In order to grasp the different key moments and places that participate in the elaboration of their future, we have mobilised the usual tools of comprehensive sociology (interviews, life stories, observations) by conducting interviews in Tunis and in the Kef region. This information was then analysed using methods relating to the analysis of social relations, in particular the so-called “name generator” protocol. By proceeding in this way, it becomes possible to highlight individual trajectories that are similar to chance encounters, often random, but which the people concerned know how to grasp. However ephemeral they may be, these contacts are in fact likely to provide essential resources for access to social autonomy for those who build them. These links, which may be one-off or last a lifetime, can counterbalance “vertical” aspirations that are often disappointed and the constant feeling of being up against the wall. They can sometimes be a real resource for upward mobility, but more generally, as collective commitment wanes a few years after the fall of the dictatorship, they restore a sense of belonging and can be an antidote to disenchantment.

The article is about six French Special Military Operations (SMOs) that were conducted in Islamic countries in the MENA region between 2011 and 2022. It provides an explanation of their historical, geopolitical, and military contexts while also assessing their compliance with international law. The text introduces two innovative concepts, the Holland doctrine and the Macron doctrine, and analyses both their successes and failures. Ultimately, the article concludes by addressing the question of why these SMOs achieved military success but failed to meet political objectives, resulting in a significant disillusionment among French political and military elites, as well as the participating soldiers.

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]

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]

Achebe’s magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, circles around a Nigerian community and the life of the Ibo people. It illustrates the life of local people before and after the British colonisation. The novel gives an account of Okonkwo’s life as a highly valued member of an Ibo clan, during the colonisation period. In this article, I intend to argue that the life of this clan was enchanted before colonisation. Later, I seek to elaborate on how this enchanted life is affected by Western civilisation and Christianity and how these elements disenchanted the Ibo people’s worldview. The liveliness of matter for Ibo people and the immateriality of objects for Christians contributed to two opposing ontologies. While Western ontology seeks to define, limit, and measure everything, the Ibo tradition gives space to the elements of magic, wonder, and fear. The sheer forces of Western rationality and Christianity served as potent elements that drained the Ibo culture of meaning. Furthermore, I posit that the emergence of Western tradition within Ibo culture caused Okonkwo’s suicide and identity crises.

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]

“Religion or Life’s Encounter with Itself”. This paper attempts to offer a comprehensive approach to the religious phenomenon, considering that religion— understood as the attitude that each life has towards the brute fact of life—constitutes an anthropological universal. I claim that there are three emotional places or types of vital pathos that allow sketching three basic modes of articulating the religious: the pathos of disenchantment, the tragic pathos, and the pathos of wonder. After discussing the dialogues, tensions, and transitions between these, the paper concludes with a vindication of wonder as the genuine experience of a strictly religious life—that is, a life reconciled with totality. [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]

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]

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]

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 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.

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]

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]

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]

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