Public Lecture By: Jason A. Josephson-Storm

Thursday, May 3, 2018
4:00pm
McKenzie Hall 125

Free & open to the public

Co-sponsored by: Folklore, History, and the Oregon Humanities Center

Many theorists have argued that a defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. In a talk based on his new book, Jason Ā Josephson-Storm will argue that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded—even within the human sciences. But then how did a magical, spiritual, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies, arguing that these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu, and that it was specifically in response to a burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.