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9780226436111

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Reviews

This book feels its way into thinking differently about a world of incipience beyond the zero-sum academic drama-storms that purify anthropological objects. Here, the undead ethnographic object of encounters and gestures returns to re-prompt attentive description. --Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas at Austin A daring, wise book about the mysterious energies generated by mass media, which, coursing through modern life, enchant and quicken us, for good and for ill. --Religion In addition to providing a critical theory of culture and a history of anthropology, The Mana of Mass Society also represents a useful plea in favor of anthropology. It not only proposes theoretical avenues but also shows how to give contemporary relevance to dusty and/or mystificatory concepts and theories. --Reading Religion The Mana of Mass Society advances anthropology's increasingly pivotal contributions to social and critical theory. Mazzarella gives a new charge to prompts from post-secularist and ontological perspectives--concerning belief, for example, and alliances between human and non-human worlds within modernity--in this brilliant meditation on magical thinking. --Leela Gandhi, Brown University Effervescent with intellectual energy, Mazzarella's Mana of Mass Society is that exceedingly rare book that stands equal to its subject matter. More than a century after its formulation as a general theory of magic, this book performs here its eternal return, making us suddenly aware of that unacknowledged magic of modernity that like a flash surfaces at a moment of danger. --Michael T. Taussig, Columbia University

A daring, wise book about the mysterious energies generated by mass media, which, coursing through modern life, enchant and quicken us, for good and for ill. --Religion This book feels its way into thinking differently about a world of incipience beyond the zero-sum academic drama-storms that purify anthropological objects. Here, the undead ethnographic object of encounters and gestures returns to re-prompt attentive description. --Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas at Austin The Mana of Mass Society advances anthropology's increasingly pivotal contributions to social and critical theory. Mazzarella gives a new charge to prompts from post-secularist and ontological perspectives--concerning belief, for example, and alliances between human and non-human worlds within modernity--in this brilliant meditation on magical thinking. --Leela Gandhi, Brown University Effervescent with intellectual energy, Mazzarella's Mana of Mass Society is that exceedingly rare book that stands equal to its subject matter. More than a century after its formulation as a general theory of magic, this book performs here its eternal return, making us suddenly aware of that unacknowledged magic of modernity that like a flash surfaces at a moment of danger. --Michael T. Taussig, Columbia University

Author Information

William Mazzarella is the Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

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