hi ELizabeth
for an overview of the general 'scientisation' of the paranormal this is
great: Alex Owens' the Place of Enchantment
http://books.google.com/books?id=rQYaGEBuRHYC&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=owens+age+of+enchantment&source=bl&ots=EQCnFgJEsm&sig=SKhzFreUIuJShChu5XjTYtoSj_c&hl=en&ei=WUc1Tc-_JYHKhAfqzLjrCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
sorry, horrid long link but easy to find on Amazon and quite possilby in a
library near you
Dave E
---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Nelson, Elizabeth Angeline" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:32:22 -0500
Subject: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] supernatural agents
> Dear list members,
>
> I have a question perhaps you all can help me with. As I mentioned
> before my work has to do with the juncture between spirituality and
> psychiatry and the overlap between madness and spiritual awakening.
> One aspect of my research is the medicalization of spiritual
> experience,
> e.g., how the autobiography of a 17th c. possessed nun makes it way
> into a psychiatric case study in the 1880s.
>
> One theory I have found useful for thinking about the movement from
> one domain to another, as from religious autobiography to
> psychiatric data, as well as from one time period to another, is
> actor-network theory. Actor-network theory was developed within
> science studies to understand how non-human and human actors
> (scientists, laboratory equipment, and microscopic organisms, for
> example) all contribute to networks of relationships, out of which
> scientific knowledge emerges. In my research I think of the nun, the
> ecclesiastical authorities who encouraged her to write, the
> psychiatrists, the document itself & the modes of its preservation,
> etc. as a heterogeneous network of this kind.
>
> Underlying actor-network theory is a sort of materialism. However, I
> am interested in writing a paper that takes up the question: can the
> actors in actor-network theory can include supernatural agents? In
> the example above, after all, it was the intervention of the demon
> that started the entire chain of events. In other words, wouldn't it
> be an interesting experiment to try to write a history of psychiatry
> that included supernatural agents?
>
> My question is: can you point me to works that take seriously the
> roles of supernatural agents in historical events? I know that
> subaltern historian Ranajit Guha tackled this in his essay "The
> Prose of Counterinsurgency," which appeared in Subaltern Studies no.
> 2, in 1983. In this essay Guha struggles with taking seriously the
> beliefs of the peasant participants in the 1855 Santal Rebellion who
> claimed that the god Thakur played a major role in the events. But I
> assume there must works coming out of ethnography or religious
> studies or other fields that do this sort of thing as well...or
> maybe not given the pressure within academia to bracket the
> supernatural or explain it away.... any suggestions?
>
> Thanks so much,
> Elizabeth
>
> Elizabeth Nelson
> PhD Candidate
> Department of History
> Indiana University, Bloomington
>
> Graduate Fellow
> Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar
> "The Circulation of Technoscientific Facts and Objects"
> Indiana University, Bloomington
> http://sawyer.indiana.edu/index.html
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