In the Study of the Witch: Women, Shadows, and the Academic Study of Religions
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2018, Vol 9, Issue 4
Abstract
This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies. On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an early modern European Christianity trying to understand itself through contrast with an imagined heresy that comes to be personified with a woman’s face. On the other, we have contemporary political and religious communities that use the identification as Witches to reverse this version of dichotomous Christian gaze and legitimize religious difference, which also comes to be symbolized by a female body. Between these historical moments we have the beginning of the academic study of religion, the theoretical turn in which Christian-dominant scholarship comes to see itself on a continuum with, rather than opposed to, different religions, as first characterized by cultural evolution theories about the origins of religion. Especially given the field’s theological roots, examining the constructed relationships between religion and magic, both of which represent crucial foci for early theorists, through the analytical lens of gender, which does not, provides opportunities to surface implicit assumptions of the current field about what is and is not worth studying.
Authors and Affiliations
Laurel Zwissler
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25971
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9040105
- Views 378
- Downloads 9
Integrating Religion and Spirituality into Mental Health Care, Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Integrating spirituality into mental health care, psychiatry and psychotherapy is still controversial, albeit a growing body of evidence is showing beneficial effects and a real need for such integration. In this revie...
Patient or Physician Centered Care?: Structural Implications for Clinical Interactions and the Overlooked Patient
Patient-centered care is widely supported by physicians, but this wide-spread support potentially obscures the social patterning of clinical interactions. We know that patients often want religious/spiritual conversati...
Human Dignity as a Right and Virtue in Practice: A Socio-Theological Reflection from and on the Cross Removal Incidents in China
This paper is written to reflect human dignity in practice with reference to the cross removal incidents in China in Zhejiang Province between 2014 and 2016. This paper starts with three questions: How did the Chinese...
One Philosopher’s Bug Can Be Another’s Feature: Reply to Almeida’s “Multiverse and Divine Creation”
Michael Almeida once told me that he thought we were just a couple of hours of conversation away from reaching deep agreement about some important topics in the philosophy of religion pertaining to God, multiverses, an...
“Nothing Sacred”: Violence, Time and Meaning in the Cinema of Possibilities
Hemingway’s disenchantment with the idea of the sacred as expressed in A Farewell to Arms became a defining aspect of the modern experience including in some Hollywood films such as Nothing Sacred and Twentieth Century...