[Anthropgrad] Friday Seminar (2 May 08)

[Sin Wen Lau]

Anthropology Student Seminar Series, Semester 1, 2008
Milgate Room, AD Hope
2 May 2008, 3 pm

**'Witchcraft, disenchantment and the reification of being in Western 
modernity' by Rachel Morgain

/Weaving our way between the worlds,
Awakening we touch the source,
And when we dream
And when we open
We remember who we are.

/From the nineteenth century, social theorists began to speak 
increasingly of the decline of religious and magical thought seen to be 
taking place across Euro-American societies. In its place, they argued, 
scientific thought and rationalisation were becoming the dominant modes 
of social understanding informing social organisation. Early last 
century, Weber spoke of this process as an inevitable ‘disenchantment of 
the world’, by which he meant a growing rationalism going hand in hand 
with the rise of mass-bureaucracy, and an increasing atomisation of 
social being. Earlier, Marx had linked such ‘alienated’ 
individualisation of social being to capitalism and its processes of 
commodity fetishism and reification.

While modern pagans might agree with these characterisations, few would 
see these processes as is inevitable. Modern Western witches, like the 
Reclaiming community of San Francisco, envision the world and themselves 
as enchanted, imaginative, interconnected and sacred. They seek to 
rediscover a sense of magic in the world and to reinvest with numinosity 
their everyday lives in busy, commodified, contradictory, urban settings.

Reporting from my fieldwork among Reclaiming witches, I explore how 
these processes are lived, and the contradictions that play out in the 
practice of bringing together these alternative views of reality. 
Reclaiming’s religious practices and imaginative forms have been crafted 
from elements available to middle-class North American city-dwellers. As 
such, they represent both a resistance to and a reflection of social 
being in the modern West. By studying the complex of social models that 
emerge out of this fusion of magic and Western modernity, we can gain a 
deeper understanding of the contested processes of rationalisation, 
reification and the individualisation of the self in the modern West.

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Lau Sin Wen
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT0200
Australia

Telephone : +61-2-6125-3271
Fax	 : +61-2-6125-4896
Email	 : sinwen.lau at anu.edu.au
Website	 : http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
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