Binding: Paperback
Description: What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers free will and religion are in some ways fundamentally opposed. Whereas free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity authorship and deliberation religious practices seem to involve a suspension of or relief from the exercise of our will. What then is agency and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human? Automatic Religion explores an unlikely series of episodes from the end of the nineteenth century when crucial ideas related to automatism and in a different realm the study of religion were both being born. Paul Christopher Johnson draws on years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France to explore the crucial boundaries being drawn at the time between humans nearhumans and automata. As agency came to take on a more central place in the philosophical moral and legal traditions of the West certain classes of people were excluded as less - than - human. Tracking the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic Johnson tests those boundaries revealing how they were constructed on largely gendered and racial foundations. In the process he reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions in trans - Atlantic thought: what is agency?
Title: Automatic Religion Nearhuman Agents Of Brazil And France
Author(s): Johnson Paul Christopher
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226749723
Pages: 312 Pages, 23 Halftones
Publication Date: 12/15/2020
Category: Miscellaneous Items