RT Book
T1 Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France
A1 Johnson, Paul Christopher 1964-
LA Undetermined
PP Chicago
PB University of Chicago Press
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1877794899
AB 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?
OP 312
CN BD450
SN 978-0-226-74986-0
SN 978-0-226-74969-3
SN 978-0-226-74972-3
K1 1800-1899
K1 Philosophical Anthropology
K1 Human Beings
K1 Agent (Philosophy)
K1 Act (Philosophy)
K1 Free will and determinism
K1 Religion : Philosophy
K1 Automatism
K1 Religion & beliefs
K1 Christianity
K1 Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
K1 European history
K1 History of the Americas
K1 Anthropologie philosophique
K1 Êtres humains
K1 Action (Philosophie)
K1 Libre arbitre et déterminisme
K1 Religion - Philosophie
K1 Automatisme
K1 Homo sapiens (species)
K1 automatism (psychological concept)
K1 RELIGION / General
K1 Religion
K1 Religion - Philosophy
K1 Case Studies
K1 Brazil : Religion : 19th century : Case studies
K1 Brazil
K1 brazil, brazilian, france, french, religion, religious studies, history, historical, humanity, humans, nonhumans, free will, freedom, 19th century, automatism, ethnography, archival research, philosophy, morality, ethics, morals, ethical, legalism, legal, gender, race, anthropology, determinism, case study, culture, agency, action, ability, understanding