Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 402.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-03-13 08:28:11+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: on spirits and technology

The best response I know to François' posting in Humanist 38.398 is the
anthropological one from Alfred Gell, first in

"The Technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. Art
and anthropology", The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, London
School of Economics, vol. 67 (Oxford: Berg, 1999, rpt. 2006)

then in much fuller development, with many anthropological and 
art-historical examples in

Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998, rpt. 2013), a 
work of uncommon brilliance.

For those of us in digital humanities and its allied technical fields, I
know of no better way of opening the eyes wider than they tend usually
to be.

The sentence to conjure with is this: "Magic haunts technical activity
like a shadow; or, rather, magic is the negative contour of work, just
as, in Saussurean linguistics, the value of a concept (say, 'dog') is a
function of the negative contour of the surrounding concepts ('cat',
'wolf, 'master').." (Gell 1999, 181)

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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