Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
I am currently Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College (before that Ph.D. Stanford 2006, MTS Harvard University). I have three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European intellectual history, and Theory. The common thread to my research is an attempt to decenter received narratives in the study of "religion" and "science." My main targets have been epistemological obstacles, the preconceived universals which serve as the foundations of various discourses.
Thus far I’ve published three monographs. First, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012, Winner SSSR 2013 Distinguished Book of the Year Award), the first study in any European language to reveal how Japanese officials, under extreme international pressure, came to terms with the Western concept of religion by “discovering” religion in Japan and formulating policies to guarantee its freedom. A second book “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” shows how the thesis that magic was a necessary victim of modernity (what Weber called "Die Entzauberung der Welt") was ironically staked out in the very period in which Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult revivals.
My third book, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (2021, Winner AAR Award for Excellence in Constructive-Reflexive Studies ), articulates new research methods for the humanities and social sciences by simultaneously radicalizing and moving past the postmodern turn.
You can read more about my work in progress on my department webpage: http://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson
Address: Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States
Thus far I’ve published three monographs. First, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012, Winner SSSR 2013 Distinguished Book of the Year Award), the first study in any European language to reveal how Japanese officials, under extreme international pressure, came to terms with the Western concept of religion by “discovering” religion in Japan and formulating policies to guarantee its freedom. A second book “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” shows how the thesis that magic was a necessary victim of modernity (what Weber called "Die Entzauberung der Welt") was ironically staked out in the very period in which Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult revivals.
My third book, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (2021, Winner AAR Award for Excellence in Constructive-Reflexive Studies ), articulates new research methods for the humanities and social sciences by simultaneously radicalizing and moving past the postmodern turn.
You can read more about my work in progress on my department webpage: http://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson
Address: Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States
less
InterestsView All (34)
Uploads
Books by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.
Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.
Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.
By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
"Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed.
More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition."
Papers by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
And yet they were wrong. All of these have lived on long after their supposed demise.
We live after one, if not many, apocalypses.
Many nonspecialists understand disenchantment as a poetical synonym for secularization; and even most Weber scholars take the phrase “the disenchantment of the world” (Die Entzauberung der Welt) at face value and assume that a disenchanted world has absolutely no magic in it. It is often assumed that Weber thought that the death of magic was the natural consequence of rationalization. But as evidenced in Weber’s own writings (including the quote above), Weber not only believed that magic persisted in modernity, but that it was possible for magic itself to be rationalized.
This paper builds on the argument in my book "The Myth of Disenchantment" to demonstrate both the contemporary persistence of belief in spirits and magic and also to show that Weber himself was no stranger to the occult milieu. Indeed, as I interpret Weber, we live in a disenchanting world in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone. After laying out this background, I locate Weber social in proximity to Stefan George and the Munich Cosmic Circle and show that he knew that many of his contemporaries believed in magic. I then analyze Weber’s writings to make a novel argument about what he really meant by "Entzauberung der Welt "and how this was compatible with what he saw as the rationalization of magic.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17480922/2022/48/4
A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion" (Equinox 2020) there are minor differences between the two so please let me know if you'd like to cite and I can get you the official version]
Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.
Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.
Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.
By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
"Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed.
More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition."
And yet they were wrong. All of these have lived on long after their supposed demise.
We live after one, if not many, apocalypses.
Many nonspecialists understand disenchantment as a poetical synonym for secularization; and even most Weber scholars take the phrase “the disenchantment of the world” (Die Entzauberung der Welt) at face value and assume that a disenchanted world has absolutely no magic in it. It is often assumed that Weber thought that the death of magic was the natural consequence of rationalization. But as evidenced in Weber’s own writings (including the quote above), Weber not only believed that magic persisted in modernity, but that it was possible for magic itself to be rationalized.
This paper builds on the argument in my book "The Myth of Disenchantment" to demonstrate both the contemporary persistence of belief in spirits and magic and also to show that Weber himself was no stranger to the occult milieu. Indeed, as I interpret Weber, we live in a disenchanting world in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone. After laying out this background, I locate Weber social in proximity to Stefan George and the Munich Cosmic Circle and show that he knew that many of his contemporaries believed in magic. I then analyze Weber’s writings to make a novel argument about what he really meant by "Entzauberung der Welt "and how this was compatible with what he saw as the rationalization of magic.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17480922/2022/48/4
A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion" (Equinox 2020) there are minor differences between the two so please let me know if you'd like to cite and I can get you the official version]