The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will host Dr. Michael Ostling for an installment of the CMRS lecture series. Dr. Ostling will present "Evicting the Landlords: Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism Reconsidered."
For about a century now, scholars have been debating Max Weber's claim that the Reformations brought about a "disenchantment of the world," rendering Nature inert, lifeless, and amenable to capitalist extraction. That discussion has too often relied on a distinction Weber himself would never have countenanced, between a romanticized enchanted premodernity and a soulless instrumentalizing present. Drawing on Weber, on Jane Schneider's Marxian "Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism," and on recent anthropological, folkloric, and historical attention to land-spirits, house-spirits, and other "small gods," Ostline will work to reconsider the shift from a spirit-haunted world to a world empty of spirits in terms of exorcism and eviction: when and why does a community seek to free itself of its perternatural landlords, and when and why might they regret those landlords' absence?
Michael Ostling is the author of Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (revised edition 2024), and co-editor of the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. He teaches at the Honors College at Arizona State University, and has been thinking for the past decade or so about the place of fairies and goblins in a disenchanted world.
This event is free and open to the public. Co-hosted by the Center for Folklore Studies and the Humanities Institute.
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