What might re-enchantment mean in a world organised around productivity, rationalisation and the reduction of many ways of knowing and living to one?
In this episode, we discuss Fables of Re-Enchantment with anthropologist Stefania Consigliere. Drawing on three decades of work in medical anthropology and ethnopsychiatry, Consigliere describes how encounters with radically different understandings of illness, healing and personhood can unsettle some of the basic assumptions of Western modernity: the division between nature and culture, the idea of a mechanical world, and the belief that waking rationality provides the only legitimate way of knowing. The conversation moves through prayer and placebo, dreams and altered states, art and imagination, plant and animal intelligence, and the coexistence of different knowledge systems. Rather than replacing one universal account of reality with another, Consigliere argues for creating gaps in which other relations and possibilities can appear: an approach reflected in the fragmentary, autobiographical and non-linear form of the book itself.
But re-enchantment is not inherently liberatory. The discussion turns to fascism’s long history of mobilising myth, affect and enchanted forms of belonging, and to the importance of distinguishing forms of re-enchantment oriented toward domination from those that cultivate different relations with humans, non-humans and the worlds we inhabit. Disenchantment made nature available for capitalist exploitation; simply reversing it offers no political guarantee. The episode ends by asking what practices might help loosen the imaginative paralysis of the present. Against the demand for dramatic solutions, Consigliere points toward smaller transformations: becoming slower, less governed by productivity, more attentive to relationships, and perhaps a little gentler with ourselves and the world. Re-enchantment emerges not as a return to a lost past, but as an experiment in recovering capacities to perceive, imagine and inhabit the world otherwise.
More On the Book: https://www.minorcompositions.info/fables-of-re-enchantment/
Made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies
Intro / outro music by Wukir Suryadi