Enchantment’ as a phenomenon within the study of religions

Abstract

In the study of religions, the term ‘enchantment’ is often invoked to imply some form of religious specialness – but the term resists reduction to one essential meaning, and the nature of this specialness varies between accounts. This article discusses three academic accounts of enchantment, offered by Jane Bennett, David Morgan and Charles Taylor respectively. I show that while ‘enchantment’ can do useful work across multiple contexts within the discipline, scholars must be careful to qualify their usage of the term and make clear in what sense it is a ‘religious’ phenomenon; crucial here is the distinction between enchantment as an inherently religious state and as a multi-realisable state of which religious stimuli can act as a sufficient but unnecessary cause.