Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment
Faculty Bookwatch Publication
David Morgan
Religious Studies
The Franklin Humanities Institute and Duke University Libraries hosted a Faculty Bookwatch panel on David Morgan's Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (Oxford University Press, 2018) at 5:30pm on Tuesday, January 29, 2019. This book explores our interaction with images and other objects as a form of enchantment--whether they are the ones motivating, inspiring, terrifying or seducing us, or we are seeking to use them (or destroy them) in order to act upon the world.
Panelists included:
Jessica Boon, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Alicia Jiménez, Assistant Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Duke University
Jennifer W. Knust, Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Duke University
Thomas Robisheaux, Professor, Department of History, Duke University
Book description:
Building on his innovative work in visual studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the mind can be enchanted by images. Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned and recognized by humans for their capacity to engage. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment--the things we do and how we do them that make the world go our way--is not a violation of cosmic order, but a natural way that the mind animates the world around it. This groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humans create culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These agents--human and non-human, material, and spiritual--become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work in visual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancients to secular icons from Mao to Lincoln, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have indescribable power.
