Introduction: Modernity and the Making and Remaking of Enchantment

The diverse and diverging trends of religious change across the globe in recent decades have taken many by surprise. In Southeast Asia many scholars of religion have been kept busy keeping up with the pace of change by detailing the empirical contours of the many new ritual-based magical and doctrinalist reform movements that have appeared with such rapidity. As Boike Rehbein and Guido Sprenger observe,

Change in post–Cold War social reality has often outpaced our capacity to develop analyses that account for what is happening in the world’s religious cultures. In Chapter One I noted that in some of his writings Weber described modernity as a complex of contradictory rationalizing and potentially enchanting processes. However, as a sociologist Weber only presented a theory of modernity as a force for disenchantment, and this theoretical exposition still dominates much contemporary social analysis. By and large it has been anthropologists who study non-Western societies who have presented theories of how modernity may be productive of new forms of enchantment. A range of anthropological studies have provided theoretical perspectives on the respective impacts of state power, capitalism, new media and the performative force of ritual on religious thought and practice. We now have enough reflective analyses based on detailed empirical work to begin to address broader comparative questions of what is taking place across the full spread of religious expression in Southeast Asia. As Jean Comaroff states in critically assessing the research now at hand, a key guiding principle is the need “to be cognizant of the complexity of the world, to be accountable to its paradoxes” (Comaroff and Kim 2011, p. 176).