SLFK 213 Magic Acts

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SLFK 213 Magic Acts

• Instructor Natalie Kononenko
• TA Robert Efird
• Course web page on toolkit, http//faculty.
• virginia.edu/kononenko
• Click on your course

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Professional Personal

• What they might think of
• Houdini
• Card tricks
• Sawing assistants in half
• Pulling rabbits out of hats
• In a traditional setting
• Curing evil eye
• Curing colicy babies
• Finding water
• Recovering lost animals

• Pick up penny
• New Years resolutions
• Make a wish on candles on cake, turkey wishbone
• Bouquet, garter at wedding
• Ground Hog Day
• Can be more complicated certain foods on New
  Years, actions predict whole year

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Magic requires a special kind of thinking

• Variously called non-linear, cluster thinking
• What is the association between candles and the
  future?
  
• Explain candles, palmistry, bouquet at wedding
• Some cultures much more into this than others

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Prevalence of magic thinking versus culture of
disbelief

• Magic thinking behind commercials, marketing
• Blair Witch Project
• M. Night Shyamalan films Signs, 6th Sense
• In Russian or Ukrainian context
• My son gets sick
• Halia and the soil

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Cultural inclinations

• Logic behind Gregs illness
• Certain things beyond logic and beyond culture?
  
  
• Driving Suprun to the seminary

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Structure of course

• Estrangement and Ryans Bathhouse at Midnight
• Please read pp. 1-67 for next week
• Between East Europe and here Wax ceremony in
  Canada
  
• Supernatural in England, here
• Return of the dead
• Extrasensory communication

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Their work

• Readings, lecture, section
• Response papers
• Two medium size projects incantation or
  talisman commercial analysis
  
• Big project magic act again, not card tricks,
  rather fortune-telling, water witching
  
• Goal not to find out whether it works rather
• How people THINK, FEEL
• And to articulate this linearly, expository prose

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Course goals

• Learn about Russia, Ukraine
• Strategic and political importance
• Commercial possibilities
• To study a special type of thinking