The Māyā of Things: South Asian Reflections on Social Theory and the Magic of Humanism

ABSTRACT The study of religion and magic, broadly defined, has been integral to the formulation of modern social thought in the western humanistic tradition. Building on the work of posthumanist scholarship that develops analytical methods for the decolonization of knowledge in academia, this article draws on the southern Asian philosophy of Sāṃkhya to theorize magic and illusion in the articulation of contemporary social theory. The focus is on the power of illusion, as understood in terms of Sāṃkhyn semiosis, to question the implicit anthropocentrism of disenchanted humanism. A perspective of disabled, magical interdependence is derived from Ishvara Krishna’s natural philosophy to suggest that a socioecological interpretation of Sāṃkhya provides a perspective of critical, inclusive holism that may be understood in terms of embodied imperfections and the material semiotic interdependency of organisms, as against their independence and idealistic freedom.