For centuries some correspondence between technological innovation and rationalism has been assumed. Yet throughout the world technological innovation has also gone hand in hand with practices which may be considered not so rational: Photographs are used to communicate with the dead, street cars are believed to be possessed by evil spirits, animist rituals of sacrifice are performed to ensure the smooth functioning of an industrial machine, and on. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, some technologies that enabled the displacement of religion by secular nationalism also provided new sites for the collective practice of superstition. Are such responses to be read as misrecognitions of a given technology’s function? Are they active resistances to modernity? Or are they ways of reasoning technology’s own illogical transformations of space and time and presence? This course will pursue these and related questions in the Asia-Pacific region by looking at several cases where the introduction of modern technology inspired, rather than dispelled, new ideas about magic and/or resuscitated old forms of supernatural belief. Students will be expected to produce and present short response papers to the readings, actively participate in discussion, and write a final paper.