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Magical Interpretations Material Realities
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Book Synopsis Magical Interpretations, Material Realities by : Henrietta L. Moore
Download or read book Magical Interpretations, Material Realities written by Henrietta L. Moore and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2003-11-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Magical Interpretations, Material Realities brings together many of today's best scholars of contemporary Africa. The theme of "witchcraft" has long been associated with exoticizing portraits of a "traditional" Africa, but this volume takes the question of occult as a point of entry into the moral politics of some very modern African realities.' - James Ferguson, University of California, USA 'These essays bear eloquent testimony to the ongoing presence and power of the occult imaginary, and of the intimate connection between global capitalism and local cosmology, in postcolonial Africa. A major contribution to scholarship that aims to rework the divide between modernity and tradition.' - Charles Piot, Duke University, USA This volume sets out recent thinking on witchcraft in Africa, paying particular attention to variations in meanings and practices. It examines the way different people in different contexts are making sense of what 'witchcraft' is and what it might mean. Using recent ethnographic materials from across the continent, the volume explores how witchcraft articulates with particular modern settings for example: the State in Cameroon; Pentecostalism in Malawi; the university system in Nigeria and the IMF in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The editors provide a timely overview and reconsideration of long-standing anthropological debates about 'African witchcraft', while simultaneously raising broader concerns about the theories of the western social sciences.
Book Synopsis Magical Interpretations, Material Realities by : H L (Henrietta L); Sanders Moore (T (Todd).)
Download or read book Magical Interpretations, Material Realities written by H L (Henrietta L); Sanders Moore (T (Todd).) and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Sorcery and Sovereignty by : Sean Redding
Download or read book Sorcery and Sovereignty written by Sean Redding and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Book Synopsis Africa's Social and Religious Quest by : Randee Ijatuyi-Morphé
Download or read book Africa's Social and Religious Quest written by Randee Ijatuyi-Morphé and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This well-crafted book probes the key dimensions of Africa’s existential predicament. It constitutes an intellectual response to a gnawing “African situation”—the starting point for grasping Africa’s social and religious quest. Beyond split explanations of external versus internal factors (e.g., colonization/slavery vs. leadership/cultural values), this study accounts more comprehensively for emergent issues shaping this situation. The situation reflects a gamut of problems in traditional African religion and material culture, which hitherto defines African communality, polities, and destinies vis-à-vis the cosmos and nature. Thus, African religion and communities, each with its own attendant values, do not operate by critical engagement with larger issues of society and civilization, especially those shaped by the advent of (post-) modernity. Rather, they operate via adaptation. The communal drive for natural and social harmony inevitably produces a preservationist view of culture (“leaving things as they are”). This study takes an integrative approach to religion, society, and civilization; eschews dichotomies; and broadly defines and re-signifies life and wholeness as a true end of Africans’ quest today.
Download or read book Moral Power written by Koen Stroeken and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient’s recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce moral values that assess the state of the system and that remove the obstacles to what is taken as key: self-healing. The implied ‘sensory shifts’ and therapeutic effectiveness have largely eluded the literature on witchcraft. This book shows how to comprehend culture other than through the prism of identity politics. It offers a framework to comprehend the rise of witch killings and human sacrifice, just as ritual initiation disappears.
Book Synopsis African Medical Pluralism by : William C. Olsen
Download or read book African Medical Pluralism written by William C. Olsen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most places on the African continent, multiple health care options exist and patients draw on a therapeutic continuum that ranges from traditional medicine and religious healing to the latest in biomedical technology. The ethnographically based essays in this volume highlight African ways of perceiving sickness, making sense of and treating suffering, and thinking about health care to reveal the range and practice of everyday medicine in Africa through historical, political, and economic contexts.
Book Synopsis The Magical Imagination by : Karl Bell
Download or read book The Magical Imagination written by Karl Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovative history of the popular magical imagination and ordinary people's experience of urbanization in nineteenth-century England.
Book Synopsis Permutations of Order by : Thomas G. Kirsch
Download or read book Permutations of Order written by Thomas G. Kirsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Permutations of Order makes an innovative and important contribution to current discussions about the relationship between religion and law, bringing together theoretically informed case studies from different parts of the world, relating to various types of politico-legal settings and religions. This volume also deals with contemporary legal/religious transfigurations that involve "permutations," meaning that elements of "legal" and "religious" acts of ordering are at times repositioned within each realm and from one realm to the other. These permutations of order in part result from the fact that, in ethnographic settings like those examined here, "legal" and "religious" realms are relational to-and in certain cases even constitutive of-each other and they result in categoric transpositions and new social positionalities through which, among other things, "the legal" and "the religious" are blended. Permutations of Order is a work that transcends convention, identifies new and theoretically overarching themes and will be of strong interest to researchers and policy-makers seeking a comparative focus on the intersections and disjunctions of religion and law.
Book Synopsis The Empty Seashell by : Nils Bubandt
Download or read book The Empty Seashell written by Nils Bubandt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief. In a book based on more than three years of fieldwork between 1991 and 2011, Nils Bubandt argues that cannibal witches for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli in the Indonesian province of North Maluku are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable.Witches (known as gua in the Buli language or as suanggi in regional Malay) appear to be ordinary humans but sometimes, especially at night, they take other forms and attack people in order to kill them and eat their livers. They are seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The reality of gua, therefore, can never be pinned down. The title of the book comes from the empty nautilus shells that regularly drift ashore around Buli village. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus, you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to recede from experience.Bubandt begins the book by recounting his own confusion and frustration in coming to terms with the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. A detailed ethnography of the encompassing inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft leads him to the conclusion that much of the anthropological literature, which views witchcraft as a system of beliefs with genuine explanatory power, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli people doesn't explain anything. In fact, it does the opposite: it confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of aporia—an interminable experience that remains continuously in doubt—Bubandt suggests the need to take seriously people's experiential and epistemological doubts about witchcraft, and outlines, by extension, a novel way of thinking about witchcraft and its relation to modernity.
Book Synopsis Aids and Religious Practice in Africa by : Felicitas Becker
Download or read book Aids and Religious Practice in Africa written by Felicitas Becker and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-02-23 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores, through anthropological and historical case studies from different parts of Africa, how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS.
Book Synopsis Perspectives on African Witchcraft by : Mariano Pavanello
Download or read book Perspectives on African Witchcraft written by Mariano Pavanello and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws on a range of ethnographic and historical material to provide insight into witchcraft in sub-Saharan Africa. The chapters explore a variety of cultural contexts, with contributions focusing on Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia and Eritrean diaspora. The book considers the concept of witchcraft itself, the interrelations with religion and medicine, and the theoretical frameworks employed to explain the nature of modern African witchcraft representations.
Book Synopsis Religion and Development in Southern and Central Africa: Vol 1 by : Amanze, James N.
Download or read book Religion and Development in Southern and Central Africa: Vol 1 written by Amanze, James N. and published by Mzuni Press. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a result of a joint conference, which was held from 18th-22nd July 2017 under the theme Religion, Citizenship and Development – Southern African Perspectives." The theme of the conference was adopted in order to underline the importance and significance of religion in the socio-economic development of people in the world generally and in Southern and Central Africa in particular. The papers in the book are divided into two volumes. Volume one consists of papers which directly discuss religion and development in one form or another. The second volume contains papers that discuss religion and other pertinent issues related to development. The papers are grouped into sub-themes for ease of reference. These include Citizenship and Development, Migration and Development, Disability and Development, Pentecostal Churches and Development and Religion and Society. All in all, despite a divergence of sub-themes in volume two, all point to issues to do with the role of religion in development in Southern and Central Africa today.
Book Synopsis Social Security in Religious Networks by : Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
Download or read book Social Security in Religious Networks written by Carolin Leutloff-Grandits and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last decades, the world has been facing tremendous political transformations and new risks: epidemics such as HIV/Aids have had destabilizing effect on the caretaking role of kin; in post-socialist countries political reforms have made unemployment a new source of insecurity. Furthermore, the state’s withdrawal from providing social security is taking place throughout the world. One response to these developments has been increased migration, which poses further challenges to kinship-based social support systems. This innovative volume focuses on the ambiguous role of religious networks in social security and traces the interrelatedness of religious networks and state and family support systems. Particularly timely, it describes these challenges as well as social security arrangements in the context of globalization and migration. The wide range of case studies from various parts of the world that examine various religious groups offers an important comparative contribution to the understanding of religious networks as providers of social security.
Book Synopsis Limpopo's Legacy by : Anne Heffernan
Download or read book Limpopo's Legacy written by Anne Heffernan and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the historical primacy of youth politics in Limpopo, South Africa has influenced the production of generations of nationally prominent youth and student activists - among them Julius Malema, Onkgopotse Tiro, Cyril Ramaphosa, Frank Chikane, and Peter Mokaba.
Book Synopsis Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya by : Bilinda Straight
Download or read book Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya written by Bilinda Straight and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Samburu of northern Kenya struggle to maintain their pastoral way of life as drought and the side effects of globalization threaten both their livestock and their livelihood. Mirroring this divide between survival and ruin are the lines between the self and the other, the living and the dead, "this side" and inia bata, "that side." Cultural anthropologist Bilinda Straight, who has lived with the Samburu for extended periods since the 1990s, bears witness to Samburu life and death in Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya. Written mostly in the field, Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya is the first book-length ethnography completely devoted to Samburu divinity and belief. Here, child prophets recount their travels to heaven and back. Others report transformations between persons and inanimate objects. Spirit turns into action and back again. The miraculous is interwoven with the mundane as the Samburu continue their day-to-day twenty-first-century existence. Straight describes these fantastic movements inside the cultural logic that makes them possible; thus she calls into question how we experience, how we feel, and how anthropologists and their readers can best engage with the improbable. In her detailed and precise accounts, Straight writes beyond traditional ethnography, exploring the limits of science and her own limits as a human being, to convey the significance of her time with the Samburu as they recount their fantastic yet authentic experiences in the physical and metaphysical spaces of their culture.
Book Synopsis Bridging Mobilities by : M. Nyamnjoh
Download or read book Bridging Mobilities written by M. Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study on the creative appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by mobile Africans and the communities to which they belong, home and away. With a focus on Cameroonian migrants from Pinyin and Mankon who are currently living in Cape Town and the Netherlands, this book examines the workings of the social fabric of mobile communities. It sheds light on how these communities are crafting lives for themselves in the host country and simultaneously linking up with the home country thanks to advances in ICTs and road and air transport. ICTs and mobilities have complemented social relational interaction and provide migrants today with opportunities to partake in cultural practices that express their Pinyin-ness and Mankon-ness. Pinyin and Mankon migrants are still as rooted in the past as they are in the present. They were born into a community with its own sense of home, moral ethos and cultural pride but live in a context of accelerated ICTs and mobility that is fast changing the way they live their lives. Drawing on this detailed ethnographic case study and related literature, Henrietta Nyamnjoh argues that while ICTs continue to enhance mobility for those who move and for those who stay put, they have become inextricably linked in forging networks and reconfiguring existing ones. Contrary to earlier studies that predicted radical social change and the passing of traditional societies in the face of new technologies, ICTs have been appropriated to enhance the workings of existing social relations and ways of life while simultaneously pointing to new directions in ever more creative and innovative ways.
Book Synopsis Surviving with Dignity by : Scott M. Youngstedt
Download or read book Surviving with Dignity written by Scott M. Youngstedt and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surviving with Dignity explores three key interconnected themes--structural violence, suffering, and surviving with dignity--through examining the lived experiences of first and second-generation migrant Hausa men in Niamey over the past two decades in the current neoliberal moment. Colonialism, state mismanagement, structural adjustment, and global neoliberalism have inflicted structural violence on Nigeriens by denying them human and particularly socioeconomic rights and relegating them to a status at--or very near--the bottom of UN Human Development Index in each year of the past decade. As a result of structural violence, most Hausa of Niamey suffer grinding and intractable poverty that has intensified over the past two decades. Suffering is a recurrent and expected condition; it is the normal condition. The central goal of the book is to explain the material (migration and informal economy work) and symbolic (meaning-making) strategies that Hausa individuals and communities have deployed in their struggles not only to literally survive in the face of economic austerity on the outer periphery of the global economy, but also to survive with dignity. Despite daunting challenges, many Hausa men find strength and patience in their humble devotion to Islam, cherish their vibrant sociability and gracious hospitality, deeply value extraordinary conversational virtuosity and knowledge, deploy humor in complex transcendent, defensive and self-critical ways, perpetuate a sense of hope and optimism for the future, articulate their own modernities, and strive relentlessly to feel connected to the modern world at large. Extreme poverty created by socioeconomic injustice constitutes an unacceptable assault on human dignity. Hausa men's remarkable strength does not negate the reality of the socioeconomic injustices they face. Their dire poverty in a world of plenty is unacceptable even when they handle it gracefully.
