Browse
by Paperbacks: Anthropology of Religion
Jane Ellen Harrison transformed the study of Greek religion with her discovery of a religious system predating that of the Olympic gods and goddesses familiar to the modern world. This book introduces her work and ideas, which have influenced and profoundly shaped scholarship, primarily in the classics, throughout the last century.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their “life”. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of “mind over matter”.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Archaeology Museum Studies
Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology
This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
The global pandemic has offered extraordinary opportunities for extremists and terrorists to mobilize themselves and revive as more powerful actors in the security landscape. But could these threat groups actually capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and advance their malevolent agendas? This book provides, for the first time, a true picture of novel trends since the pandemic outbreak.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology of Religion
An ethnographic account of daily life in Durham Cathedral, this book examines the processes of negotiation and change between a community and their cathedral.
Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Designed for both academic and lay audiences, this book identifies the characteristics of ritual and, via multiple examples, details how ritual works on the human body and brain to produce its often profound effects. These include enhancing courage, effecting healing, and generating group cohesion by enacting cultural—or individual—beliefs and values. It also shows what happens when ritual fails.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Anthropology of Religion
What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? Case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom present an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.
Subjects: Heritage Studies History (General) Anthropology of Religion
By bringing together in one place specific objects, materials, and features indicating ritual, religious, or magical belief used by people around the world and through time, this tool will assist archaeologists in identifying evidence of belief-related behaviors and broadening their understanding of how those behaviors may also be seen through less obvious evidential lines.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology of Religion
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Anthropology of Religion
In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
This book follows young Cameroonian men who aspire to migrate abroad and play football for a living while analyzing masculinities in West Africa. The book argues that the athletic aspirations of young Cameroonians and their propensity to consult with Pentecostal Men of God offer new insights about the nature of social mobility in the neoliberal age.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality
Nigeria is a country shaped by internal diversity and transnational connections, past and present. Leading Nigerian writers from Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have portrayed these Nigerian Issues, and have also written about some of the momentous events in Nigerian history. Afropolitan Horizons discusses their work alongside other novelists and commentators.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies Anthropology of Religion
Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain.
Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Evil eye is a phenomenon observed globally and has to do with the misfortune and calamities that we can cause to someone else out of jealousy of their possessions. The book engages with evil eye beliefs in Corfu and investigates the Christian Orthodox influences on the phenomenon and how it affects individuals’ reactions to it.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
Drawn from across the U.S. and Mesoamerica, the chapters in this volume explore the use, meanings, and cross-cultural patterns present in the use of ash. and highlight the importance of ash in ritual closure, social memory, and cultural transformation.
Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounter with the West.
Subjects: History (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Don Handelman’s groundbreaking work in anthropology is showcased in this collection of his most powerful essays. The book looks at the intellectual and spiritual roots of Handelman’s initiation into anthropology; his work on ritual and on “bureaucratic logic”; analyses of cosmology; and innovative essays on Anthropology and Deleuzian thinking.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion
Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, this ethnography explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology Sociology
Set against a discussion of the contemporary vitality of Aboriginal musical traditions in Australia and embedded in the historical background of this region, Curran lays out the features of Warlpiri songs and ceremonies, and centers on a focal case study of the Warlpiri Kurdiji ceremony to illustrate the modes in which core cultural themes are being passed on through song to future generations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Cultural Studies (General)
Focusing on mobility, religion, and belonging, the volume contributes to transatlantic anthropology and history by bringing together religion, cultural heritage and placemaking in the Atlantic world. The entanglements of religion, cultural heritage and belonging are ethnographically scrutinized to perceive the connections and disconnections of specific places.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and its interactions with the living. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Heritage Studies Literary Studies
Analyses the ways in which Haredi Jews negotiate healthcare services using theoretical perspectives in political philosophy. This is the first archival and ethnographic study of Haredi Jews in the UK, and will allow readers to understand how reproductive care issues affect this growing minority population.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology of Religion
Exploring the anthropology of evil as an empirical human phenomenon, this volume attempts to show the usefulness of treating evil as a descriptive reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology Anthropology of Religion
Belief in magic and particularly the power of witchcraft was a deep and enduring presence in popular culture; people created and concealed many objects to protect themselves from harmful magic. Detailed are the principal forms of magical house protection in Britain and beyond from the fourteenth century to the present day.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology of Religion
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, and in recognition of the increasingly non-territorial nature of religion in the contemporary world, Going to Pentecost offers an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements, and Pentecostalism in particular.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Being Bedouin Around Petra explores the relationships between the UNESCO protection conferred on Petra, Jordan, and the traditions and lives of the semi-nomadic Bedouin who inhabit the surrounding area. It explores what it means to be Bedouin when tourism, heritage protection, national discourse, and other forces lay competing claims to the past.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Heritage Studies
Focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions in the Iranian city, this book offers an alternative approach to understanding the process of urban transformation, and puts forward a spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals that provides a platform for developing a fresh spatial approach to ritual studies.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion
Mirrors of Passing explores the relationship between death, materiality, and temporality, drawing from the fields of archaeology, cultural anthropology, political science, and media studies to explore fundamental questions about the relationship between death and our perception of time.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized places, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Based on long-term, multi-sited fieldwork, it examines the complexity of time situated between folk cosmology, political constructions of history and bodily experiences of a landscape in transition.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies
The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with spirituality. Based on fresh ethnographies and studies of sacred sites in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology
What does it mean to “fit in?” This volume of essays demystifies the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about role of similarity in inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local social structures, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies
Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the increasingly separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, Straying from the Straight Path gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Shedding light on the role of visual creativity in religion, Canals explores the current practice of the cult of María Lionza, one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Drawing on ethnographic inquiry and the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, this volume explores people's reluctance to pursue religion. The contributors capture the experiences of godless people and examine their perspectives on the role of religion in their personal and public lives. In doing so, the volume contributes to a critical understanding of the processes of disengagement from religion and reveals the challenges and paradoxes that godless people face.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
In Bhutan, medical patients engage a variety of healing practices to seek cures for their ailments. The Patient Multiple delves into the context of patients’ daily lives and decision-making processes, showing how these unique mountain cultures are finding paths to health among a changing and multifaceted medical topography.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
This collection documents war magic and warrior religion as performed in diverse cultures and historical time periods. By foregrounding embodiment, practice, and performance, the anthropological approaches to magic, sorcery, shamanism, and religion that the authors apply go beyond what magic ‘represents’ to consider what magic does.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Performance Studies
Messianic ideas of impending redemption have inspired and engendered struggles for justice, yet also violent utopian ideologies. This book analyzes the double-edged legacy of Judeo-Christian theologies of history by exploring their impact on subsequent philosophies of history and political ideologies, from Ancient Judaism, through German Romanticism, to contemporary radical thought.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion History (General)
The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies. The chapters cover a range of ethnographic areas and examine notions of personhood, agency, uncertainty and control among other questions. In so doing, the contributors seek to contextualise understandings within wider cultural understandings found in these areas, linking these concepts to the wider social fabric.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through its set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral persons and community amid modernity, and its enormous transformations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. This volume explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. It presents a powerful warning of the dangers and mistaken conclusions that are inevitable in untrained ideas about other ways of life.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Although dying can be seen as the paradigm of liminality, because periods of transition are often associated with death, many volumes on death in the social sciences do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these “ultimate ambiguities” as crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
This ethnography focuses on Yanomami shamanism, especially in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the “part is equal to the whole.” This book fills a gap in the study of Yanomami people and enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Witchcraft violence is a feature of many contemporary African societies. In Ghana, belief in witchcraft and the malignant activities of putative witches is prevalent. This book provides a detailed account of Ghanaian witchcraft beliefs and practices and their role in fueling violent attacks on these alleged witches.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality
Though all Pagan and Native Faith movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals and agendas are diverse. Contributors to this volume draw on ethnographic cases within Europe to explore the interplay of nationalism and transnationalism within these recently emerging and diverse groups.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
A pious Muslim population lives in the southern German city of Stuttgart, where, even in the face of resentment and discrimination, they create meaningful lives. The author introduces and examines the lives of these individuals and communities, set within a city that accommodates the needs and sensibilities of both Muslims and non-Muslims.
Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion
The relationships between science and religion are about to enter a new phase in our contemporary world. This volume analyzes the relationships between religion and science as forms of life: ways of engaging human experience that originate in particular social and cultural formations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Media Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality
Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Colonial History Educational Studies
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Sociology Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion Sustainable Development Goals
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies