Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

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

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

The Art of Fate Calculationexplores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

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

“This is a compelling and intellectually satisfying volume that offers important new ethnographic work which, I would argue, revitalizes studies of medical pluralism…an important project by some of the most outstanding and well-known scholars in these areas of study — several of whose names readers will recognize and inspire interest in the volume.”  ·  Murphy Halliburton, City University of New York

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

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

Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. Paying particular attention to devotees’ failure to consistently live up to ISKCON’s ideals, and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an ‘ideal Vedic city’.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology 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)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (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

Looking at the crossroads between heritage and religion through the case study of Moravian Christiansfeld, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, this anthology reaches back to the eighteenth century when the church settlement was founded, examines its legacy within Danish culture and modern society, and brings this history into the present and the ongoing heritagization processes.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Analyzing perceived and performed cultural change by members of the Bena Bena language group in Papua New Guinea, Knapp offers a new understanding by conjoining traditional anthropological models as well as recent pursuits such as collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion

Hexfoils have a history of use for personal protection and were carved both intentionally or graffitied into church pews and walls, bed frames, doors, and gravestones. This research sheds light on the use of this historic symbol to protect the bodies and souls of the deceased, across several thousand years and multiple countries.

Subjects: Archaeology Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with death and remembrance in Ireland. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary Irish communities.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion

What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology 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

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)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

An innovative interdisciplinary volume that explores the conceptual and lived relations between the academic fields of religion and heritage. A wholistic approach is taken to considering emplacement — a broad interrelation of objects, peoples, histories and places — in the analysis of relations between religion and heritage.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Understanding the Islamic State’s ideologues as ‘entrepreneurs of identity’, this book explores how the group defined categories of social identity and used these categories as tools of communicative and cognitive structuring.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies

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)

The Altai Republic in southern Siberia is renowned for excavations of frozen mummies. It also hosts fallout zones for the second stages of rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Local inhabitants blame ‘evil spirits’ released by archaeological work and toxic fuel from rocket debris for their misfortunes. This book explores the divergent fates of such claims.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

Through six micro-level studies from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, Facing Discrimination offers insight into the dynamics of religious beliefs and bodily practices among those who are discriminated against. It examines how religion as a source of agency interacts with processes of marginalization.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology

Confession played an important role in the wars that ravaged Europe until around 1650, but the religiosity of the men and women during this period is still underexplored. Faith in War shows that confessional coexistence became a fact of army life as people from all over Europe followed the Christian life in the chaos of war.

Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern 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 Familial Occult addresses the presence of occult experiences in some scholars' families and how that has affected their epistemological and ontological worlds, as well as their identities as scholars. While much has been written on encountering the occult in fieldwork or becoming an apprentice in an occult practice, little yet has been published in the academic literature about growing up with the occult.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Anthropology of Religion

As the practice of divination, long stigmatized as an immoral superstition, enjoys a revival in contemporary China, Fate Calculation Experts explores the various ways in which diviners attempt to achieve legitimation in a society which identifies strongly with modernity, science, and rationality.

Subjects: Anthropology (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

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)

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Addressing several issues of significance in the fields of Anthropology of Migration, Politics of Healthcare, Religious and Francophone Studies, this book pursues an unprecedented line of research by bringing to the fore the geopolitical dimension of francophonie, understood as a political construct, as much as a cultural, artistic and a linguistic space, with French as common language.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion

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)

Following Vatican archives opening up access to materials on the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), the contributors to this volume were amongst the first to access these long-awaited records. They have analyzed them here to present a nuanced and revitalized approach to religious, modern post-war historiography.

Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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)

Subjects: Sociology Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Tibetan region of Amdo in northwest China, Illness and Enlightenment examines Tibetan medical and religious texts, to explore the multi-faceted concept of nyoné through key Tibetan concepts of wind, heart, and mind, as well as human-spirit relationships.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology 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

This volume is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. The author experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-building processes and, at the same time, construe the religious woman.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Sociology

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality

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

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Environmental Studies (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

The religious landscape of modern Germany is one that would scarcely be recognizable to earlier generations. This groundbreaking survey of German postwar religious life depicts a profoundly changed society that has almost entirely shed its Christian character despite a booming market for syncretistic, individualistic forms of “popular religion.”

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present 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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Media Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

This collection draws on classic anthropological ideas of pollution to explore bodies, dirt, and place, moral inversion and reinforcement, and disgust and taboo. The book is an invitation to consider the continued relevance of Douglas’ conceptualisation of pollution and dirt as ‘matter out of place’ in relation to contemporary circumstances.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

Subjects: Medical Anthropology 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

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Sociology Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

The world we live in is constantly changing. Climate change, transforming gender conceptions, emerging issues of food consumption, novel forms of family life and technological developments are altering central areas of our forms of life. This raises questions of how to cope with and understand the moral changes implicit in such alterations. This anthology is the first to address moral change as such.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Combining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders such as American missionaries through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Anthropology of Religion

An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions, and gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Genocide History Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Pilgrimage has always had a tendency to follow – and sometimes create – trade routes. This volume explores how wider factors behind transnational and global mobility have impacted on pilgrimage activity across the world, and examines the ways in which pilgrimage relates to migration, diaspora, and political cooperation or conflict across nation-states.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Seeking an answer to why the event occurred the way that it did,The Polynesian Iconoclasm explores the ten years in the early nineteenth century during which inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen related societies destroyed or desecrated their temples and god-images. In the aftermath, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches were constructed, and oppressive laws and courts were introduced — and rebelled against.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology

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

On Malaita in Solomon Islands, an evangelical Israelite-inspired movement centers on a distinctive time-consciousness that reads the historical past and present as prophetic signs of an imminent future. This book examines how these ‘prophetic histories’ interweave biblical narrative, theological reflection, local accounts, kastom practice, spiritual journeys and Old-Testament political theory.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Development Studies

“Blanes’ multi-sited ethnographic-cum-historical study of a prominent Christian prophetic church of Angolan origin is an excellent piece of scholarship, and makes a unique contribution to the literature on Christianity in Africa and on African Christianity in Europe. More than other scholars in the emerging anthropology of Christianity, Blanes gives detailed attention to the interlocking of temporal and spatial dimensions in the context of diasporic religion and religious self-identification.”  ·  Thomas Kirsch, University of Konstanz

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Through the examination of religious practices and public performance, the author offers a compelling study of how the Hindu community in the French territory of La Réunion assert pride in their religion as a means of gaining recognition as a religious minority.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Through detailed ethnographic analysis, this book shows how religious sensibilities inform the health practices, issues of sexuality and well-being of the Ghanian-Dutch and Somali-Dutch communities residing in the Randstad area of the Netherlands.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

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

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology

The book is an ethnography of belian, a lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans of Indonesian Borneo. This volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings, and highlights the irreducibility of lived reality to epistemological certainty.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology 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

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Focusing on the intricate presence of a new Japanese religion (Sekai Kyûseikyô) in the densely populated and primarily Christian environment of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnographic study offers a practitioner-orientated perspective to create a localised picture of religious globalization.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies

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

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Colonial History Educational Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

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)

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion

Set at the forested edge of Cambodia’s frontier, this book shares stories and insights from migrants, loggers, and soldiers carving homesteads into a new village. The stories included in this book show the fluid boundaries of social, economic and political classifications in the area, and that the inhabitants’ poverty or wealth reveal the legacy of imperial power.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Anthropology of Religion

Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India’s rapidly transforming multi-religious society and develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asianist scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book investigates the construction of the world’s highest Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest, Romania. Through the notion of re-consecration, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on eastern Christianity, secularization, postsocialist urban change and nationalism in a vivid account of societal transformation.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

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

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

Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Performance Studies

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

This book draws on three decades of ethnographic research to explore the penetration of mafia values in Sicilian society. By exploring rituals through which local society learns deep respect for those values, this study aims to offer a critical perspective on Sicilian modernity.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology 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

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

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion