Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019, a powerful, well-researched, fictional account exploring the trokosi tradition for the curious and the open-minded. Abeo Kata lives a comfortable, happy life in West Africa as the privileged nine-year-old daughter of a government employee and stay-at-home mother. But when the Katas' idyllic lifestyle takes a turn for the worse, Abeo's father, following his mother's advice, places the girl in a religious shrine, hoping that the sacrifice of his daughter will serve as atonement for the crimes of his ancestors. Unspeakable acts befall Abeo for the fifteen years she is enslaved within the shrine. When she is finally rescued, broken and battered, she must struggle to overcome her past, endure the revelation of family secrets, and learn to trust and love again. In the tradition of Chris Cleave's Little Bee, Praise Song for the Butterflies is a contemporary story that offers an educational, eye-opening account of the practice of ritual servitude in West Africa. Spanning decades and two continents, Praise Song for the Butterflies is an unflinching tale of the devastation that children are subject to when adults are ruled by fear and someone must pay the consequences. "Abeo is unrelenting - a fiery protagonist who sparks in every scene. Bernice L. McFadden has created yet another compelling story, this time about hope and freedom." Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun

Carlos Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is "natural" and "logical."In 1961, a young anthropologist subjected himself to an extraordinary apprenticeship with Yaqui Indian spiritual leader don Juan Matus to bring back a fascinating glimpse of a Yaqui Indian's world of "non-ordinary reality" and the difficult and dangerous road a man must travel to become "a man of knowledge." Yet on the bring of that world, challenging to all that we believe, he drew back. Then in 1968, Carlos Castaneda returned to Mexico, to don Juan and his hallucinogenic drugs, and to a world of experience no man from our Western civilization had ever entered before.

A fascinating and important volume which brings together new perspectives on the objections to, and appropriation of Native American Spirituality. Native Americans and Canadians are largely romanticised or sidelined figures in modern society. Their spirituality has been appropriated on a relatively large scale by Europeans and non-Native Americans, with little concern for the diversity of Native American opinions. Suzanne Owen offers an insight into appropriation that will bring a new understanding and perspective to these debates.This important volume collects together these key debates from the last few years and sets them in context, analyses Native American objections to appropriations of their spirituality and examines 'New Age' practices based on Native American spirituality." The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality" includes the findings of fieldwork among the Mi'Kmaq of Newfoundland on the sharing of ceremonies between Native Americans and First Nations, which highlights an aspect of the debate that has been under-researched in both anthropology and religious studies: that Native American discourses about the breaking of 'protocols', rules on the participation and performance of ceremonies, is at the heart of objections to the appropriation of Native American spirituality.This groundbreaking new series offers original reflections on theory and method in the study of religions, and demonstrates new approaches to the way religious traditions are studied and presented.Studies published under its auspices look to clarify the role and place of Religious Studies in the academy, but not in a purely theoretical manner. Each study will demonstrate its theoretical aspects by applying them to the actual study of religions, often in the form of frontier research.

Animism' is now an important term for describing ways in which some people understand and engage respectfully with the larger-than-human world. Its central theme is our relationship with our other-than-human neighbours, such as animals, plants, rocks, and kettles, rooted in the understanding that the term 'person' includes more than humans. Graham Harvey explores the animist cultures of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians and eco-Pagans, introducing their diversity and considering the linguistic, performative, ecological and activist implications of these different animisms.

The Liberatory Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a philosophical anthology which explores Dr. King's legacy as a philosopher and his contemporary relevance as a thinker-activist. It consists of sixteen chapters organized into four sections: Part I, King within Philosophical Traditions, Part II, King as Engaged Social and Political Philosopher, Part III, King's Ethics of Nonviolence, and Part IV, Hope Resurgent or Dream Deferred: Perplexities of King's Philosophical Optimism. Most chapters are written by philosophers, but two are by philosophically informed social scientists. The contributors examine King's relationships to canonical Western philosophical traditions, and to African-American thought. King's contribution to traditional branches of philosophy such as ethics, social philosophy and philosophy of religion is explored, as well as his relevance to contemporary movements for social justice. As is evident from the title, the book considers the importance of King's thought as liberatory discourse. Some chapters focus on "topical" issues like the relevance of King's moral critique of the Vietnam War to our present involvement in Middle Eastern wars. Others focus on more densely theoretical issues such as Personalism, existential philosophy or Hegelian dialectics in King's thought. The significance of King's reflections on racism, economic justice, democracy and the quest for community are abiding themes. But the volume closes, quite fittingly, on the importance of the theme of hope. The text is a kind of philosophical dialogue on the enduring value of the legacy of the philosopher, King.

Shamanism is part of the spiritual life of nearly all Native North Americans. This bibliography gives the reader access to a wealth of information on shamanism from the Bering Strait to the Mexican border and from Maine to Florida. It includes articles and books focusing on the spiritual connections of Native Americans to the world through shamans. The books covered compare practices from tribe to tribe, make distinctions between witchcraft or sorcery and shamanism, and discuss the artifacts and tools of the trade. Many are well illustrated, including collections from the nineteenth century.

Few thorough ethnographic studies on Central Indian tribal communities exist, and the elaborate discussion on the cultural meanings of Indian food systems ignores these societies altogether. Food epitomizes the social for the Gadaba of Odisha. Feeding, sharing, and devouring refer to locally distinguished ritual domains, to different types of social relationships and alimentary ritual processes. In investigating the complex paths of ritual practices, this study aims to understand the interrelated fields of cosmology, social order, and economy of an Indian highland community.

American Indian tribes have long been recognized as "domestic, dependent nations" within the United States, with powers of self-government that operate within the tribes' sovereign territories. Yet over the years, Congress and the Supreme Court have steadily eroded these tribal powers. In some respects, the erosion of tribal powers reflects the legacy of an imperialist impulse to constrain or eliminate any political power that may compete with the state. These developments have moved the nation away from its early commitments to a legally plural society-in other words, the idea that multiple nations and their legal systems could co-exist peacefully in shared territories. Shadow Nations argues for redirecting the trajectory of tribal-federal relations to better reflect the formative ethos of legal pluralism that operated in the nation's earliest years. From an ideological standpoint, this means that we must reexamine several long-held commitments. One is to legal centralism, the view that the nation-state and its institutions are the only legitimate sources of law. Another is to liberalism, the dominant political philosophy that undergirds our democratic structures and situates the individual, not the group or a collective, as the bedrock moral unit of society. From a constitutional standpoint, establishing more robust expressions of tribal sovereignty will require that we take seriously the concerns of citizens, tribal and non-tribal alike, who demand that tribal governments operate consistently with basic constitutional values. From an institutional standpoint, these efforts will require a new, flexible and adaptable institutional architecture that is better suited to accommodating these competing interests. Argued with grace, humanity, and a peerless scholarly eye, Shadow Nations is a clarion call for a true and consequential rethinking of the legal and political relationship between Indigenous tribes and the United States government.

Spirit possession involves the displacement of a human's conscious self by a powerful other who temporarily occupies the human's body. Here, Seligman shows that spirit possession represents a site for understanding fundamental aspects of human experience, especially those involved with interactions among meaning, embodiment, and subjectivity.

There are far fewer publications on the ethnology of Micronesia than for any other region in the Pacific. This dearth is especially seen in the traditional religion, folklore, and iconography of the area. Haynes and Wuerch have located 1,193 relevant titles. For the first time, these mostly scarce or unpublished materials are now accessible in this essential research tool. The focus is on tradition, which became modified after contact with the West--the adaptation and persistence of these traditions are included in this bibliography.

Traditional Micronesian iconography is largely religious in nature, as is the case with most tribal or preliterate societies. There is also a large corpus of Micronesian myths, legends, beliefs, and practices that may not fit the Western concept of religion, but would be classified under folklore. That distinction cannot be consistently made in Micronesian cultures, nor in most other preliterate, thus prehistoric, societies. The overlap of religion and folklore is pervasive, so the scope of subjects included is broad. The subject matter encompasses magic, sorcery, ritual, cosmology, mythology, iconography, iconology, oral traditions, songs, chants, dance, music, traditional medicine, and many activities of daily life. Only those works that directly treat these subjects in the context of religion or folklore are included in this volume.