From first-hand experience, the author tells of daily life among the Hopi Indians in Northern Arizona--their beliefs, rituals and Catcina (Kachina) ceremonies. The interaction and conflict between the Anglo and Indian cultures are presented from the viewpoint of the Hopi family. Robert Boissiere, born in Paris, France, came to the United States after World War II. A member of the French army, he was imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp from which he managed to escape and join a group of Basques in the Pyrenees. After moving to California, Boissiere found himself on an artistic and spiritual pilgrimage to the Hopi villages. There he was adopted by a Hopi family and became a participant in their cultural life. "The Hopi Way" is based on his experiences living as a Hopi. He is also the author of "Po Pai Mo," also from Sunstone Press.

Margaret Mitchell Armand presents a cutting edge interdisciplinary terrain inside an indigenous exploration of her homeland. Her contribution to the historiography of Haitian Vodou demonstrates the struggle for its recognition in Haiti's post-independence phase as well as its continued misunderstanding. Through a methodological, original study of the colonial culture of slavery and its dehumanization, Healing in the Homeland: Haitian Vodou Traditions examines the sociocultural and economic oppression stemming from the local and international derived politics and religious economic oppression. While concentrating the narratives on stories of indigenous elites educated in the western traditions, Armand moves pass the variables of race to locate the historical conjuncture at the root of the persistent Haitian national division. Supported by scholarships of indigenous studies and current analysis, she elucidates how a false consciousness can be overcome to reclaim cultural identity and pride, and include a sociocultural, national educational program, and political platform that embraces traditional needs in a global context of mutual respect. While shredding the western adages, and within an indigenous model of understanding, this book purposefully brings forth the struggle of the African people in Haiti.

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.

The Ifugao of Northern Luzon, the Philippines, are famous for their extensive system of irrigated rice terraces, and previous anthropological accounts of the Ifugao have stressed their immense importance for social life. This book attempts to "go against the grain" and approach Ifugao society through an often overlooked element, namely their pigs. By a detailed ethnographic description of Ifugao cultural practices related to kinship, animism, prestige, and death, Pigs and Persons in the Philippines shows how pigs are involved in the constitution and re-constitution of relations between humans and between humans and spirits. Remme draws upon theories of relationality, performativity, and assemblages to argue that the exchange and consumption of pig meat have the ontological effect of enacting persons. He also shows how pigs are the prime means of engaging in relations with spirits and argues further that prestige can be understood as a heterogeneous assemblage of relations of which pigs play a central role. While pigs are thus constitutively involved in the enactment of persons, Remme also shows how they are operative in the re-constitution of relations that occurs at death. In documenting these practices, Remme argues for a relational understanding of personhood that goes beyond inter-human relations and includes relations with nonhuman beings, including spirits, and animals.

Divining the Self weaves elements of personal narrative, myth, history, and interpretive analysis into a vibrant tapestry that reflects the textured, embodied, and performative nature of scripture and scripturalizing practices. Velma Love examines the Odu--the Yoruba sacred scriptures--along with the accompanying mythology, philosophy, and ritual technologies engaged by African Americans. Drawing from the personal narratives of African American Ifa practitioners along with additional ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oyotunji African Village, South Carolina, and New York City, Love's work explores the ways in which an ancient worldview survives in modern times.

Divining the Self also takes up the challenge of determining what it means for the scholar of religion to study scripture as both text and performance. This work provides an excellent case study of the sociocultural phenomenon of scripturalizing practices.

Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman: Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity examines the complex ways that gender and race shaped a liberation movement propelled by the Caribbean evolution of an African spiritual ethos. Jeanne Christensen proposes that Rastafari represents the most recent reworking of this spiritual ethos, referred to as African religiosity. The book contributes a new perspective to the literature on Rastafari, and through a historical lens, corrects the predominant static view of Rastafari women. In certain Rastafari manifestations, a growing livity developed by RastaMen eventually excluded women from an important ritual called "Reasoning"-a conscious search for existential and ontological truth through self-understanding performed in a group setting. Restoring agency to the RastaWoman, Christensen argues that RastaWomen, intimately in touch with this spiritual ethos, challenged oppressive structures within the movement itself. They skirted official restrictions, speaking out in public and written forums whenever such avenues presented themselves, and searched for their own truth through conscious intentional self-examination characteristic of the Reasoning ritual. With its powerful, theoretically informed narrative, Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman: Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity will appeal to students and scholars interested in religious transformation, resistance movements, gender issues, critical race studies, and the history and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean.

Coming Full Circle is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationships between spirituality and health among Coast Salish and Chinook communities in western Washington from 1805 to 2005. Suzanne Crawford O'Brien examines how these communities define what it means to be healthy and how recent tribal community-based health programs have applied this understanding to their missions and activities. She also explores how contemporary definitions, goals, and activities relating to health and healing are informed by Coast Salish history and also by indigenous spiritual views of the body. These views, she argues, are based on an understanding of the relationship between self, ecology, and community. Coming Full Circle draws on a historical framework in reflecting on contemporary tribal health-care efforts and the ways in which they engage indigenous healing traditions alongside twenty-first-century biomedicine. The book makes a strong case for the current shift toward tribally controlled care, arguing that local, culturally distinct ways of healing and understanding illness must be a part of Native health care. Combining in-depth archival research, extensive ethnographic participant-based field work, and skillful scholarship on theories of religion and embodiment, Crawford O'Brien offers an original and masterful analysis of Coast Salish and Chinook traditions and worldviews, and the intersection of religion and healing.

This book examines alleged "superhuman" powers predominantly associated with smith/artisans in five African societies. It discusses their ritual and social roles, mythico-histories, symbols surrounding their art, and changing relationships between these specialists and their patrons. Needed but also feared, these smith/artisans work in traditionally hereditary occupations and in stratified but negotiable relationships with their rural patron families. Many of them now also work for new customers in an expanding market economy, which is still characterized by personal, face-to-face interactions. Rasmussen maintains that a framework integrating anthropological theories of witchcraft, alterity, symbolism, and power is fundamental to understanding local accusations and tensions in these relationships. She also argues that it is critical to deconstruct and disentangle guilt, blame, and envy-concepts that are often conflated in anthropology at the expense of falsely accused "witch" figures. The first portion of this book is an ethnographic analysis of smith/artisans in Tuareg society, and draws on primary source data from this author's long-term social/cultural anthropological field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali. The latter portion of the book is a cross-cultural comparison, and it re-analyzes the Tuareg case, drawing on secondary data on ritual powers and smith/artisans in four other African societies: the Amhara of Ethiopia, the Bidan (Moors) of Mauritania, the Kapsiki of Cameroon, and the Mande of southern Mali. In the concluding analysis, there is discussion of similarities and differences between these cases, the social consequences of ritual knowledge and power in each community, and their wider implications for anthropology of religion, human rights, and African studies.

Margaret Mitchell Armand presents a cutting edge interdisciplinary terrain inside an indigenous exploration of her homeland. Her contribution to the historiography of Haitian Vodou demonstrates the struggle for its recognition in Haiti's post-independence phase as well as its continued misunderstanding. Through a methodological, original study of the colonial culture of slavery and its dehumanization, Healing in the Homeland: Haitian Vodou Traditions examines the socio-cultural and economic oppression stemming from the local and international derived politics and religious economic oppression. While concentrating the narratives on stories of indigenous elites educated in the western traditions, Armand moves pass the variables of race to locate the historical conjuncture at the root of the persistent Haitian national division. Supported by scholarships of indigenous studies and current analysis, she elucidates how a false consciousness can be overcome to reclaim cultural identity and pride, and include a socio-cultural, national educational program and political platform that embraces traditional needs in a global context of mutual respect.While shredding the western adages, and within an indigenous model of understanding, this book purposefully brings forth the struggle of the African people in Haiti.

African religion is ancestor worship; it revolves around the dead, now thought to be alive and well in heaven (the Samanadzie) and propitiated by the living on earth. For the Akan, the ancestors' stool is the emblem of the ancestors (Nananom Nsamanfo). Led by their kings and queen mothers as living ancestors, the Akan periodically propitiate the ancestors' stools housing their ancestors. In return, the ancestors and deities influence the affairs of living descendants, making ancestor worship as tenably viable as any other religion. This second edition updates the scholarship on ancestor worship by demonstrating the centrality of the ancestors' stool as the ultimate religious symbol. In addition, all chapters have been expanded. A new chapter has been added to show how ancestor worship is pragmatically integrative, theologically sound, teleological as well as soteriological, with a highly trained clerical body and elders as mediators.

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.

En esta obra Lydia Cabrera, transcribe y colecciona por puro deleite el conjunto de leyendas negras de La Habana. Se trata de Cuentos afrocubanos, que aunque estan cundidos'de fantasia y ofrecen entre sus protagonistas algunos personajes del panteon yoruba, como Obaogo, Oshun, Ochosi, etc., no son unicamente religiosos. La mayoria entran en la categoria de fabulas de animales. Otros son de personajes humanos en los cuales la mitologia entra secundariamente. En varios de ellos se descubren supervivencias totemicas, como cuando se cita el Hombre-tigre, el Hombre-Toro. Papa-Jicotea, etc. Otro nos ofrece unas fabulas muy curiosas, de como se originaron el primer hombre, el primer negro y el primer blanco, muestra de como abundan en el folklore negro los mitos de la etnogenia. Si bien la mayor parte de los cuentos negros coleccionados por Lydia Cabrera son de origen yoruba, en varios aparece evidente la huella de la civilizacion de los blancos.

Walter E. A. van Beek draws on over four decades of extensive fieldwork to offer an in-depth study of the religion of the Kapsiki/Higi, who live in the Mandara Mountains on the border between North Cameroon and Northeast Nigeria. Concentrating on ritual as the core of traditional religion, van Beek shows how Kapsiki/Higi practices have endured through the long and turbulent history of the region. Kapsiki rituals reveal a focus on two fundamental concepts: dwelling and belonging. Van Beek examines their sacrificial practices, through which the Kapsiki show a complex and pervasive connection with the Mandara Mountains, as well as the character of their relationships among themselves and with outsiders. Van Beek also explores their rituals of belonging, rites of passage which take place from birth through initiation and marriage - and even death, with the tradition of the ''dancing dead,'' when a fully decorated corpse on the shoulders of a smith ''dances'' with his mourning kinsmen. The Dancing Dead is the result of the author's lifelong study of the Kapsiki/Higi. It gives a unique description of the rituals in an African traditional religion based not upon ancestors, but on a completely relational thought system, where in the end all rituals are integrated into one major cycle.

Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging focuses on the Heraka, a religious reform movement, and its impact on the Zeme, a Naga tribe, in the North Cachar Hills of Assam, India. Drawing upon critical studies of religion, cultural/ethnic identity, and nationalism, archival research in both India and Britain, and fieldwork in Assam, the book initiates new grounds for understanding the evolving notions of reform and identity in the emergence of a Heraka religion. Arkotong Longkumer argues that reform and identity are dynamically inter-related and linked to the revitalisation and negotiation of both tradition legitimising indigeneity, and change legitimising reform. The results have deepened, yet challenged, not only prevailing views of the Western construction of the category religion but also understandings of how marginalised communities use collective historical imagination to inspire self-identification through the discourse of religion. In conclusion, this book argues for a re-evaluation of the way in which multi-religious traditions interact to reshape identities and belongings.

This volume is the first of four that will present the best and most important portions of the hundreds of pages of notes, interviews, texts, and essays that James R. Walker amassed during his eighteen years at Pine Ridge Reservation.

Shamanism... what is it? Is it a phenomenon with a clear definition or with a set of clearly definable attributes? Has the phenomenon changed over time, or are today's versions found in suburban basements the same as those that were practiced hundreds of years ago by various tribal people? What can we figure out about shamanism if we simply look at the term itself and how it has been employed over time? What if we restrict ourselves to one geographic location? These are some of the questions grappled with, and partially answered, in this book. By discussing the historical use of the terms shamanism and shaman in North America, Peter N. Jones offers fresh insights into the history of this phenomenon. Comparing current understandings and descriptions of the phenomenon with those of the historical and archival record, Shamans and Shamanism presents a comprehensive analysis of the terms use over time. Included in the book is a comprehensive bibliography of the term's use in North America. Shamans and Shamanism is an important resource for anyone interested in this phenomenon. It provides new insights into the history of the terms, their use in both academic and pop literature, and offers a starting point for future investigations of the phenomenon.

This work addresses the growing challenge of contextuality within Christianity in the setting of the vibrant and dynamic Caribbean. The challenge results from the recognition that all religious practices are conditioned by the geographical, ethnic, socio-economic, and cultural frameworks in which they emerge. This contextuality should inform the way theological diversity within Christianity is addressed, as well as the way Christian formulations are considered in relation to other religions. The text offers conceptual support for the position that Christian theologizing in the Caribbean requires that the context's religious diversity be engaged and that insights from other religions be explored. Processing this position through an examination of religious dynamics within the English-speaking sub-region, the prominent attempt at contextually sensitive Christianity (Caribbean Revisionist Christianity) with the associated theological orientation (Caribbean Theology) is analyzed in relation to formulations and practices from other dominant religions in the area-Afro-Caribbean Religion, Hinduism, and Islam. Epistemological analysis exposes the complexity of the religious life and a framework is proposed for inter-religious engagement. This framework engenders contextually sensitive pluralism and demands that theology be pursued in dialectical mode. The dialectical approach is then dramatized in an inter-religious dialogue on God.

David Obey has in his nearly forty years in the U.S. House of Representatives worked to bring economic and social justice to America s working families. In 2007 he assumed the chair of the Appropriations Committee and is positioned to pursue his priority concerns for affordable health care, education, environmental protection, and a foreign policy consistent with American democratic ideals. Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association"

In the West we are accustomed to think of religion as centered in the personal quest for salvation or the longing for unchanging Being. Perhaps this is why we have found it so difficult to understand the religions of Africa. These religions are oriented to very different goals: fecundity, prosperity, health, social harmony. These seemingly trivial and specific goals are not the expressions of inauthentic or undeveloped religion, as we tend to think, but of a distinctive and profound spiritual perspective from which, in fact, we may have much to learn. African religions, as this study concludes from its close examination of a number of specific African universes, are religions devoted to the sanctification and constant renewal of life. They are dedicated to Becoming rather than to Being, and seek to sustain a flourishing divine order rather than save the isolated self from it. But these religions do not comfortably express themselves in metaphysical abstractions; instead, they use a ritual idiom more effective than any philosophical disquisition. Ritual Cosmos analyzes the logic and inner meaning of such ritual structures as sacrifice and taboo, harvest festivals and rites of divine kingship, millenary movements, witchcraft, and much else. In the course of the discussion, many of the basic assumptions of the scientists and theologians who have concerned themselves with the role of religion in human society are reexamined; the distinctions often made between the sacred and the secular, or religion and magic, for example, are questioned.

The Social Context of the Mau Mau Movement in Kenya (1952-1960) explores the social aspects of the Mau Mau Movement, which have been relatively unexamined in scholarly studies of the movement. This work situates the Mau Mau in the context of "Social Movement" literature; and more importantly, blends theory and practice through the use of first-hand narrative from Muigai Kanyua, a fighter in the Mau Mau forest for at least three years. Muigai Kanyua describes the need for strong social networks, trust, faith, and determination in the community and how the Mau Mau provided this courage and perseverance. Through detailed research and Kanyua's narrative, author Kinuthia Macharia explores the social climate that united different clans and ethnic groups and sustained the Mau Mau Movement. The work also examines the role of women in the movement and combat, and the enduring relevance of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya's politics and economic development.