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Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to
provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting
and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving
the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One
of these is an attention to hauntings, ghosts, and absences that go
with the collective experience of loss and disappearance. People
memorialize the dead and their stories in myriad ways. But what
about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book
explores the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and
ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal
machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a
look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses - themselves imbued
with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations -
and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the
voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This
fascinating volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines,
including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and
scholars of technology and new media.
Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds,
this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral
energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into
existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse
has always been central to the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this
book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more
ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than
we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series
of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible
arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal
intertwines with modern technology.
When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of
healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the
existence of "other" worlds that may intersect with the so-called
"material" or "physical" worlds. 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.
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death,
Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the
dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional
anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death
"speaks" from those where death is "silent" - the latter is deemed
"scientific" and the former "religious" or "magical". 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, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences
this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.
Despite its powerful influence on Cuban culture, Espiritismo has
often been overlooked by scholars. Developing the Dead is the first
in-depth exploration of contemporary Espiritismo in Cuba. Based on
extensive fieldwork among religious practitioners and their clients
in Havana, this book makes the surprising claim that Spiritist
practices are fundamentally a project of developing the self. When
mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead,
argues Diana Espirito Santo, they develop, learn, sense, dream, and
connect to multiple spirits (muertos), expanding the borders of the
self. This understanding of selfhood is radically different
fromEnlightenment ideas of an autonomous, bounded self and holds
fascinating implications for prophecy, healing, and
self-consciousness. Developing the Dead shows how Espiritismo's
self-making process permeates all aspects of life, not only for its
own practitioners but also for those of other Afro-Cuban religions.
Afro-Cuban religiosity is likely to bring to mind beliefs and
practices with a visibly 'African' flavour - music, dance, spirit
possession, sacrifices and ritual language that have undergone a
transformation, on Cuban soil, under a strong Spanish and Catholic
influence. Much anthropological work has analysed Afro-Cuban
religion's 'syncretic' character in the light of these European
influences, taking as a given that each tradition is relatively
independent, and focusing on well-documented origins in specific
socio-historical environments. In this context, understandings of
religious innovation based on charismatic leaders have resulted in
a top down approach. However, this volume argues that there are
alternatives to cult-centred accounts, by looking at the
relationships between Afro-Cuban traditions, and indeed going
beyond 'traditions' to place the focus on creativity as an embedded
logic in everyday religious practice. From this forward-looking
perspective, ritual engagement is no longer a means of recreating
pre-existing universes but rather of generating, as well as
participating in, an ever-emerging cosmos. Traditions are not
perceived as given doctrines or mental constructs but as perceptual
habits and potencies beyond questions of spirit or matter, mind or
body. Offering a fresh, improvisatory ethnographic vision, this
book recasts the Afro-Cuban religious complex in the terms of the
experts and adepts who creatively sustain it and responds to the
significant fact, often overlooked or ignored, that many Cubans
engage with more than one tradition without any sense of conflict.
Amidst the cacophony of calls to 'creativity' and 'innovation' as
cultural commodities, here's a remarkable collection about the
power of creation as a condition of human existence, rather than
just its outcome. If you want to see what the world might be like
without the very distinction between creator and creation - or, for
that matter, between human beings and the worlds they inhabit -
then look at Afro-Cuban religious traditions, the editors tell us.
The sheer vivacity of the material is astounding, and suggests
altogether new ways to think about not just the classic concerns of
Caribbean anthropology with syncretism and cultural borrowings, but
also basic categories of anthropological thinking such as ritual,
technology, myth and cosmology. Martin Holbraad, Professor of
Social Anthropology, University College London Beyond Tradition,
Beyond Invention shows how far scholarship has transcended the
verificationist searches for origins, reification of traditions as
bounded entities, and sterile quests for typological coherence
that, for too long, dominated the anthropology of Afro-Caribbean
ritual praxis. The contributions not only vividly exemplify how
mechanistic conceptions of tradition and cultural change, or
pseudo-problems such as syncretism, can be overcome by ethnographic
means. They also point towards novel theories of the ever emergent,
hence thoroughly historical, nature of worlds shared by humans,
deities, and spirits. This book ought to inspire all
anthropologists working on complex and 'inventive' ritual
traditions. Stephan Palmie, Professor of Anthropology, The
University of Chicago"
This edited volume applies the analytic notions of paradox and play
to the ethnographic manifestation of spirits, angels, and demons in
different locations around the world. The 10 case studies
conceptualize the co-presence of humans and entities with terms
that do not exclude spiritual reasoning on the one hand, and social
explanations on the other. Through in-depth descriptions of
localized possession cosmologies, the different chapters
collectively propose path-breaking methodological directions in
this field, which incorporate ethnographic theories of simultaneity
into anthropological theories of religion, kinship, and ritual.
Framed by an introduction written by the editors and an afterword
by Michael Lambek, a leading authority in possessions studies, the
volume contains cutting edge analyses that will provide readers
with new tools to evaluate previously unstudied aspects of spirit
possession; all of which stem from the fantastic forms of human
movement that accompany the phenomenality of paradoxes in mundane
reality.
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers
of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have
understood them as representations of something else - symbols that
articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of
art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By
stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world,
the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse
environment of entities - with their own histories, motivations,
and social interactions - providing a new understanding of spirits
not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual
globe - the globe of nonthings - in essays on topics ranging from
the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the "people of the
streets" in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain.
Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the
significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network
of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological
ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its
interactions with the tangible one.
The analysis of religion has often placed an emphasis on beliefs
and ideologies, prioritizing these elements over those of the
material world. Through the ethnographic analysis of a variety of
contemporary religious practices, Making Spirits questions the
presumed separation of spirit and matter, and sheds light on the
dynamics between spiritual and material domains. By examining the
cultural contexts in which material culture is central to the
creation and experience of religion and belief, this volume
analyses the different ways in which the concepts of the material
and spiritual worlds intersect, interact and inform each other in
the reproduction of religious rites. Using examples such as spirit
mediums, fetishes and ritual objects across a variety of cultures
such as Latin America, Japan and Central Africa, Nico Tassi and
Diana Espirito Santo offer insights that challenge accepted
categories in the study of religion, making this book important for
scholars of comparative religion, anthropology and sociology.
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