Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond explores ghost movies, one of the most popular film genres in East and Southeast Asia, by focusing on movie narratives, the cultural contexts of their origins and audience reception. In the middle of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, ghost movies became major box office hits. The emergence of the phenomenally popular "J-Horror" genre inspired similar ghost movie productions in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Ghost movies are embedded and reflected in national as well as transnational cultures and politics, in narrative traditions, in the social worlds of the audience, and in the perceptual experience of each individual. They reflect upon the identity crises and traumas of the living as well as of the dead, and they unfold affection and attraction in the border zone between amusement and thrill, secular and religious worldviews. This makes the genre interesting not only for sociologists, anthropologists, media and film scholars, but also for scholars of religion.

Modernity is surrounded by an almost magic aura that casts a spell over people all over the world. To connect with modernity, various ways and means are used, among them magic practices and religious ideas. Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity deals with the magic in and of modernity and asks about its current significance for the dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in this area, the contributors to this wide-ranging volume demonstrate how religious concepts contribute to meeting the challenges of modernity. Against this background, religion and modernity are no longer perceived as in contradiction; rather, it is argued that a revision of the western notion of religion is required to understand the complexity of 'multiple modernities' in a globalised world.. Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity is part of the series Global Asia, published by Amsterdam University Press (AUP) in close collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

Der Ethnologe Victor W. Turner (1920-1983) gehort zu den einflussreichsten Kulturwissenschaftlern der Nachkriegszeit. Zusammen mit Clifford Geertz und Mary Douglas steht Turner fur den "interpretative turn" in den Humanwissenschaften. "Bedeutung" steht uber "Funktion," "Kultur" uber "Gesellschaft." Massgeblich inspiriert von seiner Feldforschung bei den Ndembu in Afrika richtet sich sein Blick auf Wandelprozesse, auf Konflikte und krisenhafte Bruche. Turners Symbol- und Ritualuntersuchungen ebenso wie die analytischen Konzepte "soziales Drama," "Liminalitat," "communitas" werden u.a. in Literaturwissenschaft und Soziologie diskutiert."