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’. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.

This volume is the first of its kind in focusing on the temporalities of museum work. Wayne Modest, Peter Pels and contributors analyze concerns around the function of museums in relation to time, inquiring whether museums can ever be successful in arresting time or setting themselves outside of time. The chapters look at how museums require a stretching and setting aside of time to exist, as well as how museum practice changes and adapts through time and what this means for a theory of museum work. Moving on from ideas that originate in Enlightenment thought of how museums present a survey of the classifiable universe, Modest and Pels indicate that something in the global exhibitionary complex has changed. This volume therefore puts together a theory and practice of museums that addresses the question of why people need to make the counterfactural effort to render identities and meanings permanent. Divided into five parts, the first part surveys and critiques implicit temporal assumptions and outlines emergent and future temporalities of museum practice. The second part looks in detail at the need for empirical studies of the historical and present-day approach to time, and modernist assumptions in relation to museums today. The third part looks at heterochronia and moves beyond modernist assumptions to consider the negotiation of 'other times', expanding the Western Eurocentric understanding that has dominated studies to date. The fourth part looks at the empirical and conceptual study of the materiality of the museum and as well as the sensory intimacy of museums. Finally the fifth part looks to whether and how museum materials can convey futures, and whose futures are being portrayed.This path-breaking collection centralizes and develops current concerns in critical museology and is a must-read for students of museum studies, anthropology, heritage studies, material culture and ethnography.

Christian missions in Africa are commonly seen as a blatant example of ethnocentrism. This stereotype partly persists because the day-today interaction between missionaries and Africans has so rarely been studied. This book shows how Africans and missionaries co-produced a Catholic Church in the Uluguru mountains of eastern Tanzania in the late colonial period, and thereby adapted each others' routines in the fields of initiation, education, magic, and religion in Africa by showing how the presence of the mission resulted in a rift between spiritual and worldly magic, and in the underdevelopment of the capacity of Waluguru to mange their own practices of revelation.

Anthropologists who talk about ethics generally mean the code of practice drafted by a professional association for implementation by its members. As this book convincingly shows, such a conception is far too narrow. A more radical approach is to recognize that moral judgments are made at every juncture of scientific practice and they require a negotiation of responsibility with all stakeholders in the research enterprise.Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes - from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.This important book is an essential guide for all anthropologists who wish to be active contributors to the discussion on ethics and the ethical practice of their profession.

"Magic and Modernity" is the first book to explore comparatively how magic--usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern--is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social sciences have studied how modern culture and institutions incorporated and even produced magic.
This book is the first to adopt a comparative approach to the study of magic as something that has a place in modernity, and that helped to constitute modern society at local and global levels. The essays in this collection contribute to recent discussions in anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and sociology that increasingly question the extent to which modern self-conceptions are accurate reflections of a state of affairs in the world rather than cultural interventions.

Anthropologists who talk about ethics generally mean the code of practice drafted by a professional association for implementation by its members. As this book convincingly shows, such a conception is far too narrow. A more radical approach is to recognize that moral judgments are made at every juncture of scientific practice and they require a negotiation of responsibility with all stakeholders in the research enterprise.Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes - from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.This important book is an essential guide for all anthropologists who wish to be active contributors to the discussion on ethics and the ethical practice of their profession.

Magic and Modernity is the first book to explore comparatively how magic-usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern-is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social sciences have studied how modern culture and institutions incorporated and even produced magic. This book is the first to adopt a comparative approach to the study of magic as something that has a place in modernity, and that helped to constitute modern society at local and global levels. The essays in this collection contribute to recent discussions in anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and sociology that increasingly question the extent to which modern self-conceptions are accurate reflections of a state of affairs in the world rather than cultural interventions.