Articulate Necrographies
Title | Articulate Necrographies PDF eBook |
Author | Anastasios Panagiotopoulos |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Total Pages | 272 |
Release | 2019-07-16 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1789203058 |
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.
Postmortal Society
Title | Postmortal Society PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Hviid Jacobsen |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | 257 |
Release | 2017-03-31 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1317077237 |
Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were. Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to ‘cheat’ death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs that address the terror of death in other areas of life, the ‘immortalisation’ of celebrities, the veneration of the dead in virtual worlds, symbolic immortality through work, the implications of understanding ‘immortality’ in chemical-neuronal terms, and the apparent paradox of our greater reverence for the dead in increasingly secular, capitalist societies. A fascinating collection of studies that explore humanity’s attempts to deal with its own mortality in the modern age, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in death and dying.
Mattering the Invisible
Title | Mattering the Invisible PDF eBook |
Author | Diana Espírito Santo |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Total Pages | 274 |
Release | 2021-05-14 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1800730675 |
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.
Other Worlds, Other Bodies
Title | Other Worlds, Other Bodies PDF eBook |
Author | Emily Pierini |
Publisher | Berghahn Books |
Total Pages | 293 |
Release | 2023-02-10 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1800738471 |
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.
South Asian Gothic
Title | South Asian Gothic PDF eBook |
Author | Katarzyna Ancuta |
Publisher | University of Wales Press |
Total Pages | 269 |
Release | 2021-11-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1786838028 |
South Asian Gothic engages key debates in the study of an area that is seriously overlooked within the field of Gothic studies. It widens and deepens the critical analysis of the gothic themes and conventions in the texts produced outside the Anglo-American context usually associated with gothic. This book pays attention to various political, historical and aesthetical configurations in South Asia and is the first attempt to theorise South Asia and its Gothic production as a common cultural landscape. Therefore, the volume will be relevant to scholars and students in the field of South Asian studies. The volume investigates a wide range of different cultural media and, therefore, is also relevant to media studies and related disciplines including literary criticism, film studies, postcolonial studies, and world cinema studies.
Experiencing the Beyond
Title | Experiencing the Beyond PDF eBook |
Author | Gert Melville |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | 279 |
Release | 2017-11-20 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 3110530775 |
Experiencing the dimension that lies beyond our empirical grasp of the world has always been a challenge for human beings, for it can expose the limitations of our agency. Such experience, while potentially terrifying, can also furnish a basis for religious faith or hope of a better future. The intercultural essays in this volume analyze ways of dealing with the beyond, including magic, religion, myth, and all-promising utopias.
The Dynamic Cosmos
Title | The Dynamic Cosmos PDF eBook |
Author | Diana Espírito Santo |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | 241 |
Release | 2022-05-19 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1350299340 |
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.