This innovative study explores how interpretations of religious art change when it is moved into a secular context.

For review see: Joseph M. Murphy, in HAHR : The Hispanic American Historical Review, 78, 3 (August 1998); p. 495-496.

Inalienable Possessions tests anthropology's traditional assumptions about kinship, economics, power, and gender in an exciting challenge to accepted theories of reciprocity and marriage exchange. Focusing on Oceania societies from Polynesia to Papua New Guinea and including Australian Aborigine groups, Annette Weiner investigates the category of possessions that must not be given or, if they are circulated, must return finally to the giver. Reciprocity, she says, is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of "keeping-while-giving." The idea of keeping-while-giving places women at the heart of the political process, however much that process may vary in different societies, for women possess a wealth of their own that gives them power. Power is intimately involved in cultural reproduction, and Weiner describes the location of power in each society, showing how the degree of control over the production and distribution of cloth wealth coincides with women's rank and the development of hierarchy in the community. Other inalienable possessions, whether material objects, landed property, ancestral myths, or sacred knowledge, bestow social identity and rank as well. Calling attention to their presence in Western history, Weiner points out that her formulations are not limited to Oceania. The paradox of keeping-while-giving is a concept certain to influence future developments in ethnography and the theoretical study of gender and exchange.

In our increasingly secular world, what good are the church’s sacred practices, and why do they even matter anymore? With insight, wit, and unsparing honesty, Benjamin Dueholm in this book explores the crucial place and power of Christian practices in ordinary, everyday life. Drawing on modern-day realities and ancient roots, firsthand experience and centuries of history, pop culture and high theology, Dueholm offers a visionary account of the critical, radical, life-affirming role that seven “sacred signposts” play in today’s post-Christian world.

Repatriation of human remains has become a key international heritage concern. This extensive collection of papers provides a survey of the current state of repatriation in terms of policy, practice and theory.

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.

The first of its kind, this seminal work charts the unlikely theological quest for Christian holiness by founder Charles Harrison Mason and the Wesleyan-Holiness Pentecostal tradition known as the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. Through fresh research and critical analysis, this book challenges existing assumptions by scholars and reveals how little-known black renewal movements informed Mason’s theological understanding and that of the movement. The rich theological resources of this historically marginalized movement are not primarily accessible in academic journals, position papers, or theological treatises. Instead, these resources function as “lived religion,” where the theological presuppositions are embedded in primitive worship, ecstatic religious practices, and countercultural distinctives. By unpacking the “lived religion” of this self-professed sanctified church, this book explores how sanctification and the practice of Christian holiness shaped and empowered the COGIC, its people, and its practices in creative and profound ways—resulting in a radical holiness ethic that emerged from an inexhaustible exilic vitality with personal, social, and political implications. Given the challenge of Christian nationalism today, this book provides a framework that informs Christian identity and faithful living for the broader Christian community.