Download or read book Ethnography and the Closing of the Frontier 1885 1921 written by Wyatt MacGaffey and published by . This book was released on 197? with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ngoma written by John M. Janzen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-10-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ngoma, in Bantu, means drum, song, performance, and healing cult or association. A widespread form of ritual healing in Central and Southern Africa, ngoma is fully investigated here for the first time and interpreted in a contemporary context. John Janzen's daring study incorporates drumming and spirit possession into a broader, institutional profile that emphasizes the varieties of knowledge and social forms and also the common elements of "doing ngoma." Drawing on his recent field research in Kinshasa, Dar-es-Salaam, Mbabane, and Capetown, Janzen reveals how ngoma transcends national and social boundaries. Spoken and sung discourses about affliction, extended counseling, reorientation of the self or household, and the creation of networks that link the afflicted, their kin, and their healers are all central to ngoma—and familiar to Western self-help institutions as well. Students of African healing and also those interested in the comparative and historical study of medicine, religion, and music will find Ngoma a valuable and thought-provoking book.
Download or read book African Vodun written by Suzanne Preston Blier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book will be of critical importance not only to those concerned with African, African American, and Caribbean art, but also to anthropologists, scholars of the African diaspora, students of comparative religion and comparative psychology, and anyone fascinated by the traditions of vodou and vodun."--Jacket.
Download or read book Missions States and European Expansion in Africa written by Chima J. Korieh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa aims to explore the ways Christianity and colonialism acted as hegemonic or counter hegemonic forces in the making of African societies. As Western interventionist forces, Christianity and colonialism were crucial in establishing and maintaining political, cultural, and economic domination. Indeed, both elements of Africa’s encounter with the West played pivotal roles in shaping African societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume uses a wide range of perspectives to address the intersection between missions, evangelism, and colonial expansion across Africa. The contributors address several issues, including missionary collaboration with the colonizing effort of European powers; disagreements between missionaries and colonizing agents; the ways in which missionaries and colonial officials used language, imagery, and European epistemology to legitimize relations of inequality with Africans; and the ways in which both groups collaborated to transform African societies. Thus, Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa transcends the narrow boundaries that often separate the role of these two elements of European encounter to argue that missionary endeavours and official colonial actions could all be conceptualized as hegemonic institutions, in which both pursued the same civilizing mission, even if they adopted different strategies in their encounter with African societies.
Download or read book Thinking with Ngangas written by Stephan Palmié and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, a Jesuit priest and proto-ethnographer of the "New World" who compared the lives of the Iroquois to the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of spirits of the dead? Where do genomics and "ancestry projects" converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the US took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecué onto the streets of Philadelphia? Can we consider Afro-Cuban spirit possession as an extreme form of historical knowledge production? By writing about Afro-Cuban ritual in relation to Western scientific practice, and vice versa, Palmié hopes to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices, revealing the logics that bring together enchantment and experiment. Throughout, Palmié is also levelling a specific anthropological challenge: he takes issue with the much-discussed "ontological turn," especially with those thinkers who promote notions of radical alterity and utter incommensurability. Instead, Palmié suggests that radical comparison with "boundary objects" can offer something new to the ethnographic enterprise"--
Download or read book Violence and Colonial Order written by Martin Thomas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A striking new interpretation of colonial policing and political violence in three empires between the two world wars.
Download or read book Ibss Anthropology 1986 written by International Committee for Social Science Information and Documentation and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IBSS is the essential tool for librarians, university departments, research institutions and any public or private institution whose work requires access to up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of the social sciences.
Download or read book The Kongo Kingdom written by Koen Bostoen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and forward-thinking book that sheds new light on the origins, dynamics, and cosmopolitan culture of the Kongo Kingdom from a cross-disciplinary perspective.
Download or read book Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas written by Yolanda Covington-Ward and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent. Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne
Download or read book Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves written by Wyatt MacGaffey and published by Folkens Museum Etnografiska. This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nations Identities Cultures written by V. Y. Mudimbe and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nations, Identities, Cultures. Three apparently transparent concepts. But are they really transparent? In 1993, I decided to face them and organized a semester-long international seminar that focused on these concepts and their relation to exile, to the ethnicization of the political, and to the recess of the social in our contemporary world.
Download or read book Kongo Political Culture written by Wyatt MacGaffey and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lutete devoted much of his attention to aspects of Kongo ritual and religious belief, including minkisi and the rituals for the installation of chiefs. The original text of what he had to say about chiefship is printed, with translation notes. The work of other informants is also used."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Gesture and Power written by Yolanda Covington-Ward and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the Lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality are critical in mobilizing social and political action. Conceiving of the body as the center of analysis, a catalyst for social action, and as a conduit for the social construction of reality, Covington-Ward focuses on specific flash points in the last ninety years of Congo's troubled history, when embodied performance was used to stake political claims, foster dissent, and enforce power. In the 1920s Simon Kimbangu started a Christian prophetic movement based on spirit-induced trembling, which swept through the Lower Congo, subverting Belgian colonial authority. Following independence, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko required citizens to dance and sing nationalist songs daily as a means of maintaining political control. More recently, embodied performance has again stoked reform, as nationalist groups such as Bundu dia Kongo advocate for a return to precolonial religious practices and non-Western gestures such as traditional greetings. In exploring these embodied expressions of Congolese agency, Covington-Ward provides a framework for understanding how embodied practices transmit social values, identities, and cultural history throughout Africa and the diaspora.
Download or read book Science and society in southern Africa written by Saul Dubow and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, dealing with case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Mauritius, examines the relationship between scientific claims and practices, and the exercise of colonial power. It challenges conventional views that portray science as a detached mode of reasoning with the capacity to confer benefits in a more or less even-handed manner. That science has the potential to further the collective good is not fundamentally at issue, but science can also be seen as complicit in processes of colonial domination. Not only did science assist in bolstering aspects of colonial power and exploitation, it also possessed a significant ideological component: it offered a means of legitimating colonial authority by counter-poising Western rationality to native superstition and it served to enhance the self-image of colonial or settler elites in important respects. This innovative volume ranges broadly through topics such as statistics, medicine, eugenics, agriculture, entomology and botany.
Download or read book Astonishment and Power written by National Museum of African Art (U.S.) and published by Smithsonian Books (DC). This book was released on 1993 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bringing together the minkisi tradition of the Kongo peoples of Central Africa and the art of Renée Stout, "Atonishment & Power" explores a complex African visual tradition and its resonance in the work of a contemporary African-American woman artist. Minkisi, as described by Wyatt MacGaffey, are figures or operative complexes made from natural and man-made materials are intended as containers for powerful medicines. Often visually impressive, minkisi are invoked to accomplish various purposes, both to heal and to harm. In discussing minkisi, MacGaffey includes numerous early-20th-century commentaries written by young Kongo men. As Michael Harris reveals, the art of Renée Stout incorporates the forms and conceptual qualities of Kongo minkisi. The inspiration for her work derives from her personal memories and her deep interest in minkisi and African beliefs. Like minkisi, Stout's work sits at a crossroads--of the sacred and the secular, the West and Africa. Both the Kongo people and Renée Stout are masters at creating works of astonishment and power, invocation and art."--Back cover.
Download or read book Southeastern Archaeology written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spirits and Letters written by Thomas G. Kirsch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of religion have a tendency to conceptualise 'the Spirit' and 'the Letter' as mutually exclusive and intrinsically antagonistic. However, the history of religions abounds in cases where charismatic leaders deliberately refer to and make use of writings. This book challenges prevailing scholarly notions of the relationship between 'charisma' and 'institution' by analysing reading and writing practices in contemporary Christianity. Taking up the continuing anthropological interest in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, and representing the first book-length treatment of literacy practices among African Christians, this volume explores how church leaders in Zambia refer to the Bible and other religious literature, and how they organise a church bureaucracy in the Pentecostal-charismatic mode. Thus, by examining social processes and conflicts that revolve around the conjunction of Pentecostal-charismatic and literacy practices in Africa, Spirits and Letters reconsiders influential conceptual dichotomies in the social sciences and the humanities and is therefore of interest not only to anthropologists but also to scholars working in the fields of African studies, religious studies, and the sociology of religion.
