Download or read book When Animals Sing and Spirits Dance written by Claude Boucher and published by Anchor Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Animals Sing and Spirits Dance is an introduction to the diversity and drama that is the gule wamkulu, the 'great dance, ' of the Chewa people of Malawi. Covering 200 characters bedecked in mask and costume or woven structure, the book reveals not only the physical variety of the characters but also analyzes their songs, dances, and often codified messages that are delivered through word and action. It is through the dancers of the gule wamkulu that the ancestors communicate with the living and give instructions on how to abide by the code of moral conduct, the mwambo. It is also through the great dance that we can glean intimate insight into the values and worldview of the Chewa. Illustrated throughout with color photographs and original artwork, When Animals Sing and Spirits Dance is a lively interpretation of the great dance, told very much in the voice of the Chewa themselves. The songs are interpreted in both Chichewa and English, with appropriate recognition that direct representation is often impossible. The gule wamkulu was declared a masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005. This book is a worthy entrée to the majesty, spectacle, and spirituality that is the great dance.
Download or read book When the Spirits Dance Mambo written by Marta Morena Vega and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When rock and roll was transforming American culture in the 1950s and '60s, East Harlem pulsed with the sounds of mambo and merengue. Instead of Elvis and the Beatles, Marta Moreno Vega grew up worshiping Celia Cruz, Mario Bauza, and Arsenio Rodriguez. Their music could be heard on every radio in El Barrio and from the main stage at the legendary Palladium, where every weekend working-class kids dressed in their sharpest suits and highest heels and became mambo kings and queens. Spanish Harlem was a vibrant and dynamic world, but it was also a place of constant change, where the traditions of Puerto Rican parents clashed with their children's American ideals. A precocious little girl with wildly curly hair, Marta was the baby of the family and the favorite of her elderly abuela, who lived in the apartment down the hall. Abuela Luisa was the spiritual center of the family, an espiritista who smoked cigars and honored the Afro-Caribbean deities who had always protected their family. But it was Marta's brother, Chachito, who taught her the latest dance steps and called her from the pay phone at the Palladium at night so she could listen, huddled beneath the bedcovers, to the seductive rhythms of Tito Puente and his orchestra. In this luminous and lively memoir, Marta Moreno Vega calls forth the spirit of Puerto Rican New York and the music, mysticism, and traditions of a remarkable and quintessentially American childhood.
Download or read book The Spirit s Dance in Africa written by Esther A. Dagan and published by Westmount, Que. : Galerie Amrad African Arts Publications. This book was released on 1997 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dancing Wisdom written by Yvonne Daniel and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landmark interdisciplinary study of religious systems through their dance performances
Download or read book Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance written by Jill Flanders Crosby and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using storytelling and performance to explore shared religious expression across continents Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the transatlantic slave trade. The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities: Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at each fieldsite, the authors not only identify shared attributes in religious expression across continents, but also reveal lasting emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with insights gained from sensorial experience. Including reflections on the making of an art installation based on this research project, the volume challenges readers to imagine the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists and artists with relevance to any discipline. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Download or read book Spirit s in Black Religion written by Kurt Buhring and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Kurt Buhring explores concepts of spirit(s) within various Black religions as a means to make a constructive theological contribution to contemporary Black theology in regard to ideas of the Holy Spirit, or pneumatology. He argues that there are rich resources within African and African-based religions to develop a more robust notion of the Holy Spirit for contemporary Black liberation theology. In so doing, Buhring offers a pneumatology that understands divine power and presence within humanity and through human action. The theology offered maintains the fundamental claim that God acts as liberator of the oppressed, while also calling for greater human responsibility and capability for bringing about liberation.
Download or read book Way of the Bushman written by Bradford Keeney and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive presentation of the core teachings of the Kalahari Bushmen as told by the Tribal Elders • Reveals how the Bushmen are able to receive direct transmissions of God’s love for healing and spiritual transformation • Explores tribal legends and teaching tales, the importance of dreams and animals, and the origins of their dances, rituals, and ceremonies Step into the imaginative realm of one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, the Kalahari Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Translated by Beesa Boo, a Bushman, and interspersed with detailed commentary from Bradford and Hillary Keeney, this book presents the core teachings of the Kalahari Bushmen as told by the tribal elders themselves. Decades in the making, it constitutes the first comprehensive work on the world’s oldest tradition of healing and spiritual experience. Told in their own words, these teachings reveal how the Bushmen are able to receive direct transmissions of God’s love in the form of the universal life force, n/om. The individuals who are filled with this force describe it as an awakened, energized feeling of love that inspires a spontaneous and heightened ecstatic awareness that opens mystical perception. Having your heart transfixed by this force enables true healing and spiritual growth to occur. Experiencing the force in your entire being, through a vision of “God’s egg”, awakens deep spiritual wisdom and extraordinary healing gifts. Those who “own the egg” are blessed with the ability to have direct communication with the Divine, a “rope to God,” and can communicate with others for all “ropes” are connected. Conveying the deep love that is the dominant emotion of Bushman spirituality, the book explores tribal legends and teaching tales, the importance of dreams and encounters with animals, the origins of their dances, such as the giraffe dance, and specific rituals and ceremonies, including puberty rites for boys and girls. “As the elder teachers of the Ju’/hoan Bushman (San) people, we hold the most enduring traditional wisdom concerning healing and spiritual experience. This book is a testimony of our ecstatic ways. We happily share our basic teachings about spirituality and healing with those whose hearts are sincerely open.”
Download or read book Ring Shout Wheel About written by Katrina Dyonne Thompson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved. As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion. Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.
Download or read book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters written by Jason Stearns and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "meticulously researched and comprehensive" (Financial Times) history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.
Download or read book African Mythology written by Stuart A. Kallen and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume looks at some of the popular myths of Africa and discusses their role in the culture and the values they reflect. The book also touches on how hip-hop music has its roots in African mythology. Readers will learn about creation myths, and the role of spirits and magic in African mythology and lore.
Download or read book Some Spirits Heal Others Only Dance written by Roy Willis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where does 'the self' in 'myself' begin and end? And what do ideas of 'spirit' tell us about the nature of human selfhood? To investigate these poorly understood matters, veteran anthropologist, neo-shaman and paranormal healer Roy Willis spent five months in a remote part of northern Zambia exploring human consciousness in a fascinating and sometimes terrifying series of adventures. This absorbing book tells the story of Willis' and his three local colleagues' quest, as they participate in and film rituals of ecstatic union with nature spirits and talk in depth with experts in managing the awesome powers of a world beyond the ordinary. The narrative follows the research team's day-to-day involvement with rituals of spirit revelation, healing, and exorcism, their encounters with the evil powers of sorcery, and the sometimes troubled relations between team members. The African healers in this book emerge both as exceptional individuals and as pioneering explorers of consciousness. Their experience is surprisingly congruent with our present sense of multiple and shifting selfhoods in the age of global electronic communication.
Download or read book African Sculpture Speaks written by Ladislas Segy and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PABLO PICASSO: “...when the form is realized, it is there to live its own life.” HENRY MOORE: “The sculpture which moves me most is full-blooded and self-supporting, fully in the round; giving out something of an energy and power of great mountains, it has a life of its own independent of the object it represents.” African Art Speaks, the first full appraisal of African art published in the United States, describes and illustrates the sculpted works of more than 150 West African tribes. Ladislas Segy approaches African art from several different but interrelated perspectives, considering the sculptures first as products of a distinct African culture, then as high-quality works of art. Seeking to bring the African carver’s work within the scope of the Western observer, Segy stresses the need for appraising African art within in its own context, suspending established procedures for art appreciation and viewing the object as it actually is, not as we think it is or should be. Bringing to bear the disciplines of aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, and phenomenology, Segy shows how the deep-seated magico-religious beliefs of the tribal carver creates such powerful emotional tension in his work that the viewer can recapture this emotion and identify it as part of his own experience. This present edition is the Third Printing, originally published in 1961, and provides a systematic Style Guide, analyzing the characteristic features of the different styles of tribal sculpture. A special chapter for the collector tells how to buy and care for African art. Segy also discusses the styles of the main sculpture-producing tribes in East and South Africa. Included are maps, a bibliography and a list of illustrations. “While much has been written about African sculpture within recent years, Mr. Segy’s book is undoubtedly among the finest published in this country.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book ECHOES OF ANCIENT AFRICAN VALUES written by Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D., F.A.C.S. and published by Author House. This book was released on 2005-07-18 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Africans, perhaps around 5500 BC, established a tradition based upon truth, goodness, beauty, and other immaterial and intangible aspects of things of worth. Believing all of God’s creations were forever linked, they focused on having good relations with and behaviors toward fellow human beings and with nature – both for the purpose of reaching a heaven afterlife. Out of these concepts arose the sense of community, including the practice of no person being left behind. Echoes of Ancient African Values discusses who Ancient Africans were as a people; their genius and creative ways of thinking; their philosophical and spiritual foundations; and their world shaping achievements. Unfortunately, peoples throughout the world have failed to realize or acknowledge the fact that Ancient Africans have produced the most brilliance civilization and culture the world has ever known. This applies whether the measure is by significance, greatness, or numbers. The fashioning of such brilliance inside high morals not only transcended space and time but also designed sublime echoes. A major premise of this book is that these echoes were extremely instrumental in enabling Ancient African slaves to survive their hellish situation as well as having ongoingly contributed to the recovery of Black Americans from the effects of slavery. Numerous examples are given. Otherwise, what is stressed to all peoples in the world is that Ancient African Values contain workable answers for solving every type of problem concerning humanity.
Download or read book Praising His Name in the Dance written by Kenneth Anthony Lum and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the phenomemon of spirit possession in the Spiritual Baptist Faith and Orisha Work of the West Indies, examining the similarities and interactions between the different religions of differing populations.
Download or read book Flash of the Spirit written by Robert Farris Thompson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark book shows how five African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River—have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.
Download or read book Introduction to African Religion written by John S. Mbiti and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his widely acclaimed survey, John Mbiti sheds light on the survival and prosperity of African Religion in different historical, geographical, sociological, cultural, and physical environments. He presents a constellation of African worldviews, beliefs in God, use of symbols, valued traditions, and practices that have taken root with African peoples throughout the vast continent. Mbiti’s accessible writing style sympathetically portrays how African Religion manifests itself in ritual, festival, healing, the human life cycle, and interplay with the mystical and invisible world. The account embraces foundational traditions, while touching on elements that spawn transitions, including migration, the spread of Christianity and Islam, political-economic development, and modern communication. This popular introduction leaves readers with informed knowledge of the riches of African heritage.
Download or read book African Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry written by Ras Michael Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.
