Download or read book Traveling Spirits written by Gertrud Hüwelmeier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalisation has provided tools for religious actors and organisations to thrive in migrant communities, as fluid transnational networks help project messages across borders and from a local to a global audience. This volume addresses several under-examined questions of religious practices within migrant communities and transnational religious networks.

Download or read book Mattering the Invisible written by Diana Espírito Santo and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Alive with Spirits written by Althaea Sebastiani and published by Weiser Books. This book was released on 2024-05-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderful and moving introduction to animism, as well as a fantastic introduction to witchcraft; even the seasoned practitioner will gain so much from reading Sebastiani’s offering.” —Mhara Starling, author of Welsh Witchcraft: A Guide to the Spirits, Lore, and Magic of Wales At the root of most spiritual traditions is the aspiration to realize one’s birthright: an intimate connection with the Land and the spiritual energies that inhabit it. This connection with the Land and its spirits is perhaps nowhere more powerfully felt than in the various traditions of Paganism and witchcraft. But the conditions of modern society strain that relationship, leaving us feeling separated from our craft and unable to feel that deep and vital connection. Discover a path to fully embrace a world filled with spirits, communion with the Land, and a greater sense of belonging in the world—a worldview known as animism. Explore animism in a hands-on way that teaches through firsthand direct experiences. Through embodied exercises based in wholeness, you’ll learn to see the world more fully for what it is and to better understand your place in it. ​Learn the three general types of local spirits Explore the importance of relationships and what it means to be in community Uncover the way that the wholeness of the world is reflected in the wholeness of the self Begin to nurture right relationships with your local spirits Alive with Spirits provides you with a firm foundation from which to transform your witchcraft practice, rooting it into the Land and in strong, respectful relationships with the spirits around you.

Download or read book Engaging the Spirit World written by Kirsten W. Endres and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many parts of the contemporary world, spirit beliefs and practices have taken on a pivotal role in addressing the discontinuities and uncertainties of modern life. The myriad ways in which devotees engage the spirit world show the tremendous creative potential of these practices and their innate adaptability to changing times and circumstances. Through in-depth anthropological case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, the contributors to this book investigate the role and impact of different social, political, and economic dynamics in the reconfiguration of local spirit worlds in modern Southeast Asia. Their findings contribute to the re-enchantment debate by revealing that the “spirited modernities” that have emerged in the process not only embody a distinct feature of the contemporary moment, but also invite a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity itself.

Download or read book Spirits without Borders written by K. Fjelstad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirits without Borders is an ethnographic study of the transnational and multicultural expansion of Vietnam's Mother Goddess Religion and its spirit possession ritual. The work explores how and why the ritual spread from Vietnam to the US and back again and the impact of ritual transnationalism in both countries.

Download or read book Having the Spirit of Christ written by Giovanni B. Bazzana and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative reinterpretation of accounts of spirit possession and exorcism in early Christianity The earliest Christian writings are filled with stories of possession and exorcism, which were crucial for the activity of the historical Jesus and for the practice of the earliest groups of his followers. Most critical scholarship, however, regularly marginalizes these topics or discards them altogether in reconstructing early Christian history. This innovative book approaches the study of possession from a different methodological angle by using a comparative lens that includes contemporary ethnographies of possession cross-culturally. Possession, besides being a harmful event that should be exorcized, can also have a positive role in many cultures. Often it helps individuals and groups to reflect on and reshape their identity, to plan their moral actions, and to remember in a most vivid way their past. When read in light of these materials, these ancient documents reveal the religious, cultural, and social meaning that the experience of possession had for the early Christ groups.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia written by Bryan S. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

Download or read book Spirits of Blood Spirits of Breath written by Barbara Alice Mann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin. Both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth" but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Alice Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to their earliest versions and sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Indigenous culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the purportedly lost, and often caricatured, world of Indigenous American thought.

Download or read book Cosmopolitan Sociability written by Tsypylma Darieva and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book approaches the concept of cosmopolitan sociability as a cultural or territorial rootedness that facilitates a simultaneous openness to shared human emotions, experiences, and aspirations. Cosmopolitan Sociability critiques definitions of cosmopolitanism as a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality that arise from contemporary experiences of mobility and globalization. Challenging these assumptions, the book explores the degree to which a 'cosmopolitan dimension' can be practised within particular religious communities, diasporic ties, or gendered migrant identities in different parts of the world. A wide variety of expert contributors offer rich ethnographic insights into the interplay of social interactions and cosmopolitan sociability. In this way the book contributes significantly to ethnic and migration studies, global anthropology, social theory, and religious and cultural studies. Cosmopolitan Sociability was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions written by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world. In this very small geographic space one encounters global religions as well as religious practices that are indigenous to the region. This volume provides an overview of Caribbean religions, one that respects the diversity of the religious traditions and the national particularity of the region. It addresses the prominent religious traditions in the Caribbean, with a focus on multiple geographic settings, and examines a cross-section of themes that impact the region broadly and the academic study of Caribbean religion.

Download or read book Invisible Hosts written by Elizabeth Schleber Lowry and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a rhetorical analysis of female spirit medium's autobiographies in the historical and social contexts of Victorian era America. Invisible Hosts explores how the central tenets of Spiritualism influenced ways in which women conceived of their bodies and their civic responsibilities, arguing that Spiritualist ideologies helped to lay the foundation for the social and political advances made by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As public figures, female spirit mediums of the Victorian era were often accused of unfeminine (and therefore transgressive) behavior. A rhetorical analysis of nineteenth-century spirit mediums’ autobiographies reveals how these women convinced readers of their authenticity both as respectable women and as psychics. The author argues that these women’s autobiographies reflect an attempt to emulate feminine virtues even as their interpretation and performance of these virtues helped to transform prevailing gender stereotypes. She demonstrates that the social performance central to the production of women’s autobiography is uniquely complicated by Spiritualist ideology. Such complications reveal new information about how women represented themselves, gained agency, and renegotiated nineteenth-century gender roles. Elizabeth Schleber Lowry is Lecturer in Rhetoric and Composition at Arizona State University.

Download or read book Trance Mediums and New Media written by Anja Dreschke and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media? Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?

Download or read book The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions explores the global spread of religions originating in Brazil, a country that has emerged as a major pole of religious innovation and production. Through ethnographically-rich case studies throughout the world, ranging from the Americas (Canada, the U.S., Peru, and Argentina) and Europe (the U.K., Portugal, and the Netherlands) to Asia (Japan) and Oceania (Australia), the book examines the conditions, actors, and media that have made possible the worldwide construction, circulation, and consumption of Brazilian religious identities, practices, and lifestyles, including those connected with indigenized forms of Pentecostalism and Catholicism, African-based religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda, as well as diverse expressions of New Age Spiritism and Ayahuasca-centered neo-shamanism like Vale do Amanhecer and Santo Daime. Contributors include Ushi Arakaki, Dario Paulo Barrera Rivera, Brenda Carranza, Anthony D'Andrea, Sara Delamont, Alejandro Frigerio, Alberto Groisman, Annick Hernandez, Clara Mafra, Cecília Mariz, Deirdre Meintel, Carmen Rial, Cristina Rocha, Camila Sampaio, Clara Saraiva, Olivia Sheringham, Neil Stephens, José Claúdio Souza Alves, Claudia Swatowiski, and Manuel A. Vásquez.

Download or read book Passages and Afterworlds written by Maarit Forde and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen

Download or read book A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism written by Ato Quayson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 811 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism offers a ground-breaking combined discussion of the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism. Newly commissioned essays by leading scholars provide interdisciplinary perspectives that link together the concepts in new and important ways. A wide-ranging collection which reviews the most significant developments and provides valuable insights into current key debates in transnational and diaspora studies Contains newly commissioned essays by leading scholars, which will both influence the field, and stimulate further insight and discussion in the future Provides interdisciplinary perspectives on diaspora and transnationalism which link the two concepts in new and important ways Combines theoretical discussion with specific examples and case studies

Download or read book Soul Whisperer written by Annette Rugolo and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her groundbreaking book, Soul Whisperer: Releasing Lost Souls, author Annette Rugolo presents a new perspective into the world of spirits, past lives, and soul retrieval. Through the sharing of her real-life experiences, she offers a glimpse into a world that exists around us, which few are open and willing to see. She presents an introduction to spirits of the deceased that remain in this world, how we encounter them, and how to help free them from being stuck here. Through her stories, Rugolo gives a clear sense of what these encounters are like, what we can learn from them, and how to recognize and deal with them if they happen. She also demonstrates the value of soul retrievals, freeing spirits, understanding karmic history, and other related subjects. Rugolos purpose and passion in life has been to take others from a place of fear to one of understanding and compassion for the souls trapped among us. In Soul Whisperer, she guides you to embrace both yourself and others as a soul who exists beyond the physical construct of our reality.

Download or read book The Mediation of the Spirit written by Mark J. Cartledge and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might a distinctively Pentecostal and charismatic theological perspective inform and enrich the discourse of academic practical theology? In order to address that question, Mark Cartledge in this book probes the relationship between Scripture, experience, and the Holy Spirit by means of the concept of mediation -- that is, how the divine is experienced in the world. An expert in both Pentecostal theology and practical theology, Cartledge offers a unique intervention into practical theology through the lens of the Holy Spirit. He presents an original reading of Pentecost and the Spirit-reception texts in the book of Acts and engages with current literature in both Pentecostal studies and practical theology. Further, Cartledge places his whole discussion within a broader Protestant theological framework, and he interrogates an existing congregational study to provide a real-life example of theological intervention.