Download or read book Debating Witchcraft in Africa The Magritte Effect written by Didier Pclard and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2018-08-03 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the circularity of the witchcraft complex in Africa, given its performative potential, isnt the flood of anthropological publications on the topic counter-productive insofar as it feeds what it pretends to analyse, and even stigmatize? Wouldnt the social scientists be well advised not to emulate the media and the Evangelical preachers and to avoid bestowing on Africa the dubious privilege of being no more than a shadow theatre devoid of substance on the stage of which everything power, work, production, economy, the family would actually be played in the occult? In this publication, eight scholars namely: Jean-Pierre Warnier, Didier Pclard, Julien Bonhomme, Patrice Yengo, Jane Guyer, Joseph Tonda, Francis Nyamnjoh and Peter Geschiere engage in a lively and contradictory debate on witchcraft/sorcery in Africa in a controversial historical context.

Download or read book Incompleteness Mobility and Conviviality written by Francis Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to the Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 is an invitation to take incompleteness seriously in how we imagine, relate to and seek to understand a world in perpetual motion. Despite our instinct for and obsession with completeness, we are constantly reminded that the sooner one recognises and provides for incompleteness and the conviviality it inspires as the normal way of being, the better we are for it. Fluidity, compositeness and the capacity to be present in multiple places and forms simultaneously in whole or in fragments are core characteristics of reality and ontology of incompleteness. How would we frame our curiosities and conversations about processes, relationships and phenomena with an understanding of the universality of incompleteness and mobility? West and Central Africa, for example, are regions where it is commonplace to embrace and celebrate incompleteness in nature, the suprasensory, human beings, human actions, human inventions and human achievements. The lectures indicate how we could draw inspiration in this regard to inform current clamours for decolonisation and the growing ambivalence about rapid advances in digital technologies (artificial intelligence (AI) in particular), as well as with twenty-first century concerns about migrants and strangers knocking at the doors of opportunities we feel more entitled to as bona fide citizens and insiders. The lectures draw on the writings of Amos Tutuola as well as from popular ideas of personhood and agency in Africa, to make a case for sidestepped and silenced traditions of knowledge. They highlight Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with the continent’s creativity and imagination. They speak to the nimble-footed flexible-minded frontier African at the crossroads and junctions of myriad encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary claims and articulation of identities and achievements. The traditions of knowledge discussed in these lectures do not only speak to Africans, but to the world, as the philosophies explored have universal application. “The crucial anthropological question of relationality and othering is at the heart of this original and enlightening book. Nyamnjoh cautions the missionaries of decoloniality against the risk of substituting one illusion of completeness with another. For him, incompleteness is the basis of any healthy exchange. He therefore recommends embracing the universality of incompleteness in motion and taking seriously an ancestral tradition of self-extension through creative imagination in this anxious age of artificial intelligence. Forcefully argued and abundantly substantiated – with finesse and laughter that run through it – this book will be a milestone by making us rediscover the demands and the magic of fieldwork.” Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt/Main Point Sud, Bamako, Mali

Download or read book Witch Hunts written by Govind Kelkar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witch hunts are the result of gendered, cultural and socioeconomic struggles over acute structural, economic and social transformations in both the formation of gendered class societies and that of patriarchal capitalism. This book combines political economy with gender and cultural analysis to explain the articulation of cultural beliefs about women as causing harm, and struggles over patriarchy in periods of structural economic transformation. It brings in field data from India and South-East Asia and incorporates a large body of works on witch hunts across geographies and histories. Witch Hunts is a scholarly analysis of the human rights violation of women and its correction through changes in beliefs, knowledge practices and adaptation in structural transformation.

Download or read book Mambila Divination written by David Zeitlyn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison considers different kinds of explanation for different features of social organization, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism. The book will be of interest to area specialists and scholars concerned with religion, rationality, and decision-making from disciplines including anthropology, African studies, and philosophy.

Download or read book Mystical Power and Politics on the Swahili Coast written by DR NATHALIE ARNOLD. KOENINGS and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces changing visions of mystical power and authority on the island of Pemba, whose people's reputed resistance to outside rule has shaped the national narratives of both Zanzibar and Tanzania. For two centuries, Pemba, the second largest island of Zanzibar, has been known by East Africans and outsiders alike as rich in dangerous knowledge. Despite Pembans' reputation for piety and deep Islamic knowledge, uchawi- 'mystical work and power', sometimes termed 'magic', 'witchcraft', or 'sorcery' - has long featured in diverse visions of their identity and as key to worldly power. Today, as traditional methods of securing agency are called into question and new ways proliferate, the mystical world is an intensely conflicted realm where the nature of power, ethical action, and reality itself is continually reframed. This luminous ethnography follows Pemban notions of invisible and worldly power through the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the trials of multiparty democracy, the rise of Islamic revival, and intensifying neoliberalism. Through an exploration of rural imaginings of power, it argues that nations and the grammars that underwrite them are made in and by their peripheries, which give 'the centre' shape. Highlighting the intersections of mystical practices, religion, and politics-as-such on the Swahili Coast, the book contributes new perspectives to studies of the imagination, power, and religious transformation in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the larger Islamic world.

Download or read book The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch s Spell written by Kiyoshi Umeya and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell is a highly detailed ethnography about how the Jopadhola in eastern Uganda talk about, interpret and cope with death, illness and other misfortunes. The book presents a provocative discussion that critiques the idea of the revival of witchcraft in the neo-liberalised contemporary world, as represented by the 'modernity model of witchcraft', and attempts to formulate a 'spiderweb model' that connects witchcraft to contemporary society in a more complex manner. The book is a unique ethnography of the collective memory of indigenous knowledge and local historicity. The author moves the reader from curse to misfortune to fortune as he plots the notion of 'curse' as deeply embedded in the Adhola way of life. He weaves between culture, religion, state and modernity with lived experience. Did the concept of witchcraft unwittingly endear the Adhola to the Christian way of life because of the presence of the notion of 'curse' in the Bible or make them less susceptible to the vagaries of modernity compared to their neighbours? These are some of the questions that the author puts on the table in a deeply reflective manner. The phenomenon of witchcraft is given an intriguing angle that invites the reader to reexamine earlier anthropological writings on the subject among African peoples.

Download or read book The Phantom Image written by Patrick R. Crowley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.

Download or read book African Philosophy and Thought Systems written by Mawere, Munyaradzi and published by Langaa RPCIG. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The once acrimonious debate on the existence of African philosophy has come of age, yet the need to cultivate a culture of belonging is more demanding now than ever before in many African societies. The gargantuan indelible energised chicanery waves of neo-colonialism and globalisation and their sweeping effect on Africa demand more concerted action and solutions than cul-de-sac discourses and magical realism. It is in view of this realisation that this book was born. This is a vital text for understanding contextual historical trends in the development of African philosophic ideas on the continent and how Africans could possibly navigate the turbulent catadromous waters, tangled webs and chasms of destruction, and chagrin of struggles that have engrossed Africa since the dawn of slavery and colonial projects on the continent. The book aims to generate more insights and influence national, continental, and global debates in the field of philosophy. It is accessible and handy to a wider range of readers, ranging from educators and students of African philosophy, anthropology, African studies, cultural studies, and all those concerned with the further development of African philosophy and thought systems on the African continent.

Download or read book Respectable Mothers Tough Men and Good Daughters written by Salo, Elaine R. and published by Langaa RPCIG. This book was released on 2018-08-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines how men and women in Manenberg township, on Cape Town’s inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven, involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

Download or read book Ori Oke Spirituality and Social Change in Africa written by Nathanael Yaovi and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dynamic nature of Christianity has necessitated its movement from the cathedral to the mountain top. This has occasioned a proliferation of Prayer Mountains throughout Africa. In Yorubaland of southwestern Nigeria, Prayer Mountain is known as Ori-Oke. Like many communities in Africa, the Yoruba are confronted with fundamental challenges in life for which people do not rest until they find solutions. Within the praxis of Nigerian Christian lexicon Ori-Oke is synonymous with the enactment of a sacred space on a mountain top characterised by various prayer regimes, rituals, exorcism and religious practices, aimed at eliciting the help of the divine to alleviate the existential challenges of devotees. This book explores the resacralisation of space on the mountains, highlighting how humans and the divine interact in Yorubaland. It brings into conversation 35 empirically rich scholarly essays on the role of Ori-Oke to those seeking divine intervention in their lives. Today, Ori-Oke have become centres of pilgrimage as a result of the lived experiences of devotees, creating unique religious value quite distinct from the aesthetic value of these mountain tops. The spirituality of Ori-Oke is anchored on the absolute belief in God and the infusion of traditional African worldview sensibilities in religious rites and worship. Ori-Oke spirituality employs resources of Christian tradition, introduced by the formal agents of Christianity, synthesised with traditional culture, to develop a life based on the precepts of an African Christianity. The book is an intellectual discourse on Ori-Oke spirituality, reflecting its contemporary relevance in a context of religious innovation and competition.

Download or read book Women s Experimental Cinema written by Robin Blaetz and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde American women filmmakers.

Download or read book Unshared Identity written by Babajide Ololajulo and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unshared Identity employs the practice of posthumous paternity in Ilupeju-Ekiti, a Yoruba-speaking community in Nigeria, to explore endogenous African ways of being and meaning-making that are believed to have declined when the Yoruba and other groups constituting present-day Nigeria were preyed upon by European colonialism and Westernisation. However, the authors fieldwork for this book uncovered evidence of the resilience of Africas endogenous epistemologies. Drawing on a range of disciplines, from anthropology to literature, the author lays bare the hypocrisy underlying the ways in which dominant Western ideals of being and belonging are globalised or proliferated, while those that are unorthodox or non-Western (Yoruba and African in this case) are pathologised, subordinated and perceived as repugnant. At a time when the issues of decolonisation and African epistemologies are topical across the African continent, this book is a timely contribution to the potential revival of those values and practices that make Africans African.

Download or read book The Monstrous Feminine written by Barbara Creed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, T

Download or read book Beyond observation written by Paul Henley and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont. Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.

Download or read book Art of Latin America written by Marta Traba and published by Inter-American Development Bank. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marta Traba, one of Latin America's most controversial art critics, examines the works of over 1,000 artists from the first 80 years of the 20th century. This book is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in studying the evolution of Latin American art.

Download or read book Magritte s Apple written by Klaas Verplancke and published by Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man named Ren floats through the world of his dreams and imagination, fulfilling his desire to become a painter--of apples and hats, apple hats, apple-these and apple-thats. In his paintings, leaves are lips, baguettes are noses, the right side is never up, and the upside is never down. Award-winning author Klaas Verplancke mashes everyday objects and words together in ways that are guaranteed to make kids laugh and think. Ren Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), one of the world's most beloved artists, created whimsical, subversive paintings that helped launch the popularity of surrealism. His works combined words and images in novel, thought-provoking ways, and used humor and ordinary subjects to inspire viewers to question the world around them.

Download or read book Globalization and Global Citizenship written by Irene Langran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization and Global Citizenship examines the meaning and realities of global citizenship as a manifestation of recent trends in globalization. In an interdisciplinary approach, the chapters outline and analyse the most significant dimensions of global citizenship, including transnational, historical, and cultural variations in its practice; foreign and domestic policy influences; and its impact on personal identities. The contributions ask and explore questions that are of immediate relevance for today’s scholars, including: How does globalization in its current form present a new set of challenges for states, non-state actors, and individual citizens? How has globalization diminished, expanded, or complicated notions of citizenship? What rights could exist outside the context of state sovereignty? How can social accountability be imagined beyond the borders of towns, cities, or states? What forms of political representational legitimacy could be productive on the global level? When is it useful, possible or desirable for individuals to identify with global political communities? Drawing together a broad range of contributors and cutting edge research the volume offers chapters that seek to reflect the full spectrum of approaches and topics, providing a valuable resource which highlights the value of an extended and thoughtful study of the idea and practice of global citizenship within a broader consideration of the processes of globalization. It will be of great use to graduates and scholars of international relations, sociology, and global studies/affairs, as well as globalization.