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Secularisms in a Postsecular Age?
This volume ethnographically explores the relation between secularities and religious subjectivities.As a consequence of the demise of secularization theory, we live in an interesting intellectual moment where the so-called ‘post-secular’ coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized. This cohabitation of the secular and post-secular is revealed mainly through political dialectical processes that overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression. Drawing on cases from South America, Africa, and Europe, contributors apply key insights from religious studies debates on the genealogies and formations of both religion and secularism. They explore the spaces, persons, and places in which these categories emerge and mutually constitute one another.
Postmortal Society
Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were. Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to ‘cheat’ death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs t...
Death on the Move
This volume explores the different aspects of the management of death, dying and mortality by migrants in Southern Europe, through deconstructing persistent idiosyncratic beliefs, myths, narratives, silences, and constraints. It focuses on migrants from diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds in Portugal, Spain and Italy. It also includes reflections on Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau, East-Timor and Cuba. The thirteen chapters provide insights into epistemological issues, the trans-national circulation of bodies, spirits and rituals, migration, the placing of the dead and diverse funerary practices and perspectives. Privileging a multi-sited approach to death and migrations, this book draws on oral, archival and published sources to give visibility to populations that often live in liminal structural positions and transient worlds. By exploring the multifaceted dimensions of death and suffering among immigrant populations, it refocuses the debate on migration in Europe and beyond by highlighting under-researched issues such as end-of-life care, mental health, death, burial, cremation, funerary ceremonies and symbols, repatriation and martyrdom.
A Prophetic Trajectory
Combining ethnographic and historical research conducted in Angola, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, A Prophetic Trajectory tells the story of Simão Toko, the founder and leader of one of the most important contemporary Angolan religious movements. The book explains the historical, ethnic, spiritual, and identity transformations observed within the movement, and debates the politics of remembrance and heritage left behind after Toko’s passing in 1984. Ultimately, it questions the categories of prophetism and charisma, as well as the intersections between mobility, memory, and belonging in the Atlantic Lusophone sphere.
Routledge Handbook of Afro-Latin American Studies
This Handbook provides a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of Afro-Latin American Studies. Afro-Latins as a civilization developed during the period of slavery, obtaining cultural contributions from Indigenous and European worlds, while today they are enriched by new social configurations derived from contemporary migrations from Africa. The essays collected in this volume speak to scientific production that has been promoted in the region from the humanities and social sciences with the aim of understanding the phenomenon of the African diaspora as a specific civilizing element. With contributions from world-leading figures in their fields overseen by an eminent international editorial board, this Handbook features original, authoritative articles organized in four coherent parts: • Disciplinary Studies; • Problem Focused Fields; • Regional and Country Approaches; • Pioneers of Afro-Latin American Studies. The Routledge Handbook of Afro-Latin American Studies will not only serve as the major reference text in the area of Afro-Latin American Studies but will also provide the agenda for future new research.
The Sudanese Zār Ṭumbura Cult
This book offers a historically sensitive ethnography of the zār ṭumbura spirit possession cult, associated with descendants of African slaves who live mainly in the area of Greater Khartoum, Sudan. It considers the history and transformations of ṭumbura, from the 19th-century slaving era to the present post-Islamist autocracy. The chapters examine the ṭumbura spiritual universe and ceremonial life, its relation to the more popular female cult of zār borē and to other now extinct forms of celebrating the zār spirit(s), as well as ṭumbura’s combination of possession, sorcery, ancestor worship and ṣūfī piety. Based on long-term fieldwork, the study shows how successive genera...
UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge
This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological “absurd”, nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, what is not known, what is in the dark, or even with what both “is” and “is not”. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and th...
New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes
Establishing a new set of international perspectives on experiences of death, disposition and remembrance in urban environments, this book brings deathscapes – material, embodied and emotional places associated with dying and death – to life. It pushes the boundaries of established empirical and conceptual understandings of death in urban spaces through anthropological, geographical and ethnographic insights.
Other Worlds, Other Bodies
When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of "other" worlds that may intersect with the so-called "material" or "physical" worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the "unknown"--be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an "other"--shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.
The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe, 2000-2020
Innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics.In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe''s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of r...
